Fade to black: film's death is nearly complete

This article originally ran in the West Valley View on June 22, 2012. 

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Technology brings about change. It also brings about death. Just look at the graveyard: VHS, cassette tapes, dial-up modems, typewriters, rotary phones.

Add to that list film projectors, which, at nearly 118 years old, had a longer shelf life than most.

The 35mm film format will get a quiet send-off this week when Dickinson Theatres, operator of the Palm Valley 14 theater in Goodyear, brings in a dozen new digital projectors to replace a dozen film projectors. They are the last film projectors showing first-run movies in the West Valley, and some of the last ones in the entire state. AMC Theatres is now entirely digital, as is Valley-based Harkins Theatres with exception to one theater, Arcadia 8 in Phoenix, that will likely be closing within the next year.

The movies will always be called films, but now it’s nearly impossible to see one on actual film.

“It had to change eventually,” Daniel Pineda, projectionist at the Dickinson theater, said recently as he bounded up the stairs to the Goodyear projection booth. “35mm was a great format, but it’s time has come.”

Pineda’s workspace is a long dark corridor high in the guts of Palm Valley 14. Up there, amid 12 clicking and clacking film projectors (and 2 silently humming digital projectors), the air is hot, but luckily, Pineda said, he doesn’t have a dress code.

Today he’s wearing a T-shirt with the Punisher skull on it, which is an ominous image to see as he stalks the dark corridor, zigging and zagging between the projectors and the massive film platters attached to them. These spinning platters, held in place by a metal frame called a tree, are where the film prints sit while the movies play. They’re as round as pitcher’s mounds, and as Pineda zips past them he gives them a big spin, which sends the tail of the film print flapping through the air.

He can reel up — or, as he calls it, “lace up” — a film in under two minutes, which involves weaving a piece of film from a platter through a series of wheels, gears and a roller-festooned brain. The process involves big, sweeping movements from platter to tree to projector, but also small intricate articulations when the film is guided through the projector housing, where the light beams through the film, moving at 24 frames per second, on its way to the screen down below.

Pineda, a Buckeye resident who’s worked as a projectionist for two years, doesn’t romanticize film’s passing.

“This is my job, so digital or film it doesn’t really matter to me,” he said while he guided the tail of a Prometheus print from platter to projector. “I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t miss having to worry about the humidity and all the problems that film has.”

Humidity is a film projectionist’s worst enemy. Too much and the film starts sticking to itself, which can lead to film calamity: “One time I came over here and the film was on the floor looking like spaghetti noodles,” Pineda said. “It was a mess.”

There are other pros to the demise of film: no more annoying scratches in the film prints, no more late nights assembling the films (they as separate reels in boxes or cans), and no more reeling up the movies to the projectors, which may take only two minutes each but it all adds up, Pineda said. The digital systems are run on keystrokes and single buttons. The movies are on hard drives or just downloaded from the studios. They aren’t without their little quirks, though. For instance, troubleshooting a problem with a digital projector is nearly impossible without calling the company that made it.

“And it might get boring,” Pineda said. “Right now, I’m busy while I lace up movies and then there won’t be anything to do up here for like 30 minutes, but then it starts all over again. With the digital systems there will be a lot more down time.”

Palm Valley 14 general manager Rick Kasting said there were no immediate plans for the 12 film projectors and the equipment that goes with them, things like film splicers, building tables and metal reels.

“I just don’t know what’s eventually going to happen to all this stuff. Nobody knows,” he said. “Film won’t be made anymore, so there’s really no reason to have it around.”

Until Dickinson — which is headquartered in Kansas and has theaters throughout the central time zone as well as in Goodyear and Mesa — decides what to do with the projectors they will most likely just stay in storage at the Goodyear theater, Kasting said.

From the Lumière Brothers and Thomas Edison in the 1890s to mothballs in the 21st Century, film has had a long and full life. Kasting said he would be sad to see it go.

“Film had its ups and downs, but it was a great format. I loved working with it all these years,” Kasting, a former projectionist said. “When 35mm first started, it was easily breakable and would catch fire and all that good stuff. Now it’s like plastic, so it can stretch. Working with it really made you appreciate film. Yeah, I’ll miss it.”

