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Friday!

The ultimate squish

Here is an article on those awful sounds you hear in movies. Specifically, it's an argument for "Drive" winning best sound-editing Oscar tonight for the "head-stomping in the elevator" scene, which was, uh, graphic. And while I am not a connoisseur of gross movie scenes, I have to say that that scene was quite effective. It comes as a shock, an "uh-oh" where the "nice guy" Ryan Gosling character shows way too much of his dark side, where the viewer realizes that there won't be a happily ever after ending for this movie, where the violence is suddenly ratcheted up to another level and pitches the viewer into the action of the final reel, through which he walks with blood all over himself.

What makes the elevator scene so effectively gross, and so grossly effective? Let's start with the squish. According to Mark Berger, a multiple-Oscar-winning sound editor who now teaches at UC-Berkeley, each violent impact is orchestrated like a musical chord. An editor might start with a thumping base note, he says—the sound of a 2-by-4 being smacked against a side of beef—and then add in some upper frequencies with a bundle of dry twigs being snapped or a plastic cup getting broken. Then he'd finish off the effect by filling out its mid-notes with something gloopy, like the sound of a ripe melon dropped on cement. By tweaking the proportions of these ingredients, he can build something dry and tough, or moist and oozy.   

The wetter sounds have tended to be the province of horror films (like John Carpenter's Vampires, known for the moist and squirty hearts of its title characters) and ultra-violent video games. A few years ago, the Joystiq blog posted a charming clip of sound editors reaming cucumbers, squeezing oranges, and attacking watermelons and cantaloupes with a hammer to make the juicy sounds they needed for a first-person shooter. The dramatic squish from Drive isn't any sort of innovation on its own terms, but it does represent an unusually graphic sound effect for what was pretty much a mainstream film.

The makers of Drive weren't trying to make the sounds of violent impact seem realistic. Like most sound editors, Bender says there's no clear relationship between what you'd hear in a movie fight and what you might hear in real life. Since very few people know what it actually sounds like to stomp someone's face in an elevator, the audio for a movie beating has to come from a sound editor's imagination. Soundtracks may be even more stylized and coded than on-screen visuals. "The criterion isn't authenticity," explains Mark Berger, the Berkeley professor. "It's perceived authenticity."

and:

There's nothing quite so avant-garde in the elevator scene from Drive, but Bender and Ennis have made their own more subtle additions to the vocabulary of concussive violence. To depict the crushing of the skull, they used the slowed-down noise of cracking nuts; for the blood they recorded the sloshing of a viscous liquid. But to complement these "obvious" sounds, as he calls them—the squishing and gushing and head-crunching—Bender and his colleagues added another track, of Ryan Gosling breathing and snorting and firing spittle. Not every viewer will be aware of this additional noise, but it adds ferocity and intimacy to the scene. "We tried to create the personal experience of [killing someone], of going through the effort of doing it," says Bender.

I agree that this should win the best sound-editing Oscar. I wouldn't recommend the movie to those with delicate stomachs, though.

At the movies: a good review of a good movie.

Here is an excellent review of "The Descendants", the movie I'll be rooting on Sunday night. It's an excellent review because it really captures what is good about the movie.

Perhaps Payne’s insistence on making human-scaled drama obscures his reach. Allergic to grandiosity, his movies depict losers, schlubs, and schmos dealing with domestic turmoil and personal crises in a nondescript, lived-in America. Across those movies, Payne has carved out an authorial identity defined by career-making performances (Reese Witherspoon in Election, Paul Giamatti in Sideways), adroit tone shifts, and the pitch-perfect rendering of life in these United States.

The Descendants shares many of those qualities, which might explain why the critical conversation surrounding the movie has seemed stunted, with most reviews amounting to little more than pronouncements of what “worked” and what didn’t. What such assessments overlook is a major American director working on his largest canvas yet and confronting some pretty fundamental questions. If Payne’s previous movies cast a sidelong glance at How We Live Now, this one emerges as an affecting inquiry into How We Live, period.

If you haven't seen it you should. Plus, I think I look sort of like George Clooney.

George Lucas

The New York Times ran a feature-length article on George Lucas a couple of weeks ago. It's an interesting read. Tip of the hat to Joan.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes: Pretty Good

Watched the new Planet of the Apes flick last night. It was really good. Granted, if you don't like science fiction or monkeys you might not appreciate it, but it was quite a film.

First off, the special effects were great. The apes really looked like apes. It was absolutely believable. I am continually amazed at how good this stuff is getting.

