Love-- Don't Fear-- The Walking Dead

 “Fear the Walking Dead,” the companion series of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” premiered a few weeks ago to huge ratings. It is set in East Los Angeles during the very beginning of the same zombie apocalypse as the first series, but if the pace of the first three episodes is any indication a major part of this series is going to be eyewitness to the collapse of civilization. This was skipped in the original series (and the graphic novel): The protagonist wakes up in an abandoned hospital, the gap between normality and post civilization left to the imagination of the viewer.

FTWD has been subject to mixed reviews: some think it is an excellent thriller with some amazing potential, others think the premier episodes was slow and many of the core characters are unlikable. These are both fair observations. I think it is excellent television, and you should definitely check it out! Also, I believe there is a reason why this show was structured this way:

• The core of the cast are Travis (Cliff Curtis) and Maddie (Kim Dickens), both with children from previous marriages. two adults struggling to merge into a new family unit as the story begins. And as much as I like this show so far, I have to admit that all three of their kids are remarkably awful. Maddie’s son Nick (Frank Dillane, a dead ringer for a young Johnny Depp) is a hopeless junkie who sees his first zombie when he comes to in a squat in an abandoned church: so far he has been resolutely concentrating on scoring more opiates, little else. Maddie’s daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is a high-schooler who was ready to bolt from family and safety to be with her infected, dying boyfriend. Travis’ son Chris (Lorenzo Henrie) is your basic never-respond-to-parents-calls, clueless kid. Much parental energy has been spent in these first three episodes just rounding the kids up in one place, leaving precious little time to cope with the collapse of technological civilization.

Travis, trying to call his dumb kid.

I think there is a reason we are saddled with so many addled kids in this series— and I know the primary reason is likely trying to capture a young viewer demographic. But “The Walking Dead” is the most popular series on television, and so far has disproven the need to cast with the 18-to-25 “ABC Family” audience in mind. This has more to do with showing true, ground-up character construction. These kids are truly clueless (except for flashes from the otherwise drug-addicted Nick, who is the very first character to identify the ”infected” not as sick people but animated dead). We will get to see them develop survival skills from essentially nothing as the show develops. Contemporary young adults are stereotyped as coddled, tech-addicted and incapable of self-support: it should be interesting to see how they harden into zombie killers.

• Added to this core family are Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades), his wife and daughter. They are from El Salvador, and bring some very interesting developing-nation values into this story. From their first meeting Daniel strikes bargains with Travis and his family: Every favor is matched with obligation. He is not shy about blowing away a zombie with a shotgun. He also sees Travis’s aversion to guns as a sign of weakness— and says (in Spanish) “Good people will be the first to die.” El Salvador was (and well may still be) a messed-up country controlled by autocrats, with a weak government and no rule of law. He is the Greek Chorus of this series, knowing all the upcoming events are going to be bad and are getting worse.

• One of the reasons I think audience are more critical of “Fear the Walking Dead” has something to do with the diminishing returns of any spin-off. The first series introduced the zombie apocalypse, right around Halloween 2010 in fact: it was bleak, thrilling, terrifying and unlike any horror show seen before. Viewers of “Fear the Walking Dead” know this universe well: they are drumming their fingers impatiently, waiting for those hordes of shuffling undead to show up, the expected Grand Guignol of gore, the descent into amoral kill-or-be-killed survival.  But the emphasis on this series is quite different: as I’ve said before here, the collapse of civilization is just as terrifying as animated cannibal corpses. The lights go out; food runs out; basic services are gone. Eventually the emergency services (the California National Guard, apparently) will break down as well, as they are either eaten or abandon their posts and run for the desert. This is going to be playing out in detail, and will be the standout feature of "FTWD."

Look at those lovely anamorphic flares!

• As is the standard for this franchise, a sizable percentage of the cast playing Southern Californians are from the Commonwealth (England, New Zealand and Australia). I’m not gonna get all Donald Trump here, but this casting fetish still strikes me as odd.

