JUST PLAY THE DAMN SCALE, GEORGE
because we just want to hear the
notes.
When I was in seventh grade, my music teacher gave
our class a simple assignment: learn how to play a C major scale on the piano.
Nothing complicated, nothing fancy. Just learn the keys and the fingering,
practice it up and down and back and forth, and then one day do it in front of
the class for a grade. We learned, we practiced, and, with wildly varying
degrees of success and more than a few degrees of failure, we played. But one
guy in my class, an earnest, likable, chronic overachiever named George Chen --
he'd eventually be our high school's valedictorian, beating my GPA by almost a
tenth of a grade point and my stress level by at least a power of ten -- decided
that nothing complicated and nothing fancy just wasn't enough. He was already a
fairly accomplished piano player, and, more importantly, he could never seem to
resist either the chance to show off for his classmates or the chance to curry
the favor of his teachers. So he embellished his simple C major scale with all
sorts of runs and notes and tricks and flourishes for which there must certainly
be technical, musical terms I do not know. It sounded cool. It sounded
impressive. But it didn't, at least to my ear, sound anything like a C major
scale. Our music teacher loved it. I thought it missed the point
entirely.
I thought of George Chen and his pointless virtuosity yesterday afternoon, as I watched the work of another earnest, likable, chronic overachiever named George flit and flicker and flutter its way across a movie screen. Like the kid who sat in Mrs. Hill's music room and wondered why Master Chen didn't just do his job and play the damn scale, the kid inside me sat in Theater #10 at the Loews Waterfront Cinema and wondered why Mister Lucas didn't just do his job and play the damn story. Much has been written -- some of it fair, some of it not -- about the wooden performances and tin-eared dialogue and various other shortcomings, distractions, and just plain idiosyncracies (there must be more severed hands and feet than in all of Peter Jackson's films combined) of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and almost all of it is true. The romantic scenes are still laughable, if not quite so appalling as in Episode II. There's more action than the first two films combined, but until the last forty minutes or so, it feels oddly paced and strangely uninvolving, like we're watching a pads-on practice instead of an actual football game. Natalie Portman, a fine actress in every film that has not asked her to act in front of a blue screen, still looks like she's trying to figure out how she got there and how soon she can leave. Anakin succumbs to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader not so much because he's sorely tempted and deeply conflicted, but because the story says he must. And there are still plenty of nagging questions -- what was the point of the Wookie scenes? since when can R2D2 fly? why isn't everyone else having as much fun as Ewan McGregor? -- to be answered. But what I found most vexing, perplexing, disturbing -- aside, of course, from the continued desecration of a once-proud film franchise that helped define not just my love of movies but also my love of storytelling -- about Revenge of the Sith was something I shall henceforth call the George Scale Issue (GSI): a tendency to tinker, to embellish, to cram your work with all sorts of interesting but ultimately inconsequential bric-a-brac not because you should, but simply because you can.
GSI afflicts virtually every frame of Episode III. It's not enough simply to show the action -- or, heaven forbid, lack of action -- amidst some attendant bits of busy-ness and careful detail; rather, every nook and cranny and corner and crevice of the screen, from background to foreground and back again, from left to right and right to wrong, must be populated with some sort of digital detritus. Every sky has a few dozen (or more) ships. Every ship has several hundred lights and decks and corners. Every city has several thousand buildings, each one a different size or shape or height or breadth. The detail is overwhelming; the effect is overpowering.
There has never been a denser -- or more distracted, or more distracting -- depth of field in the history of cinema. Watching Revenge of the Sith is like looking through a ViewMaster and seeing fifteen or twenty picture reels laid simultaneously one atop the other; your eyes cross, your vision blurs, and you have no idea what the hell you're supposed to be looking at anyway; you want to keep looking and trying to figure it out, because you're afraid you'll miss something cool, but you're getting a mad-hammer of a headache, and you're afraid that if you look for even one second more your optic nerve might explode. Critics and commentators have gone out of their way to praise the digital effects work, confusing, perhaps, quantity with quality, ubiquity with sublimity, ambition with achievement. Only David Edelstein, in an excellent, even-handed review on Slate.com, seems to share my opinion that the pixels, much more than the Sith, are the ones hell-bent on revenge : Lucas still suffers from what I called "runaway digititis": the compulsion to sprinkle every frame, every pixel with cyber-MSG, so that the simplest conversation is upstaged by a backdrop of shuttle-crafts darting up and down, side to side, and diagonally. It's like competing for attention with hundreds of goldfish on speed.
