'War Horse': Stage vs. Screen

Kurt here. I am not, by any stretch, an authority on theater, and it's only recently that I've been able to collect a good number of playbills. But I can say, without hesitation, that the Broadway production of War Horse is the best thing I've ever witnessed on stage. I saw the show last Sunday, three days before I caught Spielberg's big-screen translation. In technical terms, the play is flawless, so staggeringly well-executed that, at intermission, my partner and I just gave each other wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks. The story, as expected, is one of very typical structure, with a found-and-lost-and-found-again relationship between and adolescent boy (Albert) and an almost preternatural stallion (Joey). But the stagecraft, while clearly taking some inspiration from Julie Taymor's The Lion King (and, perhaps, the Daniel Radcliffe incarnation of Equus), feels wildly extraordinary, at once awesome and minimalistic in its design.

I've decided that what makes the play so potent, beyond its meticulously made yet intentionally haggard horse puppets, and its ripped-from-the-pages-of-history projection screen of a backdrop, is its fierce, unannounced insistence on getting in your space, nearly assaulting you when it's time for stagehands to hurriedly crisscross the performance space with barbed wire, line the aisles with pennant strings to prep for a recruitment scene, or pilot a massive, makeshift tank across an implied, strobe-lit battlefield (another highlight is an ultra-stylized, oversized bullet that's carried from the crowd and spun like a drillbit before striking a key character on stage).

And how does Spielberg's version measure up to all this? I did my best to not allow my first War Horse experience to make me biased against my second, and it's true that the two works are very different beasts. I was, however, keeping score as I basked in the orange glow of Spielberg's impossible skies, for this equine weeper's path to the screen yields a lot of pluses and minuses. Let's take a look (spoiler alert!) at how Spielberg bettered the material, and how he fell short of the merits of its past life.

Peter Mullan and David Thewlis

PLUS: Albert's Father

In the play, Albert's father, Ted Narracott is an irredeemable, profoundly hateable character (seriously, like please-shoot-him-right-now hateable). A drunk and alleged military deserter, he makes a pile of horrid choices—including impulsively selling Joey—and never considers for a moment how they will impact his son...

Fathers, Tradition, Human Animal Bonding after the jump

Click to read more ...

John Williams Heading Toward Oscar Nomination #46

John Williams © Chad Batka, New York TimesIn the long history of the Academy Awards, only one man can claim more nominations than composer John Williams. And that man, long gone, is now less a man and rather more like a symbol, a legend, an industry, a way of life. 

John Williams never opened a theme park and his name is decidedly less distinctive that "Walt Disney" but he's also inextricably embedded in our popular culture. In a very literal way John Williams has scored our collective dreams and adventures for over a half century now. Though the movies of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are hardly his only playground in terms of beloved movies, they're probably the scores that people think of first. (The fan tribute video below provides a thorough overview of just that.)

After an unusually long break from features the much celebrated composer is now back at work. He's got three new Spielberg movies on the way (The Adventures of Tintin, War Horse, Lincoln) and he could be celebrating his 80th birthday in February as a 46 or even 47 time Oscar nominee. Take that, Streep, with your piddly 16 nominations!

Tribute to John Williams, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas from whoispablo on Vimeo.

Do you think John Williams (45 nominations / 5 wins) will finally break his nomination tie with Oscar's other most awarded composer Alfred Newman (45 nominations / 9 wins) this January. Either War Horse or TinTin could do it. But will it be both? 

Related
Oscar Predictions - Aural Categories
Recent New York Times Interview
Awards Daily posted pieces from the Tintin score

How Long Has It Been Since You've Seen "Close Encounters"?

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind turns 34 this month. On a whim recently we put in the 30th anniversary edition Blu-Ray* and gave it a spin. I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and my memory of it was hilariously incomplete and childlike.

a production sketch shown on the special edition DVD

I remembered, for example, the oft repeated five musical notes that always made me nostalgic for that old light-up Hasbro game "Simon Says" and I remembered all the glowing lights and alien children at the end. My third most vivid memory was Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potato replica of Devil's Tower in Wyoming (a shape to which all the characters are drawn). Strangely I had zero recall of the far more narratively pronounced massive sculpture he builds inside of his house of the exact same structure. Funny the things you remember. The mashed potatoes must have stuck in my child brain because little kids play with their food but they're fully aware that adults aren't supposed to.

To my great astonishment, given decades of familiarity with Spielberg films, the movie is miraculously open ended. It's also open sided and open fronted which is to say that there are dozens of emotional entry points and next to nothing in the way of force-feeding or exposition. You can feel whatever you want to feel about it all the way through without the director telling you how you should be feeling (aside from free-form "wonder" which he expects and earns) or explaining any of those feelings away. In short, were his filmography a bookshelf, this would a lonely inkblot nestled between dozens of how-to instructional textbooks. 

