The Film
Ever since we first discovered the ability to record moving images, sex has rarely been far from the thoughts of those holding the camera. I remember with some fondness a film released a few years ago called The Good Old Naughty Days, which was an eye-openingly explicit compendium of pornographic films from the earliest days of cinema, and sex has been a driving force behind other technological developments; becoming a key factor in the VHS vs. Betamax war, for example, or the internet boom. With that in mind, we shouldn't be surprised that 3D has now been put to use capturing the ins and outs of sexual intercourse, but the resulting film is not the salacious, sensationalistic work you might expect. In fact, one of the most notable things about The Lovers' Guide 3D is how un-erotic it is, for all of its explicit content. As the title suggests, this film has been made for education rather than titillation, and it does its job perfectly well.
The Lovers' Guide is taking this leap into the third dimension on its 20th anniversary. Since its first instalment in 1991, the series has been an enormous success, with its various sequels exploring every aspect of sex, but with this one the filmmakers appear to be getting back to basics. It feels like something of a beginners' guide, with chapter headings such as Flirting, Touching and Kissing introducing us to very first steps of a sexual relationship, and everything is laid out in clear and simple terms. Each section of the film unfolds in a similar fashion, with an attractive couple on screen slowly going through the motions being described in the voiceover narration, which is provided by Gemma Bissix and Jeremy Edwards. They take turns reading from the script but both employ the same flat, passionless tone throughout.
Having never seen one of the Lovers Guide films before, I wasn't sure what to expect when I was invited to a special screening of this new feature. The film is shot in a pleasingly frank manner, with the composed and well-lit cinematography leaving little to the imagination as it shows a variety of couples having sex. The use of real couples is one of the film's better points, as they display a real sense of intimacy and actually seem to be genuinely enjoying each other. Although the advice offered by the film is simplistic throughout, the script Edwards and Bissix read from does appear to be detailed and well-researched (there's a great aside about Victorian doctors manually inducing orgasms in female patients to cure hysteria). That's not to say the voiceover doesn't drop a couple of amusing clangers, however, and the matter of fact way in which a line like, "You may want to get an all-clear from him before sticking your finger in his anus" was delivered prompted a few laughs among the preview audience. Another memorable tidbit was, "A bruised testicle is a sure-fire way to get a man out of the mood" – Amen to that!
The biggest problem with The Lovers' Guide 3D is the pacing. Every single scene in the film plays out at the same languid pace and with the same style and tone, and this lack of variation ensures a sense of tedium eventually sets in. The film is only 65 minutes long but it has a tendency to drag, although at least the 3D is a little easier on the eye than it has been with some features I've seen recently. Apart from one startling erection shot, the film generally avoids thrusting things at the audience, and instead the 3D is used to give each sequence a sense of depth and focus. The Lovers' Guide 3D is a curious film that might have a limited audience, but you have to say that it achieves everything it sets out to achieve, delivering a straightforward guide to sex that's very easy to watch. Viewers looking for something a little more thrilling may be advised to look elsewhere, or bide their time waiting for a more adventurous director to take the plunge and explore the sexual possibilities of 3D filmmaking. Gaspar Noé, I'm looking at you...
The Extras
The Lovers' Guide 3D will be playing for a limited time at the Apollo Piccadilly Circus, but most people will see it on DVD or Blu-Ray, where it will be available in both 2D and 3D versions. The disc contains a 17-minute behind the scenes feature that details some of the difficulties involved in the 3D production, as well as interviewing key members of the cast and crew.
The Lovers' Guide 3D will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on February 7th
Buy The Lovers' Guide 3D here
The Film
There's nothing new in Open House, the feature debut of writer/director Andrew Paquin, with the film suggesting a lifetime spent watching horror movies and learning very little from them. All of the action takes place in a house being put on the market by Alice (Rachel Blanchard) following her split from husband Josh (Stephen Moyer), and the film opens with an estate agent showing a pair of prospective buyers around the property. While he does so, a mysterious figure slips into the house unnoticed and hides himself away in the basement. This is David (Brian Geraghty), one half of a serial killer duo, whose MO is to invade open houses and kill the inhabitants, before treating any unfortunate visitors to the same treatment. For reasons that are known only to himself (and are never satisfactorily explained), David decides to let Alice live, instead locking her away in the basement and letting her join him upstairs when his ruthless partner Lila (Tricia Helfer) leaves for...work, I guess? We never really find out what she does either.