Consider the opening, GSI-suffering action sequence, when Obi-Wan and Anakin lead the assault on an enemy spacecraft: the screen was so gorged with ships and stars and droids and drones and lights and lasers and force fields and fireballs and a thousand other little digital doodles that I honestly lost track of whose crafts were whose. I knew Obi-Wan and Anakin were on the screen somewhere, and I knew I was supposed to be rooting for them, but I spent so much time, energy, and effort trying to follow them -- the blockbuster action movie as card-table shell game -- that I could scarcely measure how much danger they were supposed to be in. How could I worry about them if I couldn't even find them? The scene seemed to exist more for itself than for its audience. I was amazed by the effort. I was appalled by the execution.
The Lucas-led Industrial Light & Magic folks are undoubtedly a group of digital and artistic geniuses, but sometimes, when you're trying cut through all the technological viscera and just follow the story, you wish they were a little less so. Or at least a little more willing to show you a little less. Their mottos seem to be: Why animate twenty spaceships when you can animate fifty? Why show three or four shuttles flying in the background when you can show thirty or forty? Why create a large, vibrant city when you can create a vast, undulating metropolis? And, finally: Subtlety? What's subtlety?
For a lesson on how best to strike a balance, consider Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, any one of which is better and smarter and more thrilling -- if no less vaguely ludicrous -- than all three Star Wars prequels combined. The Jackson-led blokes at Weta Digital, another band of first-ballot artistic and technological geniuses, created and populated worlds in Middle Earth every bit as astonishing as those in outer space. The digital dazzle was no less dazzling, the special effects razzle even more razzling. Because they understood, from the magisterial beauty of Minas Tirith to the chaotic battle in Balin's Tomb, that you can fill a frame without bursting it, that you should always focus on the important action, and that, quite often, digital less means narrative more. Even the epic, tragic insanity on the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King -- with three armies (including one of the glowing undead) on two fronts, with swooping, flying Fellbeasts and charging, lumbering Mumakils -- the digital effects, and so the sensory effects, are never disorienting. You're assaulted; you're amazed; you're astonished. But you're always focused on the fear, the action, the drama, the tension. Because Peter Jackson understood what George Chen and George Lucas did not: that no matter how good or talented or ambitious you are, no matter how much more fun your aesthetic flights of fancy may be, you still have to focus on what's really important. You still have to do the job you've come to do.
Sometimes, you just have to play the damn scale.
I thought of George Chen and his pointless virtuosity yesterday afternoon, as I watched the work of another earnest, likable, chronic overachiever named George flit and flicker and flutter its way across a movie screen. Like the kid who sat in Mrs. Hill's music room and wondered why Master Chen didn't just do his job and play the damn scale, the kid inside me sat in Theater #10 at the Loews Waterfront Cinema and wondered why Mister Lucas didn't just do his job and play the damn story. Much has been written -- some of it fair, some of it not -- about the wooden performances and tin-eared dialogue and various other shortcomings, distractions, and just plain idiosyncracies (there must be more severed hands and feet than in all of Peter Jackson's films combined) of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and almost all of it is true. The romantic scenes are still laughable, if not quite so appalling as in Episode II. There's more action than the first two films combined, but until the last forty minutes or so, it feels oddly paced and strangely uninvolving, like we're watching a pads-on practice instead of an actual football game. Natalie Portman, a fine actress in every film that has not asked her to act in front of a blue screen, still looks like she's trying to figure out how she got there and how soon she can leave. Anakin succumbs to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader not so much because he's sorely tempted and deeply conflicted, but because the story says he must. And there are still plenty of nagging questions -- what was the point of the Wookie scenes? since when can R2D2 fly? why isn't everyone else having as much fun as Ewan McGregor? -- to be answered. But what I found most vexing, perplexing, disturbing -- aside, of course, from the continued desecration of a once-proud film franchise that helped define not just my love of movies but also my love of storytelling -- about Revenge of the Sith was something I shall henceforth call the George Scale Issue (GSI): a tendency to tinker, to embellish, to cram your work with all sorts of interesting but ultimately inconsequential bric-a-brac not because you should, but simply because you can.
