film and architecture section: Dick Tracy by Warren Beatty, architecture and film appreciation

category: Architecture and Film

film index: 57

relationship with architecture: storng relationship of architecture as a set with the storyline, architecture of the future

study subject in: The waterloo University syllabus (click HERE for syllabus)

film: Dick Tracy

director: Warren Beatty

writers: Screenplay:Jim Cash, Jack Epps, Jr., Characters: Chester Gould

production: US

release: June 15, 1990

playtime: 105 mins

visual: colour

Language: English

Subtitles:

Genre: thriller

Cast: Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Madonna, Glenne Headly, Charlie Korsmo

size: 730 mb

reference: innomoviz.blogspot.com, avaxhome.ws, rapid.org, www.taringa.net, warezdonkey.com

Description and download:

A flawed but stylish adaptation of the Chester Gould comic strip by director Warren Beatty, who also stars in the title role. The minimalist plot involves a battalion of baddies who confront the intrepid detective in a series of strung-together vignettes. Al Pacino is a comedic if overblown standout as Big Boy Caprice, and Madonna simply smolders as aggressive blonde bombshell Breathless Mahoney. Shot in bright, primary colors, this also won Oscars for Best Art/Set Direction and Makeup (for those inventively hideous criminals).

Dick Tracy is a 1990 pulp action film based on the 1930s comic strip character of the same name created by Chester Gould. Warren Beatty produced, directed, and starred in the film, which features supporting roles from Al Pacino, Madonna, Glenne Headly and Charlie Korsmo. Dick Tracy depicts the detective's love relationships with Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) and Tess Truehart (Headley), as well as his conflicts with crime boss Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice (Pacino). Tracy also begins his upbringing of "The Kid" (Korsmo).

Early in the development of Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty decided to make the film using a palette limited to just seven colors, primarily red, green, blue and yellow - to evoke the film's comic strip origins; furthermore each of the colors was to be exactly the same shade. Beatty's design team included production designer Richard Sylbert, set decorator Rick Simpson, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, visual effects supervisors Michael Lloyd and Harrison Ellenshaw, prosthetic makeup designers John Caglione, Jr. and Doug Drexler, and costume designer Milena Canonero. Their main intention was to stay close to Chester Gould's original drawings from the 1930s. Other influences came from the Art Deco movement and German Expressionism.

For Storaro, the limited color palette was the most challenging aspect of production. "These are not the kind of colors the audience is used to seeing," he noted. "These are much more dramatic in strength, in saturation. Comic strip art is usually done with very simple and primitive ideas and emotions," Storaro theorized. "One of the elements is that the story is usually told in vignette, so what we tried to do is never move the camera at all. Never. Try to make everything work into the frame." For the matte paintings, Ellenshaw and Lloyd executed over 57 paintings on glass, which were then optically combined with the live action. For a brief sequence in which The Kid dashes in front of a speeding locomotive, only 150-foot (46 m) feet of real track was laid; the train itself was a 2-foot (0.61 m) scale model, and the surrounding train yard a matte painting.

Caglione and Drexler were recommended for the prosthetic makeup designs by Canonero, with whom they had worked on The Cotton Club (1984). The rogues gallery makeup designs were directly taken from Gould's drawings,with the exception of Al Pacino (Big Boy Caprice), who improvised his own designs, ignoring the rather overweight character of the strip. His makeup took 3.5 hours to apply.

Imdb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099422/
wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy_%281990_film%29

screencaps:

sneak peaks:

pages

Monday, November 16, 2009

Dick Tracy by Warren Beatty, architecture and film appreciation

0 comments:

Post a Comment

disclaimer