Pixar is brave, but not entirely original

Brave is a splendid experience, but it feels more like a Disney movie than a Pixar one, with its fairy tale plot full of transforming forest creatures, plucky princesses and a crooked old witch with her bubbling cauldrons.

Did Pixar raid the Disney vault, or did Disney turn the vault over and shake it over Pixar, like pepper on a bowl of stew? It's hard to determine now that the two companies are one.

By invoking these Disney tropes, though, Brave and Pixar are hearkening back to Disney's classic era of hand-drawn animation that includes films like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. I'm curious about their intentions. To see if Pixar could do an old-fashioned Disney movie? If so, then Brave is a rousing success. If they did it to reinvent the fairy tale, then they fall drastically short — consider Brave on par with either of Disney's last fairy tale movies, the perfectly enjoyable duo of Tangled and The Princess and the Frog.

I question the motives of the movie and its makers, but please know that I loved this picture. It is a fully realized and beautifully designed animated adventure. It may use all the building blocks of a Disney fairy tale, but it uses them in ingenious ways. Yes, we might have seen these things done before, but never like this, and never in a Pixar movie.

In the Scottish highlands a royal family must arrange a wedding for their daughter with an independent streak amid all those tangles of red hair. This is Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald), a free-spirited teenager who would rather roam the countryside shooting arrows at her favorite trees than be prim and proper or bound up in some corset on a wooden throne.

Merida embarrasses her family at an archery tournament where she's supposed to pick a husband. Her refusal to pick, and the way she refuses, sparks a mock conflict between her father, the burly one-legged Fergus (Billy Connolly), and the leaders of three other royal families — including one kilted droog who would make a great plotline on Game of Thrones, and another dressed like William Wallace in Braveheart.

Merida's family drama underscores the film's ultimate message about fate and destiny, and how women within this kingdom don't get to have a say in their futures. This is probably where I should tell you that Merida is Pixar's first female protagonist in the studio's history. It's unfortunate the way Merida expresses her independence is with a man's weapon, but nevermind that.

I'm hesitant to discuss the plot further because the film's advertising has left out some major developments, which created surprises for me in my viewing. Just know that a friendly bear turns up that will upend Merida's life if she doesn't get some advice from a wrinkly old witch who moonlights as a woodcarver of exceeding talent. The witch has a remarkably simple voicemail system: "For Option 1 please dump the green vial in the cauldron. For Option 2, please dump the red vial …"

It is refreshing to see the plot being pushed forward by women, including Merida and her patient mother (Emma Thompson). The men are given lots of comedic moments, including a fort battle in the castle keep, but they are mostly background filler to the dreams, hopes and desires of the female characters. And just look at Merida, what a striking character and screen presence. (Her hair definitely helps; never has hair moved so realistically in an animated movie.)

This is not Pixar's greatest movie — that goes to WALL•E — nor is it anywhere near the abysmal and wretched Cars 2. It's mostly an entirely average Pixar movie, and an above-average Disney movie. Yes, they have different scales, because Pixar is so meticulous, so exact, so perfect at designing plots for their movies to sit in. This film looked fantastic, and had just the right combination of laughs, tender character moments and thrills. But the plot felt recycled, and it made me curious as to why a company known for their one-of-a-kind stories would turn to an idea as overdone as a fairy tale.

Many more photos after the jump.

Brave concept art reveals deeper beauty

 

Pixar's concept art is always incredible. Even the concept art for Cars 2, a Pixar movie reviled by everyone except infants and people in comas, was pretty nifty. Here is some Brave artwork that is wonderful. Review to come shortly. 

Sweetness guaranteed in hipster comedy

In 1997, the editor of Backwoods Home Magazine asked friend John Silveira to write some joke ads that would fill the classified section when it ran short. One was a phony personal ad, and the other was this little gem:

WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

Years after the fake ad ran, the magazine was still getting curious responses about time travel companions — some were jokes and others quite real. The ad eventually became an early internet meme and has lived on in cyberspace ever since. Now the “this is not a joke” joke ad forms the basis of Safety Not Guaranteed, a spectacularly charming romance about a man who runs the ad in a Seattle alternative magazine and then falls in love with the intern reporter sent to investigate his apparent lunacy.

