Helvetica (2007) and Wordplay (2006)

I have been talking up a storm about Helvetica, so it donned on me while watching Wordplay recently that these movies might make a good pair to write about. Both films incite those two bugging questions: "How can someone make a full-length movie on something so minuscule?" and "Who would watch such a movie?"

Helvetica (2007)

When my mother recommended a movie called Helvetica, my response was "You can't possibly mean the font, could you?" She handed me the Netflix disc and in the familiar courier font there was the title "Helvetica (2007)" I laughed instantly and pictured a docu-drama conspiracy around a printing press. "Helvetica: It Must be Stopped."

Firstly, yes the movie is about the font, but it serves as a platform for a larger debate. At the heart of this film is the battle between the formalist tenets of design versus more expressionist design.

I found a wonderful connection between this movie and Madmen, AMC's series about late 50's era Madison Avenue ad execs. In Helvetica one designer describes the shift in ad designs to a more bold and minimalist approach using Helvetica. When ads like these start showing up in magazines in Madmen, the ad execs are perplexed and disturbed at this new style. (Where's the content? Is this a joke?). I wonder if they will adopt Helvetica in the new season!

Above: The Coke ad that designer Michael Bierut loves. Below: The VW ad that stirs controversy in Madmen

Wordplay (2006)

I'm always appreciative of people who devote their lives to such arcane interests like puzzles. More than one puzzle solver said in the movie is even in poverty they will still devote themselves to puzzles. The idea that being dedicated to something so arcane that can bring someone such joy is why I know I'll never be bored or unhappy with life. There are so many things to become obsessed with!

I never liked puzzles all that much for a very superficial reason. Strictly for the concept that technically nothing new has been created. The answers are somewhere, and you can get them, but solvers really want to make it difficult for themselves. When they're finished, all they did was complete the puzzle like everyone else that finished. The end product of what these solvers are trying to attain all looks exactly the same; a finished puzzle that can only look one way. Of course this is short sighted, because it's easy to debate that what is created happens not in the puzzle, but in the solver's brain. Also, the creativity is not in the end product, but how they got there. Nonetheless, I still have an aversion, especially to jigsaw puzzles.

I am an ideal sample viewer for this film. I have no interest in puzzles, and I don't know anything about crossword puzzles. If movie's goal was to get me prepared and excited for the climax of the movie, then it was a success.

I would also like to paraphrase Josh, because I loved his comment about this film. He basically said that the film felt as if it were directed by the font itself. I suppose he means that everything in the film is modern and crisp, like the font. One thing I noted was a lot of the movie was shot on grey, overcast days.

I still haven't seen a documentary that I haven't liked. It is very hard for me to critique these movies because I like learning about new things and documentaries all expose me to these things. I get too lost in learning to analyze the movie.

I particularly liked the use of CGI to organize and display all of the raw data behind the puzzles and the competition. However I can imagine some people would still argue that it is too much visual information to interpret and it's distracting. Especially for those who saw it in the theater.

I wonder if the regulars of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament now resent this movie. Many of them were sentimental on screen about coming back to the Stamford Marriott where it was hosted for almost 30 years (and during the time that this movie came out). As soon as the movie came out the previously niche competition exploded in popularity, and was moved to a much larger venue here in Brooklyn. (closer to me, woo!) Ironically the movie itself most likely took away the more intimate communal experience that it shows.

This is also the second movie that has had funny clips of John Stewart in his office, the first one being The Aristocrats (2005).

So overall I enjoyed myself, was inspired, and now people think I'm completely boring when I tell them that the last two movies I saw were about a font and a crossword. With all these heroes, villains, gangsters, robots, zombies, and aliens that I write about it was nice to deal in the ordinary for a change. I reminded once again that there is an art to everything!

The burning question

I'm at work now, and judging this first day of heat, I am starting to wonder if I have to take some of those hard drives holding all of my movie images out of the computer and to someplace cooler. Just to recap, I have about 500 movies stored at full disc size (about 8gb per DVD) over 5tb of hard drive space. The summer heat should make it even hotter inside that computer tower, so I may have to organize the images so that I can use only one hard drive at a time, instead of 7 or 8. Maybe I should make a drive with 50 or must-see summer films and store the rest. The burning question is, what goes to storage and what stays in the computer?

UPDATE

The hard drives have now been removed from my tower, and I've been swapping them in and out of a dual enclosure. I also added another terrabyte into the mix, craziness! I now have to go back into each drive and add to my catalog the location of each DVD. I have my work cut out for me.

THX 1138

The only other George Lucas movies I had seen prior to THX 1138 were the Star Wars movies and American Graffiti. I was much younger when I saw AG, so I hardly remember anything about it, but I do remember liking it for one reason or another. (Sometimes when I've gotten a ticket I still want to stuff it in the glove compartment labeled "CS") As for the Star Wars movies, I loved them as a kid, but their novelty soon wore off, never to redeem themselves again. I never really considered the prequels serious films since they were released in such a consumer franchise driven environment. The first thing I noticed about George Lucas when I looked him up on IMDB is that he hasn't made nearly as many films as I had thought. It's almost as if Star Wars crippled his career, because since 1977 the only thing he has directed has been Star Wars movies.

As usual, I have seen some references or influences from THX1138 before actually seeing the film itself. In the first level of Hitman Contracts, you play as Agent 47 (who looks a bit like Robert Duvall as THX 1138). You awake in a room that is very similar to the wall-less jail, white and seemingly endless, until you reach a doorway.



