Unsung Heroes: The Animation of 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch'

Hey everybody. Michael C here from Serious Film. I wasn't necessarily feeling it when I sat down to write this week's column so I went searching for a subject I couldn't help but get enthusiastic about. Five minutes after I pulled Hedwig down off the DVD shelf and Presto I can't type fast enough. 

When the movie musical experienced a mini-renaissance at the start of the last decade I doubt I was the only one to notice a disturbing trend. For some of these broadway adaptations it's as if appearing on the big screen required them to apologize for being musicals. Chicago couldn’t do a number without first cutting to a close up of Rene Zellweger’s retinas to assure everyone that all the strange singin' and dancin' was in her imagination. When Dreamgirls’ characters ventured offstage, as in “Steppin' to the Bad Side”, it's cut as if they’re hoping no one will notice it is the characters singing and is not just a song on the soundtrack.

Even when movies were unapologetic about being musicals, like Sweeney Todd, the movie's advertisements went to great lengths to conceal its Broadway roots. The tagline on the Sweeney’s poster should have been “Stephen who?”

During this time period, one of the movies that defied this trend was John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). I remember working in a movie theater the day the poster arrived. No ticket buyers for this were going to be surprised when the characters burst into song. 

Hedwig embraced the rock musical. It wanted to squeeze every last drop of joy, pathos, wit, and fun out of it. Like Cabaret, it was logical to construct the story around a series of stage performances, but within that structure Mitchell stripped it down and decorated it like a punk teenager graffitiing his text books with Sharpie. The star/director throws in everything from split-screens to follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-alongs (with the occasional *ahem* car wash) but I think his most brilliant movie was to hire animator Emily Hubley to create a short film to accompany the song "The Origin of Love". With lesser material the addition of all these elements might seem like flash over substance, clutter for the sake of it, but the songwriting here is so strong that it can support grand gestures. 

Hubley's scaled down, hand drawn animation is a perfect fit for Hedwig's cheap, trailer park punk aesthetic. A more polished animation style would have stuck out horribly. It's simplicity allows it to add a bit of dazzle and underline the substance of the piece all without distracting from what's really important, namely, the character of Hedwig and what this all means to her. When the song climaxes with Hedwig singing directly into the camera until the animation gradually takes over half the screen it's easy to miss how well this technique works because of how surprisingly moving it is.

I don't know exactly how else to praise Hubley's work except to say that it is just plain beautiful. Origin of Love is my favorite song from Hedwig (which places high in my favorites from musicals in general) and as strong as Mitchell's performance of it is, he was right to conclude it deserved something extra. 

So You Think You Can Link?

Blog Stage says what I've been meaning to say about Rotten Tomatoe's Career-O-Matic. Why are so many websites praising it for charting actor's careers. It does no such thing!
In Contention Guy Lodge boards the Christopher Plummer Best Supporting Actor nomination train that I suspect more people will find themselves on soon. The film will need to expand and catch on more to get said train out of the station though.
Movie|Line honors 12 of Helena Bonham-Carter's craziest looks in honor of her new job as the face of Marc Jacobs.
Towleroad a few notes on Magneto's confusing sexuality and a new (singing!) Hugh Jackman film.
Go Fug Yourself Nicole Kidman at the CMAs wearing the craziest thing I've ever seen her wear.

Off Screen
Fox News --Normally I wouldn't link to them but I think this story involving BYU (my alma mater) and So You Think You Can Dance is just SO ridiculous. BYU has not loosened up at all in the past 15 years. If anything it was actually a more liberal place when I was there ... which is a frightening thought.

Hit Me... "The Woman in the Window"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we all chime in on what we think of as the best shot from a pre-selected movie. Last week 19 partipicants looked at Moulin Rouge!. This week, it's Fritz Lang's...

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944)

We begin with a great moment in Art Direction. The most curious attribute of The Woman in the Window is it's sexlessness. Despite having all the trappings of a traditional film noir including the femme fatale (Joan Bennett as "Alice Reed" pictured above) there's no sex in the movie, not even the implied offscreen kind. Naturally then, it has to be abstracted so how better to do so than placing a nude statue in Alice Reed's (Joan Bennett) apartment. It keeps her in the room even when she wanders out of it. It also gets framed between her and the three doomed men who want her throughout the course of the movie: the john, the pickup and the blackmailer.

