Category Archives: Reviews

Say Cheese, For Old Times

Image result for polaroid camera

Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Edwin Land, the genius who invented the Polaroid/Land Camera, made a cryptic short film — just him in a lab coat wandering through a gutted factory talking about the future of cameras. He pulled out a wallet that looked like an iPhone for size comparison  and spoke of “a camera that would be like, oh, the telephone…our long awaited ultimate camera that is a part of the evolving human being.”

The bold prediction underpins Instant Dreams, a trippy documentary about the film and device that not only made it possible to develop images in less than a minute, but ushered in the very era of immediacy that would eventually kill the Polaroid camera.  As much about the birth of digital photography as the death of the analog process, the film peeks into the lives of aficionados who still favor the point-and-shoot method over digital trickery.

“For a product to be truly new, the world must not be ready for it,” Land said in the home video, which unwittingly forecast the emergence of cell phones when he introduced the Polaroid in February 1947. What Land could not have envisioned were the photographers, artists and others who would not let go of his outdated technology even after his death in 1991 or his company’s demise in 2008.

Directed by Dutch filmmaker Willem Baptist, Dreams follows quirky camera buffs, including German-born artist Stefanie Schneider http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/?p=1877 , who wanders the deserts of the American Southwest in a vintage pink bathrobe and Crocs, taking Polaroid art shots of her hen and whatever model she can engage for the day. She keep a hoard of foil-packet, expiration-dated Polaroid film stockpiled in her vintage fridge because “Colors show up in a very very different way, not what you actually see with your eyes” on these photographs. She relishes even the splotches, bars or streaks, the age-or-light induced imperfections of such images.

We meet  Stephen Herchen, a retired  chemist who continues to work with and touts Polaroid film as one of the most complex analog chemical processes “that’s ever been created.” We meet New York magazine editor Chris Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid, who provides the history the camera and preaches and practices its use, a prophet for an analog religion that has all but disappeared in the digital age.

We hear newsman Lowell Thomas on old newsreels, extolling the virtues of this “new” technology — “press a button, and have a picture.” Long-dead science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke discusses how tricky it is, predicting the future and being ahead of your time, as Land was.

Author Bonanos describes and even demonstrates (Baptist follows him to parties, out in public with his camera) the “social” interchange” that is part of why he thinks of this process as inherently human; waiting for the shot to develop, the writer says, “forces you to make small talk to fill in the moment.” The cameras were criticized back in the day for not providing images as sharp as 35mm film, an idea which Bonanos dismisses — “The eye forgives everything if it’s a good photograph.”

The film also does a canny job of illustrating the camera’s distinctiveness — the Polaroid remains the only camera that does not leave a trace of itself after taking a shot: no negatives, no digital storage capacity. Each picture, Dreams underscores, is distinct unto itself, like a fingerprint or snowflake.

What’s missing from the film is the sense of fun the camera itself provided. The score is often brooding, the testimonies of its demise usually melancholy. There’s little whimsy here, including the beauty of tactile connection with old technology, from wrist watches to turntables to instant cameras. Dreams could have used a scene or two shot in the fun, washed out, overexposed tone that made Polaroid so distinct. And it completely ignores the commercial resurgence of instant cameras; a casual glance at Amazon demonstrates instant film is hardly dead.

Which is a relief. Instant Dreams can be too somber at times, but, like the film itself, give it some time and its beauty comes into focus.

Steven Spielberg’s Homage to the Master

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I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories. But I think I’ve stumbled upon one.

Steven Spielberg was Stanley Kubrick’s prized protege. They talked often, visited each other’s sets, even teamed up to make the underrated film, A.I. Spielberg has always been an immense talent, but let’s face it: Having Stan the Man as your corner cut man is like a writer having Salinger as a writing tutor. If you don’t take advantage of the teachings, you don’t deserve school.

I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of research into Sir Kubrick of late, and discovered a little YouTube nugget of an interview with Spielberg. In it, he sheepishly admitted he did not care for The Shining when he first saw it, and (very) reluctantly told Stanley as much when Kubrick asked his impressions. Only after watching the Jack Nicholson movie a few times, Spielberg spilled in the clip, did he recognize the movie’s genius and, more importantly, its subterfuge.

The Shining, an adaptation of a Stephen King horror movie, is not the haunted house flick audiences (and King) were expecting. I remember Dad’s disappointment when we left the theater. More than 46% of the nation’s critics at the biggest papers in the country gave it a thumbs-down.

Over time, though, its reputation has risen like a zombie with the munchies. Instead of a haunted house story, critics and historians posthumously realized, The Shining is a haunted human story, touching on domestic abuse, alcoholism, even the genocide of the American Indian. The American Film Institute recently named it one of the 30 most thrilling movies in the past century. The AFI also named Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance among the top 25 cinematic villains of all-time. What the AFI failed to note is that Poltergeist, the Disney-fied horror film ostensibly made for kids and families, was secretly a dark homage to Stanley from Spielberg, who wrote and produced the movie.

