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Features Features In this image released by Disney, Shere Khan the tiger, voiced by Idris Elba, appears in a scene from, ‘The Jungle Book’. (AP) Takal’s film breathtaking ‘Always Shine’ psychological thriller and meta-fiction LOS ANGELES, April 16, (RTRS): Hitchcockian doubles from Hollywood’s lowest rungs retreat to Big Sur for a weekend of hiking, drinking and mutual torment in “Always Shine,” a psychological thriller that feels like “Persona” by way of “Sin- gle White Female.” With her confident second feature, direc- tor Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs it- self nearly to death. Amid all the turmoil, Macken- zie Davis, the ascendant star of AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire,” pulls focus with a mesmerizing turn as a never-will-be actress and Caitlyn Fitzgerald is equally good as her passive-aggressive friend/ doppelganger. “Always Shine” reps a gleaming showcase for their performances, but its over- abundance of ideas presents a murkier commercial prospect. Working from a script by Law- rence Michael Levine, Takal makes it immediately clear that while Davis and Fitzgerald play struggling actresses, their own bonafides are beyond dispute. As Beth, Fitzgerald weeps through an audition as a Final Girl-type in some backwoods slasher film, only to be met with the repeated disclaimer that the role will re- quire “extensive obscenity.” As Anna, Davis gets introduced through an Oscar reel monologue of her own, laying into a mechanic for making an unauthorized repair she doesn’t have the money to cover. He laments that she isn’t “a touch more ladylike.” And with that, a theme emerges. Conflict How much misogynist culture accounts for the conflict between these two frenemies is an open question, but it certainly throws gas on the fire. There may have been a time when Beth and Anna were close, but their decision to spend a weekend together feels forced and obligatory, like a mar- ried couple trying one last geta- way before inking the divorce papers. In a secluded home on the cliffs of Big Sur, the two reminisce, but it isn’t long before a series of perceived slights and passive- aggressive jibes cause hidden re- sentments to bubble to the surface. News of Beth locking down the lead role in a crummy horror mov- ie sends Anna into a fit of profes- sional jealousy, but her pettiness is subtly matched by Beth’s quiet re- fusal to help her friend when given the opportunity. In one bravura piece of acting, Anna lashes out at Beth for tak- ing another role that calls for nu- dity (“You ever feel like a …?”) and belittles her by running lines from the horror script. After de- claring Beth’s readings weak, Anna shows her how she’d play the same role, and the tension be- tween them becomes electric. Da- vis simultaneously wills the hacky dialogue to life and suggests Anna’s pathological fury over her friend’s modicum of success, which is like some cosmic injus- tice she needs to right. Her cruelty is breathtaking, rivaled only by Beth’s acts of subterfuge. When “Always Shine” takes a turn toward the metaphysical and meta-textual, however, Takal and Levine commit their own acts of self-sabotage. What was once a gripping psychological thriller be- comes a “psychological thriller” in quotes, and the human rela- tionship they’d so carefully es- tablished between Beth and Anna turns into a flimsy construct. The obvious model for “Always Shine” is Ingmar Bergman’s “Per- sona,” which struck a balance between the intensity of a typical Bergman chamber piece and New European cinema at its most ab- stract. Takal throws a lot of effects against the wall — flash cuts, con- fused identities, the avant-garde kinks of Michael Montes’ score — but few of them stick. Once a slate for “Always Shine” pops up in the middle of the ac- tion, the film has officially folded its central relationship into a more theoretical design. It’s an inad- vertent argument for the virtues of convention: Losing characters as carefully sketched and beautifully performed as Beth and Anna to a more experimental agenda is a deep sacrifice from which the pic never recovers. LOS ANGELES: Disney’s “The Jungle Book” is aiming for an impressive $80 million opening weekend at 4,028 US stites, early estimates showed Friday. Should the forecast hold, “The Jungle Book” will notch the third-highest opening week- end of 2016 after “Batman v Superman” at $166 million and “Deadpool” at $132.4 million. The family-friendly tentpole roared to a robust $4.2 million at Thursday night previews and was headed for a $25 million opening day Friday. The live ac- tion-CG hybrid, directed by Jon Favreau, has been embraced by critics and carries a 94 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. “The Jungle Book” also has a shot at becoming the third-best April launch if it can top “Fast Five,” which opened in 2011 with $86.2 million. “Fast 7” set the April mark last year with $147.1 million and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is second with $95 million. “The Jungle Book” is the latest in Disney’s live-action re-imagining of classic stories. “Cinderella” took in $67.9 mil- lion on its debut weekend last year en route to a $201.2 million domestic total and a $542.7 million global cume. “Malefi- cent” opened two years ago with $69.4 million on its way to a $241.4 million domestic total and $758.5 million worldwide. The $4.2 million preview number for “The Jungle Book” matched that of “Maleficent” and was ahead of “Cinderella,” “Oz” and “Zootopia.” Online ticketing service Fandango said Friday that “The Jungle Book” is outpacing “Cinderella,” “Ma- leficent” and “Oz: the Great and Powerful” in its advance ticket sales. Disney’s estimate for “The Jungle Book” earlier this week was around $65 million. The movie is based on the Rudyard Kipling story about Mowgli, an abandoned human boy who becomes friends with jungle animals after being raised by wolves. Favreau’s film includes Bill Murray voicing Baloo the bear, Ben Kingsley as Bagheera the panther, Scar- lett Johansson as Kaa the snake and Lupita Nyong’o as the mother wolf Raksha. Newcomer Neel Sethi stars as Mowgli. (RTRS) ❑ ❑ ❑ LOS ANGELES: The Tribeca Film Institute has awarded “Human Terrain” and “The Burning Season” with grants totaling $150,000 from the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund. The grants are made in a part- nership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The awards are aimed at providing filmmakers with funding and professional guidance to support innovative and compelling films that offer a fresh take on science, mathemat- ics and technology. “The Burning Season” is directed by Claire McCarthy; written and produced by Jenny Halper; and produced by Kate Sharp. The story centers on primatologist who brings her daughter to a remote region of Madagascar, where her deter- mination to save endangered lemurs puts their relationship — and safety — at risk. The film is based on Laura Van Den Berg’s short story “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.” “Human Terrain” is directed and produced by Parisa Ba- rani, and written by Jennifer Blackmer. It focuses on an American anthropologist work- ing in Iraq for the Human Terrain System, a military initiative that embeds social scientists in combat units. The American is accused of treason for befriending an Iraqi woman and helping her survive. The awards jury included pro- ducer Caroline Baron (“Mozart in the Jungle”), Dr Heather Berlin, Jeanne Garbarino of the Rockefeller University, direc- tor and producer Alex Gibney (“Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison Of Belief”), producer Lawrence Mattis (“Vanishing on 7th Street”), actress Rose McGowan (“Charmed”) and Laura Snyder, author of “The Philosophical Breakfast Club.” (RTRS) Film Variety Film Director pushes filmmaking boundary Lee reveals secrets of ‘Billy Lynn’ LOS ANGELES, April 16, (RTRS): Explor- ers go where there is no map. There’s no safe path, no way to know what’s over the next hill. They figure out their route as they go, and blaze a trail in hopes that someday, others will follow. So it is for director Ang Lee with “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” His new movie, about Iraq War heroes whisked back Stateside for a victory tour, is slated for release on Veterans Day weekend (Nov 11). The picture blends different flavors of high-tech — 3D, 4K and high frame rates — to push filmmaking beyond anything the public has ever seen, even beyond the capaci- ty of the world’s movie theaters. It marks Lee, who turned “Life of Pi” into a surprise global smash (and earned a directing Oscar for it) as one of the boldest explorers in cinema today. You might expect such a visionary to speak with steely resolve, perhaps with a little blus- ter. That’s not Lee. He’s soft-spoken, philo- sophical, and modest enough that when he talks about the progress of “Billy Lynn,” he admits “I’m struggling.” “The technology’s really different,” he says. “We’re the first ones to do this. But how do you do the art, using this technology? That is more difficult.” “It is humbling,” he adds. “I can tell you I’m beginning to know that I don’t know. And that’s an important step.” Lee will get a crucial first gauge on his pro- gress Saturday in Las Vegas, where the first public screening of “Billy Lynn” footage in its full native format will be held. Some 11 minutes of film will be shown to attendees at the Future of Cinema Conference, part of the National Assn. of Broadcasters tradeshow in Las Vegas. The conference, presented by the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) draws entertainment technologists from around the world. Even in that crowd, few will have seen anything like it. “I don’t know how they’ll react,” admits Lee. “I’m very excited. I’m nervous, because I don’t know way which way it will go.” It’s hard to imagine a more receptive venue for this unveiling than the SMPTE confer- ence, which was once called the “3D Sum- mit” and is full of people who’ve dreamt of seeing films in such a format. Lee has reached a rarefied place among filmmakers. Though he wants a good recep- tion, he is able to look beyond the screening, past grosses and Oscars, and envision noth- ing less than than a new way of making and viewing movies. “Our head is still in the film world,” he says. “Not to put down film in the past, because it’s brilliant, I love it. But if we do digital, we ought to do something differ- ent, it shouldn’t be imitating something else.” And, “Billy Lynn,” is Lee’s “something dif- ferent,” his experiment with shaking off old thinking and embracing the full potential digital tools. It’s an arduous path he has chosen, one that began with “Life of Pi” and one Lee chose to pursue when he could easily have turned back. In fact, it was his dissatisfaction with the state of digital 3D on “Life of Pi” that prodded him to press ahead. Sony Pictures is backing him on “Billy Lynn,” and they knew what a challenge they were taking on. The studio felt that Lee’s re- cord as a visionary and the returns on “Pi” made him a good bet. Similarities It’s not hard to imagine their reasoning. There are similarities between “Billy Lynn” and “Pi,” but contrasts as well. Like “Pi,” “Billy Lynn” is based on a popular novel, and Lee has proven masterful at visualizing the internal action of literary fiction. The subject matter of “Billy Lynn,” though, is the Iraq War and returning veterans. That subject has been far from reliable at the box office. For every “American Sniper” there’s a little-seen “In The Valley of Elah” or “Home of the Brave.” “Billy Lynn’s” budget, said to be $44 to $48 million after production incentives, is far less than “Pi.” That puts it in the mid-budget danger zone for studio dramas, and it lacks the fantastical elements of “Pi.” Lee himself isn’t an entirely sure bet ei- ther. He made “Life of Pi,” which was an art film at heart but performed like a tentpole, but he also made the controversial “Hulk,” which proved a dud, and the low-budget NC- 17 “Lust, Caution,” which grossed just $4.6 million in the US, though it did well enough abroad to reach $62.5 million worldwide. Format A novel format can goose even a bad film; 3D made the cheesy “Bwana Devil” a big hit back in 1952. Sony could hype “Billy Lynn” as “Like nothing you’ve seen before!” but is more likely to sell it as a patriotic, emotional, American story, going for the “American Sniper” audience. Still, Lee is relying on his new format to tell that story as powerfully as possible. The “Billy Lynn” format doesn’t even have an official name yet, though its working title at Sony is “Immersive Digital” — a moniker that’s as good as any, even if it’s unlikely to rank with Cinerama, Sensurround or Smell- O-Vision in the annals of marketing hooks. Lee aims to show audiences the most im- mersive war footage ever put on a movie screen. Yet even if it does just that, it’s possi- ble the public won’t like it. Ben Gervais, pro- duction systems supervisor on “Billy Lynn,” says “Test subjects that have seen some foot- age have commented that 40 minutes after seeing battle footage, they’re still shaking.” That speaks to the power of the footage, but will the public line up to be so shaken? “In some ways I’m quite naive,” says Lee. “I just get excited about what I see. But sometimes there have been implications for the whole industry. So I feel vulnerable some- times that way. “But my intention is to show people: ‘Did you see that? Did you see what I just saw?’ That’s my whole motivation.” Immersive Digital isn’t a single invention. Rather, it’s a combination of technologies, two of which are already established before the public and one that is only now being let out of labs. Already familiar are 3D, for which mil- lions don glasses every year; and 4K, which quadruples the pixels on the screen. Both are common, but they’re not usually combined. All digital cinema projectors can show 3D, but most can’t screen 4K, even in two dimensions. Very few can show 3D with 4K on both eyes. It’s the third piece that pushes the tech of “Billy Lynn” from extreme to experimen- tal. Lee shot the film at 120 frames per sec- ond, five times the normal cinema rate of 24 frames per second. If 3D with 4K is rare, the combination of the two with a high frame rate is beyond the capacity of even the most ad- vanced movie theater projectors. One of the few people in the world who has spent a lot of time watching such a format is Douglas Trumbull, the director and spe- cial effects artist who has long advocated for something akin to Immersive Digital. Trum- bull has shot and projected 3D footage at 120 frames. “Your brain really likes it,” Trumbull told Variety. “I cannot describe to you the sense of stimulation and excitement and vis- ual vividness. It doesn’t look like television, it looks like a new movie medium with all the problems solved.” Theoretically, such an extreme frame rate would deliver much smoother motion, an end to the strobing or “judder” when the camera pans, more comfortable 3D and unparalleled sharpness and realism. That’s still theoretical because hardly anyone has ever seen a film made that way. Even if it works perfectly, there’s almost no place in the world where viewers can see it. The venue where the film will be shown at NAB is a temporary setup in a meeting room in the LVCC’s South Hall. The confer- ence uses a very large room, capable of seat- ing hundreds, but the screening room is far smaller, so there will be six showings over the course of the day. The footage will be shown in the full Im- mersive Digital format, 3D/4K/120, on a small-ish screen, just 12 feet by 24 feet. It will be projected a two-projector setup trucked in just for the occasion, with electronics souped up to surpass current standards. “This is the first, I want to do it right,” Lee says. “I will feel guilty if I do something stupid and that hurts the progress of this new technology, which I believe in.” It’s not an idle concern. He has heard of the first show- ing of footage from “The Hobbit: An Unex- pected Journey” at CinemaCon, where Peter Jackson unveiled the 48-frames-per-second version, which was not well-received. 48 Favreau Murray SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2016 Continued on Page 20
