Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Outland  (1981)

Moon  (2009)

Duncan Jones‘ Moon divided critics at Sundance, which is maybe not much of a surprise. A slow, introspective homage to classic sci-fi with one actor (Sam Rockwell in a perfectly modulated dual role), two locations (inside a moon space station, and just outside it), and minimalist special effects, Moon challeneges the viewer to confront what they think they know about space movies and lonely-man-in-existential-crisis movies equally. Audiences that get it seem to really get it, and hopefully Sony Classics, who are scheduled to release the film in June, won’t push the genre elements over the intellectual elements –– or vice versa –– when the victory of the film is the merging of the two. As I put it in my review, Moon “feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be.”

Whilst at Sundance, I got a few minutes alone with Rockwell and Jones, and we chatted about their mutual love of early-80s sci-fi, the technology and technique behind the dual performance, and the real life potential of Moon’s alternative energy fantasy. Beware: there’s a possible spoiler immediately after the jump.

After I saw Moon, I was talking to other journalists about it, and people who are really into it weren’t sure exactly how to approach writing about it, because to talk about Sam’s dual performance, you almost have to go into the fact that his character discovers he’s been cloned. But is that a spoiler? Does putting that in print ruin the viewing experience?

Sam: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know.

Gordon: You know, at end of the first act, we reveal that. So, I think it’s OK; I think it’s OK to talk about. Also, it’s a major part of the film. It’s a major part of what makes Sam’s performance so amazing. So, I certainly don’t have a problem talking about that.

Yes, obviously, the performance is the core of the film. So, two part question: Sam, how do you approach being the two different people, and how do you shoot that?

Gordon: It’s incredibly technical, obviously. And I think Sam had spent an awful lot of time working out the two separate characters. Essentially, it is the same guy, but with a three year displacement in their life experience…

Sam: We rehearsed a lot. We worked out some stuff ahead of time. I prepared quite a bit. Then the technical stuff was tough, the timing, being spontaneous and keeping it fresh and keeping the timing technically perfect.

Did you shoot one character first, or did you shoot scene-by-scene?

Duncan: We would always work out in the scene who is driving that scene. And then that would be the performance that we would do first. And Sam would have the flexibility to be a bit more improv-y with the first Sam. And then we would go back and shoot the other side of it.

I want to talk a little bit about the effects. One of the things that is really great about the film is that there seems to be only as many effects as you absolutely need. It’s not super showy. Can you break down a little bit how you approached creating different types of images, what is green screen and what is digital and what are practical props?

Duncan: There are basically two main locations, the interior of the base and then there is the exteriors on the surface of the moon. For the interior of the base, most of it is in camera. Occasionally, in particular shots where Gerty is kind of whizzing around the base, or moving around, we used CG for those shots.

But, other than that, Sam performs, and then when we have two Sams it’s still a live action performance with Sam. A lot of the time, we had a prop version of Gerty [the astronaut's robot helper/companion] and a prop version of Gerty’s arms. So, just depending on what the shot was, we would try to get away with it in camera as much as possible.

There is some CG in the interiors, but the exteriors were a totally different ballgame. We used a very traditional model, a miniatures technique for the lunar surface and the vehicles traveling across it. Then we would use digital set extensions to actually make the landscape go off into the distance and to create the sky itself.

And then we would add little elements like dirt being kicked up off the back of the car, sometimes some lens flares here and there. It’s a hybrid. The exteriors in particular were real hybrid of live action and CG. But, that’s what I used to do in commercials anyway. That’s what I’m known for.

Sam, can you breakdown the process of acting by yourself in this environment?

Sam: Sometimes we had an actor or a script supervisor reading the lines. Duncan would read stuff sometimes. Robin Shock, who’s a young British guy who was a body double –– from the back, he looked like me –– he was also an actor. So, he and I would run the lines and stuff and we would work out the blocking. But ultimately, I’m the one who would have to get in front of the camera, so I would have to work out the acting choices by myself, really, and with Duncan’s help. It’s a tough process, so I depended on Duncan to guide me through it.

Did you write it with Sam in mind?

