Boxtrolls: Interviews at Comic-Con

Posted on September 24, 2014 at 8:00 am

boxtrolls bug lunch — Copyright Nell Minow 2014

In honor of the release of “The Boxtrolls” this week, I’m sharing some of the photos I took in July at Comic-Con, where I interviewed the cast and filmmakers and attended an “Eat Like a Boxtroll” lunch made up of insects. Star Isaac Hempstead Wright (of “Game of Thrones”) was clearly not excited about eating bugs, no matter how delectably prepared, but he was a very good sport.

I admit, I tried some grubs, but drew the line at anything crunchy or with legs.

Later, I sat with Sir Ben Kingsley, who plays the villain, to talk about performing all by himself, in a studio near his home in England. He described his character as “a social climber. He spends a lot of his energy trying to get into that club that doesn’t really want him to join. It’s a small, exclusive clique of guys who run the community. They’re quite reluctant to let him in. So he invents an enemy — politicians often do this — and says, ‘I’ll rid you of that enemy.'” He wants to power himself by destroying these very sweet, harmless creatures.” He was especially happy to work with LAIKA studios, producers of “Coraline” and “Paranorman,” because they are “quite fearless in family movies, putting light and shade together, bitter and sweet.”He modeled the voice and accent of his character on a man he knows who is anything but villainous, and said that to play a bad guy “I find the flaw, the one part in me that can’t be healed. I look for the crack and feel empathy for it. And love it….Storytelling is profoundly healing. And he told me the secret of his performance: he did all of the recording lying down. “Not a tense bone in my body, completely relaxed. If there’s tension in your neck and shoulders, it will show.”

Isaac Hempsted Wright and Elle Fanning play the film’s two main characters, Eggs, a boy raised by boxtrolls, and Winnie, the daughter of the town’s most important citizen, a wealthy and powerful man who is far more interested in tasting exotic cheeses than in noticing his daughter.Fanning, whose sister played the title role in LAIKA’s first film, “Coraline,” said that the script arrived with a box of drawings to give her a sense of what the setting and characters would look like, but she learned more every time she would record. She described Winnie as “spoiled, looking for someone to listen to her, but brave, and having to learn to grow up fast.” Hempsted Wright said Eggs is “plucky, feral, raised away from people and society, surrounded by class struggles and ‘cheese struggles.’ He has the best of both, the kindness of the boxtrolls and the bravery of humans.”

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Behind the Scenes

Christopher Orr on the Coen Brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing”

Posted on September 23, 2014 at 3:53 pm

One of my favorite critics writes about one of his favorite movies in The Atlantic: the highlight of Christopher Orr’s outstanding series on the Coen Brothers‘ films is his essay on Miller’s Crossing. Whether you’re a fan of the Coens or of this film or not, Orr’s essay is a pleasure to read for its deep engagement with the film and lucidity of prose.

Miller’s Crossing is an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order on nearly every level. Begin with its almost intolerably sumptuous cinematography, with reds and greens so deep one is in danger of falling into them. This was the last film that Barry Sonnenfeld shot for the Coens—and one for which he persuaded them to use long lenses instead of the wide-angle variety they had favored—and no one involved has mustered a better-looking work since. The production design by Dennis Gassner is comparably extraordinary: the long, long oak rooms with their endless oriental rugs and all the furniture seemingly tucked into one corner.

And did I mention the score? It is not only the best work Carter Burwell has done for the Coens (or anyone else), it set a model that he would later follow for his almost-as-good scores for Fargo and True Grit: taking a traditional piece of music with some culturally relevant connection and using it as the central motif of the broader arrangement. In this case, it was the Irish ballad “Limerick’s Lamentation.” (It’s usually played on a fiddle, I think, but here’s an interesting version on a hammered dulcimer.) Burwell’s score has lived on since: It was used for the trailer of the (astonishingly bad) Melanie Griffith vehicle Shining Through as well as that of at least one other 1990s movie I can’t quite recall at the moment. It also served, as I recently discovered, in an ad for Caffrey’s Irish Ale. It is one of the truly great film scores of the last 30 years.

New on ABC: Black-ish

Posted on September 22, 2014 at 10:20 pm

One of the best new shows of the year is Anthony Anderson’s “Black-ish.” Anderson plays Andre “Dre” Johnson has a great job, a beautiful mixed-race doctor wife, Rainbow (Tracee Ellis Ross), four kids, and a colonial home in the mostly-white suburbs. But now that he has given his children a better life, he worries that they are so assimilated into upper middle class white culture that they are losing their identity as African Americans, that they are only “black-ish.”

The people behind the show have prepared some discussion materials for church and school groups and families. If you’d like a copy, send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Black-ish in the subject line.

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Race and Diversity Television

The Real Story: Tracks and Robyn Davidson’s Long Walk Across Australia

Posted on September 22, 2014 at 3:51 pm

Mia Wasikowska plays real-life adventurer Robyn Davidson in “Tracks,” based on the 1980 international best-seller about her 1700-mile walk across Australia with four camels.

A thoughtful interview with Davidson in The Australian describes her:

Davidson is an enigma. With her patrician air, prim frock and cut-glass English accent (she’s spent most of her life in London), it’s difficult to envisage her as the young woman who killed rampaging bull camels in the Australian desert, fought off rats nestling in her hair during a hellish journey with the Rabari nomads of northwest India, became a crack shot with a Savage .222 rifle, and crossed glaciers near her home in the Himalayas. She’s worked as an artist’s model and dealt blackjack in an illegal gambling den, squatted in houses and taken LSD, once having an “exquisite trip where I was Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Despite this big, adventurous life, she has described herself as “basically a dreadful coward”.

She’s whip-smart, can quote Montaigne, Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche and Novalis with the best of them, and slips easily, during our chat, from the plight of nomadic people and the slippery nature of time in a desert, to metaphysics and madness.

There’s an other-wordly, ascetic air about her: she’s described herself as a kungka rama-rama (“crazy woman” in Pitjantjatjara) and a “sausage of angel and beast”, as Chilean poet Nicanor Parra puts it. She loves a motley collection of things – silence, deserts, crows, dogs, stars (she can roll the latter off her tongue: Aldebaran, Sirius, Corvus…). I’m struck by her face, all serene planes and curves and wide Slavic cheekbones; at 62, it remains a miracle of excellent natural design. “It helps to have good scaffolding,” she concedes later during a photo shoot at Bondi, where she poses reluctantly for the camera, framed by a big blue sky and a quietly heaving sea.

Davidson told The Scotsman why she wanted to walk across the desert.

“Why? Why? Why?” Davidson laughs. “The thing that Mia said to me was that no man would be asked that. She’s absolutely right. But then perhaps if I’d been a man people wouldn’t have been so interested in the first place. Who knows? But I think that anyone who steps outside of a boundary or a cliché, it disturbs something in the culture at large so the question is, why did she do it? What does it mean that we didn’t?”

“My sense of myself is that I was a rather unformed kind of person trying to make myself up out of bits of spit and string,” is how she once described it. “Some instinct – and I think it was a correct one – led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning.”

Here Davidson and Wasikowska talk about the journeys they took.