As you may have gathered, a cloud of vagueness hangs over Open House, which rarely gets into any specifics regarding its plot, its characters or their motivation. The picture quickly settles into a very repetitive pattern, with David revealing a more vulnerable side to his character by allowing Alice to sit with him, before quickly stashing her away again when Lila turns up. This is supposed to be the prime source of tension for the film, but Alice's character is so underwritten we never care about her even in her state of extreme peril. The same could be said about any of the victims who turn up to be sliced and stabbed by David and Lila throughout the movie; they're just victims, and there's no sense of suspense as they are summarily despatched.
Brian Geraghty is good at playing unsettlingly quiet characters and he has some effective moments here (although his dress and manner is sometimes reminiscent of the superior Funny Games). Helfer's performance as the cold-blooded seductress is a little more strained, and while a sense of family loyalty obviously persuaded Anna Paquin to sign up for a cameo, it's a shame she only gets a couple of minutes of screen time. Even at just over 80 minutes, Open House is a surprisingly dull affair, which struggles to hold the viewers' interest between murders, and a sustained frenzy of stabbing late in the day can't energise the picture before its abrupt and unsatisfying ending.
The Extras
The only extra on the disc is a trailer, but a spot of googling suggests that the US release contained an audio commentary and some deleted scenes. What gives?
Open House is released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 24thBuy Open House here
March 8th 2011 is International Women's Day, and – in a neat bit of symmetry – it also marks the start of the 2011 Birds Eye View Film Festival. This festival, which celebrates and promotes the work of female filmmakers both past and present, continues to grow in prominence and it is now enjoying its seventh year. The programme for the 2011 festival was announced this week, and it once again features an eclectic collection of films and events, with new films from around the world lining up alongside classic, female-centred fare from cinema's past.
The highlight in the 2011 programme is the presence of Meek's Cutoff, the latest film from the ever-excellent Kelly Reichardt. It is an extraordinary film, beautiful and strange, and I can't wait to see it again. Another great auteur showing her latest film at the festival is Susanne Bier, whose In a Better World has recently won a Golden Globe and been Oscar-nominated, while Lena Dunham's much talked-about Tiny Furniture is one I'm very curious about. Other films in the lineup that have caught my eye are Night Catches Us and Grown Up Movie Star, while there are some equally interesting offerings in the very strong documentary strand this year. Lucy Walker, an Oscar nominee for her fantastic Waste Land, presents her new documentary Countdown to Zero, while I'll be hoping to catch Guilty Pleasures and Women of Hamas too.
Contemporary cinema is only half of the Birds Eye View programme, however, and there are real gems to be found every year in its archive section. The Sounds and Silents strand is always exciting, with female musicians being commissioned to write and perform new scores to classic silent movies. This year they will be presenting Victor Sjostrom's masterpiece The Wind, the John Barrymore-starring Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and one film I've never heard of before, Sparrows from 1926, starring Mary Pickford. Other classics will be on view in the month-long What a Woman's Gotta Do retrospective at the BFI Southbank. There are some brilliant films showing here – The Night of the Hunter, Fargo, Johnny Guitar, Aliens – as well as a couple, like Stella Dallas and Stage Door that I'm very much looking forward to seeing for the first time.
The 2011 Birds Eye View Festival runs from March 8th to 17th at the BFI Southbank, the ICA and the Southbank Centre. Tickets will be on sale from mid-February. Check the website for further updates.
