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FAKE IT SO REAL (UNRATED)

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Fake It So Real

 

 

BY ROGER EBERT / April 18, 2012

 

cast & credits Fourth Row Films presents a documentary directed by Robert Greene. Running time: 95 minutes. No MPAA rating.     Printer-friendly »  E-mail this to a friend »

 

"Fake It So Real" filled me with affection for its down-and-out heroes, a group of semi-pro wrestlers in Lincolnton, N.C. On Saturday nights, they rent a hall, construct their own ring, set out the folding chairs, stage a wrestling show, take the ring apart, truck it away and start talking about next week. For this labor, one of them jokes, they get "20 bucks, a hot dog and a pat on the ass."

There are 12 or 14 wrestlers, and together they comprise the entire Millennium Wrestling Federation, which seems to feature a title bout for its World Championship every few weeks. They have physical and relationship problems, most of them seem unemployed or in low-paying jobs, but for one shining night of the week they are stars. They have onstage personas, design their own flashy costumes, and play out scenarios of grudges, ferocity and bad-ass moves. One says he knew he'd made it when three little girls asked him for his autograph.

This is show business. Is that why I liked them so much? In some circles, they might be seen as losers, but they have taken admirable steps to bring about their dreams. During the week, they post flyers for the weekly match in gas stations and convenience stores, meet daily to rehearse and collaborate on scenarios, and in the honorable tradition of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, what they're essentially doing is renting an old barn and putting on a show.

Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" (2008), the Mickey Rourkemasterpiece, was about wrestlers performing in marginal, low-rent matches. Compared to these guys, they were flying first class. Their stardom in the ring is compensation for bad luck in other areas, trouble with wives and girlfriends, economic hardship and a great deal of physical pain. Of that there's no doubt. Yes, it's true the fights are "fixed and faked," in the sense that the script and the winner are decided in advance. But let's say the script calls for an opponent to lift you over his head and slam you down on the mat, climb onto the ropes and body slam you. What part of that, exactly, is not real?

The members of the federation all seem to be nice guys. Robert Greene's camera follows them through seven days before a big match, and we get to know them. Many felt like outsiders until they found this family. One has a disproportionately big butt and was bullied about it in school. "I said, God, you gave me this big ass, now show me how to use it," he says. On the back of his shorts are bright red lips inviting his opponent to kiss his ass.

One has asthma. One has an infection and is about to miss his first match in several years. One, Chris Solar, was born prematurely with his intestines and internal organs outside his body; that's why he lacks a navel. All are muscular enough for the considerable demands of wrestling, but many are overweight. One explains, "I'm in training. I smoke Marlboro Lights."

The best body belongs to the rookie, Gabriel Croft, a clean-cut kid who looks like Matt Damon. He gets a lot of instruction and encouragement from the veterans, who wonder if he has the right stuff. He plays a character named the Angel Gabriel and gets some homophobic kidding, but homophobia is the water in which they all swim. There is a tenderness in the way they punish one another.

As show biz, this is bottom rung. They play music from their own collections. They use Radio Shack brand strobe lights. One "villain" wears a dime-store Halloween mask. Admission is $5 (kids are free), and at the weekly show, the crowd may be loyal and loud, but it's small. The rent for their venue, which looks like a school auditorium, is $240, and that would take 48 tickets to cover it. There must not be a lot left over. The possibility exists that they're wrestling at a net loss to themselves. 

Greene, the documentarian, is a cousin of Chris Solar. He likes these guys and doesn't take cheap shots. The Rourke film contained a lot of painkiller use and illegal steroids. There are no drugs seen or referred to in this film, and my guess is they can't afford them. There is a rough nobility in the way they strive for fame and success. The film is alive at every moment. I'd like to attend one of their matches, but having seen this film, I might find it too painful — and I'm not talking about physical pain.

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IN THE FAMILY (UNRATED)

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Patrick Wang and Travor St. John in "In the Family."

 

 

In the Family

 

 

BY ROGER EBERT / April 18, 2012

 

cast & credits Joey Patrick Wang Cody Trevor St. John  Chip Sebastian Banes  Paul Brian Murray  Sally Park Overall  Dave Peter Hermann  New Yorker Films presents a film written and directed by Patrick Wang. Running time: 169 minutes. No MPAA rating.     Printer-friendly »  E-mail this to a friend »

 

"In the Family" centers on one of the notable performances I've seen — if, indeed, it is a performance. Perhaps Patrick Wang is exactly like that. Then he must be a very good man. He wrote, directed and stars in the film, but it's not a one-man show. It is about the meaning of "family." This is his first feature, and may signal the opening of an important career.

Wang plays Joey Williams, a Chinese-American man who has been living happily for about five years with Cody Hines (Trevor St. John) and Cody's 6-year-old son, Chip (Sebastian Banes). Chip's mother died in childbirth. Some months after that, to his own surprise, Cody fell in love with Joey, and they're raising Chip. This household is given enough screen time to establish it as a happy, healthy place.

Then Cody is killed in an accident. Chip stays with Joey, whose treatment of him is a study in wisdom and love. The boy is so irrepressibly joyous that we sense what a happy life he has led. But Cody's sister Eileen (Kelly McAndrew) reveals that her brother left a will years ago, granting her all of his property and custody of his child. This will, written after the death of Cody's wife and before he met Joey, has never been updated.

On Thanksgiving Day, Joey drops the boy off at the sister's house and never sees him again. A lawyer in his Tennessee town tells him flatly he doesn't have a child custody case, and no judge in the state will rule in his favor. Neither this lawyer nor anyone else ever uses the words "homosexual" or "gay." It isn't in any sense a "gay rights" film, nor is it an "Asian-American" film. It is about a father and son who have been separated against their wishes. 

Its objectivity in these terms is possible because of Wang's extraordinary performance. I've been unable to discover any details about him, but he speaks in a relaxed, natural Tennessee accent and creates Joey as a particularly convincing character, a contractor who drives a red pickup truck. (Cody was a schoolteacher.) His own parents died when he was very young. He was adopted by foster parents, who gave him their name, and who died when he was a teenager. As a man of Asian birth who has been raised apart from other Asians, as an orphan and a foster child who for years had no family, we sense how important stability and continuity are to him. 

