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