Also, many elements of Star Wars have recognizable roots in this film, including many of the sounds. Light Saber sounds are used for the batons that the robots use, and the distorted harmonic voices that are used to communicate from ship to ship in Return of the Jedi are also in THX 1138.

I'm always surprised to see when movies are set so far into the future. The 25th century is a little ambitious considering what we see on screen (the cars for instance all dressed up 60's Lolas), but maybe that's 21st century hindsight talking.

SPOILER ALERT, don't read after this point if you haven't seen this film...really! It's not the Sixth Sense, there's still a chance that you could be surprised!

The film's ending is so straightforward and final. It wasn't exactly what I expected. The last moments of the movie show a little bit of inner conflict with THX1138 as he is climbing his way out to the forbidden outer shell. (a.k.a nature), but it rests solely on a few glances that Robert Duvall makes, and his body language. This is one of those delightful situations in film where a character is left without any companions to whom he can communicate what he is thinking verbally. It really isn't developed any further than slight suggestions, and there is no fanfare. At first I hated this, I felt that the ending should have been developed more. For that matter, THX should have returned to the custody of the robots, so he could at least see LUH again, if this is a story about the persistence of love. However leaving this last minute struggle as such a minuscule detail, it makes me wonder if perhaps if it was my imagination. It's much more ambiguous this way. One clue that suggests that THX really almost went back underground is the timing of the budget for his capture running out. He was so close to making a clean break, that even if the robots didn't have to turn around because of budget constraints and continued to pursue him, he was far enough ahead of them to still be able to leave. But with the budget running out at that moment, it offers up the moment when the robots stop chasing him and ask him politely for the last time if he would come back with them. This really gives THX a moment to react and contemplate over that, if he does at all.

Brazil

Hi everybody,

I'm back from Austria, unfortunately I didn't have any time to write about movies for the last week and a half. I was so busy that I didn't even have time to watch any of the great movie suggestions that were given to me via comments from my last post. I do promise to watch a few of the suggested movies though, I am still curious as to why some of them were chosen.

Anyway, getting back into the swing of things, I am writing a mid-term paper about Brazil for my film class, so I might as well write on the blog about it too. It was only a matter of time before I wrote about this movie in some form, seeing as it was an instant top ten on my list.

The most striking thing about Brazil is its odd mix of intent. It is chilling, funny, sad, intellectual, and suspenseful all at once. Shots composed right next to each other evoke these very different feelings. For instance early in the film, we see the stormtroopers raid the Buttle home in a terrifying blitz. Yet once the dust clears, an officer in a silly hat brings Mrs. Buttle a receipt for the raid which she must sign for, and the comedic "Department of Works" (reminiscent of Monty Python) arrive on the scene with their oddly ineffective ceiling plug.

Terry Gilliam is a very unique director to say the least. If the director acts as the mediator between the films message and its audience, then Terry Gilliam is like a mad professor. The choices he makes don't always help the overall design of the movie, but I like them anyway.

The dialog in this movie helps to develop the characters, but doesn't have the structure (or what some people would call formulaic) that is in many studio flicks. It's unbalanced, sometimes we peer into the life of Mr. Helpman, Mrs. Lowry, or Jack Lint. One of the major criticisms of the movie is not developing one of the film's few female characters, Jill. Even though this is a love story between Sam and Jill, more screen time is given to interactions between Sam and Kurtzmann. According to Gillaim, the script originally had a more developed relationship between Sam and Jill but had to be cut in editing. It seems as if the development of characters in Brazil is incidental to one thing only, developing the idealogical message of the movie. Even a "bad guy" henchman gets a precious moment in the chase scene when Sam and Jill are fleeing. After the troopers crash and their vehicle burns up, we see one burning up while running from the wreck. In a two hour film, every edit counts and in Brazil, nothing is done purely for the sake of character development.

Another interesting feel of the movie are the props. Many of the machines or devices we see in this movie don't even make sense. Many of the devices, such as in Sam's apartment do not work as they should (a point unto itself), but then later we see industrial design that is totally outrageous. They indicate a sense of invasiveness, isolation, or technological decay, but yet they are too silly looking too really pose a threat. Quite contrary to any other dystopian film. In a movie that is trying to make a serious point, it has an interesting sense of humor about props. Not surprising, however, for a Gilliam film.

While these choices don't have as much structure or design, it makes the movie a more personal piece. I've heard more often of directors' choices being guided by the movie as a greater whole, as if it is an organism beyond anyone's control, rather than to directly serve the idealogical perspective of a director. Here Gilliam seems to make choices on intuition. In the commentary he has said two things that ever since have resonated with me:

1. "I dont want to do 'Committee Films' I dont want to do it that way, I dont want democracy to rear its ugly head when it comes to film making...That's why I dont have preview screenings, because I feel like a lot of the principal is that democracy is part of the process"

2. "When I make a film, I don't do it very intellectually, I don't approach it in an intellectual way or analytical way I'm doing it as an emotional expression of something, it's only afterwards...that I've realized what I've done...I want to keep doing that, I don't want to be too self aware...when you do, you start getting clever...you start worrying about the wrong things."

I think as an artist I am definitely guilty of "over thinking it." And as someone who really values other people's opinions, (sometimes too much) I fall prey to the democratic process of art. This commentary really changed the way I look at the creation process.