And there is something else. Without ever making a point of it, he has been treated as an outsider. Wang, as director, indicates this by several scenes with the back of the character's head to the camera, so that we see the other characters from his POV, instead of seeing Joey mixed in visually. He is not a hothead, not neurotic, not psychologically damaged, but in this crisis, the entire basis of his being has been challenged. Having seen Cody, we can feel certain he would have granted custody to Joey if he had ever made another will. Cody's sister doesn't see it that way. What does she think about homosexuality? She never says.

Joey's case looks hopeless. Friends try to console him, but helplessly. He's working on a house for a local attorney who has an ornate law library, and he reveals his skills in bookbinding — an art learned from his foster father. This attorney, Paul Hawks (the authoritative and wise Brian Murray), offers his help and observes there may be no help within the court system but there may be a more human path around it.

Then follows a scene of legal depositions, during which Patrick Wang's performance, in long takes that feel entirely spontaneous, recounts his life story. Joey's response to the offensively hostile attorney for the other side is masterful: He humiliates the other man simply by being a good person and telling the truth.

"In the Family" is a long film, and truth to tell, could have been made shorter. (One dimly lit confrontation between Joey and a key participant seems unnecessary.) That said, I was completely absorbed from beginning to end. What a courageous first feature this is, a film that sidesteps shopworn stereotypes and tells a quiet, firm, deeply humanist story about doing the right thing. It is a film that avoids any message or statement and simply shows us, with infinite sympathy, how the life of a completely original character can help us lead our own.

 

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FT: Movie Trends

3D fails to lift Hollywood box office take

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles

Published: January 3 2011 19:56 | Last updated: January 3 2011 20:34

The great 3D film revolution is failing to live up to its initial promise with US cinema attendance falling close to 10 per cent in 2010 and end-of-year movies failing to lift the gloom.

The key summer period, when Hollywood studios release their biggest films of the year, was the lowest attended in a decade, according to Hollywood.com.

The Christmas holidays fared little better, with box-office takings in the 10 days to December 26 falling 30 per cent when compared with 2009, according to BTIG Research.

Hollywood studios have embraced 3D technology because it allows them to charge a higher ticket price. But the lower attendance points to consumer fatigue, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research.

Several 3D films flopped at the box office in 2010. “The US consumer is becoming increasingly less interested in 3D movies,” Mr Greenfield wrote in a recent note. “While the horror and gross-out comedy genres may benefit from 3D (think Saw 3D or Jackass 3D), the vast majority of 3D movies this year have been disappointing at best.”

Total 2010 box-office takings slipped 2.6 per cent from $10.6bn to $10.3bn.

But attendance fell by 8.1 per cent, which is a concern for an industry already worried about competition from other forms of entertainment, such as video games, online social networking and television.

Although plenty of films performed well in 2010, notably Warner Brothers’ Inception, released in 2D, and Walt Disney’s 3D Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland, plenty of others underwhelmed.

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was one of the year’s biggest 3D flops. Gulliver’s Travels, a 3D adventure comedy starring Jack Black, underperformed on its Christmas release in the US, although the film has yet to be released in several international markets.

Disney’s Tron: Legacy, which was also released in 3D, had a modest opening weekend performance, in spite of an enormous marketing campaign.

The next 12 months could be more promising for Hollywood. “We believe attendance is likely to rebound in 2011 and benefit from a strong summer film slate with plenty of sequels and franchise hits,” wrote Anthony DiClemente, an analyst with Barclays Capital, in a research note.

Films in the pipeline this year include Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Transformers 3 and Cars 2.

However, the studios may have to re-think their 3D strategy and limit the technology to genuine blockbusters, rather than view it as a panacea for poor films, says Mr Greenfield.

“The movie industry should reduce the number of 3D movies it has planned or at least substantially scale back the upcharge as they are simply charging way too much for poor content,” he says.

Silver screen strikes gold in China

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Published: January 3 2011 17:40 | Last updated: January 3 2011 17:40

Here’s looking at you: a China audience takes in the 3D film ‘Avatar’. The country is adding three screens a day, the fastest growth of any cinema market

The holiday season in the west may be over but for the Chinese film industry party time has begun.

Blockbusters in the final weeks of 2010, led by the gangster comedy Let The Bullets Fly, helped China’s annual box-office receipts rise 40 per cent to Rmb10bn ($1.5bn).

The film, starring Chow Yun Fat, earned Rmb453m in its first two weeks when it came out at the end of December, and it continues to sell well.

Film companies expect the hunger for entertainment of China’s growing middle class as well as heavy investment in new cinemas to continue to fuel expansion for years.

China has 5,000 screens, about one-eighth of the US. But the country adds new cinemas at the pace of three screens a day, faster than any other market.

“It will be the world’s largest cinema industry in 10 years or less,” says Tony Adamson, marketing head for DLP, the digital cinema technology arm of Texas Instruments.

“China could have as many as 100,000 screens and it would not be over-screened.”

International companies are piling in.

Imax has raised the number of cinemas planned in China by 15 to 96, and Lotte Cinemas of South Korea is planning to build 30 theatres in the country this year.

The lion’s share of the growth is in smaller cities, some of which do not have any cinemas.

Zhang Baoquan, president of Antaeus Group, a real estate conglomerate which is expanding into film, says he expects cinema construction to spread like wildfire in areas outside the main cities, driven by urbanisation and the increasing availability of digital projection.

“In the US only one-third of all screens are digital so far, but I expect China to be 100 per cent digital by the end of 2011,” Mr Zhang says.

While converting existing cinemas requires sizeable investment, there is no additional cost to equip a new cinema for digital projection.

“The increase in screens raises the average revenues per movie, so you can spend more per film – hire better directors, get better scripts, have better special effects,” says Jiang Yanming, one of China’s leading visual effects producers.

“We will be making better movies.”

Recent releases would suggest that this is happening, at least as far as ticket receipts are concerned.

In 2009, China saw its first locally produced horror film, Painted Skin.

