Welcome To Marwen: The figure picture

Like many children of the '80s, my life was nudged in a specific direction by Bob Zemeckis and his little film about the boy whose mum tried to fuck him in the past. Zemeckis channelled 1.21 gigawatts of power into my interest in cinema, and I repaid him by watching everything else he made, up to and including Beowulf. But his forays into motion capture left me as cold as CG Tom Hanks' dead doll's eyes, and forgive me father, for I have forsaken Bob this past decade; not one of his post-2007 films have passed mine eyes.

But then along came Welcome To Marwen, with its intriguing blend of motion capture and live action, and its bizarre claim to be based on a true story despite having a trailer full of scenes that appeared to be from a spectacularly violent, war-movie version of Toy Story, and like Doc Brown I figured: what the hell.

Steve Carell engages Serious Steve Mode for his role as Mark Hogancamp, a lonely and apparently eccentric man who takes photos of dolls posed in WWII costumes and situations, and who has a thing for women's shoes. Hogancamp's true story was told - reasonably well, by all accounts (I haven't seen it) - in Marwencol, a 2010 documentary that provided the inspiration for Zemeckis' film. The reasons for Hogancamp's model behaviour are undeniably fascinating and tragic, but the first problem with Welcome To Marwen is that it takes two hours to explain them when they could have been dealt with in a ten-minute prologue. This has two immediate effects: firstly, to summarise the premise here would count as a spoiler for the whole film; secondly, Zemeckis needs to pad out the running time somehow. And if there's one thing Hogancamp's story doesn't have that Bob Zemeckis can add, it's a metric fucktonne of motion capture action sequences.

And so about half of Welcome To Marwen consists of those war-movie Toy Story scenes, in which 'Hogie', a heroic GI action figure in 1940s Belgium (who looks suspiciously like Steve Carell) is repeatedly captured by Nazi action figures, then rescued by a collection of sexy female action figures who kill the Nazis in increasingly violent fashion. Hogancamp merely photographed these imagined stories; Zemeckis splashes them on the screen in stunningly-realised fantasy sequences that are undeniably fun to watch, but which add little to the film's emotional core that the photographs don't. In fact these sequences unbalance the story, creating a weird tonal mixture of effects-driven action comedy and weighty drama that is going to be a nightmare to sell to audiences. Here's a film that wants to cover transvestism, Neo-Nazism, hate crime, violence as a solution, substance abuse, PTSD and other assorted mental health issues, but at the same time foregrounds cutting-edge CG action and visual gags. It's certainly not boring, but it is a little uncomfortable.

Carell is fine as Hogancamp (although clearly has an absolute ball as his 1/6th scale alter-ego), and Leslie Mann is wonderful as his near-mythically non-judgemental neighbour Nicol, but every other character is a cliché of some kind or other - Gwendoline Christie's Russian carer, for example, is teeth-itchingly ill-advised. Zemeckis' script, co-written with Caroline Thompson, is clunky and obvious at times: a barman drops a lead weight of exposition on a character who is only there to receive that exposition on our behalf, for example, and unnecessary narrative devices are crowbarred in to ramp up dramatic tension. Good Characters 100% accept Mark for who he is while Bad Characters 100% reject him for being a weirdo, as if the script is terrified of offending anyone with nuance. And Zemeckis can't resist a distractingly meta, extended Back To The Future-referencing gag which made me wonder if he'd lobbed it in after watching Ready Player One.

There's a truly original and inspiring film in here somewhere, but you can't help thinking it's the one that somebody else made eight years ago. Hogancamp deserves to be acknowledged for his art and the events that led him to create it, but he probably didn't deserve to have those events diminished by embellishing them with button-pushing melodrama and a side order of mega-budget kids' holiday filler. Welcome To Marwen isn't a total failure while you're watching it, and if more people look up Mark Hogancamp as a result then all well and good. But I'm fairly sure Bob Zemeckis can do better than this, and I hope it's not another ten years before I can be arsed to find out.

Book Corner: Back To The Future - The Ultimate Visual History

As we are all no doubt painfully aware, Back To The Future is the joint-best film ever made of all time ever, and so when the sexual tyrannosaurs at Titan Books offered me a copy of their new book Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History to review, I bit their hand off at the shoulder. Having once, long ago, owned and read to within an inch of its papery life Michael Klastorin and Sally Hibbin's Back To The Future: The Official Book Of The Complete Movie Trilogy but flogged it on eBay in a moment of foolish desperation, I welcomed this new volume with open cheeks. It gives me unbridled joy to say that it is everything I could have hoped for and more, and when I say "and more" I mean "with added Eric Stoltz".

OLD NEWS

Put in its simplest, most pullquote-friendly terms, you cannot not be a person who doesn't not own this book. Co-written by Klastorin from his extensive and enviably deep connection with the trilogy, it's an exhaustive detailing of the genesis, production and legacy of Marty McFly's adventures dicking about in the space-time continuum. But more - so much more - than that, it is, as you might expect from a "visual history", full of lovely, lovely pictures. So when you get bored of the words, which you won't, the pictures will be there for you. Pictures like the reference photo of Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd that Drew Struzan took before turning it into a work of airbrushed genius for the BTTF Part II poster; pictures of concept art for Hill Valley across three time periods (plus a Biffhorrific version); pictures of Eric Stoltz as Marty - about FIFTEEN PAGES of them: every page reveals a new eye-arousing wonder.

