The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
| Posted: Making a concert film was an ear-opening experience for famed director Morgan Spurlock. Morgan Spurlock turned down Justin Bieber and Katy Perry. But he decided it was best not to say "no" to One Direction. The documentary filmmaker – best known for casting a light on corporate America and fast food chains – declined opportunities to direct concert movies for Bieber and Perry because he was tied up with other projects. The call to helm One Direction: This Is Us came when he was between films. "I got a call a year ago and was asked if I had heard of One Direction. I knew all about them because I was in Britain two years earlier filming New Britannia. It was at that time they were exploding. Because I knew so much about them, and after not being able to direct the other concert films, I didn't want to miss this opportunity," Spurlock says. "Plus, this was a chance to have access to one of the biggest bands in the world and to shoot in 3D." That more people will see the concert film than have seen all his other documentaries didn't escape Spurlock. Collecting the footage took months. Spurlock travelled with the band carving out interview time whenever the five band members – Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson – weren't performing, rehearsing, recording an album, doing press interviews or napping. "We would grab them whenever we could," Spurlock says. "It gave me a new appreciation and respect for what it means to be a pop star." The only way Spurlock would agree to make the film was if he got full access to the band members and their lives. His conditions were met and that's why Spurlock was in the middle of the pandemonium when the guys went on a shopping trip and got trapped by thousands of adoring fans outside the door. It's also how Spurlock was able to capture a very tender moment when Malik fulfills a childhood promise to buy his mother a house. The last five concerts of the band's 2012 tour were filmed for the performance part of the film. Some nights, Spurlock only shot from the audience; other nights his camera operators roamed the stage like a sixth member of the band. Shooting the concerts was full of logistical nightmares, such as a scene in which the band members are carried out over the crowd to a small stage in the middle of the arena. That would have been a tough sequence to film under normal circumstances, but the movie was being shot with heavy 3D cameras. "It's easier to deal with 3D now because the cameras we shot with were smaller, but still big enough that our steady cam operator was walking around with 100lbs (45kg) of equipment," Spurlock says. "But the 3D worked great especially with their faces. With a lot of 3D, faces look flat but you can see incredible depth in ours." There's at least one face you won't see in any dimensions. Unlike his past work, Spurlock doesn't appear in the film. Even with the lack of screen time, making One Direction: This Is Us ended up being a positive experience for Spurlock. Had he not listened to some sage advice, things might not have been so rosy. "At one concert, the decibel meter with the music playing was between 95 and 100 decibels. When the band stopped, the sound in the stadium from all the screaming hit 110 decibels. When I was walking into my first concert, a security guard stopped me and said, 'You might need these,' and handed me earplugs," Spurlock says. – The Fresno Bee/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services > One Direction: This Is Us is now in cinemas nationwide. |
| Scarlett Johansson's new film is disappointing Posted: Lots of films have been shown at the Venice Film Festival, but few are memorable. Scarlett Johansson as a predatory alien in Scotland got a lukewarm reception and a film about mutilation and masochism that is banned in the director's native South Korea roused disbelieving laughter at the Venice Film Festival yesterday. Booing followed the customary applause after a press screening of Under The Skin, a comeback for British director Jonathan Glazer, starring the Lost In Translation actress. Described as "an undeniably ambitious but ultimately torpid and silly tale of an alien on the prowl" by trade magazine Variety, Under The Skin is one of 20 new films in competition for a prestigious Golden Lion at the 70th annual festival. Korean director Kim Ki-Duk screened Moebius outside the competition, which he won last year with Pieta, an absorbing thriller about a pitiless loan shark. For Under The Skin, Johansson as the alien Laura was filmed in real-life settings, including a shopping centre and a street in a drizzly Scottish town, surrounded by members of the public. "People would take pictures of you with their 'cameraphone' and not help you, all kinds of strange things," Johansson told a press conference. This technique was an "important ingredient" in the film, said Glazer, known for the 2004 picture Birth. Laura drives around in a white van, stopping to chat coyly with young men in a cut-glass English accent. Her mysterious beauty prompts one of the men she meets to comment, in a strong Scottish accent, that she reverses the trope of the creepy male motorist picking up female hitchhikers. "It didn't bother me that the dialogue was indecipherable at times" as long as the characters' intentions and behaviour were clear, Glazer said.  Scarlett Johansson in a scene from the sci-fi flick, Under The Skin. Meanwhile, Kim's tale of sex and pain, which starts with a woman cutting off her teenage son's genitals, is punctuated with cries of agony, rage and arousal, but barely any dialogue. The mutilated young man and his father experiment with masochism and the son develops a relationship with the father's ex-mistress. "While purporting to explore morality and mortality by tracking its male protagonists' pursuit of sexual gratification, Moebius offers bizarrely cartoonish characters whose erratic behaviour brims on the hilarious," said critic Clarence Tsui in trade magazine The Hollywood Reporter. Kim has made a redacted version of the film to be shown in South Korea, where authorities wanted to protect people who have not reached "psychological maturity", he said at a news conference. "The problem of censorship will have to be tackled in the future," said Kim, whose film The Isle made two people faint when it was presented in Venice in 2000. Kim said he is reproached for making violent films that seem to attack South Korea. "I criticise my country because I love my country. Loving my country doesn't mean that I should stop raising questions or that I should close my eyes," he added. — Reuters |
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