Here the ad’s writer is Kenneth (actor-director Mark Duplass) and he is certainly somewhat crazy, if not completely unhinged from society. He sports a severely unfortunate mullet and faded jean jacket, like he really is a time traveler … from 1984. His strained bravado and all-around macho behavior, along with his lovable oafishness, suggests he might be a cross between Dwight Schrute and Napoleon Dynamite. If neither of those names rings a bell, then maybe Safety Not Guaranteed is the wrong film for you.

The intern reporter is Darius (Aubrey Plaza), and she finds the assignment beneath her. She’s tagging along with Jeff (Jake M. Johnson), the article’s real reporter, and another intern, Arnau (Karan Soni), a frail Indian boy who seems to be experiencing the real world for the very first time. They’re all quite sure that the person who wrote the ad is insane, but then they meet Kenneth, who confirms their suspicions. Darius, though, sees through some of Kenneth’s oddball eccentricities and she catches a glimpse of a wounded soul, which she immediately identifies with. They connect further as het vets her candidacy as a time travel companion in scenes involving gun ranges, exercise routines, combat training and mission debriefing.

Romantic chemistry goes very far in films like this. These two leads have it. They work mostly because they’re both so strange. Duplass has this mushy face and kind eyes, and he makes Kenneth a genuine creature with complex fears of being alone and unwanted. Plaza — who, as April Ludgate, is easily one-third of the comedy on NBC’s Parks and Recreation — appears younger and more attractive than Duplass, but she makes Darius work by being plucky and resilient, and she never succumbs to the clichés of the rom-com drama.

Safety Not Guaranteed has another sub-plot involving Jeff, the lazy reporter who took the assignment because it brought him near his first girlfriend as he veers dangerously close to an early mid-life crisis. As Darius falls deeper into Kenneth’s time travel plans, Jeff does his own time traveling back to his high school days. It’s a fun narrative device that reaps its own rewards separate from the main plot. It also suggests that director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly are making a grander statement about time and how it plays with our expectations of the present.

I’ve told you the plot, but I’ve been vague on many of its details. That is intentional. Safety Not Guaranteed has an interesting payoff that I wouldn’t dare spoil. I will ask this, though: how far would you go to discover Kenneth’s sanity? I bet it’s not as far as Darius.

Time will tell.

Let's go camping in Moonrise Kingdom

When I was younger I was in the Boy Scouts. I didn’t much care for it at the time, but I look back on those years fondly.

The camping memories are especially vivid: the boy who played Dungeons & Dragons in his tent because his parents forbid it in their home. The boys who would take fallen branches and broken sticks and pretend they were guns and bazookas; pinecones were grenades. The one boy who always had a cast somewhere on his body. The kid who wasn’t happy unless he was burning something with a lighter (once he tried to light a Porta-John on fire). The kid who plucked soggy Vienna sausages from a can and stuck them up his nose. The boy who tried to light his farts at every campfire. The one boy who would never shower (think Pig-Pen from Peanuts). The one kid who dropped his flashlight in the portable toilet, which meant we all had to look at vaguely luminescent feces in the bathroom until the batteries died several days later. Or the one boy who would arrive at week-long snow outings without a jacket or even spare socks.

We did scouting things, like merit badges and knots and wilderness survival, but those memories are crowded out by the others, the ones of the people and their wild personalities.

I thought about those scouts a lot during Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s adorable new love story set within a troop of mischievous Khaki Scouts on a 16-mile-wide island in Rhode Island. The movie is a love poem to rambunctious boys and their medieval ideas about life, adventure and girls. It stars two young actors who convey the awkward innocence of adolescence because, well, just look at them, they’re perfect.

First there’s Sam (Jared Gilman), the unpopular Khaki Scout with the coonskin hat who hatches an escape plan as thorough as the one in The Shawshank Redemption, though we never see it, just the poster covering the torn hole in his pup tent. Before he leaves, he drafts a letter of resignation to Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), a kind and compassionate scout leader with a laughable smoking habit. With his backpack stocked with rope, navigation equipment and enough Tang and beef jerky to last a week, Sam cuts a trail across New Penzance Island to discover himself.

