Cigarettes and Werewolves Go Missing, and More
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow courtesy Paramount Pictures
Question: I saw and liked
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but was wondering: What was the source of Sir Laurence Olivier's performance? I've always wanted to know. - Jay
FlickChick: The late Sir
Laurence Olivier's "performance" as Professor Totenkopf ("dead head" in German) in
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was digitally built from archival BBC footage of Olivier giving a speech at some fund-raising event. The movements of his mouth were manipulated to match the film's dialogue, and the footage was processed to look like a staticky video holograph.
The same basic technology was used to alter existing footage of
Marlon Brando from
Superman (1978) so he could speak new dialogue for
Superman Returns (2006). But in
Superman Returns, the Brando footage looks as "real" as the rest, so it's another step toward being truly able to have a living actor appear alongside a dead one, the way singers can now do thoroughly convincing "duets" by integrating their new tracks with another vocalist's classic ones. It's a brave new world.
Question: What do you think about banning smoking in movies? - K.K.
FlickChick: The short answer is, I think it's ridiculous. Yes, smoking is dangerous to your health. So is drinking, reckless driving, pitched gun battles, eating French fries and bacon, sleeping with mysterious strangers, and checking on that noise in the basement. Remove all those behaviors from movies and you might as well go to church.
That said, I'm not an unreasonable person. I see where the Walt Disney Company is coming from in banning smoking from its kiddie films. As an internationally famous provider of wholesome, child-friendly entertainment, I can understand why Disney feels that, on a corporate level, it bears some responsibility to not actively disseminate images that could encourage children to engage in destructive behaviors like, say, smoking or huffing paint fumes. I can't say I'm aware of recent Disney children's films that feature children smoking or huffing, but hey, no harm in getting a rule on the books. Now, if they'd just ban kicked-in-the-'nads scenes....
ALl joking aside, Disney's promise to "discourage" smoking in films distributed by Touchstone and Miramax strikes me as a little more problematic. Some people smoke. Barring smokers across the board is like barring heavy people across the board: It's a weird distortion of reality. And once you ban smoking from new movies, someone will come up with the idea to delete it from
old movies, the way HarperCollins erased illustrator Clement Hurd's cigarette from the photo that appeared on every edition of the children's classic
Goodnight, Moon from 1947 until 2004. That smacks to me of Joseph Stalin's army of retouchers "disappearing" purged party officials from photographs.
Question: Hey, FlickChick, you rule. I thought Shane Carruth's
Primer was one of the most dazzling films of the last decade. But there's been nary a peep out of the filmmaker since. Do you know if he is working on a follow-up project? I am dying to see what he does next. - Dominic
FlickChick: Thanks, and good question. After doing hundreds of interviews to promote the release of
Primer (2004), software engineer turned self-taught filmmaker Shane Carruth seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. Three years ago he told interviewers he had already started the script for his next film, which he described as a coming-of-age romance between "an 18-year-old oceanography prodigy and the daughter of a commodities trader." He even said he'd written some music and hoped to find the money to pay a real composer to do something with it. And then... complete radio silence. But like you, I look forward to seeing what he does next:
Primer was bracingly different from the kind of films most first-time filmmakers come up with. Come back, Shane!
Question: I just saw a poster for
Skinwalkers, and that got me to wondering: How come people don't make more werewolf movies? I'm tired of vampires and psychos. - Kyle
FlickChick: My gut is that at the low-budget end of genre filmmaking, which is where the overwhelming majority of horror films are made, it comes down to special effects. You can do a vampire movie without investing in anything more than fangs; in fact, you can even do without them, was in movies like
Martin (1978),
Near Dark (1987) and
The Addiction (1995). You
can spring for more elaborate effects, you just don't have to. Ditto slasher movies: they can be utterly minimalist, though if you
want to you can pay for elaborate gore effects. But with werewolves you need to deliver transformations, and they cost.
Skinwalkers is heavily action-oriented - think guns-and-motorcycles action - and it goes for a wolfman look rather than the kind of full-body, man-into-wolf transformations that have been the norm since
The Howling and
An American Werewolf in London (both 1981). I think that was a more a creative decision than a flat-out cost-cutting effort, but I also I think it may be off-putting to horror buffs, especially in combination with a PG-13 rating.
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
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