Last year, the country’s audiences were treated to a Chinese “chick flick”, Go Lala Go, a Hollywoodesque romance about a Beijing office girl. It made Rmb124.5m.

Fox released its first Chinese-language movie, Hot Summer Days, which it co-produced with Huayi Brothers, China’s largest studio. The romantic comedy made Rmb125.8m.

“These firsts are indicative of the opportunity,” says Sanford Panitch, president of Fox International Productions.

“For a long time, most Chinese films tended to be period, and now you’re seeing more commercially minded films, clearly in response to a growing middle class audience.”

But there remains a barrier to foreign filmmakers.

The Chinese government, which keeps the industry under strict control in the name of protecting public morals and Chinese culture, has an annual quota of 20 foreign films for distribution by two state-owned companies.

The World Trade Organisation ruled last year that China was breaking its 2001 WTO entry terms and that this restriction must be changed.

However, few in the industry expect the government to take meaningful action to open up the market further, so the only way in for foreign film companies is through co-production with Chinese partners.

The films will continue to be censored for sex and violence because China does not have a film ratings system. They may also be banned for political reasons.

Zhang Xun, president of China Film Cooperation Corporation, the state outlet which supervises co-productions, says CFCC rejected a script from Taiwan about a policeman with mafia ties.

She says: “We absolutely do not encourage such films. The institutions of the state are a force for good in any country. We do not hope to describe China’s police as that ugly. We hope that justice can defeat evil.”

CFCC interfered in Yip Man, a kung fu drama set under Japanese occupation in the 1940s.

“The unity and power of the Chinese when the Japanese invaded – none of that appeared in the original script,” Ms Zhang says.

Some foreign studios find such interference too much to swallow. Joint productions are growing more slowly than the market. According to CFCC, it received 75 applications in 2009 and 90 last year.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: What inspires Clint Eastwood

What inspires Clint Eastwood

By Emanuel Levy

Published: October 22 2010 23:05 | Last updated: October 22 2010 23:05

Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon

Despite his advanced age (he turned 80 in May), Clint Eastwood is one of the most prolific, versatile and respected movie directors working in Hollywood today.

Over the past six years, he has made seven films, each different from the others in theme, narrative and visual style. Since 2004, he has directed Million Dollar Baby, which won the best picture and director Oscars, the back-to-back second world war movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, his most commercial picture to date, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, and Invictus, about South African rugby, in which Nelson Mandela is played by Morgan Freeman.

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His latest is Hereafter, a meditation on fate and mortality, life and the afterlife. Released on Friday in the US, it shows that Eastwood continues to take risks with different kinds of texts. It explores the search of three characters for answers about what lies beyond death. “We don’t know what’s on the other side,” says Eastwood. “People have their beliefs about what’s there or what’s not there, but those are all hypotheticals. Nobody knows until you get there.” He holds that “most people want to believe that there’s something beyond, so in one way or another, we can relate to the story’s core emotions – love, loss, loneliness, connection.”

Hereafter follows the trend for storytelling based on multi-plot, multi-character structure, and the film sets in motion three separate but parallel stories. A tsunami tears through a beach town in Indonesia, dragging Marie, a French journalist (played by Belgian actress Cécile de France), to her underwater death. Meanwhile, in London’s harsh housing estates, an accident separates a pair of twins (Frankie and George McLaren). And in San Francisco, the psychically aware George (played by Matt Damon) disconnects from life to shut out the voices of the dead.

Hereafter marks a departure for the writer Peter Morgan, who is best known for his political dramas (the Oscar-nominated The Queen and Frost/Nixon). Morgan, who also serves as executive producer, wrote the script shortly after losing a friend in an accident.

“My friend died suddenly and violently, and it made no sense,” he says. “His spirit was still so alive around us. At his funeral, I kept thinking, ‘Where has he gone?’ ”

He adds: “As I was writing, I was unaware that I’d created three very lonely characters who were seeking completion. It was a very unusual screenplay for me. Normally, my scripts are researched and based on fact, but this one felt very instinctive, emotional and unplanned, and it was thrilling to write.”

After completing the script, Morgan discussed it with the producer Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy gave it to Steven Spielberg, who upon reading said, “I know exactly who should direct this – Clint.”

Spielberg’s instinct was right. “The way it was laid out, it seemed to be something I had never seen before, and had such great dilemmas and dimensions,” says Eastwood. “I’ve talked to people who’ve had near-death experiences and there seems to be a similarity in their stories. Most people want to feel or to fantasise that there’s something after death, and most religions seem to believe that there is something after death.”

That said, Eastwood is quick to point out that for him, the emphasis is on the here and now. “I don’t think much about the hereafter, because I feel you’re given one opportunity to live in this world, and you have to take advantage of that and do the best you can. That’s the hand you’re dealt and you have to play it out. If you’re worrying too much about the end of it all, you can’t really live the present of it all.”

. . .

Eastwood cites a line from the character that Jay Mohr is playing (as Matt Damon’s brother): “A life that’s all about death is not a life worth living.” For him, it’s a profound line: “Even when you’re telling a tragedy, it’s through life that you’re telling the story.

“When you approach a scene in a movie, your intuition tells you to do it a certain way. I like to let stories unfold naturally by getting to know the particular characters. In this film, each of the main characters has something the other one needs, a starting point to get on with their lives. They’ve all just got to do the best they can while they’re here.”

More specifically, Eastwood liked Morgan’s story “because it was about a reticent hero, somebody whose life has not turned out the way he would have liked it to but eventually he becomes beneficial to all the characters.”

Although Hereafter portrays George as genuinely gifted, he is aware that the field of psychics and mediums is rife with phonies. “We try to show the legitimacy of what [George] does,” Eastwood notes, “as opposed to the charlatans out there. Whether there are some who are legitimate and others who are not is in the eye of the beholder, but the story does touch on people who take advantage of those wanting to make contact with the dead.”

In making any film, Eastwood says, the main thing is to cast correctly. “The casting mechanism is the most important because that’s what you start off with. I cast actors that I think are intelligent and agree with my vision. Most actors want to play roles they have not done before. You can instruct them a little along the way. Most actors are very co-operative with that, because they’re always looking for somebody to help them search out certain emotions.”

