Bodily Presents

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2009)

This comment is on the Imax 3D version.
I'm aware, when I watch movies, of what the scale of the narrative is that I am plugged into.
Often these days, its the short for narrative. Eddie Murphy puts on a fat suit and hilarity ensues. Yokels discover oil and come to Beverly Hills. Girl has problems with mom. All the action on the screen is episodic around this simple core.
Its what I call "long form" that interests me. You enter a world with cosmic machinery rich enough to match the one you live in. Things actually happen and change. There is overlap between the worlds themselves and this can matter in how you change and grow.
But there is a layer above this, one that threads through movies and often is the only real narrative I can get. In the lowest form, this is anchored on celebrity, so for instance we can follow the story of Mel Gibson from energetic Australian-style actor, through discovering his intellectual limits, making a successful Weil copy and devolving into a caricature.
More interesting is the journey of filmmakers, even film ideas. A variety along these lines is the metastory of animation studios. We have the ennobling story of Pixar with all sorts of interesting dimensions, and contrasted with that, the comparatively second rate Dreamworks Animation.
Its actually a pretty interesting story to follow, because it has tragedy, desperation, huge risks. It has some scheming — for instance with the "Ants" movie designed to cripple "Bugs Life." Its particularly interesting when they try to leapfrog Pixar.
They tried with "Shreck" and succeeded — at least so far as tickets — by engineering the humor and pathos because they just cannot seen to engineer story like Pixar can. Its an organizational thing I believe; committees cannot make real stories.
Here they try something else and the results are pretty shocking to this observer. I think something important has happened. For this, you have to understand Pixar's two competitive advantages. One is the story engineering already mentioned. A second more cinematically interesting is the exploitation of their three-dimensional modeling to give us a new way of cinematically dealing with space, specifically in the way the camera is placed and moves.
So what do Marshall-Kennedy do if they want to leapfrog Pixar? They surely cannot beat them on their own ground. Well, they try sex and three D and bury it. I am sure that what is going on here is all the usual stuff, that they had teams for story and gags and pacing and such. But the core experiment was in how to work with sex.
By this, I mean not the "in your face" stuff of beer ads, but the soft familiarity of a sexual presence in the room. I can even tell you something about the age of the guy in charge of this team, knowing the effect that the "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" had on boys. Even the gay Almodova was affected; see the giantess scene in "Talk to Her," and its foreshadowing in the first scene in the bathtub.
What's going on here is that the third dimension allows a presence, a presentation of body that the flat screen simply cannot. Excepting the standard vocabulary of "in your eye" tricks, all the animation and modeling has gone into Susan's body. Not just her shape, which is expected, but subtle details of that shape. Particular attention is spent on how she moves, with a sensuous grace that is designed to be seductive. Yes, I know it is not obvious, but watch the beginning half again and note how surrounding women are presented, before we enter the action, second half.
Look at how many computing cycles went into the way her clothing moves on her body. The cloth does not move as her skin does, but over her skin, emphasizing the womanly movement of the dancer that was used for the motion capture. Study how this compares to sexually-designed Japanese animation projects. See how clearly different and more human Susan's movements are from those of the other characters, especially the humans — except for the women that surround her in the first half.
These things are highly, highly engineered. This studio is the most severe in this dimension. These releases are strategic probes into competitive progress on cinematic advantage. Its all about how to leverage the technology to capture eyeballs. Pixar cannot respond to this. Well played.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.