Biggie Smalls is the Illest

The Notorious B.I.G. (left) & 2Pac (right)

I've got this weird dream of one day making an epic biopic.

For those of you who don't read movie reviews regularly, a biopic is a "biographical picture," a film that traces the life of a historical or cultural figure, usually from childhood to death.  The most obvious recent examples are films like Ali, Ray, Walk the Line ("Ray for white people." - Jon Stewart), and the new Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar.

This dream of mine is weird for one reason: biopics suck.

As pretty much anyone could tell you, mainstream movies are typically structured and written based on a three-act structure.  At the end of the first act, after the filmmakers have finished establishing the world and its characters, this thing happens called the "inciting incident."  The inciting incident is almost always supposed to shock the characters in a bad way, shake up their world, and set the plot mechanics into motion.  The second act climaxes as the character/s reach their lowest point emotionally.  They manage to overcome the obstacle and the various plot threads are tied up and taken care of in the third act.  Look at any movie that gets a wide release.  It follows this formula.

In a way, the three-act structure rule is the American version of Aristotle's Poetics: it describes the most logical, efficient, and emotionally satisfying method for structuring a narrative.  The problem comes in when, as a writer or a viewer, you're forced to recognize the fact that genuine human experiences typically don't fit into a three-part progression of events.  This isn't so much a problem when you're working with characters who in no way resemble real human beings (almost every romantic comedy), but when you're taking on a biography, a real historical figure whose actual life story we all have access to, the three-act structure becomes tyrannical and ridiculous.

In my mind, the best example of this problem -- filmmakers stuffing a complex life story into a standard three-act narrative -- comes in the biopic of The Notorious B.I.G., a film called Notorious that strangely and deliberately avoided addressing all of the most notorious aspects of the life of the criminal poet Biggie Smalls.

Although this blog probably doesn't suggest it, I do have other interests outside of the cinema, and music happens to be one of them.  I search for and listen to music constantly, but as with films, my tastes are a little strange.  Where I come from, most everybody listens to Dave Matthews Band, O.A.R., Dispatch, preppy jam band shit like that.  That's fine, it makes sense, it's New Hampshire.  But around the time I started caring about music, starting understanding its effects, is the same time that my skinny white friend Zig introduced me to hip-hop.

The Notorious B.I.G.'s first album, Ready to Die, was the first rap album I ever bought.  It's a classic, genre-defining concept album that traces Biggie's life from birth, to his life on the streets robbing and killing, to his imagined death by suicide on a track called "Suicidal Thoughts."  This is the song with which Smalls ended the only album he released in his short life (he was killed in L.A. at age 24):

When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell,
Cause I'm a piece of shit, it ain't hard to fuckin' tell,
It don't make sense, goin' to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black Tims and black hoodies...
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin' abortion. 

He goes on to theorize that the "people at the funeral frontin' like they miss me," that the mother of his child is glad he's gone, that he's reached his peak and can't speak. And then he shoots himself in the head and the album ends.

This is a particularly bleak and brutal way to end a narrative, and I believe it speaks to the persona that Biggie spent his last few years of life cultivating.  The simpler rhymes I just quoted in "Suicidal Thoughts" don't totally do his art, but Biggie is unquestionably a rapper of the highest order, one of the most charismatic and naturally gifted wordsmiths to be found in popular American music.  However, when you listen to Ready to Die, and especially "Suicidal Thoughts" or "Gimme the Loot" or "Machine Gun Funk," you have to come to terms with something pretty basic: Biggie Smalls was mean.

The final act of Notorious posits that Biggie spent his last day on Earth reconciling with the mother of his first child, telling his own mother that he's proud of her, making heartfelt requests that his children join him in California, and apologizing to Lil Kim for all the times he treated her badly.  It's a cheesy movie with a worse final act that commits every narrative cliche available to it, and that's a damn shame.  Biggie Smalls might not have been a nice guy, but he was a brilliant artist.  He deserved better.

Any fan of Ray Charles or Johnny Cash could accuse their respective biopics, the aforementioned Ray and Walk the Line, of the exact same problem.  They're films filled with cliches that reduce complex and rebellious artists to these moral automatons teaching us all lessons about why you should be nice to people and why family is important.  You don't need cliches to express those idea.  And besides, those ideas don't do justice to the aesthetics and the bodies of work that these artists crafted.

My weird dreams is to make a biopic that doesn't reduce the central figure to a moral puppet, one that respects and pays homage to that figure's specific persona and life philosophy.  It's not hard to make a three-act film that ties up all its own loose ends along with all of its protagonist's flaws.  The hard part is making an emotionally satisfying film that recognizes its protagonist's complicated humanity.  After all, the evil inside defines us as much as the good.

JLG le Fou

"I have never been so worried as I was two days before shooting began.  I had nothing, nothing at all.  Oh, well, I had the book.  And a certain number of locations.  I knew it would take place by the sea.  The whole thing was shot, let's say, like in the days of Mack Sennett.  Maybe I am growing more and more apart from one section of current filmmaking.  Watching old films, one never gets the impression that they were bored working, probably because the cinema was something new in those days, whereas today people tend to look on it as very old."                   - Jean-Luc Godard on shooting Pierrot le fou

Any time you take up an interest or a hobby in earnest, I happen to believe you develop a kind of relationship with that part of your life, you go through waves of love and disinterest, worship and annoyed frustration.  But what makes a hobby a deep interest, I think, and what makes a person stick with that interest through the rough times, are that moment when you associate your own identity with it, when your life story becomes fused in a complicated way to this activity.

For me, this first interest that I grafted onto my personality was cinema -- movies, film, making them, watching them, all kind of tied in together.  I really didn't get to critiquing them or talking about them until much later on.  That's the point in time that I think my views on this obsession changed most.

Jean-Luc Godard is not a filmmaker that the average person you meet in class at an American university is going to have much interest in.  Maybe that's a generalization, but the man is not too audience-friendly, especially if that audience happens to be made up of 21st century youthful Americans who relentlessly consume expensive iPad games about birds and frogs and fruit while these same mobile devices are facilitating social revolution in the Middle East.  I'm not judging anyone for apps, I own an iPhone and am as guilty of this modern form of casual consumerism, but I'm just saying, Godard probably doesn't like us too much.

And on the flipside, I don't think most of his films would resonate with the average American kid today.  They definitely don't all resonate with me.  But all of the films by Godard I've seen (unfortunately, like most others, I've really only been exposed to his incredible 60s work... honestly it's enough for me at this point) inspire me in one way or another by virtue of their disruptive qualities.  Here's JLG explaining it better than I could, talking about editing:

"What is it ultimately that makes one run a shot on or change to another?  A director like Delbert Mann probably doesn't think this way.  He follows a pattern.  Shot -- the character speaks; reverse angle, someone answers.  Maybe this is why Pierrot le fou is not a film but an attempt at a film."

