| Franzen not among book award finalists By HILLEL ITALIE 2010-10-13T16:26:26ZNEW YORK (AP) -- It's the Great American Snub.... hosted.ap.org |
The best crime films ever: any criminal omissions? We've picked out the 25 best crime movies ever, but no doubt there are masterpieces we failed to nab. Which are your most wanted classics of the genre?"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown," says the cop to Jack Nicholson in the closing scene of Roman Polanski's LA noir. What the cop means, I think, is that they are in a bad part of town where the law is largely powerless, although the implicit suggestion may also be that the whole world has become like Chinatown and that its crimes are too vast and sprawling to get a hold of. Far safer to wash your hands, walk away and forget the whole thing ever happened. It's Chinatown.It could be argued that most films are crime films, if only because most drama needs crime, or conflict, or at least transgression in order for it to spark into life. Rest assured that our list of top 25 crime pictures make room for the usual suspects (there are femmes fatales, lovers on the run, trigger-happy hitmen and strutting mafiosi. But there is also room for Michael Haneke's Hidden, in which a six-year-old boy tricks his parents into abandoning an Algerian orphan. No jury would convict this kid, but it is Haneke's skill to make his deed seem as destructive and as far-reaching as any number of casual shootings or overwrought bank heists.Cinema has shabby and disreputable roots. In its early days, it was the preserve of the travelling circus and the peep show and even now – even inside the most sterile, overpriced Multiplex – there remains something faintly illicit about it. Maybe this is why the crime film has remained a constant (dating right back to 1903's The Great Train Robbery, often credited as the first narrative picture). Cinema allows us to leave the well-lit, ordered and everyday world and step off into the darkness. Once inside, the old rules no longer apply and anything goes. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.Chinatown, incidentally, was voted by our panel as the best crime film of all time (and I have no argument with that). The complete list runs the gamut from Rashomon to The Big Sleep, Le jour se lève to Bonnie and Clyde. Inevitably, however, there are some shocking omissions (Pickpocket? Strangers on a Train? Dog Day Afternoon?). These films are presumably still out there, on the loose. They need to be rounded up and brought to book. And that, of course, is where you come in.CrimeXan Brooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sound vision: lip-synching and looping in the movies The Arbor, a film in which actors mime to recorded words, is part of a rich history of sonic experimentsLike all cinematic developments hailed as leaps towards verisimilitude, the advent of synchronised sound at the end of the 1920s in fact opened up a whole new dimension of illusion. The clue is in the name: despite the appearance of unity, the audio and video tracks are synchronised but separate recordings, and the space between them can be put to all sorts of cunning uses. The latest of these is found in The Arbor, Clio Barnard's moving and ingenious cinematic profile of the young Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, which is out this Friday. Taking its cue from "verbatim theatre", in which actors speak lines taken directly from interviews with real-life people, The Arbor features actors lip-synching to interviews with Dunbar's loved ones, to emotionally compelling yet formally alienating effect; as the film's production notes suggest, the technique "can deliberately reveal and undermine the illusion of reality by acknowledging that it is constructed".It's an unusual twist on an established area of cinematic experimentation. The potential to exploit the gap between sound and vision was evident from early on – think of the voice/body split that underpins the plot of that epic of the coming of the talkies, Singin' in the Rain.The ability to tweak a soundtrack developed into one of the most pervasive, albeit invisible, effects in the business: looping, the post-production technique by which dialogue is dubbed over footage to pep up a soundtrack suffering from background noise or – as in this clip from Postcards from Edge – a lacklustre on-set performance. (Skip to 6:45.)The most imaginative directors used looping to get away with murder. Orson Welles, for instance, whose recording career began in radio, deployed the power of his own voice to cover a multitude of sins. His film of Othello was shot across half-a-dozen European and African locations, as and when scraps of funding materialised; looping was essential