The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, August 10, 2007

Stupid Running In The Movies

I had a really bad back over the weekend. I think it was a combination of a massively sedentary lifestyle and sleeping awkwardly on Friday because a: I was drunk and B: The Cat With Which You Do Not Fuck was sleeping in the middle of the bed. I was walking with a bolt-upright, immobile spine and a sort of backwards-armed waddle in an attempt not to wrench my lower back muscles. 'Hey', I thought, 'That's like Harrison Ford in most of his movies! What an incredibly thin excuse for another list article for The Fake Life! How many more days to go again?'

So here are some fine examples of really stupid perambulation in cinema:

The 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Harrison Ford in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Even from the first sequence you know something is up. As he's running away from the Hovitos, dust flying off his clothes, you can clearly see the old man emerging. His spine is bolt straight and seemingly without mobility while his arms are doing that high, backwards pumping motion and his little legs are trying to do all the work. This is a clear sign of an action hero who's lower back is giving him gyp.

Compare this to the Harrison from Star Wars.

Here, while running around the Death Star trying to rescue Carrie Fisher from the nearest pile of drugs, you can see him leaning in to the run. His whole body is working as one to create forward momentum. It's dynamic. By god, it's sexy. Look at those hips:

But by the time of Indy, however, his back is having none of it.

No wonder he's so grumpy. I complained for half an hour yesterday just going to buy some teabags and milk from the local shop.

It's interesting to note that in Last Crusade the only noticeable running he does is a short hop onto a boat in Venice. Let's see how much he does in next year's Indy 4.

The bonus 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.

Maybe 55 years in hypersleep atrophied her muscles but come on. When she's running about the Sulaco hanger fighting the Alien Queen you can clearly see the backward-armed waddle of someone who needs an osteopath and a cup of Ovaltine.

These are supposed to be aspirational forms of human heroism but they look like they could be happy-slapped by my niece. Sigourney and Harrison were only in their mid-thirties when they made these films, and it's not like they had X-boxes to tempt them into entirely sedentary lifestyles. Pussies!

The 'Trying Not To Trip Over The Camera' award goes to Jena Malone in Contact.

This is a perennial problem in movies stemming from the technical limitations of heavy cameras and the DP's need to keep everything in focus. The camera has to move relatively slowly, so the actors who are 'running' in the shot have to move really slowly to stay in shot. The solution involves the actor pumping their arms vigorously up and down, huffing and puffing a lot and hoping like hell that the audience doesn't notice what a fool they are making of themselves. We, of course, don't notice the good examples, but the bad ones look like amateur pantomime and, in one of Robert Zemeckis' typically tricksy shots, young Jena has to run up the stairs and along the upstairs hallway while the camera reverse dollies just in front of her. Moving a heavy steadycam backwards in an enclosed space while actually keeping it 'steady' meant it had to be slow, leaving Jena to seemingly run on the spot for a few moments.

The 'Running Like A Little Girl' award also goes to Jena Malone in Contact.

I'm sorry to pick on her, what with her being a little girl and all, but I just watched Contact again recently and she really does run like a little girl.

The 'Jogging For Your Life' award goes to Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.

I don't know why people don't like Gwyneth, but one of the main reasons given on messageboards for not liking the movie is her performance as intrepid reporter Polly Perkins. You know, as opposed to the actual film being a bit crap. Maybe, deep down, movie geeks have more love for giant robots than incredibly beautiful women. And the bit of really stupid running she does while New York is being attacked by the giant robots isn't her fault either. 100ft monsters bear down on her and she gently shuffles to the side of the road to get out of the way of all that imminent, painful death. Hurry it up, love!

Part of it is her pencil skirt, which is the fault of the objectivisation of women by a male dominated society (but, hey, still looks great). The other part is that this movie was filmed on tiny green screen stages (with all the scenery added in with CGI later) so if she ran more than 3 yards she would have bumped into a wall.

This problem also afflicts many of the other action scenes in the movie. The sets are huge, but all the characters are stuck in a tiny square in the middle, which both makes the action feel stilted and the CGI backdrops even more fake. To be fair to Sky Captain (which I feel was an honourable failure and a film I still really want to like), this problem also afflicts much bigger and shittier films such as Attack Of The Clones and The Polar Express.