I can't talk about Delbert Mann.  But.  Improvisation, clearly, is an essential ingredient to Godard's work.  This might be a clumsy analogy, but based on his film production practices described at the top and his ideas about construction described just above, I've come to believe that what Godard does is a kind of jazz-fiction, an incorporation of traditional gestures/tropes of cinema (the guns, the girls, the romantic quest, the road), but arranged in the moment without regard for classical form.  And in the same way that jazz often loses me, sometimes Godard loses me, both politically and aesthetically.  I guess what I'm saying is that I value him more than some directors whose work I love more consistently because he is true to a strange method and the results are always jarring.  Jarring, but in a way that inspires you to see things differently.  And with the best of Godard, that feeling can last.

As I get further along in this project of analyzing my own musings and opinions on film, and as I find myself instinctively aligning my own personal views more and more with industry outsiders like Godard, I realize that my true problem is with the lack of a desire to surprise within our theaters.  Even if nobody ever really made good on the aesthetic promises of early Godard, radical and jarring cinema comes out all the time.  It just doesn't reach most people.  The kids have to go find it.

And I guess that's why I'm always so disappointed when I talk to anyone who mocks art cinema or dismisses anything that could be labeled, as I'm sure everybody including myself labels a Godard film, as "artsy."  The point isn't pretension or creating a cultural hierarchy, I believe the point of art cinema is to knock you upside the head momentarily, make you experience the world differently.  The good ones affect your perception long after you leave the theater.  Pierre le fou, at least, did that for me.

Giving It Up: Movie Trailers Are Easy

On the evening of the 31st, I found myself in an unfortunate predicament.  It was Halloween and all, so most everybody would be making some sort of trek out into the world clad in costume.  All of my friends were doing that, at least.  And they were all doing it while seriously inebriated.  It's Halloween at college, that's how it works.

My predicament was two-fold: (a) as a once-a-week intern at a film company far from where I live, I can't afford to show up late or hungover the one day a week I come in, and (b) in anticipation of a boring Halloween I neglected to get any kind of costume.  So when the night finally arrived and I realized I was willing to risk a potentially rough morning, it was already too late for me to put together a costume that didn't look thrown together at the last minute.

If I had Mr. Miyagi to help me out, this wouldn't be a problem.

Andrew, a close friend of mine living in that dilapidated fraternity mansion I mentioned a while back, came up with a good way to remedy the holiday.  He proposed a Halloween Marathon of Horror, an idea which I would have loved to follow through on had it not been for that Tuesday morning 7:00 am alarm I had been anticipating for so long.  I agreed to two movies.  Later intrusions on the part of exasperated fraternity officers demanding my attendance at some sort of Important Ceremony forced me to climb out the back gate, unchain my bicycle in the dark, and pedal away from my fraternal duties along with the promised second film.  We got the first one in, though: it was called Tucker & Dale vs Evil.

You see, normally I'd include a link to the trailer with the title there, give you readers a clue as to what I'm talking about.  Unfortunately for all of us, myself included, Tucker & Dale vs Evil is one of those movies where they give away almost every element of the story and plot in the trailer.

"Shucks."

I say "unfortunately for me" because Andrew -- who had seen the film at Sundance with a clean slate, with nothing but the "Horror/Comedy" label on the program to indicate what the movie was about -- pulled up the trailer to give me an indication as to what one of our choices could be.  By the end of the trailer, Andrew turned to me sadly and admitted that we'd basically just seen all of the most important moments.  They had cut the trailer like a highlight reel.

I'm glossing over something here, though.  The material looked funny enough to warrant me watching it anyway, which is a rarity.  This kind of thing happens all the time.  Every trip to the theater inevitably results in at least one trailer that gives away the entire arc of the story.  The greatest (most awful) one that comes to mind immediately is a film I never saw but am absolutely certain I completely understand, Leap Year.

This trailer not only convinces me of the film's moral worthlessness (like Bride Wars, here's apparently yet another romantic comedy that takes as a given the woman's sole value as a seeker of a mate and a partner for Interchangeable Homogeneous Brown Haired Pretty Men... take a look at romantic (screwball) comedies from 60 years ago and try to convince me that this genre hasn't undergone a troublingly regressive transformation), this trailer also tells me everything about the movie except for the final choice of our ostensible protagonist, this desperate woman with some serious attachment issues who would in all likelihood succumb to some kind of violent psychosis lest in life she be denied a Homogeneous Brown Haired Pretty Man who has intentions of turning her into a spouse.  What I'm trying to say is, I can guess that part -- she probably chooses the guy who's less of a dick.  I've watched a two-and-a-half minute trailer and not only do I know every major interaction within the first two acts, I also know the "protagonist's" final choice and by extension, the "moral" of the story.

I wonder if they're gonna overcome some surface-level differences.

In film school, we're taught that story is king.  The sacredness of story cannot be overstated.  We're taught a number of ways to keep an audience invested, but that desire to keep them invested is inherent to our education.  Engaging the audience in some way or another is not really up for debate at USC.

Which is why I'm so surprised when I see commercial endeavors like Leap Year (and to a lesser extend, Tucker & Dale, which was produced somewhat independently) so flagrantly exposing all the inner mechanisms of their plots within their advertising.  If commercial fiction film thrives on audience engagement and investment, and commercial fiction film schools teach us that it's story/plot (different things in my opinion, but usually interchangeable in the film school vocabulary) that allows an audience to stay invested, then why do studio advertisements so often give away that most precious commodity?

...maybe not the most precious commodity...

My hypothesis is that often, the people designing the advertising don't have faith in an audience's desire for surprise.  Let's be honest, the massive financial success of remakes, sequels, and franchises based on comic books over the course of the past few years indicates one thing to the studios funding the product as well as the advertising: that we don't want anything new or surprising.  Why do they tell us everything in the ads?  Because they think we need to know every plot point in order to want to see a movie in the first place.  We're not looking for New.

I have to wonder whether this advertising strategy is another effect of the escapist direction that cinema has taken in the time since the financial success of Star Wars in 1977.  The studios still do it because Leap Year made over $25 million on a production budget of $19 million.  We don't care about story, really.  We just want our expectations to be catered to.

Speaking of which, when is Shrek 5: Puss in Boots 2 coming out?

I don't believe things will stay this way forever, but in order for movies to get better we need to stop paying to see things that advertise rigid adherence to genre tropes.  In the case of Tucker & Dale, it only partly ruined what was otherwise a very enjoyable movie-watching experience.  In the case of Leap Year, I can only find solace in the idea that everyone involved in its creation will one day feel the Sweet Sting of Karma.

And just so you get a visual, I'm imagining the Sweet Sting of Karma embodied as the towering green ghost of Orson Welles shooting slime at and then devouring the cast and crew as he bellows angry incantations.  But until that starts happening, can we just stop going to these movies that are obviously awful?

The Vengeful Ghost of Orson Welles

Spectacle: A Confession

This post should probably start off with some kind of an apology. This being a weekly blog and all, it’s pretty clear I missed my latest deadline. And while lack of planning is no real excuse for tardiness, it’s unfortunately my excuse in this case. You see, this weekend was Parents’ Weekend here at school, and it’s been since June since I’ve seen my parents, so my mom wasn’t planning on giving me a minute alone since she arrived (early) on Thursday. Procrastination is great until a parent arrives.

When I miss a deadline like this, I always think back to a scene from Wes Anderson’s second feature, Rushmore, when high school theater director (and recent high school dropout) Max Fisher presents his melancholic/deeply-depressed mentor Herman Blume with a kind of peace offering.

