Countdown to the Oscars: Film Location Awards

It’s been almost ten years since I arrived in Chicago and set off into the wilds of downtown for a job interview and emerged from the office building cozied up between a few much more towering edifices and looked up and did a double take and mentally gasped and internally cried: “OH MY GOD! THAT’S THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING! AM I GOING TO WORK NEXT TO THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING?!” For several years, I very much did, and as a zealot of the film de cinema, the rush never really dissipated for me.

Film locations, in other words, are all around me. Yet it’s not simply the “Adventures in Babysitting” building nor the Cameron Frye painting at the Art Institute (which totally has its own name, FYI) or the Jewelers Building where Batman stood aloft looking down over a twinkling Gotham that looked so much more dazzling than when it was Pittsburgh or that other city somewhere on the east coast. No, there are so many more, so many you might never suspect, so many that are so small but so crucial. Locations like the Black Rock, the bar just a couple blocks down from me where bits and pieces of “Drinking Buddies” was filmed, or The Double Door, where “High Fidelity” ended and where I was less than a week ago, or the St. Vincent de Paul Parish where Kelly Macdonald in my beloved “The Merry Gentleman” visited and which I pass by, oh, say, twice a month during my favorite walk in the city.

It was my friend and film blogger and/or filmmaker extraordinaire Alex Withrow of And So It Begins... who brought to my attention the existence of the Location Managers Guild of America (LMGA) and, even better, the LMGA Awards, scheduled this year on March 7 at The Wallis Beverly Hills. Film Location awards! Of course! It makes so much sense! Let’s say “Birdman” wins Best Picture. You will, whether consciously or not, remember the St. James Theater as much as the bird costume. Sure, you’ll remember the visual effects of “Interstellar” but also lingering in the back of your mind will be the locales of Alberta, Canada.

The LMGA recognizes Outstanding Feature Film and Outstanding Achievement By A Location Professional and Outstanding Film Commission and, heck, despite only having had an awards show for two years they have a Lifetime Achievement Award! The vaunted Eva Monley Award, bestowed last year upon Alexander Payne, no doubt for this. We here at Cinema Romantico felt there was no choice but to hop on the bandwagon.

1st Annual Cinema Romantico Film Location Awards

Night Moves. Aidan Sleeper, Location Manager. It’s not simply the radiant foliage of Oregon standing at attention throughout but the barn functioning as a sort of eco-friendly Studio 54 where club-hoppers drink out of mason jars and listen to fiddles as well as the bouts of pro-environmental pissed off poetry that director Kelly Reichardt captures whether in the fleeting image of apocalyptic timber or a white collar home with a fake waterfall in the backyard whose real-life owner must not have realized Ms. Reichardt employed it to give said owner the middle finger.

Only Lovers Left Alive. Chris-Teena Constas (Detroit). The Tangier locations as managed by Mohamed Benhmamane are spectacular in their own right, no doubt, but what Jarmusch’s vampire film does for the Motor City is beyond reproach, eliciting a vibrant apocalyptic air through its locales, a nostalgia that makes it seem like modern America’s version of a fallen Rome. Maybe the ruined Michigan Theater was an obvious choice, maybe not, but, God help me, that sequence’s romantic doom is taken up to eleven because of its setting.

Beneath the Harvest Sky. Josh LaJoie, Location Manager. Admittedly part of this stems from my own whimsy. Though “Beneath the Harvest Sky” was filmed in Maine’s Aroostook County, nudging up right alongside the Canadian border, its look and feel is nonetheless akin to the rural Midwest, and that always arouses fondness in my oft-homesick mentality. The opening shot features kids tossing rocks at a ramshackle water tower because what else do they have to do? That water tower is more beautiful than any iron latticework on the Champ de Mars.

Boyhood. Peter Atherton, Robbie Friedman, Steve White, Jose Luis Hernandez, Location Managers. For Antone’s alone. What other place could so perfectly capture a father's heart-to-heart with his son in advance of the son on the precipice of becoming “a man”?

A Few Other 2014 Movie Shots I Love

I always write a lengthy diatribe about my favorite movie shot of the year (see: yesterday) but thought I might go one further this time around and pay homage to (rip off) my friend Ryan McNeil at The Matinee who annually puts up a hella awesome post in which he submits a few of his favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary. So here are a few of my favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary.

