March 7, 2005

It was an interesting weekend at the movies… well, it was for me.

I paid cash money to go see Be Cool. And I paid cash money to buy DVDs of 2046 and Kung Fu Hustle. Like I said… interesting.

Be Cool continues the up and down career of F. Gary Gray. Friday was a charming cheapie. Set It Off pretty much worked and looked real good. But The Negotiator was a mess and A Man Apart was an outright disaster. But then The Italian Job redeemed him again. And now this miss…

What is bizarre is that the three worst films of his career were shot by the three most experienced cinematographers… Russell Carpenter, Jack Green and now, Jeffrey Kimball. Wally Pfister, who shot The Italian Job, is Chris Nolan's guy, but maybe that's the key. Maybe Nolan gives him more room to work. Carpenter is known for shooting Cameron's films, Green for Eastwood and Kimball for Tony Scott… all three directors with very, very specific tastes.

Anyway, the film is a mess. You can see what might have worked about the film. But it has all the classic sequel mistakes. Someone needed to step away from the original and to see all the good stuff that was in this idea and to structure it to fit. As it is, there just isn't any pace to the film. And there is a real poor sense of irony. Cedric The Entertainer works his ass off trying to make his Russell Simmons character work, but Gray fails him repeatedly. The Rock is very game, playing gay and mocking his trademark arched eyebrow. But it never really matters that he is gay or stylish.

The film also has a bad habit of trying to do inside jokes that aren't funny. Harvey Keitel is on the phone with "Bobby and Marty." Hee hee. That eyebrow thing… funny once, not eight times. The very unclear idea of "Get Shorty" not being made by Chili, but some other film being made and then a bad sequel… blah, blah, blah.

The premise of the first film… the criminal fish out of water fits into the "legit" world of film better than the "legit" players. So is the record business really worse? If it is, we better know why. We never do. Don't even get me started on Uma Thurman as a romantic lead within weeks of her husband and partner being shot to death unexpectedly. That's hot!

Travolta doesn't look the same a decade later and cinematographer Kimball really, really doesn't help matters, shooting in a lot of harsh light. Uma Thurman's ass is lovingly shot, but we're seeing a lot of make-up the rest of the way.

Vince Vaughn gets a lot of laughs on his own. And the one redeeming feature of this film is the find that is Andre "3000" Benjamin. This guy has a relaxed, controlled comedy rhythm all his own. He is a born movie star and if New Line was smart, they'd figure out how to build the next Rush Hour franchise around him so they wouldn't have to put up with wacky Chris "I only work for $20 million or more" Tucker anymore.

KUNG FU HUSTLE is due out on April 8 via Sony Classics. That's usually a sign of a small movie. But King Fu Hustle is not a small movie.

I enjoyed Shaolin Soccer. Very cute. But not a work of genius. Solid entertainment. But with Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow surpasses all but a couple of the world's directors working on the front lines of CG-based cinema.

The comedy style is very Hong Kong, which is to say broad and about the flaws of others in the community. Interestingly, it is very harsh compared to Chow's earlier work. There is more blood, more cursing, more sexual stereotyping, more name calling than I have seen in the past. (It is, however, very reminiscent of the wonderful and little-seen-in-America Chicken Rice War by CheeK.) But it is in larger brush strokes that Chow really excels.

The closest any American films have come to recreating the cartoon world of Termite Terrace era Warner Bros. are Gremlins and The Mask. Kung Fu Hustle blows past both of these films and into new territory. Superfast running? Chow makes it work. Feet flattened like pancakes? Sure! People smash into billboards, leave silhouettes in concrete walls and smash so hard into the ground that they create craters.

But its more than that. Chow also travels on The Matrix's turf, including having both Master Woo Ping and Sammo Hung on the show handling the fight sequences. And indeed, he does some gags that we saw in the Matrix sequels, but even then finds a few toppers.

Chow also has a great eye and sense of casting. No one quite looks as you would expect them to. But from such surprises comes the magic of the movies.