• One of the most pleasing things about FTWD is how they’re shooting it. When AMC was financing their first dramatic series it was a big risk, and to keep costs down they shot “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead” in Super16. When “Breaking Bad” started to take off they upgraded the budget and shot in 35mm, but “Walking Dead” stayed with 16mm: It looks gritty, grainy, a little washed out, which perfectly suits the bleak, zombie-infested wastelands of the South. But for "FTWD" they chose to shoot in 2K digital with Hawk Vintage ’74 anamorphic lenses. This gives the show a clean, expansive look, with the same flares, bokeh and shallow focus of a theatrical release in ‘scope. Visually it is as about as far as you can get from the original series. It's still in full-frame 16x9, but I'm hoping the BluRay release will be in 2.35:1.

Hobbit 3: Peter Jackson's Freestyle Round

Just a sample of the non-stop, overlapping action that is most
of Battle of the Five Armies.

The Hobbit: Battle of The Five Armies was seen Monday night in crisp 48 HFR 3D.

Peter Jackson is much like a big kid with a huge Middle-Earth action play set. having dispensed for the most part with the events of the original novel in the first two movies, he gets to stretch out on the final battle scenes with greatly extended action sequences. His sense of cinematic place and direction is a good as ever, though, and the thousands of little CG soldiers on the screen never lose a sense of coherent action. And the ending is quite satisfying and presented without having to resort to the 6 endings of the last Lord of the Rings movie-- just one tidy ending, thank you.

Then again, the action on-screen versus the content of the original novel created a strange narrative situation where Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) the titular hero of the film, disappears from the narrative for long stretches of time. I'm reminded of the third Matrix movie, where Neo disappears for most of a movie in which he is the putative savior.

Point-to-point:

• I only counted four armies. My issue probably lies with Tolkien, not Jackson.

Tauriel, cute as an elf.

• Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel was by far my favorite character. Yes, I know she was an entirely whole-cloth, non-canonical character. But her presence is important: added to the movie version to correct Tolkien's paternalism and give us a break from looking at an endless succession of hairy faces.

We also get something sorely needed in big action franchises like this: a love story. Sure, Tauriel the silvan elf may have been invented to prevent it from being the sausage fest of the original book, but it's welcome. She falls for Kili the dwarf, fully two heads shorter than her, but their love-at-first-sight relationship carries resonance-- and this is a welcome break from the general tones of madness, hate and manly stoicism embodied by everybody else in the film.

 A lot of this has to do with Evangeline Lily. She was the best thing about "Lost:" a soulful, loving yet complex and hermetic character in a cast of caricatures and cyphers. Lilly is a remarkably expressive actor and the only shame is she hasn't been in more movies. Tauriel gets to show love and loss and longing in a keener and more immediate way than anyone else in the entire trilogy. It's either a complement to Peter Jackson's skills as storyteller-- or an anodyne, in that he cannot conceive of anyone capable of having softer emotional connections than a-- shudder-- female character.

• You can tell the various races of creatures in this film-- in all the Rings and Hobbit films-- by how they appear after a little wear and tear. Hobbits (Bilbo at least) and Wizards get completely filthy: in fact, the wizard Radegast the Brown has shown up in all three Hobbit movies with a wad of dried bird shit stuck to his head. Humans and Dwarves are sort of grungy all the time, never too clean or too dirty. Elves-- the overachievers of Middle Earth-- never have a hair out of place or a smudge on their clothes. Orcs are similarly neat, all things considered: the lead Orcs wear little bits of armor and show a lot of skin, and would not look out of place in a Pride parade.

• The HFR process: Much improved of the first Hobbit movie. It might be the outdoorsy settings overall, but the scenes seem brighter and more colorful than the dark, washed-out first installment. The 3D was remarkably restrained and natural-looking: There were only a few gimmicky shots of falling stones and billowing flame and whatnot. Whatever Peter Jackson's tech folks needed to do to get the look of 48-frame-per-second to not look like video gloss, they did it.