“I think Matt [Damon] is emerging as one of the most important actors we’ve had in a long time, when you look at the body of work and the array of roles he’s taken on,” Eastwood says. “What I like about Matt is that he’s an actor who is not actorish, and his performances reflect that. He is able to perform very subtly, you don’t get the feeling he’s performing.”

What keeps Eastwood going? “I just enjoy working,” he says, “I thrive on it. For me, a good script is usually the inspiration, and I’m always looking for new subject matters because every film is a new challenge for me.”

He elaborates: “I could have been satisfied to stick with the genres I have been doing for years but, the last decade, I’ve been doing a lot of films that were certainly different for me, experimenting with new issues and subjects.”

Eastwood has no intention of slowing down. He is already hard at work on his next project, a biopic of J Edgar Hoover: “Leonardo DiCaprio is eager to play Hoover, and so we’re going to do it together. We’re in pre-production now, and the shoot will begin in early 2011.”

‘Hereafter’ is in US cinemas and goes on release in Europe in January

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Time: End of Innocence

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1993864,00.html

Monday, Jun. 14, 2010

TIME's Review of Toy Story 3: 'An Instant Classic'

By RICHARD CORLISS

Sheriff Woody is doing his durnedest to save the world from Hamm the piggy bank, alias Dr. Evil Porkchop — "That's Mister Dr. Evil Porkchop to you!" — before the Old West train Woody's on and the orphans inside crash to their doom. His cowgal pal Jessie rides to the rescue, and space ranger Buzz Lightyear is, as always, eager to take his friends "to infinity — and beyond!" But even they may be no match for the spaceship that descends and, when its doors open, reveals ...

... Reveals, in the first scene of Toy Story 3, that the boy Andy has a terrific time playing with his toys. In a bedroom strewn with all kinds of characters, from cowboys and astromen to a Slinky dog and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, the 7-year-old mashes genres together to accommodate them all. Toys trigger what the movie's director, Lee Unkrich, calls a child's "crazy, non sequitur imagination." They unlock his creativity, let him play out elaborate scenarios inspired by films and TV shows he's seen and then remade in the wild innocence of a young mind — one that knows all the rules of narrative but doesn't mind smashing them with Dadaist abandon. (See a photographic history of Pixar.)

That's the creative strategy at Pixar, which produced the first computer-animated feature, Toy Story, in 1995 and has bloomed ever since, through Finding Nemo, WALL•E and last year's Up. Pixar filmmakers have to be able to tap into their vestigial child, their inner Andy. In that sense, the Toy Story series is their collective autobiography. Like Andy, the Pixarians — from creative director John Lasseter on down — are smart kids who never renounced their childish belief that anything is possible. Why, to make an instant classic like Toy Story 3, it just takes an unfettered imagination, several hundred artists and technicians, about $200 million and four years of nonstop work. Child's play.

In 15 years, the Pixar unit has produced just 11 features. The first 10 — Toy Story; A Bug's Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; WALL•E and Up — are not just some of the best computer-animated films but some of the liveliest, brightest, most heartfelt movies of the recent past. That they have earned lots of money ($5.6 billion worldwide) for Pixar and its parent company, Disney, is almost beside the point. Like the earliest Walt Disney fables, Pixar films are for children and their parents and everyone who can be touched by moving images. "We don't make movies for kids," Unkrich says emphatically. "Our mission statement is to make films for everybody." That includes the Motion Picture Academy: Pixar has won five of the nine Oscars for Best Animated Feature and the last three in a row. (See the top 10 voices behind Pixar characters.)

Okay, but a third Toy Story, from a studio where nine of the first 10 features were total originals? Lasseter, who directed and co-wrote the first two Toy Story films and who's supervising second episodes of Cars and Monsters, Inc., allows that some people "make sequels as a way of printing money, and they tend to rehash the same idea." He insists Pixar returns to favorite characters because "they are alive in us. We think of them as friends and family. We want to see what new, deeper emotions we can find."

For Toy Story 3's screenwriter Michael Arndt (who won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine), that meant rethinking each old toy and finding unsuspected human wrinkles. The film's visual style, bracingly clear in its 3-D version, is both state-of-the-CGI-art and faithful to the simple design of the first two films. "I wanted it to look great," says Unkrich, who served as editor on the first Toy Story and co-director on the second. "But it also had to look like Toy Story." What's more potent is the upping of the emotional ante. TS3 puts its characters and the moviegoing children who love them in their severest crisis yet. Not since the early Disney classics have cartoon characters faced so dire a threat with such heroic grace. Lasseter recalls a meeting of the Pixar brain trust for the first reading of the story. "By the end," he says, "I had tears streaming down my face. I looked around the table, and we all had tears."

Watch TIME's video "How to Be a Cartoon Voice."

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The Philosophy of Toys
In Toy Story 3, Andy is now a teenager, ready to go to college and wondering what to do with the toys that nurtured him through kidhood but that he hasn't played with for years. Unkrich admits that this is a dilemma he and his colleagues haven't had to face. "Pixar," he says, "is filled with people who don't get rid of their toys."

Lasseter, whose office at the company's Lego-like headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., is crammed with hundreds of gewgaws from his films, is an expert on the secret life of toys. "If something inanimate were to come to life," he posits, "it would want to do what it's been manufactured to do. A toy wants to be played with by a child, to make that child happy. If it's not played with, that causes severe anxieties. If a toy is lost, it can be found. If broken, it can be repaired. The one thing toys are most anxious about is being outgrown, because there's no way that can be fixed." (See the 100 best movies of all time.)

Andy's toys are a needy bunch. Woody (again voiced by Tom Hanks) is the leader and the most loyal among them, in part because he's Andy's favorite. The cloth cowboy suffered a case of battery envy when Buzz (Tim Allen) joined the team in Toy Story and a displacement complex when a toy collector filched him in TS2. But now trauma looms over all his friends: Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles), Rex the Dinosaur (Wallace Shawn), Slinky Dog (Blake Clark) and the rest.

