All the Oscars

A few years ago I was watching the Academy Awards program, and realized for the first time in many years, I realized that I'd seen over half of the films. That started a line of thinking -- how many of ALL the winners and nominees have I seen?

A couple years later, a spreadsheet with every major winner and nominee (Best Picture, Best Actor/Actress, Best supporting, and Best director) is fleshed out. Between Netflix and Tivo (thank you, Turner Classics) a vast majority of the films are available. A few more were released on VHS, a few more have disappeared, and, sadly, a dozen or so are lost forever.

My score so far? 625 out of 1171. Or about 53.4%. Right now, as I type this, the annoying (too much bouzouki music, too much pointless Dutch tilt) The Third Man is running on the DVD player.

God knows I probably would NEVER have rented some of these films, if they hadn't been nominated? Trader Horn? Topkapi? California Suite? Dreadful films, all. But, in weak years, they picked up nominations. So I gritted my teeth and worked through them, feeling a true sense of accomplishment after crossing them off the list. On the flip side, some are gems: Best Years of Our Lives, for instance. Amazingly good film, and well ahead of its time; The Deer Hunter and Coming Home owe much to this 1946 masterpiece.

My strategy is... none. I scan the TCM web site for upcoming films, and pretty much randomly keep the Netflix queue loaded with classics. Of course, in a couple months I'll have to add all the 2005 nominees. Fortunately I've seen many of the likely ones: Squid and the Whale, History of Violence, Crash, Weather Man, and even worked on Syriana...

Next up? 1999's Straight Story. Stay tuned.

2 B, or not 2 B More

Finally saw the new Nike spot with Carmelo Anthony. Impressive. I wish Nike didn't force us to see all the Flash graphics flying across the screen during the preview, but, what can you do?

That shoot was so long, so hard, and so... well, profitable. I remember showing up at the rec center on Pennsylvania Ave, and looking at an empty gym with a pile of lumber, and thinking "Ok... we shoot in four days..." Under the thumb of legendary production designer Vance Lorenzini, however, we cranked it out. We built that long tunnel out of luan and fiberglass, routing the fiberglass sheets to make it look like cinder block. We strung up half of Myrtle Ave with practicals, rebuilt an old treadmill for Melo's greenscreen shots, and, came up with some authentic beat-up street basketballs, plus the other thousand or so little props and pieces of set dressing that make up a big shoot like this. The street ball was a fun story: I drove Vance around the neighborhood looking for a nicely aged basketball. We found a young fellow shooting hoops, not far from our set.

"What will you take for the basketball?" Vance asked the kid.

Eyeing my gray A4 Quattro, he says "That Audi will do."

After some negotiations, he was happy with some bills.

So we wrangled our props, and built our sets, and then came shooting day: The crew went from a handful of us in the art department, to an enormous concoction of specialists, clients, Nike execs, ad agency people, security, helicopter pilots, and a thousand or so eager onlookers. A film set is, at any given time, the most meticulously organized form of chaos known to man.

For a while, Antoine Fuqua was happy... but not for long. It seemed like every department had some kind of glitch, including mine. The hours were brutal: Four forced calls, and one day came in at 16.5 hours without a lunch break. Tempers flared, and everybody was miserable. I even missed the Redskins come-from-behind defeat of Dallas on Monday Night Football, as we worked well past midnight that Monday (after a 7 AM call).

But... none of that matters. The spots look great. The editing is fantastic, to the point where even I can't tell where it's Melo on screen or his stand-in. The music is haunting. The authenticity of the location a stroke of genius. We pulled it off. I'm proud to have been a small part of this ad. And yeah, if you look closely in the extras on the Nike web site, you can see me. Well, my out-of-focus outline.

Ah, fame.

Filling the frame

Like a lot of film professionals, I dream of someday directing or DP'ing. Yeah, the art department is satisfying, but sometimes it's so very hard to keep one's mouth shut when you know exactly what the scene requires. If only it were me behind the camera, I sometimes think...

Unlike a lot of aspiring directors, I don't want to be the next Spielberg, Soderbergh, or even Kubrick. I want to be the next... Peter Hyams.

You're saying, "Who?"

Peter Hyams. Like Soderbergh, he does his own cinematography -- quite rare for a Hollywood director. Unlike Soderbergh, some of his scripts are pretty... well, awful (then again, having sat through Full Frontal... oh nevermind). But his films always look fantastic. With minimalist lighting, extensive use of natural illumination sources and practicals, and perhaps a bit too much smoke, pretty much every frame is suitable for, um, framing.



Yes. He directs the best-looking B-movies since... well, ever. Consider:

Timecop. Silly script, and a star who really, really can't act. Some really great camera moves, such as when the hero dives out a window after a skydiving stockbroker. The hero also has the same Casio watch as me (except mine seems to behave under Einstein's laws).




The Presido. Really silly script, and any film that casts Mark Harmon as an action hero is pretty much sure to fail. But a great use of San Fran's locations, and some really nice foreshortened perspective shots.





2010. Has any sequel ever been more different from the first instalment? But a thoroughly enjoyable film, despite being utterly un-Kubrickesque. Scheider is convincing, the house with the dolphin tank is a terrific set, and the Russian ship still looks pretty good 20 years later. Note the long shot in front of the White House. See the old man feeding pigeons at the far right? Arthur C. Clarke.