Peter Jackson, Tolkien: It's been a hell of a ride. The first film series raised the bar for fantasy films forever. The last three, while somewhat under-stuffed and not quite as novel as the first three, are still deserving of all the success they have reaped. If this is Jackson's victory round, he can and should be allowed to freestyle a bit.

Abby's First Movie Redux

(This is a re-edited posting from the Box Office Weekly Podcast site from around March 2008. I just recovered an old hard drive with a bunch of these articles-- the online versions are gone, down some Australian memory hole. I'm republishing this one, and one other that I think is totally worth revisiting. --S)

Last weekend my niece Abigail reached a milestone in her young life-- she was taken to her first movie.

This event is a sort of maturity marker for parents-- To take a very young child to a theatres makes some basic assumptions: Will he or she sit still for two hours? Will he or she understand, or at least uncomprehendingly enjoy, the movie? Does he or she know that you have to use your quiet, whisper voice? Well, these SHOULD be the criteria for taking small children to movies: Anyone who has attended a popular film lately must believe, as I do, that there must be some sort of terrible babysitter shortage.

According to her mommy Abigail, who is two years and nine months old, passed with flying colors, enjoying Horton Hears a Who! (d. Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, 2008) in a matinee screening.

I had an opportunity to drop by Abigail's place, where she consented to a brief interview about her cinematic experience. She is just as cute as a bug's ear, my niece.

UNCLE SKOT: Abigail?
ABIGAIL: What, unka?
US: Did you see a movie?
A: Uh huh.
US: What did you see?
A: Um. Horton.
US: What's Horton?
A: Elephant.
ABIGAIL'S MOMMY: What do the Whos say, Abigail? (note: They say "We are here!")
A: Help! Help!
US: Do you want to go to the movies again?
A: I want to go to Africa.
(Abigail begins a new conversation with her imaginary friend Michelle, effectively ending the interview.)

It brought back something of a special event for everyone: That first movie. Really, you were taken you your first film before the age of four you don't really remember it. Long-lasting memories are tied into brain developments that occur about age four or so, so even if you have scraps of vivid memories your brain didn't have a good filing system in place. Still, that first movie one can remember seeing was special.

I dropped a few emails into the ether, asking people the first film they and got a surprising variety of answers. Actually, most of the first movie experiences were Disney movies, which is not surprising at all: In the pre-home video days they constantly re-released their features, two a year by average.

GLEN (California--where he was as a kid): Mary Poppins. I'd just turned four years old. The film was released in August of that '64, but I'm sure it was tough for mom to get the trip all organized, so we made it to the theater near the end of the film's first run. Mom and Grandma took my two sisters and I. I'm pretty sure we saw it in Burbank, but maybe San Fernando. The house must've been packed, because I remember we were in the front row. The theater seemed really fancy, wherever it was.

JOHN (California): I believe it was Snow White. I have the vaguest of memories of sitting in the theater watching it.

SUE (Great Britain): Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Other recollections are eclectic to say the least:

DANNY (Louisiana): Well, I definitely remember seeing The Poseidon Adventure in the theater.  When the ship rolled over, so did my soda! The Jungle Book was also a big early one.  Not sure if that predates Poseidon.

SCOTT (California): It’s interesting that you would ask this question today. On this morning’s show [Scott hosts a weekly radio show] we talked about the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, and I mentioned seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater when I was 4, and that’s the reason I’m so messed up now.

CHRIS (California): Dr. Doolittle.

DAEV (Arizona): Hmm… I have a vivid recollection of seeing 2001 at a drive-in, but I think Cat Ballou or Oklahoma! was the first I saw in an indoor theater, probably at a matinee.

CAMERON (Australia): I can't remember exactly but it was either Enter The Dragon (my dad taking me to the drive-in) or Star Wars!