Like many working stiffs, the toys fret about losing their jobs; like adopted children, they fear being sent back. There's a touch of Stockholm syndrome in their dependence on Andy — once their playmate, now their inattentive jailer, their absent God or Godot. With Andy heading off to college, the toys could be relegated to the attic. Or worse, the dump truck.

Hey, guys, come to Sunnyside Day Care! It has kids galore — no toy left behind — and new friends: Ken (Michael Keaton), enthralled to finally find his Barbie (Jodi Benson), and Lotso (Ned Beatty), a folksy stuffed bear with a strawberry scent. If only the 2-year-olds to whom Buzz and the rest are assigned as playthings weren't such violent little beasts. If only Lotso didn't have a hidden agenda. If only the toys from the first two films didn't have to attempt a great escape that leads to ... well, we said the movie is intense. Unkrich calls it "taking toys to their endgame." (See the top 10 movie performances of 2009.)

The Next Generation
What's a happy end for a toy? Perhaps to be passed on to the next generation of kids. Pixar may be approaching a similar torch-passing. So far, nearly every Pixar feature has been directed by a man who has been with the company since its founding; the only exceptions (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) are the films helmed by Brad Bird, a college friend of Lasseter's who joined a decade ago. Pixar releases just one feature each year, a schedule that has created a talent logjam at the top (Pete Docter waited eight years between Monsters, Inc. and Up) and the risk that gifted, ambitious, younger animators might be lured to another studio. (Watch TIME's video about Pete Docter.)

Now, by chance and design, the kids will get their shot. Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL•E) is away filming John Carter of Mars; Bird, the fourth Mission: Impossible feature. And the studio will release three movies in 2011-12: a sequel to Cars, a film involving the Monsters, Inc. characters and Brave, the first Pixar feature directed by a woman (Brenda Chapman, who also helmed DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt). "With Andrew and Brad off in live action," says Unkrich, "it makes sense that we'd be nurturing the next generation of Pixar."

Yet continuity remains a studio hallmark. John Morris, the child who voiced Andy in the first two films, is back as older Andy. And next year there'll be a short film with the same characters. Some toys — and Toy Storys — are to be treasured forever.

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FT: Summer Blockbuster

The birth of the summer blockbuster

By Nigel Andrews

Published: July 16 2010 16:59 | Last updated: July 16 2010 16:59

From left: ‘Jaws’ (1975), ‘Star Wars’ (1977), ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008), ‘Top Gun’ (1986), ‘Shrek Forever After’ (2010)

It was a bright spring day in 1970s Hollywood and a studio chief, walking down his executive corridor, overheard a conversation behind the office door of his vice-president for marketing.

Woody from ‘Toy Story’

“We’ve got all these blockbusters coming up over the next year,” the VP was saying.

“Some are blockbusters,” said the junior honcho closeted with him.

The studio chief lit up like a flashbulb. “Summer blockbusters!” (he thought he had heard). He had never encountered so novel an idea. One so brilliant, so counter-intuitive, so filled with – with potential money. He charged into the office, promoted Junior to Senior Executive Officer for Brainstorms, and everything else is history. (Except this story, which is industry folklore.)

How else to explain that at a certain point in the mid-1970s our filmgoing habits suddenly changed? Back then June, July and August were the movie industry’s low season. By day, everyone was on the beach; by night, eating, drinking, dancing and carrying on. Who wanted to go rectangle-eyed in the dark, watching movies? That was a winter thing. The only steady summer dollars came, in the US, from drive-in theatres, and even their postwar heyday was faltering by the 1970s, assailed by charges of seediness. Too little movie-watching in darkness-veiled parked cars, too much making out.

Today there are fewer drive-ins but summer multiplexes are filled with blockbusters, fantasy epics, top-dollar sequels. The money that comes into a studio one year goes out again the next, to its favourite sons, the filmmakers. Christopher Dark Knight Nolan is handed $170m to make this year’s Inception. The makers of Toy Story 3 have a piggybank of $190m.

This summer the likes of Shrek Forever After and Knight and Day (Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz spy rom-com) are backed up by titles that promise fantastical screen jiggery-pokery – The Last Airbender and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Nicolas Cage vehicle, not Mickey Mouse version). There is also our current, weird obsession with the 1980s, the mothering decade of machismo movies: The Expendables (hulk-crammed vehicle for Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis and Co); The A-Team; The Karate Kid.

Most of these movies share a set of assumptions. It is reasonable to expect the spectator to bring a body and two senses: sight, hearing. It is unreasonable to expect him to bring a brain. The movies must be big on action, glamour, stars, spectacle, novelty (though not too much of that), but light on cognitive demands. This is vacation time, after all.

The summer blockbuster was born on June 20 1975, when Jaws opened wide. The movie and its bestselling source novel by Peter Benchley, published the previous year, were ideal for summer customers, for all those human beach towels ready to be scared off the beaches. Jaws producer David Brown admitted: “The release of the film was deliberately delayed till people were in the water off the summer beach resorts.”

The makers and the studio, Universal, sensed the occasion and opportunity. Three times the normal number of press and media interviews were given during the shooting of Jaws. At a Long Beach sneak preview, Universal moguls Lew Wasserman and Sidney Sheinberg tape-recorded the enthusiastic audience reaction and then launched an unprecedented $700,000 worth of TV advertising on 211m homes. Add stunt publicity such as special Jaws ice-cream flavours – “finnilla”, “jawberry”, “sharkalate” – and no one was surprised that, after 11 weeks on screen, Jaws was the highest-earning film in North American history.

Jaws also gave audiences the ultimate thrill ride. Chased by a shark? You can’t get more adrenalised than that. The audience lived the drama with the embattled characters played by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Spielberg would later match his Great White with all-but-man-eating Nazis in the Indiana Jones saga and dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park series. Jaws had given him the template for the perfect blockbuster. Create a colossal baddie (human or animal) and a colossal hero, or at least a colourfully beleaguered crew of would-be heroes, follow by natural law.