They meet on a street corner in front of Max’s father’s barber shop and Max gives Herman a box, which he opens:

Max Fischer: That's the Perfect Attendance Award and the Punctuality Award. I got those at Rushmore. I thought you could choose which one you like more, and you could wear one and I could wear the other.
Herman Blume: [after gravely considering both the proffered olive branch and the choice] I'll take Punctuality.
Max Fischer: [smiles] Okay.

I love this scene and even though I never knew for sure what Herman’s choice meant (which is more desirable, punctuality or perfect attendance?), it was clear to me that the awards meant so much to Max and by extension to his friend. They’re not awards I would receive and maybe that’s why they make me really love Max. He’s always showing up and he’s always on time. There's a voice deep inside me that tells me I should always turn my homework in on time like I used to.  I should be more like Max.  He inspires nostalgia.

When you live far from where you grew up, it seems like it’s easy to feel separated from where you came from. I mean that in a number of ways: geographically, politically, spiritually, intellectually even. I like to think that a far move will shake up a person’s identity, force it in news directions by exposing it to foreign culture. That culture part is the key. I think above all else, it’s easy to become separated from your own culture, the culture you grew up on. 

Like this.

Parents’ Weekend sparked a little more nostalgia in me, which makes sense what with all of the conversational reminders about my past.  At one point I started thinking about my own history.  Then I thought about the history of my taste.

I guess I have a confession to make. When I was five years old, it was Jurassic Park that inspired me to make movies.

Obviously the significance of that isn’t too clear without a little explanation, since whenever I tell people that they’re usually just amazed that I started trying to make movies at that point in my life (I shot them on an early 90s camcorder that weirdly my parents let a very young child handle) but to me the strangest thing is that it was Jurassic Park that made me want to get into this art form in the first place. Jurassic Park, this landmark in Computer-Generated Imagery, which dominates the world of mainstream movies and has arguably become the crutch that the entire industry rests on.

So much of what I’ve complained about here, in a way, stems from Jurassic Park and Spielberg’s innovative use of CGI. But that doesn’t mean I should blame him or the movie or my young self for being blown away by it; Nirvana doesn’t suck just because almost every grunge-inspired band that came after them did. I mean, the analogy isn’t perfect because unlike grunge, CGI is here to stay, but nobody should ever be making the claim that Spielberg is a guy who doesn’t care about his image quality. I won’t speak ill of Spielberg.

Regardless, though, I look back on the beginning of my love for cinema and I can’t help but feel separate from it in a way. It was a totally different love back then. I was five and obsessed with dinosaurs and Spielberg making them come alive opened my mind to the idea that you could have any kind of experience you wanted, live in any kind of world, if you could translate your imagination into movies. I believe that still and it’s the main reason I still do this.

I came to love the movies thanks to what I would call a great spectacle film, Jurassic Park. In 2011, I find myself tired of spectacle films and I wonder where I would be if I had never moved on from the dinosaurs. These days I believe we need to focus on other ways to create new worlds. CGI cannot always be the broad brush. It shouldn’t always be the main tool.

In regard to that criticism, which applies to so much of today's Hollywood product, Jurassic Park is exempt.

I’m going to suggest an idea: Jurassic Park is all about Spectacle. Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

But just as it revels in the magic of the experience it offers, the reanimation of dinosaurs, Park also spends it entire second and third act driving home the idea that spectacle can be dangerous. It can bite your fucking head off, endanger the lives of your grandchildren, and take out your best in-house poachers with a sneak attack: 

I put forth the idea that Jurassic Park is the ultimate spectacle film in that addresses this very issue. Jesus, those dinosaurs are incredible. But if we let them run amok they will kill us all.

Did the raptors represent represent Spectacle itself to Spielberg? Maybe not. But maybe they did. He knew the story he was making was about the dangers of taking Spectacle – a theme park – to its logical extreme. And then he went and he made the Spectacle so good that we all spent the last twenty years chasing after that and missed the moral entirely.

Spielberg. Sneaky devil.

South Park the Surreal

“I am Catatafish. I am a great wizard. And, I am a friend. And I am a ghost, besides, of course, being a fish.” - Catatafish, South Park

Being a senior at a film school, I hear a lot about employment. We talk a lot about how to act while employed in the film industry, how the production machine works and how we're expected to work within it. It's a great thing to learn. It makes sense and it's necessary, especially if I want to continue eating.

I'm a production major, so my focus is the final product, which generally means I either shoot, direct, or edit. The funny thing is, they're not pushing us towards feature film production these days. In terms of all this employment advice, I'm hearing mostly about how smart it is to get into webisodes or other online content. There's more to make, more to shoot, direct, or edit. Screenwriting majors, on the other hand, apparently hear a lot about television. They say TV is the route to employment, and coincidentally, the best format for a writer.

I once read something somewhere about TV being a writer's medium and film being a director's medium. I get what that means -- TV moves faster and its production schedule is accelerated, so writers' work goes pretty much untouched in its translation to the screen, where a feature script can go through a team of a dozen writers before it reaches its final form. I'm not saying that's the way things should be done, but a lot of the time it just is done that way. Seriously, you thought a living, thinking human being with a family and a life and genuine experiences that they remember could actually create something like Bride Wars?

Sometimes when individuals work together they produce something incredible. And other times they produce the most horrifying pieces of garbage imaginable. I see shit like the Wars and I have to wonder about that whole production machine we keep learning so much about. The right way to do things. But when something like the Wars lashes out and attacks you, you have to sit back and tend to your wounds and you can't help but wonder "is this the only way? Is this all that's out there?"

And that kind of thing can get onto television, too, and sometimes it does. But last night I watched the new South Park episode "Bass to Mouth" and maybe it was Lemmiwinks' guides' reappearance or the revelation that the wizard/ghost/talking/levitating Catfish is some kind of aquatic sex criminal, but the not-exactly-unexpected creative insanity of the episode inspired me to put into writing what I've been thinking for years: South Park is the American Surreal, and it's one of the greatest cultural achievements in this nation's recent history. The best part is, I don't really feel much of a need to elaborate. 60 Minutes is pretty popular and they covered that idea recently.

Probably thanks to the success of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, their original and still most-famous project (South Park) has been getting a lot of coverage recently. Comedy Central, the channel that airs SP, recently documented the show's strange and by-now-very-well-known production cycle in an hour-long special called 6 Days to Air. I watched the doc a few days before this new episode aired, so I had their method fresh in my head as I experienced the final product.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are delinquent-savant visionary comics of a bizarre breed and without them South Park would obviously have never existed. But I don't think I'm making any sort of leap when I make the conjecture that it's their production method -- a six-day production cycle in which the episode is written, acted, animated, edited, and aired in less than one week -- that gives us episodes like "Bass to Mouth": unfathomably absurd and genuinely funny. Having seen 6 Days to Air, I feel like I can safely say that at no point were these guys told that a floating catfish ghost shouldn't be delivering a lengthy monologue about a gossip site's exaggeration of his romantic involvement with a young tuna to group of young children. That in itself deserves a moment of appreciation.

