Told from the point of view of Eli Sisters, the book follows the travels of Eli and his brother, Charlie, from Oregon City to San Francisco on a mission to kill a man. But unlike other Western tales of tracking and revenge, the man they aim to kill, Hermann Kermit Warm, has done them no wrong. Their employer has assigned them to kill him, and this is hardly their first such job for the man. As with any road story, they meet colourful characters along the way and get into tense and exciting altercations. Typical stuff.

What sets The Sisters Brothers apart is deWitt’s effortless writing style. The words flow off the page in a most enjoyable way, but much like Charles Portis’ True Grit there is a sense of worldliness about the story. This isn’t some mere shoot’em up Western. Eli’s journey is one of deep reflection on his path through life and the things that motivate him and give him comfort. Murder is not a light matter in his world, but neither is it something too deeply shocking. It’s a part of his life that he is giving serious consideration to. What is it all for? Can Eli settle into a normal life.

In a way, The Sisters Brothers could be read as a prequel of sorts to Clint Eastwood’s film, Unforgiven. This is the story of two men coming to terms with the ill morality and utter pointlessness of their current lives. Their settling down may not be permanent. This “one last job” may not be their last, and their past may come back to call on them. That’s all speculative, though. The book itself offers more than enough wit and wisdom to both entertain and leave you thinking. It’s a light read with heavy meaning. My favourite kind of book.

Links time!

First up is screenwriter Sean Hood over at Genre Hacks with a great advice piece for first-time screenwriters. He offers up some quality, helpful information.

Ronan Wright at Filmplicity delightfully tackles the tough issue of how two people share an armrest at the cinema.

Scott Lawlor at Front Room Cinema reviews one of my very favourite films from last year, The Muppets, which has finally reached across the pond to the UK.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is back in theatres in glorious (shitty) 3D! Mike Ryan and Matt Singer had a hilarious chat about the film over at Moviefone.

My new favourite blogger is also a pretty big name. Brenda Chapman, a legend in the world of animation and the original director of the new Pixar film, Brave. For two examples of what makes Brenda such a great blogger look no further than this post about her undying love for Meryl Streep, and this post about the changing definition of animation in the world of motion-capture.

Over at DavidBordwell.com, Kirstin Thompson and David Bordwell have an amazing in-depth article about the dangers facing the world of film preservation due to the ongoing conversion to digital. This is necessary reading for any film lover.

Finally, Steve Kimes at Just Another Movie Blog has written a review, in song, of the film Alamar. I haven’t seen the film, but I’m seriously looking forward to it now.

Onward, to the reviews!

The Nominees

Dimanche

A Canadian short about the boring routine of young boy on a sunday in a small town. There is probably a little too much melancholy in the film, with sad boredom and some animal deaths. The 2D animation is beautifully styled, with subdued colours. To a certain degree I wish the short was a few minutes longer. The ending lacks the kind of punctuation to really sell the emotional power clearly intended. It leaves you feeling like it was oddly unfinished, lacking an overall point.

A Morning Stroll

One simple story told three times in three different time periods with three different animation styles. A man walks down the street, a chicken turns the corner and walks by him. They look at each other and then the chicken walks up some steps to a door, pecks at it, the door opens and it walks in. In the first setting, 1959, the animation is cel-shaded black-and-white lines. In 2009 we get candy coloured cel-shading, now with a gag about taking a video of the chicken on a cell phone. The big laughs come in the final version, set in 2059, post-zombie apocalypse. It’s silly, but very funny, and the animation is excellent.

Wild Life

Another Canadian short, because few countries pump out as many animated short films as Canada. Wild Life tells the story of a young British man who moves to the Canadian West with designs on being a cowboy. Of course, he can’t let go of his pampered aristocratic lifestyle and this leads to a lot of charm, but also a melancholy undoing. The real highlight here is the animation, which is done with 2D brushed paintings for every frame. The details and quality of the animation is kind of astounding.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

An avid reader gets blown away and killed(?) in a huge storm. In his afterworld he finds a big library of books that can fly. He lives there the rest of his life, taking care of the books, forming a deep bond with them and then moving on when it’s time. The 3D animation is quite good, but the character design is strangely inexpressive. The short tries very hard to elicit emotion, but it’s a little too specific to be moving. Maybe serious book lovers will fall for it, but I wasn’t transported.

