Roma (Movie)

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    In These CGI-Heavy Movies, There’s Not an Explosion in Sight

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    Though blockbusters are synonymous with computer imagery, dramas and art-house films rely extensively on tech magic, too. Don’t be fooled by the naturalism.A woman crosses a bustling street at night. Cars pass noisily. A streetcar cruises by. Behind her, we see twinkling streetlights, a cinema marquee, towering neon signs. It rained earlier; the roads are still wet. It’s Mexico City in the early 1970s, and it feels vibrantly alive.This is a scene in “Roma” (2018), Alfonso Cuarón’s naturalistic, semi-autobiographical black-and-white drama based on the life of the housekeeper who helped raise him as a child. It’s also, less obviously, a dazzling showcase of visual effects.The huge movie theater in the background is entirely CGI. So is the streetcar, and many of the other vehicles, as well as most of the buildings, signs, facades, lights and pedestrians. Even the reflections visible in the puddles on the road were created on a computer. Though it’s been designed to be completely inconspicuous and convincing, Aaron Weintraub, the head of creative operations at the visual effects studio MPC, describes this moment as “one of our flagship shots.”What comes to mind when you think of visual effects, or VFX? For most people, it’s fantasy and science fiction: aliens in spaceships, superheroes zooming across imaginary lands. And while it’s certainly true that big-budget genre films and summer blockbusters are rife with computer-generated imagery, VFX studios like MPC estimate that about half the work they produce is made to be invisible. For every “Kraven the Hunter” or “Argylle,” there’s a “Ferrari,” “Maestro” or “Killers of the Flower Moon,” movies with sophisticated visual effects that the filmmakers hope you’ll never realize was an effect at all.“When people talk about VFX, it’s the obvious stuff — the explosions, the laser beams, the science-fiction stuff,” Weintraub said. “But there’s a whole world of work being done that’s transparent to the audience, and no one is supposed to know.” He likened it to the work of film and TV costume designers. What attracts attention and wins Oscars, he said, are “lavish period costumes and fancy superhero suits,” but in fact, “you have a costume designer on every film who makes normal clothes that normal people wear, and no one talks about them.”In “Nightmare Alley,” the digital effects include the addition of flames, above, and the deletion of a line of dialogue. Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      25 Biggest Oscar Snubs of All Time

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      Every year since the Academy Awards were invented, somebody has been overlooked, ignored, passed over, disregarded or brushed off. You know what they say about beauty and beholders.But perceived Oscar omissions — snubs, as we have come to call them — have grown into a frenzied annual conversation, with people left off the nomination list, or nominated but denied a statuette, sometimes receiving as much attention, or more, as those who win.These are the 25 true snubs and unjust losses that Times film critics, columnists, writers and editors still can’t get over. Read more →‘Do the Right Thing’ for Best Picture (1990)Actual winner: “Driving Miss Daisy”Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in the Brooklyn-set drama.Universal PicturesSome people hated this movie. Others, more ominously, feared it, or claimed to. News articles and reviews imagined riots sprouting in its wake (they never came), seeing in the character of Mookie — who, in a fit of righteous fury, smashes a pizzeria window in the film’s famous climax — confirmation of Lee’s insidious intent. Did academy voters have similar misgivings? Lee, who was shut out of the directing category, did receive a nomination for his screenplay, suggesting at least one branch of the organization had his back. (Danny Aiello was also nominated for supporting actor.) But it’s hard to look at the eventual best picture winner, “Driving Miss Daisy” — a film in which Morgan Freeman plays Hoke Colburn, the patient chauffeur of a bigoted, elderly white woman — and not see a statement of preference. In 1990, it was the Hoke Colburns of the world, not the Mookies, who were welcome on the academy’s biggest stage. REGGIE UGWU, pop culture reporterWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice: Can Iñárritu Beguile Oscar Voters Again With ‘Bardo’?

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      The director behind award-season favorites ‘Birdman’ and ‘The Revenant’ returns with a personal new movie, but not everyone is a fan.I love a great movie debate, and on only its second day, the Venice Film Festival has kicked off a robust one. As I walked out of the press screening for Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s lengthy new film “Bardo,” I thought I had just watched Oscar catnip, the kind of movie that awards voters typically go gaga for.Then I talked to other people.“Bar-NO,” texted one critic. “Three hours? So self-indulgent,” said a film festival programmer. And in a hotel elevator later that day, an Italian woman segued smoothly from complaining about the weather (“Horrible!”) to the movie (“Also horrible! Why does he have to copy Cuarón?”).She was implying that “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (to use its full title) takes more than a few cues from Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” and there are certainly some similarities: Like his friend Cuarón, Iñárritu is a Hollywood-venerated filmmaker who has returned to his native Mexico for a Netflix-financed autofiction teeming with long takes, digital tricks and stunning cinematography.The streaming service certainly hopes that “Bardo” can net the same Oscar nominations as the laureled “Roma” (which wound up taking three statuettes), and with Iñárritu at the helm, there’s reason to be bullish: Every film he’s made has received at least one Oscar nomination, and he’s coming off back-to-back best director wins for “The Revenant” (2015) and “Birdman” (2014), as well as a best picture victory for the latter film.So will award voters respond more favorably than that initial wave of Venice filmgoers would indicate? I think so. Certainly, the plot will resonate more with them: “Bardo” is Iñárritu’s riff on “8½”: it’s a surreal dramedy about Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a documentarian making sense of his life story. Though he’s prone to dreamlike visions, Gama’s problems are the kind that middle-aged Hollywood types can relate to: Do I deserve my success, or am I a fraud? Have I spent too little time at home with my family? Will my children be spoiled and entitled?After Iñárritu shot “Amores Perros” in Mexico in 2000, he and his family moved to Los Angeles to pursue mainstream Hollywood success, just as the “Bardo” protagonist did. In many ways, Gama is a thinly veiled Iñárritu stand-in: He’s attired just like his creator and haunted by an old collaborator who now shuns him, which may be a reference to the rancorous professional breakup between Iñárritu and the co-writer of his early films, Guillermo Arriaga.But though the film acknowledges Gama’s flaws, it doesn’t really examine them. Characters tell Gama that he’s too self-involved, too bougie, too fake, and we have to take their word for it, since Gama just shrugs and moves on. Giménez Cacho is appealing but passive in the role, which may inhibit a robust awards run, but the film can definitely rack up several technical nominations: Darius Khondji’s cinematography is superb, and all of Gama’s visions — apartments flooded with sand, subways steeped in fish-tank water — are brought to incredible life by the production designer Eugenio Caballero (who also worked on “Roma”).Past that, we’ll see how well the film connects with the Hollywood types it’s portraying, and whether Netflix is willing to push it as hard (and as expensively) as it did “Roma.” Certainly, “Bardo” implies that streaming services have the coin for it: One of the movie’s most successful jokes is that in the world of “Bardo,” Amazon is about to complete its successful purchase not of a new awards contender but of the entire state of Baja California. Compared with that, what’s the cost of a few hundred for-your-consideration ads and some private planes? More