The Star Chamber. Ok, so it ends with a pointless shootout and chase scene. But man, what a buildup. And a great use of a run down warehouse. I once dressed an old warehouse in Baltimore for a reality show (same one that burned up in Ladder 49, in fact), and was both horrified by the oozing chemicals and active vermin, but totally in love with the quiet, dust-moted stillness with shafts of light leaking through the roof. In the Star Chamber, Hyams combines an action film with some of the deepest legal philosophy ever discussed in a movie.



Capricorn One. Yeah, like the Naked Gun movies, it's a bit harder to watch OJ on the screen these days. And the plot is patently ridiculous. Who cares. Look at those helicopters, buzzing about like angry wasps. Check out that telephoto shot where Lear jet bounces its landing gear off the windshield.



Outland. Elegant simplicity. High Noon in space. Sean Connery makes a jumpsuit look cool. The movie is a cheeseburger: tastes great at the time, but the more you think about it, the worse you feel.



So where are the great-looking B-movies these days? One could argue that National Treasure or Pearl Harbor, which had plots and dialogue so absurd you wonder if they were written on the set, are the heirs to Hyam's films from the 70s and 80s, but these newer films rely so much on digital effects, it's really not the same. They're just a bit too slick, too expensive-looking, to really qualify as B-movies.

So hey -- the field is wide open for me, right? Harvey, baby, call me, we'll talk.

Ann Coulter: Brewer. Patriot. Film Critic

On November 9, 2005, Ann Coulter offered a review of sorts of "Good Night and Good Luck." I say "of sorts," because apparently she didn't actually, you know, watch the film. I'll leave her politics to bloggers who focus on this sort of thing, but one of her quotes jumped out at me:

"I don't intend to see his movie because — except for the McCarthy parts — it sounds like a snoozefest. (Half the reviewers so far have said "good night" to Clooney, and the other half have said "good luck.")

Indeed? I remembered reading Ebert's review, which was pretty upbeat. As was The Washington Post, USA Today, and the LA Times. But, I figured Miss Ann is better informed than I, so I checked out other reviews of GNAGL, looking for the dreadful ones that she mentioned.

I searched throught 117 reviews, in fact. And I found a negative one. One. Out of 117. Phil Hall, from FilmThreat, describes the film as "a travesty." Intrigued, I pored over his review, expecting the kind of outrageous indignation provided by Miss Ann. What I found was that Hall felt the film did a poor job of portraying Murrow, and accurately depicting the real threats of McCarthyism. Hall finshes his review with:

"THE PARALLELS FROM THEN TO NOW. Some people have been itching for controversy in trying to link the McCarthy parallels of the 1950s to the reign of Dubya today. Forget it, because it doesn’t fit. The shame of yesteryear’s politics bear little resemblance to the shame of today’s (and, of course, there is no Murrow on today’s TV). “Good Night, And Good Luck” does not play as a warning against contemporary government, so Bush-bashers have to look elsewhere.

Those who wish to know what Murrow accomplished should seek out the recent DVD collection of his most famous broadcasts to see the original man in action. “Good Night, And Good Luck” does not do Murrow justice. In fact, the film is a travesty.

What to conclude? Well, a cynic might say that Miss Ann was simply fabricating all those horrific critics of GNAGL, from critics as offended as she that Clooney would canonize Edward R. Murrow. Not being a cynic, I must therefore conclude that... um... she saw some other reviews... besides the 117 that I saw.

Like Pounding sand?

Is it just me, or does it look like this little gingerbread fellow is, um, "humping" the snow?

Everybody Loves Ray Lewis (or else)

Last night we hung out at bar in Old Town for Halloween. There were about 10 of us, mostly my girlfriend's crew. Of course I kept watching the clock, waiting for 9PM. Because then I could expect that spine-tingling decension tof the greatest four chords in football, "Da-da-da-daaa!"

I speak, of course, of Monday Night Football. And tonight it's the Ravens at Pittbsurgh. Neither is exactly my favorite team, but what I'm looking forward to is the bumper, that little 90-second minifilm that always starts off a MNF show. This one especially held my interest as I was the propmaster for the segment. Well, half of it... you see, it was a crossover between MNF and Disney's new film, Chicken Little. The Disney folks shot the first half out in LA, on a set especially created to look (sort of) like a Ravens locker room. This was in August I believe; and it consisted of shots with no actors, as Chicken Little and his friends would later be drawn in. Due to a scheduling conflict, Ray Lewis was unable to go to LA to shoot the other half. So, they packed up the set, trucked it to Baltimore, and we re-assembled it at the Raven's training facility.

Working with continuity stills, I carefully laid out each sock, jersey, and helmet, to match the shots from LA. We assembled the faux cinderblock wall, put the clock and the fire alarm and all the other stuff, and set up the projector. Ray came in, and was a champ -- hit his lines perfectly. And of course he's talking to foamcore cutouts of Chicken Little et al, drawn quickly by the production designer. It was a textbook shoot, we wrapped earlier, and Ray was great to work with.

So, a few months later, it was fun to see the final product, with the animated characters drawn in. The spot seemed a bit shorter than the original script, and of course Ray was not even suited up for the game. But it was still a hoot, and my friends at the crowd pounded my back and bought me beers. They said "Hey -- it looked like a locker room!"

My work here is done.