I'm not even saying that this was one of the show's best episodes. It probably wasn't. What I'm saying is that in the film and television industry, production method is like scripture. The one thing that is hammered over and over again into my head as a film student is the importance of production protocol.

The fact that these two have carved out a niche for themselves and that they get to make their brilliant shit in their own brilliant way, well, that's really inspiring to me. I don't know for sure, but if South Park is any indication, maybe getting creative with working method will generate creative product.

But secretly I just think the world could use more wizard catfish.

Technology and Soul in America

One of the more perplexing things about today’s annual blockbuster binge, in fact, is that it has become very hard to determine which films are genuinely popular and which are not – which is to say, films we would actively seek out, as opposed to merely sit through.  Oftentimes, all we have to do is check that a movie is as bad as everyone says it is, in enough number, and – poof! – we’ve accidentally launched another blockbuster film franchise on an unsuspecting world.

     - Tom Shone, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer

I came across this quotation last week while perusing the stacks of books down in the subterranean cinema library at USC.  I’d been down there scouring the aisles for anything that could be useful in my research on contemporary cinematic culture but to be honest, I eventually had to tear myself away from The Wolf at the Door (a reference book which postulates that Stanley Kubrick hid innumerable references to the Holocaust throughout his body of work, but more interestingly that The Shining is actually secretly about the Holocaust) in order to learn about how artists like Kubrick were wiped off the landscape.

“Artists like Kubrick” is a dumb thing to say, though, (who the hell is like Stanley Kubrick?) and reduces the issue of the Blockbuster Era to an Us vs. Them rhetoric, when in truth, even the “Us” that identifies itself as opposed to “infantilizing” cinema help contribute to the box office gross.  How can we stay cinema lovers and never go to the cinema?  We can’t.  We love it.  So we pay for things we shouldn’t.

Shone’s point is a fairly common one in 2011: a massive weekend gross doesn’t equal popularity.  The practice of over-saturating the advertising market with billboards, TV spots, internet ad banners, iPad apps, whatever, is incredibly commonplace today and as Shone discusses in his book, is a sign of a studio’s lack of faith in their product.  If their advertising reaches and convinces enough individual people, then maybe they can make back their investment without being hurt by the bad word of mouth that will take a serious bite out of the Weekend #2 gross.  Basically, excessive advertising is the sign of a bad product.

But that doesn’t account for everything that makes it into the yearly Box Office Top Ten.  Some of the entries are genuine cultural phenomena.  Below, I’ve included three lists: the top ten yearly box office domestic grosses from 2000, 2005, and 2010.  Comparing the entries might tell me something about the developments in mainstream American cinema over the course of the last decade.

2000 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas - $260,044,825
2. Cast Away - $233,632,142
3. Mission: Impossible III - $215,409,889
4. Gladiator - $187,705,427
5. What Women Want - $182,811,707
6. The Perfect Storm - $182,618,434
7. Meet the Parents - $166,244,045
8. X-Men - $157,299,717
9. Scary Movie - $157,019,771
10. What Lies Beneath - $155,464,351


2005 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith - $380,270,577
2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - $291,710,957
3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - $290,013,036
4. War of the Worlds - $234,280,354
5. King Kong - $218,080,025
6. Wedding Crashers - $209,255,921
7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - $206,459,076
8. Batman Begins - $205,343,774
9. Madagascar - $193,595,521
10. Mr. & Mrs. Smith - $186,336,279


2010 Box Office Domestic Gross

1. Toy Story 3 - $415,004,880
2. Alice in Wonderland - $334,191,110
3. Iron Man 2 - $312,433,331
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - $300,531,751
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - $295,001,070
6. Inception - $292,576,195
7. Despicable Me - $251,513,985
8. Shrek Forever After - $238,736,787
9. How to Train Your Dragon - $217,581,231
10. Tangled - $200,821,936

So the first thing that jumps out at you, before the title even, are the numbers.  Movies weren’t even hitting the $300 million mark back in 2000.  My first thought: inflation.  Which is interesting.  Because immediately I had a difficult time imagining that people were more excited about going to the movie theater in 2010 than they were in 2000.  So I checked the Inflation Calculator at West Egg to see how the top movie of 2000 would rank in 2010.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas made $260,044,825 in America in 2000, which according to the calculator would be $325,914,966.49.  That gross would put it at #3 for 2010 and #2 for 2005, if we were to magically transplant the Grinch into different years.  Does that mean that movies are slowly regaining an audience?  If it couldn’t have made it to the top even when adjusted for inflation, doesn’t that mean movie theaters are doing better now than they were ten years ago?

Well, honestly, I’m not so sure.  Looking over the entries again, the second thing that jumps out at you are the franchise titles, the remakes, and the sequels.  Always a favorite topic for me here.  But my point isn’t to harp (once again) about the lack of originality and absence of original content.  I’m wondering whether the Grinch really could have been released in any of the years between 2000 and 2010 and still make money.  I mean this: what makes this Grinch film specific to its place in time?

Look at these lists.  Of the 30 films listed, 17 are based on older material: remakes, sequels, or adaptations. In fact, unsurprisingly, 2000 has far and away the most original material of any year I’ve referenced: Cast Away and Gladiator have each stood the test of time in their own way.  The most surprising thing about 2000 is the dominance of live-action material.  No animated feature made it into the top 10.  In comparison, literally half of the top films of 2010 were computer-animated features marketed towards children.

I worry that we’ve arrived at a point in time where our entertainment is arbitrary.  I get why Toy Story 3 was wildly popular and why it deserved to be.  But let’s get real for a second: that movie could have been released anytime between 2005 and 2010 and people still would have gone nuts.

Here’s a question: why did a fake sequel of Alice in Wonderland get green-lit for release in 2010?  Why did audiences flock to that story?  I guess I could make some sort of psychological case for Alice’s appeal in an age of rabbit-hole economics, but that would be a stretch.  It seems to me that, aside from Toy Story’s appeals to our nostalgic impulses, the primary appeal of entertainment in 2010 was technology.

I’m not making any conclusions about our culture in general yet, but this fascination with technology as it relates to entertainment has got to be one of the topics.  After all, what else can you get out of the insane successes of animated sequels that use technology to make watching movies more visceral?  The How to Train Your Dragon sequence below, to say nothing for the entirety of Avatar, is a great example of this “visceral” preoccupation:

Going to the movies in 2010 was at least as much about one’s physical experience as one’s emotional experience.  As movies become more and more immersive, as their environments become more fictionalized and fantastical, I worry that we’ll sacrifice any chance at getting a basic emotional response other than awe.  Here’s to hoping that in 2020, this Immersive Cinema will have developed a soul.

Postmodern Literature, Postmodern Film

Last week, I promised a piece about Drive, the recent critical darling and postmodern genre piece starring Ryan Gosling. That’s still coming. Thanks to a late-night viewing of Japanese “workman” director Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, I was inspired to write a piece on postmodernity in cinema and genre filmmaking in general. My piece on Drive will follow this personal discussion of the Postmodern.

* * *

There are works of art that I’ve come across over the years that have honestly changed my life. I’m not sure if this kind of thing happens to “normal people,” if such people exist, but ever since I was young I’ve been aware of the possibility of using art – whether it’s a movie, a novel, an album, a photograph – to push one’s own identity in a different direction. There are works out there that I connected to in a way that inspired me to change my personal style, my philosophies in life, and my career goals.