Even the murder near the beginning of the film which informs every moment that follows is a kind of abstraction. We see it happening but it's not technically a murder so much as an accidental necessity involving self-defense. It's the covering up of this "crime" that's the actual crime, so The Woman in the Window seems to cheekily be happening behind glass, always a bit removed from itself.

Best Shot
Take this worrying witty shot of our sorry protagonist Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G Robinson).

outside his own story

He has just PURPOSEFULLY removed himself from the story in progress, his story!, by feigning sickness. But though he keeps mopping his brow nervously in the safety of the car, he can't help but keep twisting around to peer back in on the murder cover-up story, his story. His best friend happens to be the DA and has taken him to the scene of the crime where an investigation is underway.

Throughout the movie people will keep telling the Professor the story, which he already knows being the protagonist, and he will keep nervously listening and watching and nearly giving himself away.

All these layers of telling lift what might be considered a minor Lang picture into something that's quite fun to watch if you're in the right mood. It's a noir that happens more in your head than in your heart or loins.

My favorite sequence illustrating the humor of these "layers" of telling is when the word first gets out about the murder. The police are offering a $10,000 reward for information. Bear in mind that we've already seen the murder and the coverup firsthand. So has Alice, who is seen reading about it in the paper. The paper reads "Boys Scout Finds Slain Millionaire's Body". Cut to: a movie screen telling us the same thing (they used to show newsreels prior to movies starting). HEY, THAT'S US WATCHING THIS MOVIE. Cut to the Boy Scout in the news reel filling out his own details...

Layers of Telling in "The Woman in the Window"

I was practicing woodcraft in the woods just off the Bronx River Parkway extension when I found Mr... Mr. Mazard's remains.  No I was not scared, a boy scout is never scared. If I get the reward I will send my younger brother to some good college and I will go to Harvard.

Imagine it. A Harvard education AND a second "good college" for only $10,000 bucks? Sweet deal.

Accomplices To This "Best Shot" Crime

• Film Actually has been a tireless contributor to this web series. Check that blog out.
• Movies Kick Ass on Fritz Lang's constant "frames" within the frames.
• Pussy Goes Grrr two choices.
• Awww, the Movies picks a shot I almost picked. It's so "Dead Again". I bet Kenneth Branagh saw this movie before directing that.

What's next in this series?

Wed June 15th @ 10 PM: Peggy Sue Got Married (nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars) starring the one and only Kathleen Turner, 80s film-stealer Nicolas Cage and a few supporting cast members that went on to much greater fame in the 1990s.

Wed June 22nd @10 PM: Rocco and His Brothers (1960) 
Luchino Visconti's homoerotic drama about a widow and her five volatile sons. Those readers who loved I Am Love (2009) should definitely check this out as Visconti was a major influence on Tilda's auteur. Auteur giants like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are also among Visconti's fanbase.

Join us! 
All you need is a blog, tumblr, flickr or site where you can upload your choice for best shot, with or without an essay or capsule as to why you chose it. We link up to participating entries!

Cinema de Gym: 'Daredevil'

Kurt here. For those of you just tuning in, Cinema de Gym is an experimental series in which I give my two cents on movies that play in an in-house theater at my local gym, where I'm attempting to shed "writer's pounds." Instead of seats, this screening room has treadmills and such, and plays a daily film on a loop. For the first installment, we chatted about Barry Levinson's Bandits. Today, inspired by Nathaniel's "Mutant Week," the subject is Daredevil, the 2003 handicapped-hero flick and the third big comic book movie of the Aughts (following, of course, X-Men and Spider-Man).

This is an easy movie to belittle for a whole mess of reasons. Box office clout be damned, Ben Affleck makes for an unwieldy superhero, especially since he was nowhere near his lean Town physique when this film was shot (directing just literally takes it outta ya, I suppose). That he looked a lot older than 30 at the time certainly didn't help matters, and both age and unwieldiness compounded the secondhand discomfort of that red leather suit, which, frankly, wasn't worth the poor cows' hides.

Then there was the silliness of Colin Farrell's Bullseye who, however well cast, would be one of the first of many counterproductively-comical superbaddies, saddled with meta lines like, "I want a bloody costume."