La Luna

The annual Pixar entry! Maybe it’s not fair for Pixar to be playing in this contest. They’re the big guys after all. But you know what, their short films are great, and the focus on allowing directors to do interesting things that will actually get seen by mass audiences is great. La Luna is maybe the best short they’ve ever done. Enrico Casarosa’s tale about a boy, his father and his grandfather taking a boat and anchoring it to the moon is extremely whimsical, but also quite beautiful and moving with its light touch. The animation is classic Pixar. Basically perfect. But as is always the case with these shorts, the expressiveness is just wonderful. It seems silly to say it considering how much I’m already biased toward Pixar, but this really was my favourite of the five nominees.

The Commendables

Skylight

This one might have been my overall favourite short. It doesn’t have the beauty of La Luna, nor is the animation style too complex or anything, but it’s hilarious! It’s a mock PSA about penguins and holes in the ozone layer. Many animals are die, and I couldn’t stop laughing. That might sound awful, but I promise it’s delightful. And while the animation isn’t too wild it is very funny. The penguins in particular is brilliantly animated. SO FUNNY! You can actually watch the film on YouTube here, though it lacks the hilarious end credits and post-credits gag.

The Hybrid Union

Basically an exercise in 3D mechanical character animation. Three mechanical robots race away from a cloud for some reason. I’ll say that while I think the animation is quite fantastic on a technical level, the design and style just bored me.

Nullarbor

Quite a long 3D animated short about a man driving down the Nullarbor, an extremely long and straight road in the Australian Outback. He really wants a cigarette, and when he loses his he tries to get another driver on the road to give him one. They comically race each other down the road, messing with each other. It’s a funny short but with a weirdly off-putting art design.

Amazonia

A fun short about a couple of lizards trying to get food in the Amazon while avoiding predators. It’s fun. Kids will enjoy it as well I’m sure. The CGI animation is wild and cartoony. It’s nothing special, but as a piece of cartoon entertainment it’s very good.

Sure, half the book is about the creation of those great 70s movies and the directors who made them, but the other half is all about who did what drugs and which directors slept with which women. It’s gossipy drivel and that completely overshadows any good insight into the actual films the books is supposed to be about.

And the gossip isn’t just limited to sex and drugs. Biskind got tons quotes from many of the players involved, but most of the quotes deal with how everyone backstabbed everyone. It’s somewhat interesting, but the amount of space given to this stuff turns it into boring crap. I was totally with the book for the first 100 or so pages, hoping it would dig deeper as it went. It never dug deeper. Biskind just isn’t interested in the substance.

And worst of all is how Biskind tries to draw conclusions about what this particular era in Hollywood meant and how and why it didn’t last. He seems to put a lot of blame on Spielberg and Lucas, as though they were directors who lacked any serious artistic integrity. His comments about the quality of their movies come down to personal opinions and bias, without any serious examination of what actually happened. But then that makes sense. Biskind was clearly more enthralled by all the fucking and snorting of the “auteurs” than he was by the squeaky clean and smart decisions of the people who made the blockbusters. Even with Coppola he feels the need to describe Apocalypse Now as something of a failure because he doesn’t happen to like the third act.

It’s bad criticism. It’s bad journalism. It’s a dumb book and I can’t believe it has come so highly recommended by most people.

What’s more, Double Fine has decided to forego seeking a publisher. Publishers are a waste of time, and if Double Fine pitched a point-and-click adventure they’d get sent packing. Adventure games are dead! Tim and his brethren have taken the case to the fans instead. They’re going to fund the entire game development through Kickstarter.

The goal was to get fans to put up the cash for getting the game made. Anyone who donates also gets a copy of the game when it’s completed. On top of that, Double Fine has hired a documentary crew to create an ongoing series that shows all the ins and outs making a game.