Only Lovers Left Alive

The best art, whether of a performance, literary or visual variety, is ageless. Certain vampires are also ageless, which is precisely what makes them the perfect vessel to express the preceding sentiment. Though the word vampire is never used and its exact definition within the film’s world is never established, the characters at the forefront of “Only Lovers Left Alive” demonstrate vampiric tendencies of the classical sense. Blood denotes life, wood denotes death; yet the finer points of these mythical nocturnal creatures’ folklore is merely the handsome contrivance by which the film becomes an intoxicating elegy for the artist as a purveyor of cultural truth. Perhaps that sounds elitist, but the tone is too marvelously dreamy to get bogged down in smarm. If ever a film could make a mere mortal comprehend the replenishing sensation of drinking blood, it’s this one.

Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a reclusive musician on the outskirts of an apocalyptic Detroit, surrounded by vintage recording equipment and occasionally peeking through his rustic curtains at “rock ‘n’ rollers” ringing his doorbell who want to pay homage but whom he ignores. Born of another time in the truest sense, he has walled himself from the rest of America, partially by circumstance but partially by choice. To him, they (we) are zombies. Not the flesh-eating, slow-moving zombies of Romero, but the workaday drones for whom CBS TV is the creative pinnacle. It’s what might have happened had Marion Cotillard of “Midnight In Paris” time-traveled to now. How can you deal with art of the Aughts when you lived through the Belle Epoque?

It’s not a stretch, in fact, to imagine the film’s auteur, Jim Jarmusch, an American independent mainstay since the 80’s, insulated in his editing bay and surrounded by old LP’s and bound copies of the titans of literature. When Adam’s better half, the predictably named Eve, played by a wildly evocative Tilda Swinton with a delirious white wig explosion that suggests she is trying out for the part of Lady Gaga, takes a transatlantic plane flight, she packs her suitcase with poetry of the Renaissance, amongst other selections, a quiet statement against the horrors of airport book racks. Still, she finds pleasure in the here and now, even if it’s out of the past, putting on a soul record and commanding her bloodthirsty partner of several hundred years to dance. “Only Lovers Left Alive” is Jim Jarmusch dancing alone but allowing everyone in to see.

Plot is minimal and atmosphere is extensive. The blood of today’s humans has become too dangerous, too infected with toxins and, I assume, high fructose corn syrup, to feast in the manner of Nosferatu, and so much detail is paid to the way in which Adam and Eve acquire precious supplies of O negative. (This allows for a two scene cameo by Jeffery Wright which is the subtlest form of high comedy you’ll ever see.) They are in love but they live continents apart, because after a century or two even true lovers need some alone time. But disillusioned, Adam summons Eve, and she finds herself hopping nighttime flights from the mazes of Morocco to the lyrical smokestacks of Motown.

Jarmusch has gone on record as referring to Detroit as the Paris of the Midwest, and he revels in its majesty as much as its ruin. Adam takes Eve for rides in his muscle car, cruising through landscapes of quashed American dreams, and here Jarmusch’s tone is less holier-than-thou than longingly romantic. They stand in the ruin of the Michigan Theater, remade as a parking garage, its faded beauty still somehow cutting through the degradation. Eve is more willing to revel in what was than Adam, who prefers to bemoan what everything has become, never more so than when Eve's precocious sister Ava (Mia Wasikowksa) suddenly appears.

If Adam and Eve are sunglasses-at-night, slow-motion-striding rock stars, Ava is an L.A. teenybopper, bound to adolescence forever, hungry for instant gratification and the theoretical lights, an embodiment in the mind of Adam of all that has gone wrong with the world. It is a brilliantly mischievous performance that would threaten to steal the film if the film weren't so good in every facet that it's unstealable. Ava's irresponsibility threatens to be the final wooden stake to Adam's heart.

One could read the film as Jarmusch's disgust with how art has sort of become interchangable with entertainment and thus, one might wonder if it symbolizes an opulent white flag. Except that Jarmusch fought for seven years to gain financing, never giving up, eventually winning out, Rotten Tomatoes scores and box office be damned. Which is why it's just as easy to read the film as its creator's own cinematic chalice of replenishing O negative. He's a survivor, baby.