BILL (California): I have a memory of seeing a very boring film about Bigfoot at the Capitola theater.  Searching IMDb, it may have been Bigfoot: Man or Beast?  I guess I was about six.

This last one is great-- Bigfoot was released by American National, a bottom-dwelling roadshow exhibitor like Sunn Classic Pictures used to be. They specialized in exploitation films: Chariots of the Gods, In Search of Historic Jesus, stuff like that. They released their terrible, non-factual documentaries "four-wall:" Rent movie screens (all 'four walls") in a particular TV demographic region, then blitz the local channels with lurid, overheated ads. Fast money made, they would move on to the next demographic area.

Still, it's all part of the film experience we all fell in love with. There you are, tiny in your chair, in a big dark room. The images on the screen are titanic, the colors intense, the sound loud. There is something about the act an ritual of moviegoing that makes us all kids, looking up at a world that is larger than life, larger than us.

--Skot C.

p.s. What, MY first movie? I'll never forget it: The Sand Pebbles (d. Robert Wise, 1966). What on earth was my dad thinking, dragging a four-year-old to a bloody, violent, morally ambiguous, patently adult three-hour-long film? Well, he was a former Marine, and he probably was very interested in the story of a headstrong, anti-authoritarian sailor (Steve McQueen) caught up in the turmoil of American gunboat diplomacy in 1920s China? He probably thought I'd, in the parlance of the times, "learn something." Dad would later drag me along to enjoy such family-friendly movies as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969).

I did learn something: I learned how beautiful and exotic the world looked when it was shot in Panavision and projected on an 80' screen. The photography for The Sand Pebbles was (and still is!) stunning, washes of blues and oranges, Chinese alleys and streets disappearing into mist. The final showdown in the Mission was a perfectly choreographed sequence (rendered in dark blues and grays by DP Joseph MacDonald), just Steve McQueen and his Browning Automatic Rifle valiantly defying his fate. On the way home, dad told me that was the kind of gun he used in the Marines (they gave the tall guys in the squad the heavy machine gun).

So I gained two things at my first movie: the beginning of an abiding passion for cinema, and a rudimentary working knowledge of mid-20th-century American military firearms. --s

Skippy The Bush Kangaroo As Embodiment Of National Character



Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo (pictured center)

 As I mentioned last week, one of the cultural artifacts my girlfriend Leanne brought back with her from Switzerland was a DVD of some episodes of Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, enigmatically dubbed into French. To be more specific the episodes are from the 1991 revival series, The Adventures of Skippy. Still the situation is the same - unmarried Austrailian game warden and his two children, sharing adventure with the unusually smart and helpful titular Kangaroo. Pretty obviously male Kangaroo in this case. Don't ask me to give details.

Skippy has captured my imagination.  Even though I don't speak enough French to understand the dialog, it's clear that the show is not dialog driven. It's an action show. Which is why I keep thinking that it must have been unbelievely frustrating for Australians to write it.

Skippy is the main character - you can kind of think of him as a superhero but his chief superpower is indication. "What is it Skippy? What are you pointing at? Oh no, it's a toxic waste spill! Who could have done that?" Skippy's function on the show is to notice the thing that sets the plot in motion, and then accompany the game warden or children as they investigate and solve the problem. If possible, Skippy will notice and indicate something else over the course of the episode.  Perhaps he'll hop off and the little girl will follow him to discover a leaky pipe. But other than that, Skippy ain't nothin'.

Can you imagine the poor staff writers trying to crank out a script every week? "He can't speak, he can't drive a bloody car, he can't hold a gun - crikey, how the hell am I supposed to use this thing? He doesn't even have a bloody pouch." To make matters worse, the characters Skippy deals with most are children, who are similarly limited protagonists. Ultimately the real engine of the show is the game warden, who just does what Skippy and the kids tell him to.

Australians are famously simple men of action, and this show is the most passive/agressive situation imaginable.