He eventually meets up with Suzy (Kara Hayward), who receives little attention in her home so she decides to run away with Sam, maybe to a hidden cove where there will live off the land and fall in love. Suzy is more complex to Sam’s textbook simplicity. They make a darling couple, though some of the things they do and encounter require maturity beyond their years and they perform admirably. Once these two go missing, the small island is turned upside down by pocketknife-toting Khaki Scouts, their overwhelmed leader, a mail plane, two marginally worried parents (Billy Murray and Frances McDormand) and a befuddled police officer (Bruce Willis). Every now and again, Bob Balaban turns up in his sailing gear to narrate parts of the adventure.

Now, I’ve just told you the plot, but I’ve expressed less than a tenth of what Moonrise Kingdom actually is. Keep in mind, this is a Wes Anderson picture, which means the movie is filled with whimsy, quirkiness and all his other signature moves: deadpan acting, a retro lo-fi soundtrack, wonderfully detailed sets, unique cinematography techniques (unconventional framing, symmetrical composition), Bill Murray’s feigned machoness, and a timeless, albeit analog, fashion sense. New to the Anderson collection this time around is an authentic love story. Love was an expression in his other films, including Rushmore and Bottle Rocket, but this might be Anderson’s first full-fledged romance.

I was startled to see where Sam and Suzy’s relationship went, especially since they appeared to be no older than about 12 years old. Surely, sex is too mature a theme for that age, but the movie handles it with care and I think the PG-13 rating is proof to that. Any other movie would hint that this adolescent love couldn’t last, that Suzy and Sam would grow up and drift apart and then rediscover love with other people in high school or their 20s. I think not. I can picture these two growing old together. It’s a fantasy relationship, but remember this is a fantasy world.

The two leads have their romance, but then there’s another — our love affair with that damn island. It’s just so delightfully odd, with its patches of scruffy beauty pock-marked by colorful locals and those wild Khaki Scouts and their 60-foot treehouse and their impenetrable scout camp. Anderson has a way of coloring his locations with so much character that they develop into personalities themselves. Think of that school in Rushmore, the Tenenbaum manor, the Indian train in The Darjeeling Limited, or, my favorite, the research vessel Belafonte in A Life Aquatic. Like those settings, New Penzance Island is special because it’s magical, yet feels real enough to inhabit these characters. If you leave the movie and don’t have the urge to vacation to that island then Moonrise has failed you.

The movie is also hilarious, but in subtle swaths of visual and ironic humor. I especially loved the dialogue, which is so underplayed it almost feels off the beat. There’s nothing funnier than Bill Murray’s character, unhappy with the days events, coming downstairs shirtless in his pajama bottoms carrying a bottle of whiskey and an ax and telling his remaining children, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.” Even the children are given funny lines, like when someone asks whether a dead dog was a good pet or not. Sam says, “Who’s to say?” What child speaks in abstract philosophical nonsense? Anderson’s children, that’s who.

Elements of fantasy creep into the picture more and more as it goes along, and at one point someone is struck by lightning with no discernible injuries. There’s also a flood that sweeps away a scout camp, a totem pole that nearly crushes a celebrity cameo, a Noah’s Ark of costumed children and a storm of the century. Anderson shows us these events using subtle special effects, miniatures, trick lighting techniques, forced perspective and almost always at right angles perpendicular to the action. The film is like nothing you’ve ever seen … unless you’ve seen a Wes Anderson movie before.

I loved Moonrise Kingdom, and not just because of the scouting material. I loved it because it made me appreciate my childhood so much more. Those awkward phases defined who we are today, more so than high school, or college, or a career. Those moments when we were discovering ourselves, those were the key moments of our development. Moonrise captures that and does so with careful affection.

I'm including all the pictures after the jump, but one note: they had a yellow tint to them that I don't remember in the movie. Using Photoshop I've balanced the colors a little better. It's not my intention to change Anderson's movie; I just felt like they didn't match what I'd seen on the screen.

Prometheus ponders death ... and life

Prometheus, the long-awaited quasi-canon Alien prequel, does not answer the questions Alien fans have been asking since 1979, nor does it acknowledge the fact that they've been asked at all. It does, however, veer off on its own to ponder grander bits of the cosmos. Like Ferdinand the Bull, why should Prometheus gore spectators when it can be smelling the flowers?

For those interested in those sorts of scenes: fear not, there is gore, enough to make you re-appreciate John Hurt’s post-coma snack from Alien, but these scenes are framed within a larger idea, one that hints at the very origins of life on this planet and others.