But the biggest shock is the massive leap from the rather crude CG of Shaolin Soccer to the work here. This film is driven by the CG work. There is wore work and stunt work, but the audacity with which he uses the computer to make the impossible into silly fun offers the audience surprises when it seemed that the door to real surprise in visual effects was all but over.

The film reminded me of Robert Rodriguez' work in the Spy Kids sequels…. more and more inside the computer. And Chow is working a similar demographic. But there is something a bit more sophisticated about Chow's work. I guess it's that there is very little cuteness in Kung Fu Hustle, and when it does put its emotions on its sleeve, it is very Asian… unrepentantly melodramatic.

In the big cinema picture, Kung Fu Hustle is a piffle. But it felt, as I was watching it, like so much more. It felt like "discovering" Spielberg or Zemeckis or Wolfgang Petersen. Chow is very commercial. But there is something really special going on in his work… something that reaches above. And if you are someone who will just dismiss the film on silliness points alone - which would not be unfair - you won't see what I see. But many will. Chow could be one of those unique directors with a powerful sense of himself and a real touch commercially.

As I watched the film with my nephew and niece, who enjoyed the dubbed Shaolin Soccer enough to sit through the subtitled Kung Fu Hustle, I found myself explaining the subtext of the films references to classic martial arts films, like the endless references to everyone's style of fighting. (Chow introduces two new "styles" that even characters in the film refer to as having been considered urban legends.) The film keeps that bond to the classics. But it adds and builds into something almost inconceivable just a few years ago.

I suggest that Sony let this movie sell itself. The images are not the kind of arty stuff that Zhang Yimou did in Hero and House of Flying Daggers. But the images are beautiful nonetheless and some of the fight sequences draw you in within seconds.

The biggest problem is that the film is R rated here in the U.S. and I'm not sure they can fix that problem, since the great sell here would be to elementary school aged kids…. Not that there is not an adult audience. But so much of it is a real-life cartoon, that little kids seem a natural sell.

I would like to think that there is a $40 million domestic grossing movie in this. We shall soon see.

More on 2046 tomorrow, but let me leave you with three words - Chris. Doyle. Oscar.

READER OF THE DAY: CAPTAIN CELLULOID writes: "First, I agree -- Richardson is really good . . . . aesthetically and technically and as a person.

Second, I strongly DIS agree . . . . . . shooting film for a Digital Intermediate is NOT as easy as KB TOYS seems to think.

Watching the excellent piece on digital grading on the LOTR dvd does NOT make one an expert on digital grading. It is aestheitcally naive and technically under-informed to say "The simple fact is that if you have a properly exposed negative you can pretty much make it look like anything you want in post."

If you were to call Bob Richardson or Chris Doyle or Andrew Lesnie or Rob Legato they would, graciously I am sure, tell you otherwise
in no uncertain terms.

The DI is a tool, a GREAT tool . . . it is NOT, however, a panacea for the untrained . . . or the impatient.

If you do not know how to light and expose for a DI or how to control it you can get into HORRENDOUS problems. Mediocre garbage in is still mediocre garbage out . . . all digital tarting-up and polishing aside.

The cinematographer's role is, of course, changing because of the use of DI but it is definitely not of lesser importance. It is arguable that the role is now GREATER because of their participation in the DI posting process. It is not accidental that the best cinematographers produce the best looking Digital Intermediates.

Why did I write this? To comment and to take issue with the current SILICON SNAKEOIL-sh trend of sorts which suggests that all things digital are great and that film is dead.

Perhaps Robert Rogriquez, whose work I enjoy and whose effect on the industry I admire, feels that when shooting film he didn't know what it was going to look like until he saw the print . . . . but I promise you that Richardson, Doyle and Lesnie DO know what it will look like.

My credentials for my opinions? I've been shooting film and using digital grading for many years. Digital grading is new to features but it has been used in TV commercials for 15 or 20 years . . . .

I love digital grading and certainly would not want to give it up . . .but please trust me -- it can cause you a world of pain if not used well."

E-ME: What causes you a world of pain?

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