What's more, many of the pictures are replica props: "a wealth of special removable items", as the book's press release describes them. Sure enough, you too can wave a 'SAVE THE CLOCK TOWER' flyer in your spouse's face, boggle at the amazing lenticular photo of the McFly family (complete with disappearing Dave and Linda) for hours on end, or frame the sepia snap of Marty and Doc either side of the Hill Valley clock in 1885 and proudly display it on your bedside table, as I may or may not have.

WHAT'S THE MEANING OF THIS?!

Of course, pictures are all well and good, but one thing many books have in the past included in order to deepen their potential is a shitload of words. And Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History has precisely one shitload of words. I'm not going to pretend I've read them all (some of them are quite long, plus the book only arrived the other day and it comes out on Friday, JESUS give me a break), but I can tell you that those I have read are the pictures' equal in terms of fun things to look at. Christopher Lloyd's preface, for example, asks you to imagine a world in which you were reading Jeff Goldblum's or John Lithgow's preface to the same book. This set my mind wandering for about half an hour, and upon its return I was uncertain that neither option would be a bad thing at all.

Alternate timelines aside, this book approaches its subject in a pleasingly linear fashion, describing the making of each film in order of production. So after all the idea-having and draft-writing and title-wrangling (MCA president Sid Sheinberg's hilarious memo pushing for Space Man From Pluto gets a full page to itself) is dealt with, the Stoltz era is given meaty coverage before the "real" Marty McFly arrives, complete with Fox's own battered (and discontinued) sneakers, 25 pairs of which had to be made specially by Nike because costume designer Deborah L Scott forgot Marty's "proper" shoes and preferred those the actor turned up in on day one.

Further memories, anecdotes and revelations from pretty much everyone involved in the trilogy's successive five years follow, and the briefest flick-through while standing in Waterstones will provide as convincing an ad for the book as I can give here (I just opened it at random looking for an example and accidentally spent ten minutes reading about the painstaking attempts to recreate scenes from the first film for the second). An appropriately tiddly section is given over to the Universal Studios ride and the animated series, and as you discover the final treat - a fold-out poster for Jaws 19 - you'll immediately want to stick the films on for the bazillionth time and re-indulge in their wondrousness once more. Or, like me, you can just keep playing with that lenticular photo. It really is quite clever.

Yeah, 'bye Dave

Steve Buscemi’s Bizarrely Arranged Face

Remember the good old days before Shia LaBeouf took to ‘acting’, Robert Zemeckis made real films with real people in them and the Coen brothers effortlessly and with almost tedious regularity squirted out top-notch qualitertainment like Fargo and The Big Lebowski? Well, wake up, ask someone to slap you in the face as hard as they can, and accept the cold, hard reality of the present day, in which TheBeef is the star of the third-highest grossing film this year, Zemeckis can’t even remember what a real person looks like, and the Coen Brothers are making films like A Serious Man.

I can only really describe how terrible events are by bringing out The Incredible Suit’s Coen Brothers Qualitometer:

If ever there was a film in which a bunch of people said a bunch of stuff to some other people, then A Serious Man is it. No bikers from Hell, no hula-hoops, no bowling and no Dapper Dan. Just people. Talking.

Empire: 5 Stars
IMDb: 8.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%
The Incredible Suit: One solitary tear on Steve Buscemi’s bizarrely arranged face.

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Undead Checkout Operators

Robert Zemeckis is parping out another of his motion-capture films this Christmas. A Christmas Carol doesn’t star Jim Carrey, it stars Jim Carrey’s performance and voice. Here’s a trailer to clarify my ramblings:

I really don’t get all this motion capture stuff. It’s too close to looking photo-real to be animation but it’s not close enough to actually look real. As a result “mo-capped” (ugh) people just look like dead-eyed dolls moving in a manner unnervingly similar to humans, in much the same way as Shia LaBeouf approaches acting.

In films like The Polar Express and Beowulf, mo-cap (eurgh) has been used to capture the movements and facial features of actors like Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie and Ray Winstone, in order to create an animated character that looks a bit like Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie or Ray Winstone and stick them in an animated world. Am I missing something here? Why not just film these guys against a green screen and make the effort to put a realistic-looking world around them? That’s what happened in the Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars prequel trilogies, and their actors didn’t look like undead checkout operators at the end of a 10-hour shift. Well, except maybe Hayden Christensen.

As it happens Peter Jackson did use mo-cap (bleurgh) to create Gollum and King Kong from the performances of the inhumanly awesome Andy Serkis, so I suppose it does have its place, and its place is creating non-human characters, not vague approximations of humans just peculiar enough to give you nightmares. Of course Jackson has now blown his winnings by teaming up with Steven Spielberg to waste years of quality movie-making time on the Tintin films, to be filmed entirely in, yes, motion capture.

So sorry, I love Robert Zemeckis for giving us the Back To The Future trilogy, but I wish he’d stop mucking about with mo-cap (hrrreeuurrrrgghh) and get back to making proper films. You know, ones that use actual film? If he’s unsure, here’s a handy cut-out and keep guide to the difference between success and failure:

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