Video Essay of the Week

Matt Zoller Seitz reviewed the ten best movie scenes of the year for Salon. Here is his take on a particularly great scene from Toy Story 3. (Note: Please don't watch this if you haven't seen the movie yet.)



Also great is his take on the rowing scene in The Social Network.

Hand Models: Creepy or Creepiest?

Ran across this interview with Ellen Sirot, hand model. Haven't been able to get these three minutes of weird goodness out of my head since.



Jason Kottke hit the nail on the head: "Sirot is constantly performing with her hands but it's also like she hasn't got any hands, not functional ones anyway."

Zoolander wasn't that far off...

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

Thanksgiving at the Movies

Celebrate Thanksgiving with this ode to food in film, from the master of the video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz.



MZS correctly recognizes that the preparation, presentation, and plating are just as important as the eating.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Is Larry Summers the Key Character in The Social Network?

In my last post I mentioned in passing that Larry Summers is the only likable character in The Social Network. Let's revisit that idea.

I still think I'm right about the Summers character's likability. But as I was discussing the film with my roommate, I realized that this issue might be more complicated than I initially thought.

Your thoughts on Larry Summers in the film--played by Douglas Urbanski--most likely depend on your thoughts on the Winklevoss twins. Are they spoiled brats who expect the world to conform to their expectations or are they the victims of a serious case of intellectual property theft? This, of course, is the main question of the movie.

I initially read the twins as the former, but there's reason to reconsider this approach. After all, Zuckerberg did steal their idea, even if he did all the coding from scratch. The courts agree, to the tune of a $65 million settlement. (I'm talking here only about the universe of the film; I have no idea what happened in real life.) They're honorable gentlemen--or, at least, one of them is--who believe in the ideals of a Harvard code, initially refraining from suing Zuckerberg. They've previously succeeded in business, sending a programmer off to work for Google. They're athletic. They're attractive, no small thing for audiences who love identifying with good looking characters.

So why am I introducing the film's overarching theme through Larry Summers? Because the twins' quick interaction with the Harvard president may be the crucial scene to determining their character. Summers dismisses the Winklevosses and their claim pretty conclusively. If the scene were played differently, it might have added additional support to the idea that their legitimate claims are being ignored by the very people entrusted to safeguard their success. But, as shot, this short scene lends credence to the opposite approach.

Let's start with Summers. As Harvard president, he starts off in a position of authority. This appeal to stature is only strengthened when he mentions that he understands the financial considerations of the case because, after all, he had served as Treasury Secretary of the US. But beyond that, Summers is quick and confident and funny, a likable combination. Compare this to the Winklevosses, who repeatedly lose their cool throughout the meeting. Not as much room for sympathy with them. It only gets worse as the viewer learns that the twins relied upon their father's connections to secure this meeting. Score one for the privileged brats theory. Their petulance and immaturity are again highlighted as one of the brothers breaks the knob off a historic door.

This scene, short as it was, sealed my interpretation of the Winklevoss twins. If it were shot just a bit differently, my entire approach to the movie would have been different. It might not be true, then, that your understanding of the Winklevosses guides your take on Summers: your analysis of Summers just might determine your reading of the Winklevoss twins and, I believe, the film as a whole.

Facebook, Privacy, and the Bettering of Society

All everyone's been talking about is The Social Network, the so-called Facebook movie. And with good reason: it's a damn good film, even if it took some time on the way home from the theater to come up with even one likable character. (We eventually settled on Larry Summers, and, maybe, Erica and Rashida Jones' character.) I'll have some more thoughts on the film, I hope, later this week, but I found it interesting that so many publications used the occasion of the film's release to talk about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. As opposed to the usual formula of the movie following a book--even as The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires--here we have an outpouring of the written word following a film.

The best of these, at least of the ones I've read, is Jose Antonio Vargas' profile of Zuckerberg in the September 20th edition of The New Yorker. There's the usual history and background, but where Vargas really excels is in discussing issues familiar to any of Facebook's users, a number somewhere around half a billion worldwide.

