Word: conran
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Captain is every bit as much an animated film as Shark Tale. Kerry Conran's script has a plot lifted and sifted from lots of '30s films--The Wizard of Oz, Lost Horizon and a dozen sassy newspaper comedies. But the technique is the star here: Conran's devising of a Deco-meets-delirium universe that he projected onto a blue screen, in front of which the game, clueless stars--Jude Law as the intrepid flyboy, Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky news gal--recited their lines...
Granted, they can't bring much life to their characters, since the movie's sepia-toned look almost literally drains the color from their faces, which are shot in light so diffuse they look as if they were painted on velvet. It's more important to Conran that they be figures in a landscape whose tones have the texture of a seeping, seductive gouache. In his vision of moviemaking as essentially a basement activity--a controlled environment as unpolluted as possible by the egos and quirks of performers--Conran is a lot like George Lucas from Star Wars on. Actors...
...diminishing Conran's achievement; we're simply noting that he hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land...
...only arty texture stuff the actors got to do was minimalist theater in front of a blue screen in a Van Nuys, Calif., warehouse, stooping when Conran yelled "Duck!" and pretending they were interacting with everything from dirigibles to a desk to a shaky hologram of a digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier (another actor voiced his new lines). George Lucas and others have created scenes in front of blue screens before, but Conran was the first to try to build absolutely everything nonhuman on the computer. It's the anti--Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Conran leaving holes for the actors...
...Conran, in all his shyness, is going to have to leave his computer for the first time in a decade. As he starts promoting the film, Conran is becoming less freaked out by things like interviews and sunlight. But the real shift in his life won't occur until later this month, when he has to go around the world to the various premieres for the film, seeing all the places he meticulously crafted on his computer but never actually visited, like Radio City Music Hall. And you just know, somehow, compared with the world he built, it's going...