One of those works of art was White Noise, a postmodern novel by Don DeLillo that I read in English class when I was 17. Up until that point, I had almost always immersed myself in “classic” American films and modernist literature. That eerie tone, the sharp social commentary, the surreal imagery, the consumption-obsessed, death-fearing characters all contributed to kind of stylistic revolution in my mind. The thing that struck me hardest, what really knocked me on my ass, was DeLillo’s mixture of high and low art, that defining characteristic of postmodernism that I didn’t quite grasp yet.  For example, in the novel, two eloquent professors discuss cereal boxes as the modern American avant-garde before moving onto a dialogue about the fear of death.  You know, that type of thing.  It destroyed everything I knew about style.

It was all a big surprise, then, when I came to film school only to hear words of scorn for postmodernity in general. In USC’s legendary introductory film class, Cinema 190, Professor Casper has become known for his (general but not total) disdain for what he deemed “postmodern” films, which he categorized (again, generally) as anything released after 1977, the year of the first Star Wars and beginning of the Blockbuster Era.

For me, postmodernity was a literary term and as far as I was concerned, postmodern film hadn’t even been seen yet. “What we’re going through in post-1977 American cinema can’t be postmodernity, because it isn’t anything like postmodern literature,” I thought. Surely the depressing onslaught of cinematic formula (from identical action films to identical spectacle disaster movies to identical romantic comedies) can’t have anything to do with the postmodern literature that flattened me.

But apparently it does.

In a weirdly positive review of the film Earth Girls Are Easy, legendary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum says that

postmodernist artists as disparate as Thomas Pynchon, the Beatles, Philip Glass, and the makers of music videos (Temple included) think nothing of making Cuisinart blends without any sense of pathos or regret. The negative side of this can be seen in the average rock video, where the entire history of cinema — modernist and nonmodernist alike — is represented, but with all of its meaning and effect stripped away. Through a process of equalizing and synthesizing all sorts of contradictory materials, what tends to emerge is a kind of nerveless mush, easy to consume and often impossible to remember.

Basically, postmodern films tend to draw so heavily on such a wide variety of “high” and “low” sources (namely the structuring conventions of classic drama and the dressing of 21st century popular consumer culture) that the final results become an unintelligible mess of styles and reference points missing their context.

13 Assassins

However, Rosenbaum finds a bright side:

But the positive side of this kind of mix, which the work of Temple [the filmmaker in question] illustrates, is the elimination of all the snobbery and condescension about culture and class that modernism often entails–and the implication, more pragmatic than pathetic, that if we have to eat mush, it might as well be tasty.

In truth, if this project of mine is all modern American film culture, it’s really about postmodern cinema, which encompasses everything from playful throwback genre movies (Drive being an American example and 13 Assassins a Japanese one) to those CGI spectacle disaster films (the oeuvre of Roland Emmerich) to nihilistic and satirical absurdity (Crank, Crank 2: High Voltage). A valid discussion of modern American film culture couldn’t be complete without a discussion of the various categories which make up the scene, but it’s worth noting that these films all have something in common: they draw heavily from past styles or modes of communication. There is no avoiding the conspicuous absence of the Genuine Original, as nearly every commercially successful film is in some respect heavily indebted to the past.

“Mush” is bad. There’s no way I can get around that idea. When the merger of disparate styles reaches its logical conclusion, all you’re left with is a kind of paint-by-numbers genre piece, with the signifiers of genre formula grounding us in the “story.” But to label all postmodern film as “mush,” a million styles without a trace of meaning, is to dismiss an era of American creative work that contains not a few gems. Just because some postmodern filmmakers fail doesn’t mean they all do.

In a culture obsessed with image and fiction, what could be better subjects than our own cultural products, the popular films that serve as our secular scriptures? Is culture itself the true subject of postmodern film? If a culture’s artistic output reflects or represents its obsessions, then ours – stuffed with sequels and remakes and superheroes – indicates a preoccupation with our own escapes. These films aren’t based on real-life experiences; they’re based on popular art. I suspect the true subject of postmodern film is fictional cinema itself.

Originality

Back in the summer of 2007, I worked at a two-screen movie theater in downtown Exeter, New Hampshire, a town of just under 10,000 people.  It was called the Ioka and it had been operational since 1915.  It closed in December 2008 and now it’s an ice cream parlor.

But when I was working there as a sometimes projectionist-apprentice and more often a popcorn salesman, I found I had plenty of downtime to relax.  We didn’t have a lot of customers for a number of reasons, many of which were just aftershocks of the changes in American film culture over the last decade.  I remember Ratatouille, my favorite movie from that summer.  I got to watch different pieces of it many times over.  But I also remember that three-week stretch where we played Transformers (the first one) on screen one and Underdog on screen two.  Those three weeks were unbelievably brutal.  Clearly they only cemented all of my then-17-year-old cynicisms about culture.

I saw Transformers three times, then I dove into reading A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man to “redeem” myself, I think.  It was one of the more pretentious things I ever did, but I did love the book.  Can’t say the same for Transformers.  And being the levelheaded and responsible consumer that I am, I didn’t go see the sequels.  Mainly because I knew I wouldn’t enjoy them.  So I’ve got to admit, having never actually watched Revenge of the Fallen or Dark of the Moon, I am not qualified to comment on either film specifically.  But I still reacted to the latest television spot for the Dark of the Moon Blu-Ray and DVD release yesterday.

“The Best Action Movie Ever,” says Rusty Gatenby of ABC TV Minneapolis.  I laughed when I saw the spot.  But again, I never even saw the movie.  I’m still just reacting to Transformers 1, I suppose, which is bad criticism.  But what about Robocop?  Die Hard?  Mad Max?  Hot Fuzz, even?  Point Break?  A discussion needed to be had.  My friends around me laughed, too.  Some of them even liked Transformers, and still they agreed with me.  The consensus was that we go to these movies even when we know how bad they will be.  None of them attended Dark of the Moon expecting much.  But they went, which confused me.

Then the other day I came across this piece written by Michael Atkinson, “Straight to Hell,” on a blog called Zero for Conduct.  It’s an astute and opinionated and approximates my understanding of where we’re at right now.  It’s a great cynical cry-out for people to stop paying for sequels and remakes.  I mean, Footloose is actually coming out soon…again.  It’s hard not to see his point if you’ve got any stake in the cinematic arts.

The part that really gave me pause was this:

I know it’s common to decry how stupid we’ve become in toto, and equally common to prove the position wrong by comparing the pop culture of the ‘50s to ours today. Fair enough, but imagine how your parents and grandparents might’ve reacted if you’d told them that in five decades’ time the art form and American life in general would evolve into a universalized obsession with superhero movies. Which were, back then, the kinds of movies that only kids watched, along with cheap giant monster thrillers and beach romcoms. The adults had something else. 

At first, this struck me as a little condescending, but it rang of truth in many ways.  The major films released this summer were X-Men First Class, Green Lantern, Thor, and Captain America.  Adult films just aren’t often released in the summer.

