Production notes

I just watched some footage from my new Canon HV20 on the big (24-inch standard def TV) screen, and I was very impressed. The sharpness is stunning. And that's shooting standard def, autofocus.

Anyway, the other night while we were watching Mahogany, with its great wide-screen camerawork, I was shocked by the occasional zoom. For an urban drama made in 1975, the zooming was downright judicious, but still it jolted me. No, let's be clear: It offended me. There's something about that technique -- the way it draws attention to itself? forces a certain perspective about the story on the viewer? is such an obvious, lazy shortcut? -- that it really bothers me.

Then I realized that I spent several hours at a trade show last week shooting ... zooms! Zooming out, occasionally zooming in, going from signs to wide shots, faces to crowds -- and fast! They're a staple of my news videos, and right smack in the mainstream of Web and local TV news style. I realized it all depends on the context. And I do think there's something quite different about using a zoom in nonfiction film than in a narrative. Off the top of my head, I guess it has something to do with the fact that as a documentarian you can't completely control where you are or where your subjects go, although there are also limits to control in Hollywood filmmaking and non-fiction filmmakers may have more options than we like to think.

All this got me to thinking what I should do about an upcoming project that's nonfiction but not news, more of a documentary with music. Would zooms be OK in something like that? Is it more acceptable just because I'm shooting it on digital video rather than film? And now that I think about it, very slow zooms are not so bad.

Review: Mahoga...

A big gripe of Asian-American media activists like my friend Angry Asian Man is that almost every Asian character in an American movie or TV show is there for an "Asian reason." They can never just Be There. Anthony Perkins had the same problem. Last night we were watching the DVD of the 1975 Diana Ross vehicle Mahogany and saw him playing a fashion photographer. That's great, I thought: Not a bad-looking guy, definitely has some acting chops, breaking out of that Psycho thing. But then his character got more and more creepy, and finally he pulled a From Russia With Love-style gun on Billy Dee Williams. So it turned out he was there for an "Anthony Perkins reason" after all. So disappointing. Anyway, I can't tell you what he did with the gun because at that point we just went to bed. As Seventies as Mahogany is -- and I love the Seventies -- and as great as Ross looks in David Watkin's gorgeous cinematography, we couldn't take any more of the ridiculous plot. I think they just made it up as they went along. Run, don't walk, to see Lady Sings the Blues instead.

Review: Olympia (Part One)

Leni Riefenstahl's International Olympic Committee documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games, Olympia, stands out in several respects. The games were used as a showcase for a murderous regime, the filmmaker was associated with that regime to a degree, and the film's blurring of fact and thematic montage is distinctive. But it's also a timeless lesson in documentary filmmaking.

Part One of the film, which I saw last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is first of all a marvel of concision. It covers several track and field events in less than two hours, minus a long thematic introduction. And though there is a dated, by-Jove British narration in the English-language cut of the movie, the story comes through mostly in the extraordinary shooting and editing. We see the facial expressions of the athletes and audience, frequently in close-up. The action sequences show the athletes from preparation to follow-through, sometimes focusing in on a stance or a movement, showing rather than telling how the sport is played. Most amazing is the variety and quality of the footage. As each competitor performs and as races go through several heats, there's a different angle seemingly every time. One heat of a sprint is shot from behind and above so we can see both the start and the finish in a single shot. The next heat starts with a wide-angle shot from the ground, just on the inside of the track. This variety, along with judicious use of slow motion at various speeds, gives a heightened sense of drama to an already dramatic event. Even making allowances for out-of-sequence edits of action and audience reaction, and what must have been a large crew with small handheld cameras, the craft is amazing.

And that's saying nothing of the movie's sheer beauty. I stopped following the competition after a while just to take in the images. The incredibly long cross-dissolves of Greek ruins and statuary at the beginning are gorgeous, and the closing sequence of the Olympic flag superimposed on the stadium is breathtaking. There's something about the way she shoots the stadium from a distance, centers it, and isolates it that simultaneously exalts the event and makes it seem part of something even larger. As creepy as that sounds, I wasn't even thinking about meanings at that point. (The shots of Hitler are surprisingly candid but straightforward, making one's skin crawl even more.)

But it's the pole-vaulting that's most amazing. It starts in daylight and ends at night, and the coal blackness behind makes the brightly lit action more dramatic. The scene starts to look very intimate as the background disappears. Athletes waiting their turn watch together on the grass nearby. One image sticks in my mind: Two male athletes sitting on the field, sharing a blanket to keep warm as their eyes follow a vaulter going over. It's delightfully and chastely homoerotic. (Homoerotic images of women far outnumber those of men, here. Intentionally or not, Olympia must be a lesbian landmark of some kind.) The shot of the waiting pole vaulters is just a cutaway, but I see reflections of its style all over the fashion photography of the last 30 years. In addition to making Nazi propaganda in Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl may have invented Abercrombie. But Olympia, Part One is a great film and, I believe, one that uplifts humanity.

What summer is it?

John Leland takes a good look at the Summer of Love's 40th anniversary in The New York Times, revealing some connections between the definitive hippie moment and today's commercial deployment of it that are more direct than is typically believed. The Summer of Love was a media-conscious event with an organizing body, he writes, and by playing up its role as periphery, it became the center. The result, if we are to follow Leland's conclusions, is staggering:

"To 'drop out' in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.

