The Gab of Steel

Werth: Wise, look up in the sky!

Wise: Is it a bird, or a plane?

Werth: No it's a Hollywood promotional juggernaut for the latest Superman reboot, Man of Steel.

Wise: Henry Cavill's chiseled puss is everywhere.

Werth: While I personally am excited by the trailer—

Wise: And Henry Cavill in a skintight unitard.

Werth:—I have a feeling I'm going to miss that old "comic book" sense of style that some earlier incarnations of Superman embodied. In 1941 producer Max Fleischer of Popeye fame and his brother, director Dave, brought the Superman comic books to the big screen in an animated short-form format for Paramount. 

This was the Golden Age of the animated short, when Bugs, Mickey and Tom & Jerry delighted movie going audiences between feature films and Movietone News segments that showed Europe dissolving into war. They gave the audience time to breathe in between Citizen Kane, Suspicion, and Hitler.

Wise: And made it even harder to sneak out to the john. 

Werth: But with the Superman series, the Fleischers did something a little more elegant than the other cartoons. Sticking to the comic's origin story, these shorts quickly absorbed the audience into the story of Superman, the last survivor of a doomed planet who has super powers like being faster than a speeding bullet and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. 

When he isn't fighting for truth and justice, he is disguised as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent whose competitive relationship with deep-throated co-worker Lois Lane will undoubtedly lead to romance.... someday.

Wise: Lois put up a better fight than Hildy Johnson. 

Werth: What makes these simple cartoons so thrilling is the animation that was used. The comic book becomes cinema with art moderne and industrial designs for everything from a radio, to a cityscape, to a huge death ray; and a film noir lighting scheme that uses shadows and light to rival The Maltese Falcon. 

Shot in Technicolor, Lois Lane's salmon jacket and skirt are muted yet bold, and the way the figures move is mesmerizing with their jerking, yet fluid movement. Eight of the original cartoons are worth a gander with Superman fighting various mad scientists, a thawed-out tyrannosaurus rex, and a big ape who runs amok on the midway. 

The robots in The Mechanical Monsters clearly inspired the robots used in 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, proving that even a 72-year-old cartoon can still inspire today's filmmakers. 

Wise: The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is based on the beloved comic by Belgian artist Hergé and follows the intrepid young reporter (Jamie Bell) and his dog Snowy as they delve into the mystery surrounding a family curse, a valuable ship model and a sunken treasure.  Combining three Hergé books—The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure—the film is a madcap frenzy of chase sequences, slapstick humor, and derring-do, taking full advantage of the combined talents of director Steven Spielberg and producer Pater Jackson.  

Werth: That's a lot of talent.

Wise: The film was animated using motion capture and does so much more successfully than other projects which have used the technique and rendered their actors as a pack of creepy Botoxed mannequins.  

Werth: It's like being sucked into an all-day Housewives of Beverly Hills Marathon on Bravo.

Wise: The technology allows Spielberg to indulge in every action sequence daydream he's had for the past four decades.  Tintin is not bound by the same physics as Indiana Jones, and as a result doesn't simply evade a boulder or weather a nuclear blast in a refrigerator; 

instead Spielberg stages a chase sequence that involves a jeep, a motorcycle, tumbling buildings, a tank, the torrent rushing from a dam, a trained falcon, a clothesline, a crowded bazaar, and a hijacked ship making its way out to sea.  

Werth: And all of it unleashed in 3D.

Wise: The one element lacking is the emotional heft characteristic of even Spielberg's most lighthearted fare.  It's difficult to say if this is the fault of the format (although Jackson's Weta Digital seamlessly marries Hergé's elegant line with incredibly realistic detail) or the cheerful blankness of the film's everyman hero.  

Andy Serkis is both comic and touching as Tintin's tipsy but stouthearted ally Captain Haddock, and even Daniel Craig's sinister Sakharine has more emotional range.  But even if the film doesn't make audiences cry, it can still make them cheer, which is quite an accomplishment for a comic book thrown onto the screen.

Werth: I'm ready to see if Zack Snyder can make me cheer.

Wise: At least as much as you cheered for the giant, blue, naked guy in The Watchmen.

Werth: Tune in next week for more big screen heroes right here on Film Gab!

True to Life Film Gab

Werth: Hello, Wise.

Wise: Hello, Werth. What cinematic plans do you have for this weekend?

Werth: Well if I can recover from Film Gab favorite Chris Hill's birthday margaritas, I'd like to go see Argo.

Wise: Oh right. The new Affleck flick based on the recently declassified CIA mission to rescue U.S diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis while disguised as a Hollywood film crew.