The one I saw and can attest to is The Tree of Life, which, full disclosure, was made by one my favorite directors, Terrence Malick.  It opened in four theaters while The Hangover Part II, Kung Fu Panda, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides stood atop the box office.  Midnight in Paris, another of my favorite recent films, was also doing strong at #7 the weekend Tree of Life was released.

The Tree of Life was a critical and festival success, but it had a harder time finding audiences.  Here’s a photo of a banner that a theater in Connecticut had to post after receiving demands for refunds following Tree of Life screenings:

The thing is, this photo, which is now passed gleefully around cinema message boards, is further validation of the growing gap between critical film analysis and general expectation.  People actually demand a straightforward narrative structure to the point where they demand refunds when those conventions are challenged. I find myself wondering why people go to the movies.  I like to think that I go for exotic and exciting experiences that aren’t otherwise possible.

Regardless of what you thought of The Tree of Life (and I thought it was unlike anything I’d ever seen), I would put forth the notion that it deserves to be recognized for its originality, a quality that I feel is often missing from movies released between the months of March and August.  These strange summer films are experiential escapes, refreshing breaks from the usual.

But as I mentioned earlier, Tree isn’t missing any kind of critical acclaim.  The conversation in my field is kind of split between press junket caption reviews for films like Dark of the Moon (“Best action movie ever!”) and thinkpiece raves for increasingly rare studio-funded art pictures like Tree.  You don’t get those thinkpieces on the films that represent the mainstream.  In this investigation of the trends in present-day American film (and an investigation of their cultural implications), I’m hoping to take an in-depth look at a few new films as indications of different modern trends.

Mostly, I’m hoping the conversation will lead to an unforeseen discovery of originality in the studio film landscape.  This week I’ll be taking a look at Drive and making some brief comparisons to one of its biggest influences, Le Samourai.  More to come soon.

Finding an Internet Social Bookmarking Buddy, Writing-340 Style

Tasked with the assignment of finding a “social bookmarking soulmate,” I was pretty apprehensive. I suspected I wouldn’t find somebody with my particular set of film tastes. Normally I wouldn’t think my tastes were that unique, but with all the trouble I had earlier finding good personal blogs that appealed to my interests, I felt a little bit like I might be somewhat alone in my choices of smaller sites. First, I did some searching through delicious.com and happily found some great personal blogspot sites that I could easily see making reference to for choosing subject matter and finding a voice that fits the topic of American cinema.

Unfortunately, I had an incredibly difficult time finding any kind of bookmarking “soulmate” through delicious. For some reason – and maybe it’s the popularity of the bookmarking site itself – almost everyone citing the sites I found most useful were also citing a wide array of topics. Every time I would click through in the hopes of finding a resource, I’d end up with somebody with a minimum of “film, cinema, movies, blog” tags and a large number of tags in some other discipline.

So I went back to diigo.com and found success. For whatever reason the same genre of blogspot resources I found led me quickly to a like-minded individual with similar interests and some great tags. He’s Joel Kropinski and he’s unfortunately not an avid diigo user. He follows no one and no one follows him. A lone island in the Internet Ocean, this Joel Kropinski. I suspect he uses this site for better bookmarking, not better socializing.

Actually, my favorite link of Joel’s (that I’ve explored up until this point) is the second-most recent one he linked: a PopMatters’ Short Ends and Leader blog entry called ReFramed No. 10: Andrei Tarkovski’s Stalker. This film is a personal favorite of mine, so I followed Joel’s link and discovered the “ReFramed” series, an intelligent roundtable discussion on misunderstood films by directors they (and incidentally, I) deem “great.” The piece on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which I would argue fits into the category of mainstream American filmmaking despite its awesome idiosyncrasies, is definitely worth checking out. Calum Marsh even manages to articulate the primary reason I love the film and the primary reason I love all Kubrick films:

Kubrick’s going for a very specific tone here, and he sustains it so vividly across two and a half hours that when you’re done you really feel like you’ve lived in the world of this film.

So for me, finding the Short Ends and Leader blog is akin to finding a great read. Good criticism and absolutely a site I will return to for casual reading and ideas for my own blog features, but not any kind of peer-reviewed academic resource.

For full disclosure here, Stanley Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker at the moment. Whenever someone asks what my favorite Kubrick film is, I’m tempted to say a different one. Barry Lyndon is the answer at the moment. Anyway, Joel’s got more Kubrick links, which endears him to me even more. I’ve mentioned my love for Roger Ebert’s criticism before, and here Joel links me to a video roundtable of Ebert (and others, obviously, it's a roundtable) discussing Eyes Wide Shut and the rest of Kubrick’s career.

I’ve written a lot in this whole leading up period about the need for a type of analysis that draws on many different sources of life and culture. This isn’t something I’ve read, really, but it’s something I’d like to see more of. Joel’s tastes basically match the ones I pursue in my personal reading, which is why I’ve chosen him as my bookmarking match. I’m having a great time going through these sites, and I want to emulate them to a certain degree with my blog, but I’d also like to keep mine focused (at least for a time) on a critical analysis of the mainstream American movie of the Present. I think this will mean sacrificing thinkpieces on my favorite Stanley Kubrick movies. But I’m sure in a moment of weakness I’ll find some way to do some auteur name-dropping.

TRIO

Young Werner Herzog

1. Hello, World

It was a gloomy California Thursday at midnight when I Kramered into the Cave, a large, dark, and windowless bedroom in the center of the dilapidated fraternity mansion I lived in for just under two years. It had been an evening of painting and whiskey drinking. I was on edge.

The puffed-up leather couch was crammed from arm to arm with glazy-eyed guys. I spotted the Cave’s inhabitant and landlord, a screenwriting major with whom I have a running dialogue, a vulgar back-and-forth that has something to do with cinema. His lit face turned towards me in the dark.

“Star Trek,” he said.

“The new one,” I assumed. Not that I’ve seen the old ones. Old Star Trek always seemed like Alien CNN to me. He nodded. I sat on a pink metal chair a close friend stole from Del Taco years ago.

I have only watched J.J. Abram’s Star Trek that once, and it’s possible that between the slow loss of my psychic whiskey forcefield and the poor design of the pink chair (the Del Taco chair might have been “free” but it’s still not something you want to sit on long), I was set against the movie from the start. By time it ended, I mostly complained about the imaginary cosmic substance (“Red Matter”) that resolved the plot and saved the main characters. Red Matter isn’t real. Red Matter has nothing to do with anything. We watched a whole shaky movie for that? I was being kind of a contrarian, sure, but I don’t think I was wrong.

As hoped, the screenwriter jumped in to confront me. He accused me of faulting a science fiction film for being fiction, of ignoring the craft of the narrative, of missing The Story, maybe the point altogether. I demanded a point, knowing full well that he was could have been right. He didn’t answer me.

This, in essence, is my relationship to contemporary American film. Even with a stiff drink first, things usually end in shouting – and after that I’m typically left feeling a little mean and out of touch.

Between 2004 and 2008, I developed my taste for movies through a devotion to a 3-disc mail-based Netflix account. I typically watched about three films a week on a DVD player up on the third floor of this colonial house built in the middle of a New Hampshire forest, away from everyone else, late at night. And I had nobody’s taste to answer to except my own. I was free to watch anything I liked.