Ironically, the only scenes this '100% green screen' technique works in are the quiet conversation scenes set in small rooms, with the actors in close up and the backgrounds out of focus. Which renders the whole thing a bit daft.

The 'You Try Doing That In The Playground, See How Long You Last' award goes to Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.

Robert Patrick plays the T-1000, a killer robot made of super-mimetic poly wolly got a ding dong pseudo science. Or liquid metal, if you prefer. It had to be tougher than Arnold Schwarzenegger - faster, stronger, scarier. Robert achieved this by clenching his jaw, never blinking ever, and running like a stamp collecting ten year old.

I mean it - most kids will run like big spazzers with the complete lack of co-ordination that comes from gleeful abandon, a few will run with cat-like natural grace, but there are certain little kids, the type that iron their own shirts, that will take this running business really seriously. Remember playing soldiers when you were a kid and you were all running about going 'RRAARRRGHH BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD BOOM!'? There was always one kid who wanted to hold the gun correctly, practice those parade ground maneuvers when you put the gun on your shoulder and stuff. Him. He wanted everyone to do it properly.

The back is upright, the joints are stiff, all the lines are straight and all the movements sharp. There is no smiling. It's a child's idea of running like an adult. A child who doesn't want to be a child. A child who's room is really tidy. It looks really, really stupid.

But, just like that kid, it's also really scary. Yes it's dumb if you tried to do it in real life, but in the movie you believe he can outrun a car, you believe that it is simply the most coldly efficient way to move quickly, you believe that he is made out of knives.

Some things just work in movies, no matter how silly they are in real life. It is a continuing shame that Edward Furlong isn't one of them.

The 'Supersize Me' award goes to Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2.

The martial artist, Buddhist, legendary bluesman and ecologist Steven Seagal seemed like he could take up the action hero mantle from the Stallones and Van Dammes in the early 90's, but while the former respectively used steroids and coke to stay in shape, Seagal seemed to prefer Big Macs.

It was 1995's Under Siege 2 where the weight started to show, despite his character wearing a lose fitting, black (slimming!) suit. Already a lot of his fights were filmed from the sternum up, or consisted of him shooting lots of baddies in very wide-shot while walking very slowly down a train carriage. One scene, however, demanded he run along the roof of a carriage and his huffing, unconvincing waddle was probably the most exercise he'd had all year.

These days Steven spends most of his time standing in the middle of rooms while strategically doped stuntmen run at his fist. And rocking the fuck out.

The 'This Was Stupid 70 Years Ago' award goes to Ed Burns and Jemima Rooper in A Sound Of Thunder.

In a film so terrible even Franchise Pictures delayed it for years, Ed and Jemima walk down a street in Future City and talk about some shit or other. Not having the budget to create such a lavish set, they imported a Playstation 2 cut scene and superimposed the two actors walking on a treadmill in front of it.

Their steps do not match up with the movement of the pavement, so giving us that 'skating' look computer games managed to solve a half decade ago, the grain and the lighting of the various elements don't even begin to match and it is a nakedly obvious camera trick that went out of favour for being 'really crappy' around about the time of The Jazz Singer.

I'd give the two actors awards for not simply curling up and dying out of shame, but has anyone seen this Jemima Rooper since the film was released?

The 'Most Judicious Use Of Celluloid' award goes to Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3.

The climactic action setpiece of one of last year's big summer action movies consists of Tom Cruise running a quarter mile down a sidewalk.

Possibly this was a result of starting to shoot before they had a script and simply not having the ideas or money or time to come up with something fancy, but more likely it was the result of Tom thinking that his presence was so magnetic, his physical acting so intense and the American audience's ability to be impressed by regular exercise so strong that he could create all the excitement and tension necessary for the final act just by running really emotionally.

Interestingly, a lot of the PR for the movie concentrated on the fact that he was really running in this scene, not just relying on clever editing (it was all in one shot) or camera tricks like sped up footage (though there were some fancy tricks to make him not look three feet tall). I guess that the PR department realised that this was a pretty crummy finale to a movie to and so tried to 'amp' up, or at least prepare, the audience for it. A shame that the PR department showed more common sense than the film-makers.

I guess one could commend director JJ Abrams for turning this total non-ending into an attention grabbing scene as best he could, but sod that: this is hugely cynical, hubristic and, above all, dumb movie-making. Rumours are the finale of Mission Impossible 4 will consist of Tom doing push-ups for half an hour.