This Kickstarter project is already extremely successful. Double Fine announced the project last night with a goal of $400,000 (that’s $300,000 for the game and $100,000 for the documentary). A totally reasonable goal. Well, in just about 16 hours by my current watch, the project has amassed over $725,000 from nearly 18,000 backers. That’s insane.

Seriously. Insane.

Schafer posted this on Twitter earlier today:

Kickstarter records so far: Most funds raised in the first 24 hours. Highest number of backers of all time, and growing! Good morning! —
Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) February 09, 2012

Absolutely nuts. I haven’t donated yet, but I definitely will. Most likely at the $30 level. If you’re a fan of indie gaming and classic adventure games I’d recommend doing the same. Even though they are already well beyond their original goal, the more money the project gets the more they can offer with the game. Versions for various platforms right out of the gate. More languages. More and better voice work. And best of all, it’s a slap in the face to major developers. It shows them that despite all their focus on huge, big-budget games, there are vast untapped markets just waiting for great smaller games.

Now if only Hollywood could get a slap in the face like that as well.

I just had the pleasure of watching the documentary series, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. It’s a long title for a long series. Three parts, roughly four hours in total. There is so much information and insight in those four hours it’s almost difficult to keep up. Scorsese includes countless clips from classics and forgotten classics of studio-era Hollywood. There is only one major problem with the film: it isn’t long enough. That four hours could have been twenty-four hours and it probably wouldn’t have satisfied me.

Seeing all those clips was great, too. Scorsese often shows clips that spoil the endings of the movies, but who cares? These are great movies. They’ll stand up to spoiling the ending. Plus, how can anyone discuss the greatness of The Searchers without showing that amazing final shot? Also wonderful is the fact that I haven’t even seen most of the films Scorsese highlights. While watching I tried to keep track of all the films I hadn’t seen that looked great. Here’s that list:

• Duel in the Sun
• The Bad and the Beautiful
• The Crowd
• Shadow of a Doubt
• The Great Train Robbery
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley – Griffith short
• High Sierra
• She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
• The Furies
• The Naked Spur
• The Power Play
• The Left-Handed Gun
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• The Regeneration
• The Roaring Twenties
• I Walk Alone
• Force of Evil
• Point Blank
• Gold Diggers of 1933/35
• 42nd Street
• Footlight Parade
• Meet Me in St Louis
• All That Jazz
• The Cameraman
• Death’s Marathon
• Cabiria
• Intolerance
• Her Man
• The Big House
• Leave Her to Heaven
• Johnny Guitar
• The Robe
• East of Eden
• Some Came Running
• Land of the Pharaohs
• The Fall of the Roman Empire
• Cat People
• The Thing From Another World
• I Walked With a Zombie
• Letter From an Unknown Woman
• Detour
• Crime Wave
• Outrage
• The Renegades
• T-Men
• Raw Deal
• Kiss Me Deadly
• Silver Load
• All That Heaven Allows
• Forty Guns
• Pickup on South Street
• Two Weeks in Another Town
• Broken Blossoms
• I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
• Hell’s Highway
• The Scarlett Empress
• On the Waterfront
• The Man With the Golden Arm
• One, Two, Three
• America, America

I’m sure I missed a few. The clips seemed endless, and they all looked great. If you’d like to see the documentary, it’s on YouTube.

This got me thinking about other great expansive documentaries about film history. The first one that came to mind was the amazing 13-hour series, Hollywood: A Celebration of American Silent Film (also on YouTube). It’s ridiculously in-depth, but like Scorsese’s doc, endlessly watchable.

And then there’s the follow-up doc from the same creators, Cinema Europa: The Other Hollywood (again, also on YouTube), which covers the silent era of European film. Scorsese has his own long documentary about European cinema, specifically Italian cinema, called My Voyage to Italy.

The BBC also produces wonderful series about film history. One of my favourites is A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (YouTube!).

And then there’s the weirdly unique documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, which hasn’t even been released properly due to rights issues (but, of course, is on YouTube).