I had devoured movies throughout childhood but in 2004 when DVDs began to arrive in the mail, my mom quit policing the contents of the rentals. I moved from spectacle films to prestige pictures. I checked movies off the AFI Top 100. I moved from “classics” to American independents, then to European auteurs, then into niche genres, camp, kitsch, and the avant-garde.

I attend the USC School of Cinematic Arts as an undergraduate film production major. In May 2012, I will graduate. I will presumably attempt to enter the workforce as a paid professional contributing (in whatever small way) to film culture. I spend every day writing or filming movies. I have not been to a movie theater in months.

I’m not proud of it. It never used to be a problem. But sometime between 2010 and 2011 I lost interest. I think it happened after Iron Man 2.

Which transitions perfectly into a digressive short rant:

I can't justify dropping twenty dollars on The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I don’t care what Metacritic says, there is no way I can’t use my afternoon for something more enjoyable and rewarding than that 43 year-old tentpole prequel. Right? How many times can you stick “of the” into a title? Our film culture is a hostage held in a chokehold by deranged blue mutant merchandising objects and alien robot car merchandising objects that happened to be popular in the 1980s. Plastic toy nostalgia is our contribution to history. Hasbro is sucking up our brains through curly straws.

But I want to keep up. I realize that two of the last four movies I paid to see were Annie Hall and Boyz N the Hood, from 1977 and 1991 respectively. This really doesn’t say much for my engagement with contemporary mainstream film.

Okay, so, even as I dismiss the Gorilla Planet Picture, I realize that I shouldn’t. No person should spend their life watching obscure rarities alone on a computer. No diet, cultural or otherwise, should be so one-sided. Everything in moderation, as the politicians and the Moralists say.

Maybe we shouldn’t listen to them. Maybe I just shouldn’t feel cultural nostalgia at 21. I suspect nostalgia to be deeply harmful to one’s character and soul.

But still, I make videos, I work in film, I care very deeply about these things. Years ago, I found a quote in a book I'd taken out from the cinema library here:

In Church only one drama is performed and always one and the same, year in, year out, while in the cinema next door you will be shown the Easters of heathen, Jew and Christian, their historic sequence, with their similarity of ritual. The cinema amuses, educates, delights the imagination by images, and liberates you from the need of crossing the Church door. The cinema is a great competitor not only of the public-house, but of the Church. Here is an instrument which we must secure at all costs! 

                      -    Release from a 1928 Soviet conference on socialist realism and the cinema

I need to put it out there that I am not political and even though this 2011 and I have no fear of Joseph McCarthy, I can’t confess that I’ve ever had anything that could be called an interest in communism. But I was blown away by the explicit connection between the Church and the Cinema. Film had been my church for so long.

I hope Monsters' Church will serve as an outlet for my weekly thoughts on contemporary American film, both the mainstream and the art house. I will try my hardest to remain objective and open to every film I watch and to expand on my responses in entertaining, intelligent, and unpredictable ways. My responses will branch out into culture, history, music, literature, science, whatever I'm dealing with at the time and whatever the film inspires. I hope to develop an educated response to American film in the fall of 2011 and to engage with the cinema of the present as I continue develop my own filmmaking style on the side.


* * *

For full disclosure, this thing is currently being written for an English class, and I did what I could to make a rambling manifesto in My Own Voice that also fulfilled certain requirements. As such, I have to shout out some inspiration here.

I've been reading Jonathan Rosenbaum for five years and Roger Ebert for longer. These two guys have formed a lot of what I see when I watch movies and I don’t think I’m alone there.

The Film section at the Slant Magazine Blog is a source of great writing and although I might take a more casual tone, I read and absorb a lot of their reviews and features. Also, I've recently been hitting Incite Cinema and the Film section at The Quietus for some great commentary and interviews, respectively. That’s all for now.

Anna Karina

2. Some Thoughts on Slate and Blog Convention

At first, I thought that long-form personal film review blogs weren’t out there. I’ve been reading film criticism since I was 15, and here I was unable to find the sites I knew had to be out there. I’m 21, I’ve spent a lot of time researching on the Internet, and I suspect that I know when something is scarce.

Almost every site I ran across falls into one of three categories: a defunct film review blog that ran for a couple weeks and imitated the format of newspaper caption reviews of old; highly professional film blog collectives, sites dedicated to thorough and mostly academic analysis of the Western (North American and European) film festival circuit; or film news blogs, whether entertainment/celebrity-centric, art house production-centric, or some industry internet trade paper. But when I was looking for a like-minded blog to compare to my own, I couldn’t find one that consistently exploited all of the resources I want to exploit, which include academic resources but also everyday life, cultural trends, film history, literature, other blogs, etc. It seems as if individuals don’t often publish their reactions to films as they relate to the subjects in their lives, whether intellectual or artistic or personal.

That’s not to say there aren’t any out there. But cineastes (lovers of cinema) are typically obsessives. For whatever reason, the art form draws a loud, sophisticated, and increasingly more organized community of Internet commentators. The conversations that come out of this community are often enlightening, but almost always medium-specific. By which I mean, the people that comment tend to have a vast knowledge of film’s aesthetic history and development but rarely discuss films as they relate to larger themes and ideas. If you’re looking for an incredible source of discussion from this community, sign up for Mubi. You’ll have no trouble finding short but often insightful or sharp criticism from the crowd.

But I don’t want to compare this to a comment board. This is just me doing my thing with concessions to my Academic Overlords. So I chose to compare my project to a more conventional site, but one whose writing and voice I respect and hope to emulate, to a certain degree.

Slate’s House Next Door Film Blog is a well-presented collection of contemporary film criticism and features written in a colloquial vernacular grounded in academic rigor. The reviews aren’t tough to read and you’ll get a lot out of them.

Any film review you choose on the site is liable to be well written and well researched and intelligent and all the things you expect when you read a piece of professional writing. What sets the site apart for me is the depth of the reviewer’s engagement with the film culture they belong to. By that I mean that these people know their shit. They don’t spend much of the review “describing what happens,” (which, by the way, is not a good way to talk about a piece of art) nor to they spend most of time on their adjective selection (apparently “delightful” is a popular one among independent bloggers whenever something French comes out). Like my most-trusted Review Gods Jonathan Rosenbaum and Roger Ebert, they relate their experiences with each film to their experiences of other films by the same director or other films within the same vein. This review for Grindhouse is a great example of the method: talk about why the movies fail or succeed based on how they relate to other films. That’s how it’s done, that’s the convention. And if you do it well, you’ve written good criticism.

Here’s the thing: film reviews don’t typically adventure outside of an evaluation of the work at hand. As with most other sites, the endless procession of Films To Be Reviewed results in a collection of solid and trustworthy film commentary, but often limits the site’s writers’ ability to talk at length about how these films fit into their own personal experiences or interests, which, I think, is what makes art interesting in the first place. To get all we can out of a film, we need to bring more to it than just our experiences with other films. Unless you’re at a Quentin Tarantino film (and this is in no way an insult – unlike the House blog, I love Death Proof), chances are the director wants you to think outside of the world of movies.

Academic, film-specific commentary is incredibly useful for someone like me, a student of the craft, but it does nothing to invite participation from any kind of layman. My hope is that art house or festival cinema can find a new audience of youthful viewers who are dissatisfied with the experiences they encounter at the tentpole movies. As the moving image finds its place on the web, I believe this will happen. I hope the medium will be re-energized. But I think we need intelligent and non-medium-specific commentary to make this happen. We need bridges to those viewers.

The goal here, I guess, is to bring the same kind of breadth of emotional and intellectual influence to my commentary as the filmmaker brought to the film. And reviews have done that. Ebert’s take on The Tree of Life was unsurprisingly one of the most touching reactions I read. He talked about the film’s success in evoking a memory of a very particular time and place, something that most online film reviewers (who generally didn’t grow up in 1950s middle America) have no frame of reference for. His review helps me to see the art and the man experiencing more clearly.

Here is what I want: I want criticism that takes the art and speaks honestly about how it relates to the intellectual ideas and personal hang-ups that inspire the critic. When we write reviews like that, reviews that take film make it about the world, we draw ourselves closer and closer to an understanding of our cultural identity and the people we imagine ourselves to be.

Monica Vitti

3. Love for a Blonde: Down to Ride for Kim Morgan

I was sitting in this film critical studies class today – “The Origins of Cool” – when my esteemed professor, Dr. Todd Boyd, the original Notorious P.H.D., made an interesting point about the difference between the film industry and the music industry. He put forth the idea that music is a more immediate art form, not easier to make but faster, and therefore music is often used as a kind of barometer of culture. That is, music reflects culture in real time more accurately than film does.

If a film goes the traditional production route – through a studio – it will take a year to move from original conception to final edit. If it’s an independent it will take longer. The process is slow, laborious, and collaborative. Film as an art form just isn’t equipped to be topical or even “hip,” necessarily. Which is not to imply that films can’t engage with the culture they come from, but they do it a different way. Keeping up with the cutting edge culturally just isn’t a primary concern of mainstream filmmaking. Keeping up technologically is apparently essential, but culturally it’s just not happening.

Unsurprisingly, mainstream film criticism follows its example. In my last post, I expressed a little disappointment at the apparent lack of personal film blogs with personality, which was admittedly a hasty conclusion that arose out of a deadline. I’m still digging for more and there don’t seem to be a lot, but as I follow the links I find some gems.

One of those is called Sunset Gun, which features the writing of Kim Morgan and bears the description “kim morgan movies music melodrama.” This is promising, I thought. She likes things other than movies.

Turns out Kim’s got a hand in a lot of different things: she runs the MSN daily film blog The Hitlist, yet apparently still finds internet time to run her own personal blog, which links to a number of other Sunset Run-related sites (a Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube channel). And then I saw that Kim’s favorite car movie is Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, a personal favorite that has a place in the Existentialist Cinema Hall of Fame. I knew I’d found my blogger.

Kim’s approach to writing changes depending on the topic she’s writing about. Which makes sense. She does write reviews for a living and they tend to stick to that formula I keep complaining about. But then on Sunset Gun it seems like Kim’s able to get a little more informal and a little more personal. In particular, I enjoyed her piece called “Siren and Sunset: Leave Her to Heaven,” which begins with a personal anecdote about an unhealthy obsession:

A few years back, I went through an odd, perhaps disturbing personal film festival during which I would watch a double feature of John M. Stahl's masterpiece Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and King Vidor's underrated Beyond the Forest (1949) over and over again. The only person who knew just how many times I'd stayed up, riddled with insomnia, soaking in the heart-stoppingly gorgeousness of the deranged Ellen Berent Harland and the harsh "what a dump" beauty of scheming Rosa Moline was my sister, who got it -- at first. Two movies about unhappy, deeply disturbed women who go to murderous lengths for privacy and very seriously reject pro-creation? Well, yes indeed, that's a perfect double bill.

This is Kim’s opening paragraph and it immediately tells us a good deal about who she is and how she wishes to present herself. She’s not afraid of coming off as a little crazy, “perhaps disturbing.” She’s the type of cinephile capable of re-watching a 1940s double feature over and over again. For a film-lover like me, this gives her cred.

Then there’s that sentence: “Two movies…pro-creation?” Phrased as rhetorical, the question ends up translating to something like “Dark feminist movies with anti-creationist agendas are totally my thing.” A sentence like that will tell you a lot about a person in terms of taste, political beliefs, and social preoccupation (in this case, Kim’s interest in feminism).

The article gets humorous (her sister suspects her obsession means she’s secretly pregnant) and then deep. Years later, Kim discusses her old obsession with a like-minded friend (“Farran Smith Nehme, she of the remarkable Self Styled Siren”) and finds to her relief that she’s not alone in sympathizing with the “murderous” women she kept getting drawn back to in the movies:

I said of Ellen, "I kind of sympathize with her." Sayeth the Siren: “So do I, so do I.”

Which illustrates another important point about Kim’s blog “voice.” She’s talking about feminism, privacy, 1940s cinema, and the issue of sympathy, all of which typically beg for an academic or “objective” voice. Thankfully, Kim writes it like a human being, one with her own “perhaps disturbing” obsessions and concerns. This is what makes for engaging analysis, in my opinion.

Her recent post on Sunset Gun called “Insecticide: Revisiting the Genius of Bug” finds Kim bringing up Bug, a mostly-unseen festival film that played briefly back in 2007, and discussing mostly it in terms of the actors’ brilliance. Of star Ashley Judd, who, I suppose, hasn’t received a lot of attention for her recent acting work, Kim says

Judd … when given the chance, can be one of the bravest and most electrifying actresses working. Moving from a quiet, seen-it-all cynicism to a deranged, focused conspiratorial rambling, her transformation is without question. In her earlier moments, you can see that spark of insanity so, when it blooms to full flower, you truly believe she’s exiting the smothering cocoon of her life.

Here we see Kim getting closer to the role of traditional film critic, analyzing a single element of the film and using it to champion an artist who deserves the recognition. But the seed of Kim’s feminism, her respect for Judd’s portrayal of a powerless woman going to extreme measures to create a little bit of self-worth:

She’s found her purpose. She's also attempting to reconcile her damaged past and neglect in one of the most destructive, insane ways possible. But in Judd's hands, she’s so good, so real, so with her character (my God, just the way Judd sits on a couch is remarkably natural) she becomes, in a tragic, twisted way, inspirational.

This is not the typical caption review for Bug. Most people don’t dig deep enough to reach a conclusion as thought-provoking as finding inspiration in insanity. And Kim does it with style.

In comparison, here’s a piece from Don R. Lewis’ review in Film Threat, which Metacritic deems helpful enough to be one of its three reviews on its unexpanded page on Bug:

It's a tough one to recommend to everyone. Just know now this isn't a horror film as they're making it out to be nor is it a true return to form for Friedkin. Even so, it's worth seeing but perhaps as a DVD rental further down the road.

This is exactly the kind of review that is bad for us. A review can be a recommendation to see or not see a movie, but it shouldn’t always be and definitely doesn’t have to be. I’ve seen the films, I’ve read the recommendations. What I’m looking for is engagement. I think Kim Morgan engages. I think I kind of like her.