Duncan: Absolutely, yeah. There was another project that I wanted Sam to do with me and unfortunately we weren’t able to do that one. But, we had a really good conversation and got on very well, and  I decided I have got to have Sam in my first feature film. I really wanted to work with Sam. Knowing what he was interested in and knowing what I wanted to do with the first feature, I left the meeting we were having about this other project and went off to write a project for Sam.

Sam: We geeked out on a lot of the movies that we grew up watching when Sci-Fi came along. Outland, Blade Runner and Alien…

In Moon there are things that seem like references to other movies, that you then take to a different place. It made me wonder if the world of Moon is a world in which science fiction exists. Had Sam the character seen 2001? What sci-fi popular culture would he have been exposed to?

Sam: That’s interesting.

Duncan: It’s a weird time that we set the film in, because it certainly doesn’t adhere to any of the science fiction that is coming out now, like the George Clooney Solaris, where it’s got kind of this iPod chic look to it.

It’s very different from that. It’s much more retro. It’s almost a late ’70s, ’80s version of what the future is. But it still feels relevant to me, because it’s kind of gritty and it’s blue collar and it’s a human story. The technology has a believable functional aesthetic to it. So, it’s almost like time went off in a slightly different direction.

Do you see it as the future in front of us right now, or is it more of an alternate universe?

Duncan: No, no, no. I still see it as the future for us. I just think it’s a very different design aesthetic than where we are right now. But then again, things come into fashion. Right now this [points to an iPhone] is the cool look. In ten years time, we might be going back to quite chunky, clunky-looking Richard Kit, because we just like the aesthetic of it.

So harvesting solar energy from the surface of the moon, this is actual technology that could be used.

Duncan: Absolutely. Fusion power is a real technology which is being developed right now. It hasn’t quite reached its potential, but helium three is a natural resource which would be used theoretically once fusion technology is available.

The situation depicted, that there is not enough helium on the earth, is a fact. And it is also a fact that there is plentiful supply of helium three on the moon. So, starting from there it makes sense. Mining the moon for helium three is a real possibility.

If the film predicts that this could happen, are you in favor of it? Do you think it’s a good idea?

Gordon: Absolutely. I think human beings by their nature use the resources which are available to them. We do need to find an alternative for the energy sources that are limited. And this might give us the time we need to create truly renewable energy sources.

Under discussion:

Spring Breakdown  (2008)

Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixed reviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.

Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. I’d like to give Stratman’s film another look before writing about it in more depth, but as I expect it to show up in at least one upcoming festival, I’ll have a shot. Bizarrely, it’s the studio-produced comedy that I may not soon have another chance to consider, or even see.

Spring Breakdown, co-written by Rachel Dratch and starring Dratch, Parker Posey, Amy Poehler, Amber Tamblyn and a number of SNL and Arrested Development regulars in supporting roles, had been on the shelf for awhile before news broke that Warners planned to release it straight to DVD. It was a surprise, then, to see the film pop up on the Sundance Midnight line-up, and after the press screening, there were grumblings that Breakdown didn’t belong at Sundance at all. It’s always amusing when anyone tries to claim Sundance as a refuge from populist, lowbrow fare — this, the festival that launched both Saw and Super Troopers –– but it’s an especially wrong-headed way to look at this film, which rides a very fine line between total trash and intelligent provocation, mall multiplex dreck and Troma-esque satire via the grotesque.

Dratch, Posey, and Poehler play three 40-ish women who have been friends since bonding as uber-nerds in college. These are not inner beauty-full flowers who just need a Cher Horowitz to come along and give them contact lenses and a pair of Spanx; full-on social rejects, they repel everyone but each other. Nor can they be saved by men, who will never condescend to wanting them as long as there’s a single 20 year-old hardbody left on Earth. This is not the 40 Year-Old Virgin, where laughing at the loser at the center of the piece gives way to sympathizing with him, and cheering for his triumph. Unless our culture heads into a serious recalibration of values and quick, says Spring Breakdown, ladies like this will never truly triumph.

At the start of the action, Dratch catches her obviously beard-needy fiancee (Seth Meyers) getting handsy with the young Latino gardener, Poehler is rejected by a blind guy (Will Arnett — who, I’ve noticed, elicits laughs from the Sundance press corps just by showng up on screen), and Posey cat dies, which is bad, because she’s basically treated it like a boyfriend. Posey’s meek office girl is then bullied by her senator boss (Jane Lynch) into secretly trailing the senator’s daughter (Tamblyn) down to spring break in Texas. The three amigas go down together, and Dratch and Poehler’s characters soon find their staid lives upended by this new world of binge drinking and unabashed sluttiness. Posey tries to hold down the line for earnest appreciation of board games and ankle-length skirts, but is eventually sucked into the debauchery when the plots final machination demands it.

