Untitled Pam Ferris Project

Production designers, it strikes me, have a bit of a thankless task. Audiences sort of know what they do, not really enough to notice when they’re doing it really well, but possibly just enough to know if they’re doing it badly. In this respect they differ from a most other jobs on a film crew – a focus puller, say, just to think of a random example. If a focus puller does a brilliant job, nobody in the audience goes, ‘What great focus pulling.’ They’ll probably just think the high standard of focus lies with the director, or maybe if they’re a bit more movie-savvy, the (wait for it) ‘DP’. Likewise, if the focus puller can’t pull focus to save his life, how does that act to the detriment of the film? Presumably, it would make the film out of focus, in which case, audience members would blame the director or a cameraman or – if they were movie savvy, like what I am – the DP.

So, production designers. Me movie savvy, remember, and I can’t recall a single occasion thinking, ‘Great production design.’ Perhaps when I’ve been prompted by a review or a DVD ‘featurette’ I’ve thought, ‘Yes, it did look good, and thinking about it, yes, it is the production designer we have to thank for that it,’ but I’ve never independently doffed a mental cap to the production designer. So far, so focus puller. Yet on the other hand, I did – just the other day – think, ‘What crap production design.’

And there you have it: the cross the production designer must bear. Their good work goes unnoticed, credit given to the director as usual, their bad work gets called out by people like me. In this regard they’re a bit like sub-editors, another vocation where people sort of know what the job entails. These same people, if they read AA Gill’s column in the Sunday Times, and enjoy it, naturally lay all the credit for that with AA. But nobody’s copy fits exactly into the space allocated for it, so there will have been a sub-editor, sculpting and shaping AA’s pith into the finished article, nine times out of ten doing an exemplary job. The one time people notice is if AA’s copy is suddenly riddled with errors, or finishes halfway through a sentence. Then they go, ‘Tsk. Terrible subbing.’

The bad production design was in Secret Window. Specifically, the cabin in which Johnny Depp spends most of his time, most of it alone. Goodness me but that cabin looks nice. Big, spacious, cosy thing with a mezzanine floor, a large reception area and a generous kitchen. Plus, it’s pristine. It looks like something out of Ikea. Where’s the threat, the menace and the creeping claustrophobia? That cabin should look like a cross between the cabin in Evil Dead and Catherine Deneuve’s apartment in Repulsion. Not like the real Johnny Depp really does live there.

Okay, so he’s a well-known writer in the story, so let’s allow him the zillionaire’s cabin, what about the way he looks? He’s suffering from writer’s block, he sleeps on his couch, he wears a tatty bathrobe. Yet… when he gets up from his couch-time slumber, just look at that bed hair. Oh, and those glasses he wears, the way his tatty bathrobe looks so perfectly distressed. The theme of the film is supposed to be ‘tortured writer is stalked by weirdo’, instead, it’s ‘fashion spread bloke lolls sexily around show home’.
It spoiled it for me, that production design, it really did. Focus-pulling was great, though.

Quick cut-out-and-keep guide to Captivity.

1. In it, Elisha Cuthbert plays a blonde hottie who gets kidnapped by a sicko
2. But it was re-edited to feature more torture…
3. …so it could be a proper torture-porn film, like Hostel and those Saw films that do so well
4. It was directed by Roland Joffe, who once directed The Killing Fields, and who has, with this, descended so low that he must now think of The Scarlet Letter as ‘the good times’.

I’ve seen it, Captivity. It was lame, it was boring, it contains a romantic sub-plot that simply beggars belief, and I sat wondering what all the fuss was about.

And there was fuss about Captivity – oh yes – an awful lot of it. First, because the film was re-edited to contain those aformentioned torture scenes not originally present. But mainly because, with its new torture-porn-friendly coat of paint, the studio launched an ad campaign featuring Elisha Cuthbert’s bruised and bloodied face that offended Los Angeles so much that studio chiefs were forced to withdraw it, look downcast and chew on their lips apologetically.

As a controversial sidebar to the controversy, Buffy man Joss Whedon partly used Captivity as the launch pad for a strongly worded and beautifully well-argued blog about global misogyny. He was appalled by the notion of Captivity, its implicit message about the treatment and standing of women in our society. His is a brilliant blog. Here’s a bit from it.

“Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.”

He’s made his feelings on Captivity known to the MPAA. More power to him that he’s prepared to do something about the issue. Something about his argument troubles me, though; specifically, his linking real-life footage of Dua Khalil’s honour killing (recorded by men on their mobile phones) to a horror film. To buy into his argument, you also need to believe that people who watch horror films do so for deeply unpleasant reasons, namely that they endorse the idea of inflicting pain on young women. But I don’t think so. I think horror film viewers come to the genre for a number of reasons: for the films’ transgressive allure, for catharsis, because they love a good safe scare or because they like to see characters in films overcome challenges, and being chased by a guy with a chainsaw is a bigger challenge than revising hard to get four Bs in your GCSEs.