GSI afflicts virtually every frame of Episode III. It's not enough simply to show the action -- or, heaven forbid, lack of action -- amidst some attendant bits of busy-ness and careful detail; rather, every nook and cranny and corner and crevice of the screen, from background to foreground and back again, from left to right and right to wrong, must be populated with some sort of digital detritus. Every sky has a few dozen (or more) ships. Every ship has several hundred lights and decks and corners. Every city has several thousand buildings, each one a different size or shape or height or breadth. The detail is overwhelming; the effect is overpowering.
There has never been a denser -- or more distracted, or more distracting -- depth of field in the history of cinema. Watching Revenge of the Sith is like looking through a ViewMaster and seeing fifteen or twenty picture reels laid simultaneously one atop the other; your eyes cross, your vision blurs, and you have no idea what the hell you're supposed to be looking at anyway; you want to keep looking and trying to figure it out, because you're afraid you'll miss something cool, but you're getting a mad-hammer of a headache, and you're afraid that if you look for even one second more your optic nerve might explode. Critics and commentators have gone out of their way to praise the digital effects work, confusing, perhaps, quantity with quality, ubiquity with sublimity, ambition with achievement. Only David Edelstein, in an excellent, even-handed review on Slate.com, seems to share my opinion that the pixels, much more than the Sith, are the ones hell-bent on revenge : Lucas still suffers from what I called "runaway digititis": the compulsion to sprinkle every frame, every pixel with cyber-MSG, so that the simplest conversation is upstaged by a backdrop of shuttle-crafts darting up and down, side to side, and diagonally. It's like competing for attention with hundreds of goldfish on speed.
Consider the opening, GSI-suffering action sequence, when Obi-Wan and Anakin lead the assault on an enemy spacecraft: the screen was so gorged with ships and stars and droids and drones and lights and lasers and force fields and fireballs and a thousand other little digital doodles that I honestly lost track of whose crafts were whose. I knew Obi-Wan and Anakin were on the screen somewhere, and I knew I was supposed to be rooting for them, but I spent so much time, energy, and effort trying to follow them -- the blockbuster action movie as card-table shell game -- that I could scarcely measure how much danger they were supposed to be in. How could I worry about them if I couldn't even find them? The scene seemed to exist more for itself than for its audience. I was amazed by the effort. I was appalled by the execution.
The Lucas-led Industrial Light & Magic folks are undoubtedly a group of digital and artistic geniuses, but sometimes, when you're trying cut through all the technological viscera and just follow the story, you wish they were a little less so. Or at least a little more willing to show you a little less. Their mottos seem to be: Why animate twenty spaceships when you can animate fifty? Why show three or four shuttles flying in the background when you can show thirty or forty? Why create a large, vibrant city when you can create a vast, undulating metropolis? And, finally: Subtlety? What's subtlety?
For a lesson on how best to strike a balance, consider Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, any one of which is better and smarter and more thrilling -- if no less vaguely ludicrous -- than all three Star Wars prequels combined. The Jackson-led blokes at Weta Digital, another band of first-ballot artistic and technological geniuses, created and populated worlds in Middle Earth every bit as astonishing as those in outer space. The digital dazzle was no less dazzling, the special effects razzle even more razzling. Because they understood, from the magisterial beauty of Minas Tirith to the chaotic battle in Balin's Tomb, that you can fill a frame without bursting it, that you should always focus on the important action, and that, quite often, digital less means narrative more. Even the epic, tragic insanity on the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King -- with three armies (including one of the glowing undead) on two fronts, with swooping, flying Fellbeasts and charging, lumbering Mumakils -- the digital effects, and so the sensory effects, are never disorienting. You're assaulted; you're amazed; you're astonished. But you're always focused on the fear, the action, the drama, the tension. Because Peter Jackson understood what George Chen and George Lucas did not: that no matter how good or talented or ambitious you are, no matter how much more fun your aesthetic flights of fancy may be, you still have to focus on what's really important. You still have to do the job you've come to do.
Sometimes, you just have to play the damn scale.
Posted: Tue - May 24, 2005 at 03:13 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM