Tag: Bruce Willis

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

Glass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

There’s an arguably gratuitous sequence at the end of Split (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016) linking it to the seemingly unrelated Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000). Split is about Kevin Wendell Crumb a.k.a. the Horde (James McAvoy), a man with multiple personalities who abducts and kills teenage girls. Unbreakable is about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), sole survivor of a train crash, and obsessive comic books fan with brittle as glass bones Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) who engineered the crash to unearth a superhero. Dunn, it transpires, has superhuman strength and the ability to read people’s thoughts by bumping into them.

Glass makes considerably more sense if viewed as a third film of a trilogy. It relates to Split and Unbreakable in different ways. It starts off with split personality Crumb tormenting four kidnapped girls (from Split) while Dunn (from Unbreakable) goes out walking every day, hoping to bump into the kidnapper and save the girls. Well-meaning psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) catches the pair fighting and incarcerates them in a maximum security, psychiatric facility where Price, the self-styled Mr. Glass (again from Unbreakable), is also held.

The stage is now set for Mr. Glass to engineer a confrontation between superhero Dunn and supervillain Crumb. But for the fact that he’s constantly being administered medicine to keep his highly active and brilliant mind out of mischief.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON in Glass. M. Night Shyamalan brings together the narratives of two of his standout originals—2000’s Unbreakable, from Touchstone, and 2016’s Split, from Universal—in one explosive, all-new comic-book thriller.

Jackson is nothing less than superb at keeping you guessing: is this patient really sedated? Or is he playing some kind of trick and just faking it? Similarly, there’s a pleasure watching Willis reprise one of his classic roles from the period of the nineties and early two thousands when from Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) onwards, he seemed to be in every other Hollywood action movie on the screen.

McAvoy, although of a much younger generation, is by no means second fiddle to these two. As with Split, his performance, traversing many of Crumb’s 23 alternate personalities including the terrifying, wall-climbing Beast, is breathtaking. This time round, the Beast gets considerably more onscreen time than he did in Split.

Writer Shyamalan throws in lots of highly effective plot devices to keep the audience on the edge of its seat. It’s very much a ‘dangerous characters contained in a holding environment’ type of movie, with each of the three main protagonists restrained in different ways. Glass is sedated and locked up in a building with almost as many security cameras as you find in the average high street in Britain. Dunn’s room can be quickly flooded with water which robs him of his immense strength. And Crumb’s cell is equipped with flashbulbs triggered whenever one of his more violent and threatening comes out, instantly transforming it into another of his inner personalities.

As producer/director, Shyamalan brings back a host of characters (played by the same actors) from the two earlier films. While Anya Taylor-Joy again does an excellent job pretty much taking up where she left off in Split as the final girl who survived the monster, there’s an even greater pleasure in seeing not only Charlayne Woodard play Jackson/Mr.Glass’ mother 19 years after she played the role in Unbreakable, but also and arguably more significantly the 28-year-old Spencer Treat Clark revisit the role of Willis/David Dunn’s son Joshua which he last played as a nine-year-old, complete with flashbacks to Joshua and his dad made up from outtakes that were never used in Unbreakable.

When the nerdy Mr. Glass starts explaining the twists and terms of the plot in terms of comic book narrative and lore, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the world really needs another movie on the subject after the quantity of superhero movies from Marvel and D.C. in recent years. That said, this is more inventive than most superhero movies although you’ll like it more if you watch the two movies which spawned it beforehand. It works well enough as either a third instalment of a trilogy or a post-modern take on the superhero genre.

Glass is out in the UK on Friday, January 18th. Watch the film trailer below:

For your lips only!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

From as far back as the Tower of Babel, humans have seen language as a divisive tool. Film has worked around language barriers since the days of black and white silent reels using subtitles, dubbing and elaborate body language. But if working around a foreign tongue is such a hassle, why bother?

In many ways, the intricacy and unique nature of language adds new layers of meaning and emotion that can’t be found through a simple translation. There are phrases that just don’t work in stilted translations (think John Kennedy’s iconic “ich bin ein Berliner” for starters, pictured below) and of course the limitations placed on casting those who can only speak the main language of the film can be incredibly detrimental to the realism and intersectionality of the cast.

It is also crucial to note that there is a power dynamic here that those in the cinema industry rarely discuss: the colonial hangover of portraying ethnic minorities as speaking in stilted, broken English or, worse, presented in yellow or blackface.

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Tongue twisters

When, as an actor, you perform your own cultural stories and your nation’s history in your first language, you can take command of what you are saying. You can speak in the rhythm and motion of your mother tongue, fully engage with the script in a way that works for you, and take back control over what you truly want to say about your country’s past, rather than parroting the words of a foreign screenwriter.

When you are working in a language that you don’t know very well, the consequences can be somewhat dire. There have been hilarious translations over the past – The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) famously became “If you Leave me, I Delete You” in the Italian translation, and the translation for Twister (Jan De Bont, 1996) became “Run! Run! Cloudzilla!” in Chinese. And that’s just movie titles. The problem becomes far more complicated when you have to dub entire dialogues in a film. And even if you have got a really good translator on set, sometimes the poetic and personal nature of dialect and accent become lost when distributed abroad.

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Dubbing reinvented

But if I’m going to point out a problem, I might as well point towards a solution, or at least a film that has overcome these difficulties spectacularly well. That film is Air Strike (Xiao Feng, 2018; pictured above). Or The Bombing, if we are talking about the European title. Or Unbreakable Spirit in China. It stars Bruce Willis, Adrien Brody and many Chinese actors). The film tells the story of the Japanese bombing of Chongquing in WW2, a horrific campaign that is not widely known outside of China due to the Eurocentric focus on the conflict that the West tends to take. Using American, Chinese and Japanese characters, speaking their own languages, the film manages to transform a simple war movie into an intersectional marking point in cinematic history.

With over 55 speaking roles dubbed over a four-week period, followed by six weeks of sound mixing, the task of translating the film was a mammoth one. Talent is so often blurred by an unconvincing dub, but the film’s rythmo band dubbing technique allowed Chinese star Bingbing Fan (pictured below),to appear to Western audiences as she appears to Chinese speakers, every word delivered at the same pace and rhythm as her own voice.

The “band” is actually a clear 35 mm film leader on which the dialogue is hand-written, together with numerous additional indications for the actor – including laughs, cries, length of syllables, mouth sounds, breaths, and mouth openings and closings. The rythmo band is projected in the studio and scrolls in perfect synchronization with the picture. A little bit like a teleprompter. You can see an example here.

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Words tailored for your lips!

It’s fascinating to watch, and the success of Air Strike backs up how much it is transforming the industry. Sold to over 100 countries, the impressive dubbing was among the key factors that made it so attractive to distributive buyers. The rythmo band method allows words to be stretched, compressed or even changed to perfectly synchronise with lip movements on the screen, allowing the pace of the dialogue to flow more evenly.

But this wasn’t simply a feat of dubbing. In total, the cast and crew spoke four different languages, and working together proved to be an interesting challenge. The directors in China relied on body language and hand signals to ensure that the cast understood what was happening. You can listen to the cast and director talk through this experience here.

In a globalised world, the film industry is becoming bolder and braver with the stories we want to tell, the languages we use to tell them, and the people we cast and hire to work on them. Films like Air Strike show that we can overcome the stumbling blocks of translation and language barriers and create innovative, poignant work that challenges the borderlines of traditional storytelling.

The all-English dubbed version Air Strike (aka. The Bombing in the UK) was made available on all major VoD platforms on December 18th, after a number of controversies (including a tax evasion scandal) delayed its release. The film is considered one of the most expensive non-English language films ever made.