Author: John D'Amico

The Man Who Built R2D2 and Brought us ‘Battlefield Earth’: An Interview with Roger Christian (Part 1)

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Roger Christian built the future with his own two hands. As set dresser for Star Wars and production designer for Alien, he’s the man who, among other things, built R2D2 and made an industry out of turning scrap metal into spaceship walls. As director of films such as The Sender and Battlefield Earth, he’s no stranger to the dizzying highs and lows of filmmaking. His life’s work is a reminder that it is no mean feat to get by in this industry.

These days, Roger has a book coming out, a new film, Stranded, available on Netflix, and is currently gearing up for the imminent release of his long-lost companion piece to The Empire Strikes Back, the short Black Angel. I was very honored that he took the time to sit down with me.
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John D’Amico’s 2013 in Film

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What a year! Lots of challenging, beautiful films. A strong year for minority representation—including films that weren’t about that, like Fast & Furious 6 or The Best Man Holiday (oh lord), the latter of which I haven’t seen yet. Probably the strongest spread of black cinema since the late 1990s, but the prospect of a long-term sea change in that regard is rocky. And lots of films about the changing landscape of the American Dream, both excellent (Spring Breakers) and terrible (The Canyons).

If you’re not up to date on the Direct-to-Video action renaissance, you’re missing out on much of the most powerful and ambitious filmmaking in the world today. Last year, this market was dominated by the incredible Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which has made the whole movement kinda too good to ignore for a lot mainstream critics. This is wonderful news, but unfortunately none that I saw wowed me this year—if I missed any good ones, let me know. I hope going forward, we cease to be surprised to find quality in DTV, and instead expect ambition in the cracks as a matter of course. There’s no reason not to, right?

Here’s every 2013 movie I’ve seen, in order from best to worst. (Any film marked ‘2012’ was originally completed in 2012, but officially released in 2013.)

Feel free to comment and argue!
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As I Lay Dying: Filming the ‘Unfilmable’

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As I Lay Dying (2013)
Directed by James Franco
Screenplay by James Franco and Matt Rager
Based on the novel by William Faulkner

Spoiler-free.

As I Lay Dying is James Franco’s seventh feature-length film as a director, but only his second to receive much of a release. The first was The Broken Tower, a biography of the poet Hart Crane, which was completed as his MFA thesis for NYU. Despite the fact that Focus picked it up and it starred Franco and Michael Shannon, that film felt like a student film through and through, and Franco received the critical berating he earned. Two years later, he’s back with another difficult work of American Modernism.

James Franco kind of stepped into a minefield with this one. The literary crowd is unimpressed with his famoused-my-way-into-a-book-deal poetry and prose, and his more mainstream fans are turned off by his occasional excursions into ‘pretentious shit’. Here, then, is a way to alienate two distinct fan bases at once.

I must just be a contrarian, because these are the sorts of films that interest me most.
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On Colorization

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She (Orig. 1935, Colorized Version 2008)

Colorization is one of those things that people call “controversial”, and like most glib descriptors, it’s a kind of shoddy definition. There’s no controversy over colorizing things. People hate it. Everybody hates it.

The people who care about movies hate it because it paints over esteemed favorites, dolloping them in eerie flesh tones and smeared, lifeless color like a little girl trying out one of those toy makeup kits. Meanwhile, they fail to catch any new blood because those who hate black and white movies don’t just hate black and white movies because they’re in black and white, and a bit of clown makeup will never bridge that psychological distance.
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A Rebuttal to ‘Gravity: A Lifetime Movie in Space’

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Gravity (2013)
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
90 min.

The following is a rebuttal to a recent Smug Film review, ‘Gravity: A Lifetime Movie in Space‘. Mild spoilers.

Gotta disagree on all counts.

Let’s go through it. The 3D diorama effect was kind of essential here, because it’s a film in a setting where people are literally thin slices floating on a plane of nothingness. It created strong contrasts between Bullock and the stars, debris and earth, and even the thumb-printed glass of the helmet and the actor’s faces. There’s one moment where a space station, a person, and the Earth are all in frame, separated by hundreds of miles, and all perfectly in focus because of a lack of atmospheric distortion. The 3D made that distance come alive in a way it can’t in 2D. It’s about gulfs, impossible blank gulfs, and that’s why it’s one of the only truly essential uses of 3D I’ve seen yet. About the only other one I can think of is Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which used it to bring out distances of millimeters of depth on a wall. Seems like 3D is at its best when it’s working with the very small or the very large.
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