I won't go deep into the plot, it's not that deep and it pretty much follows a lot of sci fi stories. A scientist's dad, played by John Lithgow, is going senile, and the son is trying to come up with a cure for Alzheimer's. If you watch a lot of these movies you will remember that this is essentially the same plot of "Deep Blue Sea" (1999) except that in that movie they want to extract something from sharks' brains that cures Alzheimer's. Instead of harvesting a lot of small sharks they make the mistake of raising giant sharks with giant brains, and the mayhem ensues.

In the latest incarnation of the Planet of the Apes the scientist gives this stuff to an ape who is defending its baby, and while the mother is killed when she goes apeshit the baby is adopted by the scientist. The baby chimp gets smart and hijinks follow. Long short, John Lithgow eventually dies, the evil drug company makes an aerosol version of the virus and there's a monkey revolution when the smart chimp, Caesar, starts feeding the smart virus stuff to captive monkeys. Like other sci fi films they take over San Francisco, beat the California Highway Patrol on the Golden Gate Bridge and settle into Muir Woods. The neighbor of the scientist, an airline pilot, is infected and as the credits flip past the virus is spread around the world, presumably to make all monkeys smart.

I can see a sequel just over the hill.

Still, how come there is always a guy at the monkey house who doesn't like monkeys and mistreats them, thus justifying when the chimps go on the warpath?

Ryan Gosling, this year's model

On New Year's Eve Joanie and I saw "Drive", the Ryan Gosling movie wherein he as a Hollywood stunt driver who earns extra money being the wheel man for robbers and gets pulled into a really shady deal. Gosling's character doesn't talk much and in certain circumstances is prone to excessive violence in response to the violent characters around him.

On the trip home Joan pointed out that despite Gosling performing the role of the strong, silent type you could read his emotions, as opposed to the opaque Daniel Craig, who we'd seen in "Cowboys & Aliens" a few days previous. I tended to agree with her, but I also wonder how much of the reading of emotions in actors is brought by the viewer. That is, if you don't like Daniel Craig then his strong, silent character is wooden and empty. If you like Gosling, his strong, silent character offers the viewer a vast palette of seething emotions that are repressed but which you, the viewer, can read.

(I generally tend to measure my own trending towards leading actors by how much I'd want that actor to portray me in any biopic that I imagine being made about me. I could see Gosling portraying me, but not Craig. Having said that, in the past I could see Harrison Ford, Denzel Washington, George Clooney and Jet Li as portraying me.)

There was a recent article in Salon calling Gosling this year's "thinking girl's crush".

And in pondering this article, and Gosling's performance, I was trying to suss how much of a leading man's popularity is dependent on his roles, on the zeitgeist of the times, on his beauty, on his talent. There's a scene in "Drive" where Gosling's character stomps a man to death in an elevator in front of the leading lady, and after the rush of adrenalin I was thinking, "Gee, that's not the thing to do in front of a woman you want get jiggy with." But these days, as opposed to thirty years ago, leading men's quirkiness seems to allow for flourishes of psychopathic violence. (The stomping did turn off the leading lady in the movie, but that didn't stop Gosling's character from doing the "right thing" in this evil universe, as strong, silent types tend to do in films like this.)

At any case, here's that article. Follow the link to read it all.

Hey, Girl: In case you hadn’t noticed, Ryan Gosling may be this year’s king of pop culture. He’s certainly this year’s king of the Internet meme: Ryan Gosling is a feminist, works in publishing, teaches rhetoric and composition, works as a librarian, studies public history, goes to law school, and still finds time to be romantic. In real life, he fights crime, hangs out with Eva Mendes, and has very nice abs. It’s no wonder Gosling was recently named Time magazine’s Coolest Person of the Year, an honor that may appease the people who were so aggrieved by Gosling’s failure to be named People’s Sexiest Man Alive this year that they held a protest.

While I’ve not quite reached that level of obsession, I understand their fascination.  Who wouldn’t swoon for a man who turned Benedict Anderson into a pickup line, understood intersectionality, and swore his devotion to the proper use of the Oxford comma? I’ve encountered The Crush in women who pride themselves on not paying much attention to celebrities, women who don’t go for blonds in real life, even women who don’t go for men in real life.

The point of a fantasy is, of course, that it’s not real life, and most forms of The Crush involve some amalgamation of the “real” Ryan Gosling — a very talented, very pretty actor, who seems thoughtful about his career choices, capable of laughing at himself, and appropriately complex (twisted enough to empathize with the more alarming characters he plays while remaining far enough removed from them that we can tell he’s only acting) — and the invented Ryan Gosling of the Internet meme, an artsy, decidedly bookish man with a devotion to literary and social theory, a sharp critique of capitalism and patriarchy, and a serious weakness for studious ladies. The proliferation of fictional Goslings is in part a function of the Internet’s tendency to perpetuate itself, but it seems to me there’s also a complicated permutation of fantasy happening here, one that makes sense for a generation of women raised to be wary of fantasy, and that makes even more sense in a year that’s been as rough on fantasy as 2011 has been.