Oscar History and 70s Nostalgia after the jump

Click to read more ...

Spielberg Buried In Gold

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we noted how crowded the Lifetime Achievement field is getting already for 2011? Well, add another huge name to the list:  Steven Spielberg, who already has three Oscars, a Thalberg, 3 Golden Globes and a Cecil B DeMille, 4 Bafta honors of varying sorts, 2 NBR honors, an honorary Cesar, 11 Emmys of different types, 3 DGAs and a lifetime achievement, at least 1 award from every critics organization, and dozens upon dozens of other prizes will be adding to his trophy collection in January. He will be honored by the Producers Guild of America with the David O. Selznick award on Saturday January 21st, 2012 three days before the Oscar nominations are announced. (Just in case War Horse isn't Oscar worthy?)

This will be the 8th time Spielberg has been feted by the PGA. He's won 4 times competively and received 3 additional special honors from that guild. If you melt down all his statues to form one big one how big would it be? Bigger than a mechanical shark named Bruce that's for sure! Maybe even bigger than a T-Rex?

In other lifetime achievement style honors...
We forgot to mention that Glenn Close's first tribute of 2011 (we're betting more will follow) happened over Emmy weekend at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

She looks happy.

Little known fact: All gold plated statues contain gooey centers filled with endorphin rushes, chocolate, and melatonin.

Cinema de Gym: 'Minority Report'

Kurt here. (Surely many of you recall that Michael C. just recently offered an Unsung Heroes post on the Minority Report think tank, so allow me to pre-arrest myself and apologize in advance for the déjà vu.) Minority Report turned out to be a perfect movie to watch in my gym's cardio theater, each of us exercisers piloting our own personal machines like hovercraft-riding Spielbergian cops. Like most, I adore this film in all its blue-filtered beauty, and I'm happy to report that I was lucky enough to walk in for one of my favorite scenes: Tom Cruise's eye transplant surgery.

Surely the dirtiest segment of this very sterile sci-fi noir, the scene, which sees Peter Stormare's ex-con play doctor with Cruise's fugitive, John Anderton, is squirmingly tactile and visceral, greatly conveying the nightmarish ickiness of its atmosphere. Within the apartment unit, a setting of uglified modernity most evocative of Ridley Scott, the great Stormare enhances the dread tenfold with his mad-scientist line readings, which reveal that he was once arrested by John...for burning his patients. With that stirring revelation, we're invited to sit back and relax in the operating chair, seeing Stormare and his nurse – if I remember correctly – through John's eyes, which, y'know, are about to leave their sockets.

When John awakes, the nightmare continues, as the good doctor has playfully misled him as a means of mild, yet nonetheless grotesque, revenge. Blindfolded, and forbidden to remove his bandages lest he actually go blind, John has a string tied to each arm to lead him to the kitchen and bathroom, which – again, if memory serves – have been intentionally mixed-up. The new scene conjures a sort of schoolyard-bully terror, never greater than when John finally heads for the refrigerator. Reaching for the sandwich and milk his caretakers promised him, John instead grabs a brick of mold-covered grossness, and after spatting it out, attempts to wash out the taste with a big swig of green god-knows-what. Gaaahhh, I can feel the shivers now. It's such a repulsive moment, for which, of course, I tip my hat to Mr. Spielberg.

Minority Report supports one of my favorite Tom Cruise talking points, a theme that can be traced through much of his '00s filmography. To help boost John's post-op anonymity, Stormare's doc gives him an emergencies-only, taser-like device that, if zapped under the chin, will turn his face into an unrecognizable glob of Quasimodo skin-putty. If it hadn't been already, vanity was surely the Tom Cruise motif of the new millenium. Everything from the Mission: Impossible franchise to Valkyrie involved some degree of covering up or disfiguring Cruise's million-dollar mug, as if to say there was no greater sin or provocation in mainstream movies. Certainly, Cruise used it as a way to both be self-indulgent and shallowly work against his icon status, superficially striving for character-actordom by obstructing – or, god forbid, destructing – his pretty face. Minority Report came on the heels of Vanilla Sky, wherein this theory is surely most apparent, with Cruise Vanity essentially serving as its own subplot. What does it all mean? Ultimately, I prefer to think of it as eerie foreshadowing, an inundation of Cruise defacement amidst a career climax, after which his face would never be the same.

Conclusions?

1. Though not exactly one for always putting a distinct stamp on his work, Spielberg sure can draw you into the moment.
2. Though not exactly one for pushing the boundaries of foulness, Spielberg sure can gross you out good.
3. Though often reduced to a negative Russian stereotype, Stormare can bring a whole lot with very little.
4. Though his need to remind us did indeed grow tiresome, Cruise does have one killer face to deface.

If the '00s marked the era of Cruise vanity, which Cruise era are we in now?