Two movie reviews.
I hate CGI. I know it, you know it. I love animals, especially doggos. I hate CGI animals. What is it about animal movies these days where you can get an experienced wrangler and real animals but instead they cheap-out and generate everything in a computer? Has it gotten to the point where we need to be making movies where cute animals are subjected to such unimaginable hardships that the only way to film it is to fake it? Are we scared for the animals themselves? The actors? THE PRODUCERS’ INVESTMENT? We all know Lindsay Lohan is expensive to insure: what if you made a movie where Lindsay Lohan played Jane Goodall and went into the middle of the wood with a bunch of living apes to shoot one of those handheld iPhone movies? FORGET IT. You would have better luck posting your movie to YouTube to watch for free let alone wide distribution in the slowest audience-attendance period of the theatrical year. Hollywood is cheap and stingy, and if something works then they will do that thing into the foreseeable future until a cheaper alternative is found. They found their alternative in CGI. Soon you won’t even need mo-cap actors because there will be cyborgs who do a better job of imitating Carrie Fisher than her own daughter. SOON YOU WON’T NEED ACTORS AT ALL. It’ll all be dead people, vomited-up from the grave and reconstituted on IBMs. Plus side: you could then get the dead animal actors such as ALL THE DOGS from ALL THE PREVIOUS FILMED ADAPTATIONS of Jack London’s book and reanimate them and have an unscripted reunion special on HBO. Invite the holograms of the original Benji and Old Yeller while you’re at it. Live animal wrangling for film is looked-down on in today’s world the same as those who perform in the circus and it looks like it may completely go the way of the dodo, like puppetry (if the dour and pointless Dark Crystal prequel on Netflix right now is anything to go by. LOW DIG).
I watched the 1972 Call of the Wild the Wednesday before we saw the new one. It was available on Plex’s new “free TV” service (because the new fad is to put the same public domain movies on as many streaming platforms as possible) and, with it being in the public domain, you could probably go watch it, ironically, on YouTube RIGHT NOW. As a matter of fact, here you go (although it is 30-minutes longer then the cut available on Plex, so I’m not sure exactly what footage is missing where. The Plex cut was fine though; it wasn’t like they hacked an hour off in the middle of the movie without any continuity, like KVOS Channel 12 used to). Some may say this spoils the surprise, since I’ve never seen any filmed incarnation of London’s work before nor read his book. I’m not even sure if it’s told in the first-person of the dog himself. And if IMDB is anything to go by, every generation has their own made-for-TV adaptation of this material. But I have been known to “research” new movies by watching previously-filmed versions first (like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games). What I know then is that, the 1972 Call of the Wild has very little to do with its supposed leading canine character and is more of an episodic look at different endemic groups trying to make their fortune during the Alaskan Gold Rush, with Buck The Dog and his various trials the link. The original story is about the dog’s retrogressing from well-trained house-pup to his natural congenital identity and while Buck does eventually run off with the wolves who had been hunting him and his dog sled musher-slash-human companion Thornton, without any narration from the dog or even Thornton himself (played by the always-gruff Charlton Heston, and why wouldn’t you use Heston as voice-over?) the film’s numerous shots of broken-and-bloodied pups don’t serve our faithful doggos compassionately and instead portray them as additional casualties of man’s greed. Taking away the dog stuff, the 1972 Call of the Wild is actually pretty watchable (and at 70-minutes on Plex, it’s the length of watching two network TV shows without commercials back-to-back. Or you could watch 10-straight-hours of the same show on Netflix) and you can’t beat seeing real animals in real locations with real stakes. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure they couldn’t get away with some of these scenes without killing a few dogs by-accident along the way (maybe even some hoomans, too!): there are some intense, on-location sequences with the dogs running unharnessed on the edge of 100-foot dead drops and climbing uphill at 80-degrees in 10-feet of snow. This is the sad opposite to using real animals, and your mileage may vary depending on how important you place dogs to man on the food chain. I don’t think that stunt dogs deserve to die on a movie set. I think that it just happens. You can’t throw Burt Reynolds down a rapid without a life jacket and expect him not to break his arm. This is a production fault. ALL on-set deaths are production faults. That’s how Brandon Lee died. Shit happens. No one sets out to simulate a dog fight with real dogs trained to play like they’re trying to kill each other and not expect any collateral damage. My old Gaffing instructor used to say that no movie is worth dying for. Dogs don’t even know what a movie is. Buck probably thought the German Shepherd on playback was a different dog and started barking at the screen to get his own attention.
And like a kick to the face, I had the whole review mapped out assuming that I would hate the new movie because of the fake dog and I didn’t. Hollywood’s multi-million-dollar remake of The Call of the Wild for today’s generation (with Harrison Ford as lead hooman) is a technical marvel. The dog is cute, okay? All of the dogs are cute. And ALL OF THE DOGS ARE CGI. I suppose they figured, “we’re going through the trouble of mo-capping our lead dog and our sweatshop animators are working overtime: why not animate ALL the dogs and then we don’t have to worry about animal rights AT ALL!” That is putting a whole heap of faith in your actors to have the chops to make talking-to and petting fake dogs look real, and somehow they pulled it off. The plot is approximate to the 1972 film, although you can see where they took liberties in the adaptation. Let’s assume that the 2020 film is closer to the book. Thornton is a drunk who’s separated from his wife in the midst of a tragedy (dead kid) and is contented to drink himself to death in the Alaskan wilderness until Buck enters his life and fills it with the kind of vitality most men Harrison Ford’s age now can only get by watching the pornos. Buck, however, is on his own mission to tap a hot timberwolf and succeeds as leader of her pack. If there was anything I could complain about, it’s that there is too much action. When Buck is part of the sled dog team at the start of the film, there is a gratuitous “outrun the avalanche” scene that had no reason to be there other than pervasive adventure, but it was still exciting to watch. Same goes for the unjustified “riding the canoe down the whitewater rapids” scene, or the “saving someone from drowning in an ice pond” scene. They’re well done, but they’re obviously there to pad the time. I think I’m grasping at straws. So not only did I complain about CGI animals (for the last time, I promise!), I went and watched two movies that made my opinion moot: one where real animals are used-and-abused for our entertainment, and another where fake CGI dogs turn out to be as effective as real dogs (if not more so). What am I going to do for next time? No preconceived notions of what something will be when it turns out to be nothing like? Assumption-free? Does this mean I have to -gulp- write my reviews after watching the movie instead of pre-writing? UG. SO MUCH WORK. No one said fame was easy. Tell that to Benji. BARK BARK!
//jf 5.13.2020
theory of a daskeman 