Clint Eastwood famously likes to shoot his screenplays as they are written, making no revisions, and that may be where the problems began with his new film Hereafter. Peter Morgan's script feels like a first draft, with plot points and characters merely sketched in, and the narrative held together by strained contrivances, as if they were put down as markers with Morgan intending to come back and add some finesse and depth at a later time. It seems he never got the chance, and Hereafter now appears onscreen as a bewilderingly half-cocked load of nonsense, and the work of a director who seems patently unsuited to this material. This film, with its analysis of death and the afterlife, and its reliance on curious twists of fate, required the light, otherworldly touch of a Kieslowski (admittedly, directors like that are in short supply), and Eastwood's typically pragmatic, workmanlike approach feels horribly at odds with the material. Hereafter bleeds vitality and potency from its first scene onwards. What on earth can you say about a movie that begins with a tsunami and climaxes at a book fair?
That tsunami does provide the film with a startling opening, though. It's a spectacular recreation of the 2004 disaster, with one of the film's three main protagonists getting caught up in the chaos. French journalist Marie (Cécile De France) is on holiday with her boyfriend when the wave hits, rushing terrifyingly through the streets and destroying anything that lies in its path. Marie is engulfed by water and she comes close enough to drowning to experience a brief glimpse of the other side, a glimpse that haunts her as she recovers from her traumatic experience back in France. She gives up on the book she has been commissioned to write – an explosive biography of François Mitterrand – and instead begins to pursue her newfound interest in the other side, following a path that will eventually bring her into contact with the film's two other lead characters.
This is one of those movies in which the narrative focus hops between separate narrative strands before they are eventually pulled together. In London, we meet twins Marcus and Jason (George MacLaren and Frankie MacLaren), the 12 year-old sons of a junkie mother, both of whom are appalling actors whose flat delivery suggests they're reading their lines for the very first time, although the pain of listening to them is at least halved when Jason is killed by a car. Meanwhile, in America, Matt Damon plays George, a reclusive individual who possesses the power of contacting the dead, but who hides his gift, believing it to be more of a curse. Damon's performance is the picture's most successful, as he brings a sensitivity and emotional weight to the role, but his character is as one-note as the film, which Eastwood shoots in shadowy tones and paces lugubriously.
Some of Hereafter's weird tangents are just baffling. There's the Swiss scientist (Marthe Keller) and her big box of evidence for the afterlife, the rather cheap inclusion of the July 7th London bombings, and an amusing cameo from Derek Jacobi (never knowingly underacting, even as himself). Morgan ties everything together in a clumsily laborious fashion, and the picture never appears to have anything worth saying about the afterlife, or any sense of purpose behind it. Why did Eastwood make this film? It is another lumbering misfire from a director who, just a few years ago, seemed incapable of putting a foot wrong. Since his hugely impressive World War II double-bill in 2006, the only Eastwood picture I've really enjoyed has been Gran Torino, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that he brought his inimitable presence to the leading role. I can't help feeling that Hereafter could have used a similar onscreen boost, perhaps with Clint playing an old man coming to the end of his life and facing the truth of what lies on the other side. It's a ridiculous notion, of course – after all, it would have required a rewrite.
A legendary figure among Disney animators, Glen Keane began working at the studio in the 1970s, where he learned his trade from Walt's original artists. He has subsequently been responsible for some of the most iconic Disney characters of the modern era, with Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas and Tarzan all coming to life under his pen. Now Keane has helped bring Rapunzel to cinemas in Disney's Tangled, and when he came to London last week to promote the film, I had the opportunity to talk to him about it.
I wanted to ask you about your background with this film because you've been involved with it for a long time. Could you talk about how it has evolved from the time you first began working on it in 2002?