Farrell as Bullseye, Garner as Elektra

But I hardly count this among the worst of our last decade of superhero cinema, as the subsequent years would give us beauts like Jonah Hex, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and, oh yes, Elektra. Before the spinoff, I thought Jennifer Garner excelled as Daredevil's sai-wielding vigilantess, balancing sex appeal with girl-next-doorness and fitting much more nicely into her S&M gear than future hubby Ben. She certainly has this movie, not Alias, to thank for her big-screen career.

Moving on, I'm with Roger Ebert in regard to the film's visual f/x, which the uncannily prolific critic championed heartily upon the film's release. In a movie of fickle success, writer/director Mark Steven Johnson – whose own professional fickleness we'll get to in a sec – finds some handsome ways to envision the tricky nature of hero Matt Murdock's powers, which are akin to Sonar in that the blind crime fighter can "see" sound vibrations. Specifically, a scene in which Elektra stands in the rain so Matt can see her face via droplet sound waves is quite purdy, if overtly digital.

Matt Murdock. No relation to Scott Summers.The thing with Cinema de Gym is, I only see 15- to 30-minute snippets of the film in question (depending on the day's endurance level), so I ought to discuss the segment. What I saw of Daredevil was in fact a lot of down time – the slower bits in which Matt chats with his co-worker and Hollywood-prescribed best bud, played by future Iron Man helmer Jon Favreau. Matt, a lawyer, has a built-in taste for justice, but that's not all that interesting. What I liked were curious details about his handicap, like how he folds bills of different denominations in different ways, so as to feel the correct amount. I remembered that part from first viewing, and saw it again in my gym segment.

About Mark Steven Johnson, the guy's got a really odd filmography, penning a grab bag of screenplays and directing a few of them to all-over-the-map results. In the '90s, he wrote the Grumpy Old Men movies, Simon Birch and Jack Frost (the Michael Keaton weepie, not the straight-to-video slasher), then did Daredevil before writing and directing...Ghost Rider and When In Rome.

[Pause] ...whoa.

At a recent party, someone told me he felt Daredevil was the movie that shaped the superhero film as we now know it. I'm not sure about that, but it certainly seems to have been a tipping point for its director.

Conclusions?

1. Ben Affleck is wise to have not returned to comic book cinema (assuming it would have had him back).
2. If nothing else, mediocre superhero movies can lead to loving, lasting Hollywood marriages.
3. Supporting parts in superhero flicks can give actors the comic book director's bug. (Might the long-awaited Wonder Woman be helmed by Thor's Kat Dennings?)
4. I'm suddenly dying to see what Mark Steven Johnson does next, and I imagine he's open to suggestions. The floor is yours, TFE readers.

Newish on DVD. Reader's Choice?

Last time we did this you chose The Other Woman -- curse you!!! -- but we'll do this bi-weekly because I aim to please. The following films debuted on DVD yesterday or last week. Which are you planning to watch? Which would you have me watch/write up?

• BIUTIFUL -in which Javier Bardem gives Job a run for his money in the personal misery department. Sounds like a laugh riot.
• BLUE CRUSH 2 -in which... well, surfer girls! Three of them.
• THE COMPANY MEN - in which rich famous-looking guys lose their jobs and must rebuild their lives. It's hard being super rich and then not quite as rich, okay !?!
• DRIVE ANGRY - in which Nicolas Cage and Amber Heard put medal to the pedal and chase after a cult leader in some sort of exploitation movie. 3D only obviously not now that it's for home viewing.
• JUST GO WITH IT -in which Jennifer Aniston pretends to be Adam Sandler's wife for reasons we can't comprehend and Nicole Kidman cameos for reasons currently unknown to us.
• PASSION PLAY -in which musician Mickey Rourke falls for "bird woman" Megan Fox at a travelling circus. Bird women do have their appeal.
• RUBBER - in which a tire menaces people.
• SANCTUM - in which... no, I don't know what happens. I think it's about a watery cave? Produced by James Cameron but not directed by him.
• TRUE GRIT - in which Hailee Steinfeld looks for people who have True Grit, even though she already possesses it. Very Wizard of Oz, that. Also: Pigtails.

I'm not including True Grit in the poll because it got plentiful attention from December through March. (I even interviewed the great cinematographer Roger Deakins.) And I'm not including The Company Men because I tried to sit through it once already and just could not deal.

poll by twiigs.com

If you want to sway undecided votes your way, make a case in the comments.