Try it as I accidentally did: Play The Shining theme over any three minutes of Poltergeist, and you’ll see that the whimsical score and sitcom lighting were simply a ploy to get it a PG rating. But when played with a traditional horror score, the movie feels entirely different — and the images are sheer Kubrickian. Here’s a sample. At 1:20, you’ll swear Stanley rose from the dead for the editing booth:

Now for something less theoretical, FactSlaps:

  • Chinese princess Xin Zhui’s body, who died in 163 BCE, is so well preserved that her skin is still soft her arms and legs can bend, and her internal organs are still intact.Image result for Xin Zhui'
  • Camels gave humans the common cold.Image result for camels have humans the common cold
  • Science knows more about coffee, wine and tomatoes than it does about breast milk.
  • Hugh Jackman was a party clown before being famous.Image result for hugh jackman party clown
  • More people watch online video game play than major cable networks and subscription entertainment services.Image result for people watching video game
  • The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure, stands 2,716 feet tall. It has 24,000 windows, contains 393,000 cubic yards of concrete and took 22 million man hours to build.Image result for what is The Burj Khalifa?
  • World renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma once left his 266 year old cello, worth $2.5 million, in the back of a NYC taxi. It was returned to him in time for his evening concert.Image result for Yo yo ma's $2 million cello

The Death of the Hollywood Twist

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Two months months ago, while working a story on M. Night Shyamalan’s career, I called up every internet clip and video analysis I could find about the director, who is known for his twist endings (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs).

In the course of reporting the story, a prelude to Shyamalan’s latest film, Glass, I came upon a number of videos breaking down the new film — including the twist ending — which hadn’t even been released yet.

That didn’t stop sneak preview viewers from spilling more than the twist ending. The videos spelled out every twist. Every unexpected turn was revealed, dissected and analyzed. There were a half-dozen surprises in the film, at least. Some video critics warned they were going to spill the movie’s  secrets. Some did not.

By the time I walked into the movie, I knew every turn the flick was going to make, from character revelations to battle outcomes.

I enjoyed the movie, but couldn’t help but wonder whether spoilers had cast a shadow of bias over my viewing. It certainly ensured a surprise-free couple of hours. Tension was a non-factor. Still, the spoilers had alerted me to Shyamalan’s break from comic book tradition with Glass — which perhaps biased me to like the movie.

Regardless of this particular movie, spoilers have become such a reality in film that, to enjoy one, you pretty much have to avoid computers, cell phones and TV sets till you’ve seen the film.

What would Hitchcock think about the development, I wondered. This has to be crazy-making for suspense directors like Shyamalan, John Carpenter, West Craven, and on. Just this weekend, Jordan Peele’s movie Us raked in $70 million on its opening weekend, breaking multiple records for a suspense film. So spoilers didn’t appear to hurt the bottom line.

Still, on a lark, I decided to do similar research Saturday on the movie, which ends with a twist on which the film squarely rests.

So I turned on YouTube. The first video recommended was entitled “The ending of Us explained.” The video was done by a group called Looper, a wildly popular movie website and online channel. The movie opened at midnight Thursday. The video was posted about 4 p.m. ET on Friday. Within its first four hours, it had more than 15,000 views.

The video aired without warning viewers of spoilers ahead, and the six-minute video broke down every key scene in the flick, as well as the identity of the mysterious villain. A cursory look uncovered a half dozen other similar videos. Then I went to Wikipedia and looked up the movie. There, too, was a page-long synopsis of the movie, including the surprise ending. All within 36 hours of its opening.

What’s happening here? Remember when you had to hear someone tell you of  The Sixth Sense! Or The Crying Game? Go all the way back to Citizen Kane or Psycho; Some of Hollywood’s most iconic moments stem from rugs being pulled beneath viewers’ feet. Imagine your reaction if a friend told you in the mid-80’s, “You gotta see The Empire Strikes Back! It’s got great effects! And I can’t believe Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father!” (oh, spoiler alert). You’d likely punch your friend in the face.

But spoilers have become so pervasive in movies some YouTubers are recording their reactions literally seconds after stepping from the theaters. And perhaps that’s inevitable. Maybe word-of-mouth is like the phone booth and mailbox; short for this world. Our laptops have become our water coolers, Facebook our hair salons, Twitter our barber shops.

The overall effect on movies is hard to gauge, though some signs are ominous. A recent study by VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands found that spoilers may not ruin an experience entirely, but can reduce suspense and decrease overall enjoyment of a film.

In a study of 412 college students, scientists found that movies that had been spoiled were rated as less moving, less thought provoking, and less successful at drawing the viewer into a narrative world and providing an immersive experience. The effects of story spoilers were “consistently negative,” Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor and study coordinator, said in a statement.

“Our study is the first to show that people’s widespread beliefs about spoilers being harmful are actually well-founded and not a myth,” Johnson said. “Instead, we surprisingly found that for all the outcomes, spoilers were detrimental.”

The study did not recommend solutions, nor even suggest one was possible in the immediacy of an internet era. But Hollywood may have no choice but to act: Despite annual box office records, most of the increase is due to inflation. Actual movie attendance is down about 10% over the last 20 years, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. If that trend continue, studios may be on the receiving end of a disastrous spoiler.