Here's Vargas on Facebook and privacy, one of the recurring issues of our new digital lives:

Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, “This is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place—and more honest, you’ll hear that word over and over again—if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it’s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.”

Zuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September, 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they’re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I’m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources—some of whom might not approve of homosexuality—would see it.

“So what did you end up doing?” Zuckerberg asked.

“I put men.”

“That’s interesting. No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out,” he said. “We didn’t create that—society was generally ready for that.” He went on, “I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.”

I've never understood Zuckerberg's claim that openness is good. I always pictured this as the posturing of someone whose billion-dollar company requires the redefinition of online privacy in such a way that maximizes profits. But, now, I'm not so sure. I still don't necessarily want my grandmother to see all the pictures I'm tagged in, but it might actually be a good thing--both for individuals and our society at large--if, for example, people felt more comfortable being honest about their sexuality. Who knows, maybe Facebook is doing some good after all.

June 17, 1994: Subtle Choices Are Choices Nonetheless

ESPN's presentation of Brett Morgen's documentary June 17, 1994--part of the sports network's 30 for 30 series--opens with the director addressing the audience, saying:

June 17, 1994 is not your typical documentary. There are no talking head interviews, there's no narration, there's simply my editor, myself, and a bunch of footage. Over the last ten years what I've been trying to do is create non-fiction films that are what I call experiential. They're movies that take place in the past but are presented in the present tense. The reason we chose June 17, 1994 is just about every emotion that one relates to sports took place on that day.

I'm not sure whose idea it was to have Morgen describe his directing style before the start of the film, but that person should be commended. Leaving aside the fact that this introductory remark may provide evidence that there is, in fact, at least one talking head interview included in the film, Morgen's opening explanation is a necessary one. It's the first documentary I've seen that eschews reflective interviews and, even if the audience would be able to follow the action without this documentary staple, it takes something of a mental shift to realize that what we're watching is not a meditation on that June date through the lens of sixteen years of reflection: we're watching the on-the-spot reactions of those who witnessed these events unfold in real time. Morgen's introduction might not be the most elegant way to prepare the audience for this change, but I'll take what I can get from ESPN.

The film follows a single day of events in the sports world. The New York Rangers victory parade down the streets of Manhattan. The opening day of the Chicago-hosted World Cup. Arnold Palmer playing his final round of golf at the US Open. Game 5 of the NBA finals, featuring the Knicks and Rockets. A full slate of baseball games. And, of course, OJ's car chase.

The most interesting part of the film is some really great behind-the-scenes footage of Bob Costas, hosting NBC's coverage of the NBA finals. Costas, in these clips, discusses with his production staff how to handle the uncomfortable need to broadcast what was considered a rather important basketball game during what became one of the biggest news stories of the century. The viewer sees Costas desperately trying to determine how best to introduce the game even while OJ sits in the back of a speeding car with a gun to his head. This, in a nutshell, is the major theme of the movie: it's an exploration of how context and juxtaposition create meaning and how people respond to these juxtapositions. While Costas puts on a professional and appropriate face, Morgen throws everything together, forcing the viewer to assimilate six events at once. Trust me when I tell you that each event informs the others, as everything always does. What's fascinating here is that no one--except maybe those working the nation's newsrooms--could possibly have followed the day's events with a level of attention matched by Morgen's mashed-up day. June 17, 1994 as experienced by an average American bears only a slight resemblance to June 17, 1994 as experienced by the film's audience.