It’s worth pausing here to note that with the exception of “The Notebook,” which remains the anomaly in his career, Ryan Gosling’s cinematic oeuvre does not exactly scream “romantic kiss in the library stacks.” His best-known roles include a self-loathing Jewish neo-Nazi, an awkwardly styled and  socially challenged man who falls in love with a blow-up doll, and a drug-addicted middle school teacher who is inappropriately dependent on one of his students.

Gosling’s 2011 films include “Blue Valentine,” a bleak portrait of marriage that could convince the most hopeless of romantics that no matter how adorable and in love you are, your marriage could well end in excruciating disappointment and desolation; “Drive,” a stylishly bloody movie in which he plays a getaway driver who’s handy with a knife — convenient if you need to be rescued from murderous criminals, but not exactly ideal boyfriend material — and “The Ides of March,” in which he plays an increasingly unscrupulous political operative in a movie that emphasizes the degree to which politics treats young women as disposable.

The five worst Christmas movies

If you've still got a little egg nog in the fridge and can't quite quash the Christmas spirit for another year, here is a list of the five worst Christmas movies, as per Slate, to help you get over the holidays. For example, Elves.

Elves also has the bonus of starring Dan Haggarty, who made his fame and honed his acting skills as the straight man for a bear in the TV series "Gentle Ben". Who could have even imagined writing a script where the elves switch allegiance from Santa to Hitler?

Elves (1989)

[I]f anti-Christmas pagan rituals, big-time kink, and advanced sexual theories hold any appeal to you, 1989’s Elves is a veritable Citizen Kane of the holiday genre. The last image of the movie is a fetus, but that’s almost anti-climactic after you get through a plot that involves a neo-Nazi who has finally figured out what Hitler was up to. It wasn’t that the Führer wanted to take over the world with a master human race. Rather, the goal was to breed elves with humans. And that’s what the bad guys try to bring off here, with the help of a teenage girl and a randy elf. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it is, in its entirety, on YouTube.

Merry Christmas, Jean Shepherd

Donald Fagen, the main man for the rock group Steely Dan, grew up in New Jersey listening to Jean Shepherd on the radio. Like me. Shepherd wasn't a perfect man, but was a man for that age. Here's a very good article about him:

In the late '50s, while Lenny Bruce was beginning his climb to holy infamy in jazz clubs on the West Coast, Shepherd's all-night monologues on WOR had already gained him an intensely loyal cult of listeners. Unlike Bruce's provocative nightclub act, which had its origins in the "schpritz" of the Catskills comics, Shepherd's improvised routines were more in the tradition of Midwestern storytellers like Mark Twain, but with a contemporary urban twist: say, Mark Twain after he'd been dating Elaine May for a year and a half. Where Bruce's antics made headlines, Shepherd, with his warm, charismatic voice and folksy style, could perform his most subversive routines with the bosses in the WOR front office and the FCC being none the wiser. At least most of the time.

I was introduced to Shep, as his fans called him, by my weird uncle Dave. Dave, who was a bit of a hipster, used to crash on our sofa when he was between jobs. Being a bookish and somewhat imperious 12-year-old, already desperately weary of life in suburban New Jersey and appalled by Hoss and Little Joe and Mitch Miller and the heinous Bachelor Father, I figured Dave was my man. One night, after ruthlessly beating me at rummy, he put down the cards and said, "Now we're gonna listen to Shepherd—this guy's great." The Zenith table model in the kitchen came to life midway through Shepherd's theme music, a kitschy, galloping Eduard Strauss piece called the "Bahn Frei" polka. And then there was that voice, cozy, yet abounding with jest.

He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my 12-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with 25 more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down, and loosened his tie. I was hooked. From then on, like legions of other sorry-ass misfits throughout the Northeast, I tuned in every weeknight at 11:15 and let Shep put me under his spell. Afterward, I'd switch to an all-night jazz station and dig the sounds until I conked out. Eventually, this practice started to affect my grades and I almost didn't graduate from high school.

Listening to Shep, I learned about social observation and human types: how to parse modern rituals (like dating and sports); the omnipresence of hierarchy; joy in struggle; "slobism"; "creeping meatballism"; 19th-century panoramic painting; the primitive, violent nature of man; Nelson Algren, Brecht, Beckett, the fables of George Ade; the nature of the soul; the codes inherent in "trivia," bliss in art; fishing for crappies; and the transience of desire. He told you what to expect from life (loss and betrayal) and made you feel that you were not alone.

I have a memory of riding somewhere with my family in our Studebaker, on a cold gray winter afternoon, with Jean Shepherd on the radio.

Turn it up, Dad.

Merry Christmas.