In the years after Jaws, the entire release calendar changed. What had been a novelty became a habit; especially when Star Wars, two years on from Jaws, repeated the magic. The smash-hit opening for George Lucas’s film in May 1977 turned a small-budget sci-fi sleeper into a wake-up call for the industry. The second and third Star Wars films opened at three-year intervals – The Empire Strikes Back in May 1980, Return of the Jedi in May 1983 – and the blockbusting movie franchise was born.

Every filmgoer climbed aboard the carousel. From Star Wars (1977) to Die Hard (1988) to Batman (1989) to Jurassic Park (1993), through one-offs such as Top Gun (1986) and Independence Day (1996) – a previously untapped summer audience was tapped senseless. Depending on when you boarded this carousel, you were a child of the shark age, the Skywalker age, the space age or the Digisaurus age. Semiologists and sociologists scratch their heads over why different ages respond to different story trends. Probable answer? Hollywood tells them to. Or technology says, “Now is the time” (as with photo-realistic dinosaurs).

Though some smash-hits stubbornly cling to winter openings (Titanic and Avatar were both Christmas season hits), the summer mainly sets the fashions and rings the tills. It has done so ever since studios realised the movie-going demographic was getting younger – there are more teenagers in America today than ever – and that school vacation time was a desert of idleness waiting to be made fertile.

In the process the term “blockbuster”, defined by size of revenue rather than size of budget, proved it wasn’t even restricted to the action-adventure, the epic, the big-budget fantasy. A comedy could be a blockbuster. It could win audiences even by making fun of the summer blockbuster.

In July 1980 a little film called Airplane! opened. Costing $3m to make, it took $83m, becoming one of the highest-flying comedies of all time. One of its three directors was Jerry Zucker. (The others were Zucker’s brother David and Jim Abrahams.)

“We took it round a lot of studios who turned it down. Finally Paramount liked it, though they tried to get other people to direct it,” says Zucker. The trio persevered. Having written it together, they wanted to direct it together.

“The first studio preview at Paramount was a disaster,” he continues. “They pulled people in off the lot. No one laughed except for one guy who was hysterical throughout. Then we previewed it ourselves in college campuses and gave out free tickets. Word of mouth grew. And the trailer played really well.” (It featured a mini-spoof of Jaws, with the plane nosing through clouds to the ominous, oom-pah shark theme).

The summer “blockbuster” could be anything: that was clear, or is now. Who could have predicted some of the high-season hits that have entered Hollywood’s history book? A multi-instalment religious allegory for kids? (The Chronicles of Narnia.) A pirate adventure built around a star, Johnny Depp, who insists on delivering a camp impersonation of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards? If a film crashes the record books, that is enough.

So $200m is piled into Shrek Forever After or $300m into Alice in Wonderland 3D, in the faith they will return $500m and $750m respectively. Two and a half times your investment, goes the Hollywood accounting wisdom, is black ink.

Another industry wisdom is that filmgoers want more of the same. So every summer brings a salvo of sequels. The titles resemble football results. This year’s, if simplified to names and numbers, would read: Sex and the City 2, Iron Man 2; Twilight 3, Shrek 4; Toy Story 3(D), Piranha 3(D).

Hollywood has become craftier with spin-offs. It no longer rubber-stamps rubber sharks swimming in diminishing circles of audience feeding frenzy, as with the infamous Jaws sequels. As Steven Spielberg (who directed none of the follow-ups) once told me: “In my hands Jaws 2, 3 and 4, if I had made them, still would have failed because of the improbability of a shark that large occurring thrice. The audience will only accept so much until it becomes hooey.” 

Now pains are taken to immunise sequels against the ridiculous. Ingenious time-games, including prequels, or new injections of star power (Sean Connery coming in as Indiana Jones’s dad) freshen the formula. Yet repetition is still part of the charm. Whoever said, long ago, that movie theatres were the new cathedrals was right. Audiences like liturgies. They like trooping into large, umbrageous buildings where everyone delivers the same responses and seeks to experience the same raptures. They await the awesome, the unintelligible, the transcendent. Instead of God, it is dinosaurs, space monsters, vampires, digimated swamp ogres. Whatever we cannot understand will make us strong.

But audiences want something different as well as the same, the same as well as different. Hollywood has to keep squaring the circle. If a movie surprises, or defies expectation, so much the better. Let it surprise again. Let novelty and ritual be served on the same plate. Next year Pirates of the Caribbean 4 will arrive, the first film ever to have auditioned its actresses with a “jigging” test to determine the silicone-free authenticity of their breasts. Men in Black 3 will arrive, slotted in for Memorial Day. The difference this time for the FBI-versus-extraterrestrials saga? Yes, 3D. The aliens will land in our laps.

A lot of water has passed under a lot of monster-hunting adventures since Jaws. Yet its legacy lives on. Steven Spielberg still works. And though two Jaws stars have died, Shaw and Scheider, to discover the third you need only check out this year’s Piranha 3D. There he is. Richard Dreyfuss. Still acting, still fishing. For the story of the summer blockbuster is the greatest true-life fisherman’s yarn of all, one that just gets longer and just gets bigger.

.............................

The five biggest summer blockbusters

1. The Dark Knight July 2008)

Takings: $533.3m

In brief: Batman’s (Christian Bale) war on crime against sinister mastermind The Joker (Heath Ledger) is complicated when district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and he fall for the same girl, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Ledger’s posthumous appearance, six months after his death, undoubtedly enhances the film’s must-see appeal, writes Kirsty Blake-Knox.

2. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (May 1977)

Takings: $460.9m

In brief: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) joins Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and a cast of mechanical misfits in a bid to rescue rebel leader Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from the clutches of Darth Vader’s empire. Box-office triumph results in a franchise spanning more than 30 years and Leia became every sci-fi geek’s fantasy woman.

3. Shrek 2 (May 2004)

Takings: $436.7m

In brief: newlywed ogres Fiona and Shrek run into marital difficulties when Shrek meets his in-laws, the King and Queen of Far, Far Away. Dangerous adventures ensue, involving wisecracking donkeys, breakdancing pigs and Antonio Banderas.