I actually started it in '96, so it has been 14 years on this film. It was while I was working on Tarzan, and when you're animating you're always thinking about what's next. I was thinking about this story that had always fascinated me, the story of this girl with this potential inside of her, born from a magical flower and with this creative gift. I started to develop it, I did drawings, I did an enormous amount of work from '96 all the way up to 2002, while I was doing Tarzan and Treasure Planet, and then 2002 was when I started work on it full time. I did a whole presentation for Michael Eisner and told him that I wanted to do this movie, and he said, "Yes, let's do it! But Glen, I want you to do it on a computer." I said to him, "Michael, don't you like these drawings?" and he said, "I love them," so I said, "But you can't do that on a computer!" He said, "Glen, I don't want you to leave behind what you love in hand-drawn, but I want you to find a way to bring that into the computer." I mean, he may not have been saying that for artistic reasons, it may have been because Shrek just made a bunch of money [laughs], but nevertheless, I felt that the challenge was honest, and I can't really say no to that. Every time the computer has crossed paths with me, I felt like it forced me to draw more in dimensions, to draw better. John Lasseter and I actually started the first computer animations in the mid-80s with the Wild Things test after seeing Tron. He animated the backgrounds and I did the characters by hand, because the computer couldn't do organic forms at that point. I realised that now I had to stop saying that a computer can't do what the hand can do, and instead I needed to start asking "Why?" What is it specifically that I don't like about the computer, and how can I change that? What tools do we need?
So we started off on this adventure and I realised the studio was pretty much split. There was a group of CG artists and hand-drawn artists, and they weren't really talking. So we had a retreat called The Best of Both Worlds where we bought both groups together and we realised that there were a lot of things that computer animation just wasn't doing, because it had never been asked to. For example, the computer does things perfectly symmetrical. Symmetry is easy, and typically the way you would design a CG character is that you would model half of it and duplicate it. It's done and it's perfect, but what you've done is you've created create this robot and everyone goes, "Ew, something's weird." With Rapunzel I did an enormous amount of drawings and I wanted to keep a sense of asymmetry in her. I read a book about feminine beauty and it said the key to beauty is strangeness in a woman's face. There needs to be something slightly off, some element; it might be her nose, her lip, her tooth, or one eye higher than the other, but something. Even in Rapunzel's teeth, the way she talks, there's something a little bit wonky in the placement of her teeth, and things like that were designed so that she was more real, true and appealing. We also had the characters breathe more so they weren't just CG figures, they were actually... [takes deep breath]...they have lungs inside them. There were so many different things like that and we started developing them and...I'm sure I've gotten so far off your question [laughs].
Don't worry, that's fine. How was it when you came back to the project in a different capacity then? Did it allow you to have a fresh perspective on the film you'd worked on for so long?
Yeah. In 2008, I had a heart attack and I stepped back. For six months, I took off and I just spent time with the family. My daughter had a daughter, so we have a granddaughter, and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. My first day back at work was...it was difficult because something I had been driving for so long was now in somebody else's hands, and that's never easy. You watch somebody else make their own choices and Byron and Nathan needed to make it their own, to direct a film you have to make it your own. One of the first things I noticed was that the dog was gone and a horse was there, and I said, "You took the dog out! That was my family dog, I loved that dog!" [laughs] Then I realised that they had replaced it with a horse but now the horse was acting like a dog, and it was even better. They were adding things but the structure and architecture was still there, and all the elements I loved were deep-rooted. The ideas all have their roots in the original fairytale, so I learned that in a new role I could just focus on what I did best, drawing and animating. I could take all of the principles I had been taught by Frank Thompson, Ollie Johnston, Eric Larson and the nine old men of Disney, and I could spend my time teaching. In dailies, when we worked with the animators it was like passing the baton onto a new generation.
That's why it still retains that classic Disney feel.
Yeah, there were these lessons. When I would go into Ollie's office in my early 20's, he would say things and I realised that I was hearing stuff no one else in the world was hearing, and the reason he was telling me wasn't just to be nice, he was giving me something that I needed to pass on. I would go back to my room and write it down because there were some profound ideas, and I found myself repeating them to this group, because they were so clear. I would say, "Don't animate what the character is doing, animate what the character is thinking," and it makes a world of difference, because suddenly it's not just a robotic action, it's an emotion that's happening up on the screen. Another one is, "Look for the golden poses, look for the golden moments, and spend time on that," craft that pose as if it was a painting in the Louvre and you only had one image to tell the whole story, sculpt that, don't move them all over the place. We were really teaching people to value a pose and have confidence, don't feel you have to move everything, spend time on the subtle things. Most of the artists were from other studios and they didn't know the Disney heritage, but they needed to know the roots that they were now part of, so I was constantly passing those things on and felt like that was my role. Stepping back from directing really gave me something I wouldn't have been able to do if I had been the director.