Is Spring Breakdown a “good” film? It’s debatable, but in the end what’s good about it may be, as it often is with lower budget cult films, its intentions, and not so much the package they’re wrapped in. With the production values of a Mad TV sketch and a similar tendency to telegraph every beat with shouting and wild gestures, the way an insensitive person tries to communicate with a foreigner, it’s often both horrible to look at and hell to listen to. You could say that Breakdown is, like Humpday, a comedy of uncomfortability, but unlike Humpday, it can’t work as audience catharsis because no viewer would want to admit to being as socially awkward as the film’s three heroines. With one film, you squirm because you can relate; with the other, you squirm because you hope you’ll never be able to relate.

That said, I was consistently entertained, sometimes laughing (anything that puts Poehler’s hood rat persona a feature-length narrative context is fine by me), sometimes just gaping at how far the film was willing to go in order to make it clear that its heroines were total no-hopers, far exceeding the point where one imagines an audience of actual coeds actually continuing to get the joke.

I suppose it’s possible to laugh at/with Spring Breakdown as gross out comedy without taking it too seriously, but throughout I could sense there was also some really interesting stuff roiling underneath the top level, without being quite able to put my finger on it until near the end. And then I realized: Spring Breakdown is a parody of Sex and the City-style media, which depict 40-something women and sex and image obsessed to the point where they might as well be adolescents, but the film enacts that parody by aping the Fight Club model. Having hit bottom by being “themselves”, with nothing to lose, these three ladies embrace the fact that, in a time and place where there are no constraints, to be “normal” in America is to be self-destructive. They dive deep into a nihilistic subculture of masochistic thrill seeking. Eventually, they realize that this is not the answer to their woes. But not until it’s too late to stop everything from exploding.

The women in Spring Breakdown look at these very American traditions, including a number of rituals –– from keg stands to female salsa wrestling to “talent contests” in which 95% of the participants are there to shake barely-clad assets in synchronicity –– entered into with the express purpose of excusing female objectification (if not date rape) and/or inciting promiscuity, as curious outsiders, who sre torn between this new world’s obvious attractions and their nagging belifes and morality. And though it documents very different sorts of spectacles (Civil War reenactments, high school football games, motorhome culture), O’er the Land unfolds from a very similar point of view. But more on that later…

Under discussion:

Paul Blart: Mall Cop  (2009)

In the world of writing — not unlike that of sports or other businesses — those who can, do, and those that can’t, become film reviewers who take perverse pleasure in tearing down the efforts of those willing to put their names, talent, and oftentimes, hard-earned money, on the line to create movies crafted to elicit any number of emotions out of the viewing public. How easy it is to never step into that arena and take potshots at those who do.

From a Huffington Post piece by Douglas MacKinnon, titled Paul Blart: Mall Cop. More Real Than Reviewers

There are a number of really amazing things about this story:

1. That MacKinnon, who calls out Nathan Lee and Brian Lowry by name, would suggest that it’s an “easy” career path to writing film criticism for Variety or the New York Times;

2. That MacKinnon more than once slams “non-stop negative media narrative about the economy,” and implies that journalists should ease up on reporting all the bad news, and focus on the bright side. You know, like they should have focused on all the good news coming out of Iraq, instead of, like, Abu Ghraib.

3. That MacKinnon is so intent on diverting our attention away from the state of the world that he posits patronizing Mall Cop as not only a recommended “couple of hours of needed escape from the pervasive doom and gloom spread by most of the media” but also a stick in the eye of “elitist reviewers writing for a minute collection of fellow elitists.” There’s a vast media conspiracy that wants you to think! But Kevin James just wants you to laugh!

4. That in showing such distaste not just for film criticism, not just for journalism, but for the wider practice of thinking, MacKinnon manages to make virtually everythng published on Breitbart’s new bastion for conservative film chat Big Hollywood seem positively intellectual and urbane. Nice work, Huff Post!