Out of this world

4. E.T. (June 1982)

Takings: $434.9m

In brief: ‘Jaws’ creator Spielberg brings us an alien who is sheltered from the US government by a 10-year-old boy. After an airborne bike ride and a series of fancy dress moments, E.T. finally gets his wish to “go home”.

5. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (May 1999)

Takings: $431.1m

In brief: The first of three “prequels”, chronicling an age before Luke Skywalker and dated special effects. Despite huge takings the film received tepid reviews from Star Wars fans.

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BT: Evolution of Movie Marketing

Cinema

Published July 23, 2010

The evolution of movie marketing By NATALIE KOH WITHOUT the level of technology we have today, how were movies promoted in the past? There were no blogs, Facebook, Twitter or even toy merchandising to create hype about movies back then. But producers still found ways to promote their offerings - ways that the ongoing exhibition at The Cathay Gallery reveals.   Seducing moviegoers: Efforts to evoke public interest depicted at the exhibition include photos of elaborate floats (above) for bigger films such as 'Cleopatra' (1963), and memorabilia such as a gun in a Bible (next) for the 1976 movie, 'God's Gun' This year, in celebration of its 75th anniversary, Cathay Organisation, one of Singapore's leading leisure and entertainment groups, has put up a temporary exhibition - Box Office Hits: The Magic Of Movie Marketing - in The Cathay Gallery to show the evolution of movie marketing, juxtaposed with the resident exhibition that showcases the evolution of Cathay Organisation over the decades. Lindy Poh, curator of the exhibition, says: 'It was important for Cathay to showcase the evolution as a self-aware acknowledgement of how fluid, nimble and creative the Cathay team has been over the years. The objects or events that appealed to people of that time reveal the trends of the time - the popularity of a-go-go and cha cha competitions to promote movies, for instance.' The exhibits consist of freebies that were used to promote movies, such as paper napkins and wax cups with the movie titles and pictures of the actors printed on them; old posters; memorabilia such as a gun in a Bible for the 1976 movie, God's Gun; as well as photos of events held to create awareness and evoke public interest. These include costumed promoters, such as moving mascots for Tempest (1979), human billboards and elaborate floats for bigger films such as Cleopatra (1963). Ms Poh describes some of the other differences between movie marketing of the past and the present that are highlighted in the exhibition. 'The extent and investment in marketing and merchandising has also changed,' she says. 'It is no longer an aspect that kicks in after a movie is done, but is factored in at a really early stage of movie production. Some estimates tell us that about 5 per cent of expected box-office takings was spent on marketing and merchandising. Now the percentages are phenomenal.' But even though movie marketing of the past was not as large-scale as the huge advertisements on MRT trains or the infinite number of plush toys of various Pixar characters sold everywhere we turn today, movie promotion during that time was still creative - and, above all, more personal than it is now. Ms Poh says: 'I have met people who saw the exhibition who thought it was more personal, more imaginative, more 'real'. For myself, it was an eye-opener to see what was done - the promotion efforts were disarming and quirky.' As the exhibition traces the evolution of movie marketing and the growth of Cathay throughout the past 75 years, it is also a reflection of how the audience has changed during that time. Ms Poh says: 'Movie marketing has evolved because audiences have evolved - effective marketing picks up on how people relate to products, services or events at particular periods of time. The exhibition is not an extensive one but it does track certain shifts in popular culture.' The Cathay Gallery (#02-16 at The Cathay) is open Mondays to Saturdays, 12pm-8pm, and closed on Sundays and public holidays. The exhibition is on until Dec 16. Admission is free

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http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/apple-facetime-commercial/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

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NY Times: Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!)

“A lot of comedies in the last 30 years have wanted to be ‘Airplane...But most of those movies took the wrong message from ‘Airplane!’ They were gag, gag, gag, gag, where ‘Airplane!’ is really structured, driving the story along all the time. In a weird way it’s like a Beatles movie. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of sweat and blood that went into it.”

"Seeing the movie for the first time taught me a great lesson: You’ve got to play comedy as if it’s deadly serious. You’ve got to play weirdness as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.”

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Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!)

Paramount/Everett Collection

From left, Julie Hagerty, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (lying down), Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves in “Airplane!” (1980), written and directed by Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker.

 

 

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Published: June 25, 2010

WHEN the creators of “Airplane!” were lining up actors for their rollicking parody three decades ago, some of the straight-arrow character actors that ended up in the cast worried about the harm it might do to their careers. One of the most skittish participants: Peter Graves, the taciturn “Mission: Impossible” star who played the movie’s pilot, a kindly veteran who welcomes a little boy named Billy into the cockpit and asks questions like “Ever seen a grown man naked?”

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Clips From 'Airplane!'

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Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection

Mr. Nielsen in the picture. He starred in subsequent projects for the writing-directing team.

“His agent got him the script, and he was totally turned off by it,” Jerry Zucker, who wrote and directed the film with his brother, David Zucker, and their lifelong friend Jim Abrahams, said recently during a phone interview with his erstwhile partners. “He thought it was tasteless trash.”

Mr. Abrahams interjected, his voice perfectly deadpan: “I don’t understand. What did he think was tasteless about pedophilia?”

Graves (who died in March) needn’t have worried. Within months of its release in July 1980 “Airplane!” became the highest-grossing comedy in box office history, a distinction that held until “Ghostbusters” came along in 1984. And it remains one of the most influential. Its anything-goes slapstick and furious pop culture riffs can be seen in the 20-gags-a-minute relentlessness of “The Simpsons,” “South Park” and “Family Guy” and grab-bag big-screen parodies like “Epic Movie, “Date Movie” and the “Scary Movie” franchise (the third and fourth installments of which were directed by none other than David Zucker). It also inspired “Airplane II: The Sequel” in 1982.

“I was in Rhode Island the first time I saw ‘Airplane!’ ” recalled Peter Farrelly, who co-directed “There’s Something About Mary” and many other slapstick comedies with his brother, Bobby. “Seeing it for the first time was like going to a great rock concert, like seeing Led Zeppelin or the Talking Heads. We didn’t realize until later that what we’d seen was a very specific kind of comedy that we now call the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker school.”