What’s especially refreshing about Prometheus is the way it fuses laboratory and chapel together in this theo-scientific mash-up of chest-bursting hyphenation. The main character, daughter of a Christian missionary, is searching for a creator, or maybe the Creator. When she finds a humanoid alien species on a foreign planet, a colleague suggests that her God doesn’t exist after all. “But then who created them?” she asks pointing at the alien discovery. Religion is so often posed against science, and science against religion, but those formulas neglect to include the people who can’t answer to one without the other. Surely before the Big Bang there was a Bigger Bang, right?

These broader questions are surprising here, especially coming from Alien, a straightforward sci-fi horror-thriller, about an acid-blooded creature turned loose on a killing spree within the claustrophobic steam-blown halls of a space freighter. There was a great deal of subtext in that film — gender roles, rape fear, technology — but for the most part it was a monster movie, maybe the ultimate monster movie. Prometheus aspires to be something entirely different, and achieves that.

The movie takes place roughly 50 years before Alien. Research vessel Prometheus has landed on a rocky world outside of our solar system. Its crew, geeky scientists and craggy terraformers, have been guided here by star maps found within ruins on Earth. On the uncharted planet they discover an ancient civilization of alien humanoids — they’re “alien,” as in foreign, not “alien” as in the xenomorphs from the previous movie — and what appears to be a science lab where they were engineering life, or maybe death.

Leading the research team is Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), though she holds little power compared to Prometheus captain Janek (Idris Elba) or icy Weyland Corporation honcho Vickers (Charlize Theron). Vickers is so cold and impassive her crew thinks she might be an artificial intelligence in a human construct, like robot crewmember David (Michael Fassbender), who has modeled his mannerisms from Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

Horror oozes into the seams of the rather straightforward sci-fi movie after Shaw and her team discover the Engineers’ elaborate storage chambers, filled with stone jars containing some kind of creature, virus or biological technology. As they venture deeper into the ruins, they find fresh horrors: fossilized humanoid bodies, morphing wall murals and Alien’s famous “space jockey” riding his macabre gun-throne. How all this does or does not fit into the Alien legacy is something I will let you discover, but I’m not entirely sure the movie will have all the answers. It’s ambitiously ambiguous to the point of hair-pulling frustration.

Oh, and the plot holes. There are many. Too many for a movie this rich in detail, wonder and scope. For instance, why does a crewmember attack his teammates? Why does a whirling probe device bing back results after parking itself outside a suspicious door? Why did the Engineers carve xenomorphs into their wall art? Why did the humanoids all die, except for one in a hibernation pod? Why did the contents of the stone jars have three different effects on three different characters? And the most asinine plot hole: how could two characters get lost in a labyrinthine temple when they had a 3D map of the temple itself? I was disappointed that many of these details weren’t clarified. It’s as if Prometheus was trying to juggle too many elements and there was a banana peel on the stage.

All that aside, though, Prometheus has good bones and I think most viewers will do what I did and forgive the reckless story elements that mar the otherwise solid plot. After all, the film looks wonderful, including shots of Prometheus hovering down onto a world with an entire other planet filling the skies above it. The set design is top-notch, with lots of neat space technology and ship designs that are juxtaposed against new H.R. Giger-designed sets made of sinew and spines. And the actors are wonderful, especially Rapace and Fassbender. She plays with too much emotion and he plays with none at all, and the balance is perfect.

It is directed by futurist visioneer Ridley Scott, whose Alien and Blade Runner are sci-fi royalty. In Prometheus Scott romanticizes space and exploration, though tints of Alien’s blue-collar grittiness are not far off — remember, this is a prequel of sorts. His work here also makes me think of westerns, which has never been a stretch for science fiction. Both genres thrive off that great void outside the window. In westerns the void is the desert, but here it’s space, the ultimate abyss, where a man, woman or entire civilization can find its soul and lose it again without bumping into anything.

There’s an inherent loneliness to films like this, which further validates the importance of the Shaw character: her ultimate science-and-religion quest is to discover if humans are alone in the universe or if a higher power is at work here, which is she so willfully dons a spacesuit to dance at the mouth of madness. For her, the loneliness will end with a larger discovery.

Audiences will go to Prometheus hoping to find aliens. Like Dr. Shaw, they will discover so much more.