This is only scratching the surface of the kinds of huge documentaries available. There have been so many films about the history of film made. The Wizard of Oz Blu-ray set has a great documentary about the history of the MGM studio. Mark Cousins has a 15-hour documentary called The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which played at TIFF and which I got to see the first six hours from. It has aired on TV in the UK and will apparently be available on North American shores this year. I can’t wait to watch the rest of it.

If you’ve got a big appetite for film knowledge and film history, these documentaries are a great place to start. Literally days of material.

Do you love these docs as much as I do? Are there any huge documentaries about film I’ve neglected to mention? Let me know, I can’t wait to check them all out.

Let me answer those questions in reverse order. No, CGI has killed nothing. That’s because visual effects alone do not a “Whoa…” moment make. Such moments have always been a rarity. Having your mind blown by what you see on screen usually comes down to a sense of the achievement behind the camera which sells a new idea of reality on screen. One of the best examples in the history of cinema is this scene from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park:

The CGI doesn’t even look that amazing these days. It holds up well enough, but only well enough. Yet, after all these years, the moment I see those dinosaurs I get goosebumps. The technical feat was impressive for its time, but somehow knowing its an effect only adds to the brilliance of the moment. That’s because it’s not just the effect itself, it’s the idea of the effect. The build-up. The pay-off. The image of dinosaurs in modern times. It all comes together and the illusion is sold in my heart even when my head tells me it’s not real.

But there is some truth to the notion that CGI effects have become too easy. I never get goosebumps watching Transformers. Sure, the big damn robots are cool, and I admire the effects work, but it all ends up feeling like a cheat. Like somebody just drew a cartoon. Of course that building in Transformers 3 falls over, it’s CGI! Practical effects have an advantage in this regard. There hasn’t been a better “Whoa…” moment in the last decade than this scene from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight:

There’s just no getting around how damn cool that scene is. He flips a fucking truck! A real truck! He flips it!!! Holy shit. The prologue to The Dark Knight Rises that was featured at IMAX presentations of Mission: Impossible 4 had similar epic scale practical effects that are completely mind-blowing. Oh, and that Dubai sequence in Mission: Impossible 4? Same deal. Sure, they digitally removed cables and wires, but at the end of the day, you’ve got a camera looking out over the the tallest building in the world with Tom “Crazy SOB” Cruise hanging off the side. “Whoa…”

Computer effects can still be mind-blowing, though. Take, for example, the shot in The Matrix when the helicopter crashes into the building creating a shockwave of glass. It’s just so damn cool. Even fully animated can do it. The single take chase sequence in Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin was absolutely insane. It can’t even be discounted by the fact that it’s animated. The sheer choreography of it is near-impossible to process. It’s phenomenal.

These kinds of scenes are what made me fall in love with movies to begin with. These are the moments where illusion becomes reality and my brain cracks. The only proper response is “Whoa…”

What are your favourite “Whoa…” moments in cinema? Are there older films that still do it for you? Are you completely unimpressed by CGI?

When I heard Marc Webb was helming a reboot of the franchise I perked up. (500) Days of Summer is one of my favourite films of the last few years, and I saw in Webb a guy who would be able to find tonal consistency in an inherently silly property. By the looks of this new trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man, Webb has succeeded. It looks genuinely funny and playful, but also realistically moody and dramatic. I like the looks of Andrew Garfield. I love Emma Stone for reasons. Even Lizard looks pretty cool. All in all, colour me excited. Watch the trailer below:

Once again, Kermode is a great storyteller, but there is just something less interesting about hearing his life story than there is in hearing him use stories to rant about everything right and wrong with modern filmmaking. The Herzog story is incredibly entertaining, as any story about Herzog undoubtedly would be, but that kind of reveals the problem. When the most interesting story in your memoir is essentially about a completely different person, well, maybe you aren’t the greatest subject for a memoir.

It’s Only a Movie is an easy read, and quite fun, but it just doesn’t hold the interest or weight of his follow-up. It’s the kind of book I could only recommend to huge fans of Dr. Kermode, and even then I’d probably give them a little warning. All in all, a decent book, but not one that comes with a high recommendation.