to impose a degree of cohesion on the whole and even enabled Welles to overdub entire roles, as he did with Robert Coote's Roderigo (seen here with Micheál MacLiammóir's Iago).Plenty of other performances have been dubbed in post-production because film-makers were unhappy with an actor's accent or singing voice, or if they died between shooting and the completion of post-production. Almost always, though, the sound is engineered to fit the visuals. More unusual are cases, such as The Arbor, in which the visuals are composed to fit around pre-existing dialogue, an approach that demands actors match their delivery – breathing, pauses, tics and all – to the soundtrack. One field in which this is the norm is animation, where the specifics of the vocal track offer a useful frame for artists rather than an imposing challenge for performers. Although this is common for animated features, the best known example is probably the series of Creature Comforts shorts created by Aardman, in which everyday, even banal vox-pop interviews are made compelling by the fantastical anthropomorphism with which they are matched.Singing is another form in which lip-synching is common, notably in the classical musical; musical delivery is of course easier to mime to than dialogue. The most conventional form of this – the mode nodded at in Singin' in the Rain – is used to make someone who looks good sound good too, hopefully without the audience seeing the join. But here too the technique can be put to more stimulating, provocative use. David Lynch, for instance, has created "playback" sequences that make eerie use of Roy Orbison's songs Crying (in Mulholland Drive) and In Dreams (in Blue Velvet).Those sequences are profoundly disturbing, not least because Lynch draws attention to the gap between sound and vision. A lighter version of the technique has been used in pop too. Videos for singles from Elton John's album Songs from the West Coast, for instance, saw other stars mouthing his words: Justin Timberlake donned star-shaped specs for This Train Don't Stop There Any More while Robert Downey, Jr, mooched around an empty flat to disarming effect for I Want Love (directed by Sam Taylor Wood):It's put to more blatantly absurd use in Harry Hill's new music video, which has his voice coming out of a plump teenage girl's mouth:Live lip-synching is perhaps most commonly associated with drag acts, and the use – or abuse – of iconic songs during performances. But certain accomplished performers have also risen to the greater challenge of miming to dialogue. The American drag queen Lipsynka developed a bravura routine incorporating lines from dozens of camp-classic movies, ironically juxtaposed and delivered with precision timing, as this clip from Joan Rivers' talk show illustrates:And, more recently, British "drag fabulist" Dickie Beau has created superb work in which he sings live but lip-synchs to dialogue, demonstrating astonishing technical competence as well as conceptual ambition. In this clip, he splices together material from a couple of interviews with the artist Francis Bacon.Beau has also provided visuals to match a viral clip of a voicemail message in which an arch-narcissist lays out his dating conditions to a girl he's just met. Another recent viral video is itself a lip-synching sensation, showing Craigery Morgan, a 20-year-old Florida drama student, miming to Kristen Wiig's performance in a Saturday Night Live sketch. The sketch is about a surprise and one of the reasons the video works so well, along with Morgan's terrific delivery, is the giddy surprise the viewer feels at the gulf between what we see (butch all-American boy) and what we hear (squealing over-excitement).Most film-makers who tweak their soundtrack to fit a performance try to make the join seamless. That's much harder to achieve when you try to make the performance fit the soundtrack. The best uses challenge the viewer to reconcile conflicting signals, fusing expressive ideas together while simultaneously prying open the space between them, with complex, uncanny, absurd or unsettling results. Mind the gap.Ben Waltersguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The art world's Bernie Madoff, and his deceptions By HELEN O'NEILL 2010-10-24T04:01:16ZNEW YORK (AP) -- In a clattery, uptown bistro, not far from the studio where he once watched his father paint bold abstract masterpieces, Earl Davis contemplates the greatest loss of his life.... hosted.ap.org |
Q&A: Director Todd Phillips Talks About 'Due Date' Todd Phillips, director of hits like The Hangover, talks to TIME about his new movie, Due Date, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis as accidental, dysfunctional road-trip buddies feedproxy.google.com |