Peter Farrelly and a writing partner, Bennett Yellin, were so enamored with “Airplane!” that they contrived to get a comedy script (still unproduced) into the hands of David Zucker, who liked it enough to give them their first Hollywood writing job. “I’ll tell you right now,” Peter Farrelly said, “if the Zuckers didn’t exist, there would be no Farrelly brothers.”

Back in 1979, when “Airplane!” was being shot on Universal’s back lot in Los Angeles, it didn’t seem like a potential blockbuster. The three Wisconsin-born filmmakers were rather amazed that anybody would give them a budget — and $3.5 million at that — to make such a lark, one that had no big stars. A follow-up to their 1977 cult film “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” which they had written, this was an extended riff on “Zero Hour!,” a glum thriller from 1957 about an imperiled aircraft that set the template for the next half-century’s worth of disaster pictures.

The plentiful pop cultural references and anything-for-a-laugh attitude of “Airplane!” recalled early films by Mel Brooks (“Blazing Saddles”) and Woody Allen (“Bananas”). But its velocity and density were new. Every scene was packed with surreal, often faintly metafictional sight gags (including a supporting turn by the N.B.A. giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a co-pilot who denies that he’s really Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a cameo by Ethel Merman playing a psychiatric patient who thinks he’s Ethel Merman). And the film proudly served up jokes so astoundingly corny that they somehow managed to circle around the bend and become hilarious. (“Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley!”)

At the same time “Airplane!” wasn’t just a collection of bits. The narrative hewed closely to that of “Zero Hour!,” and if you can factor out all the silliness — no small feat with a movie that segues from a “Casablanca”-inspired romantic flashback to a “Saturday Night Fever”-like dance number — what remains is a compact, even classical piece of filmmaking.

“A lot of comedies in the last 30 years have wanted to be ‘Airplane!,’ ” said Patton Oswalt, a comedian and actor and the voice of the hero in “Ratatouille.” “But most of those movies took the wrong message from ‘Airplane!’ They were gag, gag, gag, gag, where ‘Airplane!’ is really structured, driving the story along all the time. In a weird way it’s like a Beatles movie. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of sweat and blood that went into it.”

The filmmakers Z.A.Z. team cast relative unknowns — Robert Hays, a co-star of the sitcom “Angie,” and the angel-voiced, deeply kooky Julie Hagerty — as the film’s estranged lovers. And they filled out the production with sturdy, unglamorous character actors, including Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen, who would build a second career out of playing clueless, comic creators of mayhem.

Mr. Hays, who played Ted Striker, the shell-shocked ex-military pilot with a drinking problem (cue beverage tossed in face), said Mr. Nielsen, a prankster, was a key influence on the movie’s tone. Mr. Nielsen kept the actors off-balance by interrupting their line readings with his favorite comic prop, a hand-held toy simulating flatulence.

“He played that thing like a maestro,” said Mr. Hays, who conveniently was a licensed pilot flying small aircraft since the late 1970s. (“To this day, when I’m heading over to a plane, I sometimes still get looks from people that are like, ‘Are you sure you want to get in there?’ ”)

The nominal plot of “Airplane!” recounts the efforts of a stalwart flight crew trying to land a commercial airliner after spoiled fish incapacitates most of the crew and passengers.

“Originally the movie was kind of trying to continue what we did in our first film, ‘Kentucky Fried Movie,’ ” said Jerry Zucker, who co-directed “Top Secret!” (1984), the cop-show parody television series “Police Squad!” (1982), and its spinoff “Naked Gun” films (starring Mr. Nielsen) with his brother and Mr. Abrahams. Solo, he has directed “Big Business,” “Ghost” and others.

“We had a live revue theater that we operated for one year in Madison starting in 1971, and then we moved the show to L.A. a year later,” he added. “We had a video component of the show that would play onstage in front of the live sketches — satires and spoofs of commercials.”

The team used a reel-to-reel video recorder to capture local television broadcasts and generate ideas. When “Zero Hour!” ended up on one of the tapes, the three knew they had struck comic gold. The first “Airplane!” script, titled “The Late Show,” was a variation on “Kentucky Fried Movie”: a “Zero Hour!” sendup interrupted by parodies of television commercials.

“There is one line in ‘Zero Hour!’ where a stewardess says, completely seriously, ‘The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner,’ ” Mr. Abrahams said. “That was the essence of the movie. We just repeated the line. We didn’t have to change a thing.”

Mr. Oswalt said: “Seeing the movie for the first time taught me a great lesson: You’ve got to play comedy as if it’s deadly serious. You’ve got to play weirdness as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.”

There was plenty of weirdness to play, and while the cast eventually got into the spirit of things, some of the veterans — those who’d cut their acting teeth in solemn television and movie dramas and wholesome sitcoms — were flummoxed at first. Barbara Billingsley never imagined that her long stint as the saintly suburban mom on “Leave It to Beaver” would lead to an “Airplane!” cameo as a woman who volunteers to interpret the subtitled street patois of some passengers. (“Oh, stewardess? I speak jive.”)

“She was totally nervous, but she read the scene pretty much the way you saw it in the movie,” said Mr. Abrahams.

Jerry Zucker added, “She was convincing without trying to be funny, which is what we wanted.” Had the entire film been poker faced, it might not have had the same energizing effect on viewers, Mr. Hays said. He credited the film’s success to its unpredictable mix of droll performances and bursts of anarchic visual humor. One of his favorites: “Reporters end an interview by saying, ‘O.K., guys, let’s get some pictures,’ and they start picking stuff right off the walls.”

He continued: “People tell me, ‘You guys were the first ones to do that kind of comedy,’ and I say, ‘Thank you.’ But the truth of the matter is, we were following in the footsteps of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy and ‘The Goon Show.’ It’s all one long evolution, and we just happened to be one of the steps along that path.’ ” The team has tried to put the experience in perspective and be humbled by it. But not so you’d notice.

“A lot has happened over the last 30 years,” Mr. Abrahams said, “but one thing that David and Jerry and I have all shared is that when we had children, the first thing we would do when we woke them up in the morning was ask, ‘What movie did Daddy direct?’ ”

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