Did the media economy's displacement of manufacturing start with the Summer of Love? He doesn't answer the question or even necessarily ask it, but if so, the hippies ultimately achieved a fascinating combination of victory and loss.

Leland's point of entry is the museum shows and staged entertainment events that will commemorate the anniversary this year. He minimizes these events by comparing them to the original. Here's where I think the article sheds light on the cultural moment we're in today.

"In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins."

On YouTube, Justin.tv (as a technology), and other media gathered under the awkward techspeak name "Web 2.0," this is patently not the case. Does this mean we're seeing a new Summer of Love? Perhaps a new Summer of Self-Absorption? (1967 was one of those, too.) Will what we're watching now replace the kind of media industry that makes America run today? I don't have the answers, but it's time to ask the questions. As with rock'n'roll in 1967, we're nowhere near the end of this.

On Cuaron

Scholar Slavoj Zizek is featured in a movie out now called The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. It's not what it sounds like, according to a friend who saw it and highly recommends it. Here's Zizek (not sure whether it's from that movie) talking about Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. Great insights.

FNL renewed!!!

"Friday Night Lights" is coming back next season! It'll be on Fridays at 10, but with TiVo, iTunes, and online, scheduling means less than it ever did. Even better, I read that they're going to push the next season by pushing up the the release of the first-season DVD and discounting it. This is one of the best TV dramas ever. Thanks to NBC for having faith in it.

Review: Spider-Man 3

Spider-Man 3 is the perfect blockbuster for the YouTube era. Its highlights are brief, light set pieces that could almost stand alone. Then we're back to the main story, too serious for a comic book and lumbering on toward a too-late ending. The special effects are excellent, but more so than the earlier installments, Spider-Man 3 lacks the effect it needs to captivate us: a strong performance by Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. His boyish quality served him well in 2002's Spider-Man, but his character has outgrown him. Maguire has no chemistry with Kirsten Dunst, who plays girlfriend Mary Jane. The filmmakers shove easily made points down our throats and Parker learns the usual hoary Lessons. What works are lighter scenes, such as Mary Jane and James Franco's Harry Osborn cooking to the oldies and publisher J. Jonah Jameson (the hilarious J.K. Simmons) struggling with stress management. They almost make this well-meaning movie well.

IAST: Colma: The Musical

I am so there: Richard Wong and HP Mendoza's Colma: The Musical is coming to the luxurious Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco on June 22. I've been pushing Colma ever since I saw the world premiere at last year's SFIAAFF. It has a sense of fun that's rare in film today. In some ways I'm happily shocked that it got national theatrical distribution -- it'll also play in Los Angeles, New York, and two other cities -- but at the same time, I've known all along that this is the kind of movie people are looking for whether they know where Colma is or not.

My movie

I made this movie in a video production class last year. I can't thank the participants enough, especially Max and Gabe. Hope you like it.

Review: Blood Diamond

It's action-packed and looks great, and it certainly has its heart in the right place. But Blood Diamond, Edward Zwick's social-message drama about the role of the diamond trade in African wars, shortchanges its message by the way it tells the tale.

The story starts with Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a poor fisherman in Sierra Leone who is captured by rebels and sent to work in a diamond mine, where he finds a large diamond and keeps it for himself. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mercenary turned diamond trader, helps Vandy get the diamond out of Africa for his own reasons, while longtime war correspondent Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Garner) gets involved in the course of writing an expose of the trade.

The cause is worthy enough, assuming the situation is as bad as the film makes it out to be. Shot on location in South Africa and Mozambique, the film never looks false as it moves from gorgeous wilderness to grim urban settings. It's refreshing to see a natural attraction between two characters in dire straits (Archer and Bowen, cleverly named) not blossom into an unrealistic battlefield romance. (It's also nice that the obligatory beefcake shot of DiCaprio is matched by one of Hounsou.) DiCaprio's performance is phenomenal, showing great range, and Hounsou is also very good, though Garner falls flat.

Much is right with Blood Diamond, and it's worth seeing if you like adventure, don't mind blood and appreciate good acting of the man's-man variety. What's wrong with it surfaces early, in a scene where delegates to a conference on "conflict diamonds" lay out the problem with speeches that sound like stuffy documentary scripts. A privileged outsider's shock and anguish is spread thick over Blood Diamond, smothering the chance for a realism that goes beyond exposition and location shooting.

The lost opportunity for a more nuanced story is most obvious in Honsou's and Garner's characters. In the real world, a poor fisherman and a serial war correspondent would be more far more canny and less shocked by tragedy than these two. Maybe the makers of Blood Diamond thought they needed someone to model the audience's reaction to the story, like news anchors who emote about each item they report. A straight story with realistic characters would have made for a more powerful film; audiences could discern the tragedy here for themselves.

IAST: The Bourne Ultimatum

I am SO there: The Bourne series is getting a third installment, opening Aug. 3, The Bourne Ultimatum. Brian Cox, Joan "How does that scan?" Allen and Chris Cooper are all coming back, along with Matt Damon, of course. Judging from the shooting locations, they're going to make Berlin, London, Tangier, and Riga, Latvia look like places you'd never want to go. And that's how we like it!