And this brings us back to Morgen's opening claim. Just because Morgen claims that this is a thoroughly experiential film, throwing the viewer back in time to 1994, doesn't mean that we have to believe him. As in all films, what the audience sees on-screen is highly curated. The very editing itself is nothing if not a subtle form of reflection, offering moments of commentary through juxtapositions that are anything but neutral. Jumping from OJ's 1985 NFL Hall of Fame induction speech in which he thanks Nicole for some of the best years of his life to an image of a bloody garment at the Simpson residence in 1994 says something. Bringing together footage of a high-speed car chase and a clip of OJ running through an airport on Hertz's dime says something. Apposing the Rangers Stanley Cup victory parade with the throngs who lined the California freeways to gawk at and cheer for OJ's infamous white Bronco says something. Of course, films are supposed to say things. That's the point. And no, this documentary does not faithfully represent how anyone actually experienced that warm June day, but, again, this is the point of film: to selectively tell a story, bringing together diverse elements while omitting needless ones. Morgen does that in spades.

Recommended.

Movie Literacy in Summer 2010

I've spent some time reading the Screen Rant post which introduces the following video, trying to determine what motivated the hours and hours of editing and splicing that it took to piece this thing together. And I couldn't really find anything beyond: I'm totally stoked for all the movies that're coming out this summer.

But yeah, the video:



To me, the more interesting thing here is that these 150 seconds represent, at least in a small way, the total Hollywood's output for Summer 2010. Familiarity with these films marks a not unimpressive level of movie literacy. I'm personally familiar with 14 of the 24 source movies without having seen a single one of them. And I go out of my way to avoid knowing about movies before I go to see them. If nothing else, this spliced trailer represents how successful movie marketing has become. (Assuming, of course, that the goal of marketing is create awareness for products. But that seems like a question best left to a different blog.)

Everything is Familiar

It appears that, as a society, we've run out of things to say. How else to explain the popularity of videos like the following two?



And:



I'm not sure what exactly these say about our familiarity with everything, but it seems pretty significant, whatever it is.

[Movie one via Emily]

Elementary

Your feelings on the new Sherlock Holmes movie will probably mostly depend on your feelings on superhero movies in general. Make no mistake: Sherlock Holmes fits squarely in the superhero genre that we've all become familiar with over the previous decade. Holmes, of course, follows the Batman model (basically human and theoretically--if not practically as the title character in a movie desperate to spawn a franchise--mortal) more closely than the Superman model (not human and not really mortal); his specific power is a big brain. That's a slight shift from the usual superhero fare but it's one of detail rather than overall direction. Holmes still gets to save the girl, and defeat the villain (on top of an unfinished bridge, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, no less), and frustrate his sidekick with unnecessary risk taking, and dedicate some time for comic relief (nothing's funnier than a flatulent dog), and set the stage for a sequel.* I might be bored with movies in which there's no possibility for anything seriously bad to happen. (The most egregious example here is Watson's unexplained survival of an elaborate three minute explosion sequence.)

*Sherlock Holmes has already earned $228,975,000 worldwide according to Box Office Mojo, so there's no chance that a sequel won't be made, but I think it would be fun to track movies that obviously set the viewer up for a sequel but fail so spectacularly that one is never greenlit. Just a small bit of schadenfreude directed at overconfident directors.

But even if you're not yet bored with superhero movies and conventions, your enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes will also depend on your enthusiasm for Scooby-Doo-style storytelling techniques. This is because the plot of Holmes precisely follows that of an episode of The Scooby-Doo Show. The mystery is established, Holmes or Fred (or Velma or whomever) acts counter-intuitively to defeat the villain, and the rest of the movie/episode is spent explaining the mystery. In Sherlock Holmes, the good detective pauses every twenty minutes or so to explain to Watson--or, less plausibly, to the bad-guy--why he did something and how he saw through the deception. An awful lot of Robert Downey, Jr. explaining things goes on in what is supposed to be an adventure movie.

Reviewing Avatar

[Spoilers for Avatar ahead.]

I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good practice^[*], but I've fallen into the habit of reading some pretty detailed reviews of most of the TV programs and movies I watch (if you're interested, Alan Sepinwall's TV review blog is comprehensive and excellent--and, as a bonus, he's a Jersey guy). The crucial difference between reviews for movies and for the type of reviewing most often done for TV shows is that movie reviews generally are written for people who have not yet watched the film, while TV reviews usually are meant for already-watched programs. I go out of my way to not read movie reviews before I see the film in question, because not only would this exacerbate the second question enumerated in the footnote below but it would also cause me to see the movie itself with the perspective of a reviewer. Avatar proved to be a weird movie to me.