Werth: It's perfect—real life imitating Hollywood when Hollywood has always enjoyed taking true stories and turning them into movies. But oftentimes movie-making has played fast and loose with the truth. David Lean's Oscar-winner The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a perfect example of a movie that people think is based on true events—but is actually more movie magic than reality.  

Kwai tells the story of a group of WWII British POWs led by stalwart Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) who endure torture and starvation in order to build a bridge for their Japanese captors.

Wise: Kind of like the last time I was at Uniqlo. 

Werth: Shears, a U.S. naval officer (the oft bare-chested William Holden) escapes and is soon leading a group of commandos to blow-up the bridge that Nicholson has taken such care to build. In typical Lean fashion, nature sets a stunning backdrop for this story of human chutzpah and conflict. 

Shot mostly in the dense jungles of Ceylon, the local flora provides a very real cage to trap these men (and actors) in. If you want to grab a bottle of water while watching Lawrence of Arabia, in Kwai you want to grab a moist towelette and a flyswatter. 

Part of Lean's genius was creating all-encompassing atmosphere by replacing sets made by man with sets designed by God.

Wise: Does God get credit for set design?

Werth: The other thing Lean did very well was choose and direct amazing actors. William Holden is as brash, smart-mouthed and rugged as ever—so American he should be made of apple pie. 

Former Asian silent film star Sessue Hayakawa earned an Oscar nom for his role as camp commander Colonel Saito, a cold bastard who finds his well-run deathcamp turned upside-down by Nicholson. 

Which brings me to Guinness. The ease with which Guinness portrays Nicholson is breathtaking. This career soldier's desire for rules and regulations is so deep that he will stand quoting a copy of the Geneva Convention while his captors focus a machine gun on him and his men. 

It should come off as comical how this man justifies building a bridge for the enemy so that he can keep his men's morale up. But Guinness inhabits the unbending role so completely there is no room for comedy. He rightly earned a Best Actor Oscar for making this complex character so real.

Wise: So what about the movie isn't true?

Werth: Try most of it. There was a bridge built by British POWs over the Mae Klong River (Thailand) in 1943, but that's where the similarities end. In fact, when the movie was originally released, veterans who worked on the bridge were fairly upset at the depiction, pointing out that there was no whistling in their camp, and the real-life Col. Nicholson, Phillip Toosey, actually worked to sabotage the bridge instead of building one he could be proud of.

Wise: Long before Peter Jackson was corralling Hobbits or remaking the greatest monkey pic from the Golden Age of Hollywood, he was busy examining the inner lives 1950's teenage girls.  

Werth: Something he has in common with Errol Flynn.  

Wise: Heavenly Creatures (1994) dramatizes the notorious Parker-Hulme murder case in which two New Zealand teenagers developed an incredibly intense friendship that led to the brutal beating death of one girl's mother.  

Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), the privileged daughter of an English academic, and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey), the beetle-browed offspring of working class parents, came from very different backgrounds, but they bond over childhood illnesses and a shared love for James Mason and Mario Lanza.  

Together they create an all-consuming fantasy world, and when their parents begin to worry that their fierce friendship would tip inevitably into lesbianism, plans were made to separate them.  Lashing out, the girls bludgeon Pauline's mother and hope to flee to Hollywood.  

Werth: It might have been easier for them to just wear tight sweaters and hang around the soda fountain.
 

Wise: This is the first film appearance of both Winslet and Lynskey, and it's incredible how committed they both are to their performances.  Winslet is by turns fragile and venomous, already displaying the talent that has made her the darling of awards season.  

And Lynskey, who has until recently been mostly confined to sidekick roles (including a long-running stint on Two and a Half Men), reveals the ferocity inside not-so-pretty girls who have something to prove.  

Werth: You'd be ferocious too if you had to act with Charlie Sheen for eight years.

Wise: But it is Peter Jackson himself who does the most amazing work here.  Writing the script with his longtime partner Fran Walsh, he finds the heart of the picture in the girls' friendship and not in the frenzy surrounding the trial.  Plus, as director, he is somehow able to seamlessly combine period piece, fantasy film, domestic drama, and murder mystery into a beautifully integrated whole. 

The film isn't about lurid details—although the scene with a brick in stocking bashing Pauline's mother's skull would turn anyone's stomach—but about the beauty and danger offered by the creative life.

Werth: Speaking of creative, I have to pick-out which flavor margarita I'm going to drink several of tonight.

Wise: Tune in next week for more salt or no-salt Film Gab!