You have been responsible for so many iconic Disney characters. When you're designing one for the first time, do you have a particular way in? Is there an aspect of them that you try to capture first, so the rest of them will fall into place?
I have this strange belief that the character exists before I draw them, like it's already there. Everyone has heard about Michelangelo sculpting and releasing the figure inside the marble, and it's bizarre but it's true. It has been that case for every character I have designed, there's a moment when I recognise them and say, "Oh, there you are." I did hundreds, thousands of drawings of Rapunzel, but none of them were her, and hearing Mandy's voice helps too. She's adding something that gives it a certain irrepressible nature, and then the design locks in and you say, "There she is!" I also base it on people I know, it's not just out of my head. In this case, a big part of Rapunzel was my daughter Claire. I remember when she was a little kid and she always wanted to paint the walls and ceiling in her bedroom, she was an uncontainable little ball of creative energy, and constantly clashing with my wife Linda; "No Claire, you're not going to paint the walls." By the time I was doing this movie, Claire was going to art school and had become a really talented painter, so I hired her to create the look of Rapunzel's room. There was a lot of Claire in Rapunzel, and I think there's a lot of me in that character too – of course, I'm not a girl – but the qualities I really admire in Rapunzel are her irrepressibility, a desire to share the gift she has got with other people. To me it's a spiritual thing, that's why you want to do a story. I believe we have something to give to others and I connect with that.
Have you had to adapt your style in the age of 3D animation?
Not really. I think of drawing as sculptural drawing, so I've always thought in terms of 3D. Having it be 3D with the glasses is just a step closer to the way I do it. I love the idea of having this character in space and it doesn't need to be gimmicky or anything, although there are a few places where we take advantage of it, when we throw the hair straight towards the audience or the lanterns float out into the audience and the kids reach out to touch them. Those elements are fun, but the best thing is that Rapunzel feels like she's in space, in this environment, the tower is real, and we don't want the 3D to overpower the character.
How do you feel about the future of 2D animation? When films like The Princess and the Frog don't do as well as expected, it seems people are very quick to write off that art form. Do you think 2D still has a place alongside 3D CGI animations?
Well, I know Ron and John are working on another hand-drawn film right now, but that isn't to say that there aren't new directions for hand-drawn to go in as well. I think the traditional look of hand-drawn Disney animation is a medium in itself, just like CG animation, but that traditional Disney look is there because of the technical limitations of having paint on cells, and we don't have to do that anymore. When you draw, there's an energy in that drawing, and the computer can celebrate hand-drawn animation and help it be free on the screen. I'd love to see us use more of that.
Finally, you mentioned that you worked with John Lasseter in the 80's. Now he's back overseeing the entire animation operation at Disney. From a filmmaker's perspective, what impact has his presence made on the studio?
John has really brought his love of hand-drawn with him, because those are his roots. It's nice to see someone come back to the studio with that and honestly give people a choice. On his first day at work he came down to my office and said, "Glen, there's nothing more important at the studio than this movie, but you have a decision to make. Do you want to do it hand-drawn or CG?" If he had asked me three years earlier I would have said hand-drawn for sure, but now I had this goal and I really believed there was something to strive for and I wanted to do it CG. It was really wonderful to have that support all the way through the film because we were constantly reinventing and challenging the way things were done at Pixar. We wanted to do them in new ways down here and he wasn't saying, "Well, no, we always do it this way," he was allowing us to reinvent an approach for CG animation in our own studio. Allowing Disney to just be Disney was a really important step for him.
The Film