But not because they enjoy inflicting pain on people — or even like the idea in hypothesis. In fact, it may be well be the opposite. Perhaps the audience for Captivity is present to work out some sub-conscious deep-seated fears they have about torture committed in their name, by their government. Maybe making the victim Elisha Cuthbert is the only way to present that concept in semi-palatable form to a viewing public, and perhaps Roland Joffe has not made a crock, a film that will slide into obscurity, notable only for its William Castle-esque attempts at shock promotion, but a revolutionary and subversive allegory for the treatment of terrorist suspects in the post-9/11 era…

Well, I’ve seen it, and I reckon not. But here’s the thing: there’s another mis-step in Whedon’s commentary – that the Cuthbert character dies. She doesn’t. She defeats the sicko. I wouldn’t go as far as saying she’s empowered exactly, but she gets up and walks away. Firstly, I’m not sure it’s completely fair to compare that scenario with that of Dua Khalil. Secondly, I wonder, has Joss Whedon seen Die Hard 4.0? You know the scene I’m thinking of…

When I’ve seen a film I like to read as many reviews of it as I can. I’m impressionable, easily led and I don’t know my own mind, so it’s handy to have someone form my opinion on my behalf – especially if they’re the kind of people who can’t spell apparently. Here’s what MYKL has to say about Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning in the nice, cosy environment of Rolling Stone’s half-star review, the coward.

“Is it possible in a film like this to have ugly people running around being severly lacerated by a chainsaw?.. Apperantly not. It “apperantly” is a better idea to have very attractive humans running around in jeans and string tops or wife beater vests,while being severly lacerated by a chainsaw.Well of course it is after all you either get one or the other, brains or looks, and I think it is crystal clear in this “film” what the character’s have as their main assets. It was nauseating from start to finish and don’t worry I won’t spoil the plot (not that there is one anyway). Predictable, pathetic , please! Maybe if you were interrogating someone, it might be a good idea to make them watch it. Cinematic gunge.?”

Fine. MYKL is entitled to his opinion, and TCM: TB is no classic, but, look, he’s used my least favourite crit-word: ‘predictable’ – the word stupid people use to shout down a film they didn’t like.

Why? Because, predictable when? At what point does a film become predictable or not? A character walks on screen and I predict he or she will say some lines. How about that? No, now you’re just being silly, Andrew. But how about a character steals a gun in the first five minutes? Pretty safe to predict that that gun will go off at some point, no? What about a thriller called Vertigo about a guy who suffers from self-same condition. Hmm, I predict a vertiginous, height-based climax. And if I don’t get one, well then how lame is that? So, yes, MYKL, in a film called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I predicted certain elements that you clearly did not: mainly that people would be ‘severly lacerated by a chainsaw’. Yes, they will make stupid decisions, scream a lot and investigate noises when clearly they should run away and all that business, but that’s not being predictable, that’s being generic, possibly derivative, maybe formulaic. And if you don’t like generic, derivative and formulaic, why on earth watch a film that’s not only a genre film, but a prequel to a remake? If you don’t like frozen food don’t shop in Iceland is what I always say.

So, I saw Die Hard 4.0 and though I enjoyed it, it’s hardly the masterpiece promised by the SF Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle here

I mean, come on, Mick, really: ‘old school’? I don’t think so. For a start the filmmakers seem to have dispensed entirely with the everyman persona that made the John McClane character a bracing alternative to the action heroes of the 1980s (I’m sorry, but John McClane cannot and should not be able to fly a helicopter), and second it’s not exactly refreshingly free of CGI – any film that pits a big truck against a fighter plane is never going to be.

My biggest problem with a DH4.0, though, was a moment of casual racism, and not just racism either, but racism with a smidgen of misogyny thrown in. It happens when, as Mai, Maggie Q comes close to opening a can of whup-ass on John McClane. Clearly, her martial arts are no match for his NYPD brawn, though, and she loses. Shortly after, when taunting the baddie (some of the familiar Die Hard tropes remain), McClane refers to her as an ‘Asian hooker’, then a ‘Ninja bitch’.

Ouch. The moment definitely clunks.

Did he really need to say that? Would he have said it if her ethnicity was different? No and no, I would argue. True, McClane is an anti-hero for our times, and perhaps we’re supposed to feel discomfitted, in a post-Guantanamo kind of way, at the behaviour of those who supposedly keep us safe from terrorists. On the other hand, maybe we’re being asked, in a post-Guantanamo (much more disturbing) kind of way, to excuse it.

Incidentally, I tried to follow the debate on the iMDB forums…
Eight pages of users calling each other a dumbass, almost nobody engaging with the actual issue. Great.