Describing a movie through writing that the reader hasn't seen is a somewhat futile exercise even under the most fortuitous circumstances. (This is what is so--intentionally--frustrating/cool about the dozens upon dozens of pages of descriptions of fictional movies in Infinite Jest.) But Avatar is more problematic in this regard than just about any other movie I can think of. As has been well-documented, Avatar's plot is almost completely derivative--the watcher has seen this plot before, and she knows how it ends. And yet the visual beauty of the film is so stunning that watching it becomes a very powerful movie experience. But if the main selling point is the visual aspect, what's there to say about it?

It's the literal job, of course, of a group of reviewers to find something interesting to say about movies that the reader hasn't seen, and you can judge for yourself how well they succeeded (hint--the good ones manage to say something more than "Looks pretty, recommended"). More promising is a detailed analysis meant for people who've already watched the film. But even here, the story-telling flaws are so obvious--Stephen Lang's colonel character is flat, with no believable motivation; the heavy-handed narration is often superfluous and distracting; etc., etc.--that they don't really warrant mentioning. There's still room for more creative excursions, using the film as a starting point. (Personally, I'm waiting for Bethlehem Shoals to elaborate on his theory that Avatar is an allegory for the NBA.) But these types of writings don't really fit in with the classic genre of movie reviews.

So what's left? I managed to hold a ~40 minute conversation centered around Avatar with the three friends I attended the movie with during our subway ride home. In retrospect, the most insightful points we made were hyper-focused analyses of small details. For example, we noticed that the repeated use of the phrase "I see you" really cheapened what could have been a meaningful line. The great lines of movie history--think "I drink your milkshake" in There Will Be Blood--are great because they're meaningful in the context of the moment. In Avatar, Cameron seems to favor the brute-force method: if the line isn't sufficiently expressive, repeat it throughout the movie until the audience realizes that it's supposed to be important. But is this a crucial point to note when discussing the film? Probably not--the movie is still well-worth seeing, and yet this specific story-telling failure pales in comparison with the more obvious deficiencies. In the end, this analysis might still be worthwhile even if it's not crucial, because the insight about "I see you" both deepens in a small way the my understanding of this film and is transferable to other films.

Sometimes I'm glad that I'm not a professional reviewer.

^[*]
I have second thoughts about this type of habitual review reading because it elicits two main questions: 1. Is each episode of Community, for example, really so crucial that I need to read a review of it (the episode)? (Follow-up to question 1: Shouldn't I spend my time reading things more important and lasting than reviews of a decidedly mediocre sitcom?) 2. Am I becoming reliant on reviewers to think through my TV and movies for me? I think it's probably worthwhile, though, because reading well-written and thoughtful reviews provides a sort of crash-course in reading the movies and TV shows that the reviews review. I'm going to leave for another time the question of whether becoming a better TV watcher is a worthwhile goal.

The Changing Reader

As I mentioned briefly last week, I spent Friday at the first ever Footnotes conference, subtitled thus: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies. If you're interested, you can read what Twitter (or, mostly me) thought of the conference. And if you're at all interested, you should check out Nick's recap on The Howling Fantods!, which is way more thorough and informed than any review attempted by me could hope to be. But I do want to elaborate on one point that seemed to recur throughout the conference: readers, as "consumers" of media, have changed as much as, if not more than, media in the last 30-40 years. This is true, I posit, even for forms that have been around all those years, namely, fiction and television/film.

The ways in which postmodern literature and film differ from their predecessors is fairly well established. There is no shortage of information on these changes on your friendly neighborhood internet, but since I've already linked to this once before, here's The L.A. Times' Jacket Copy blog's list of postmodern attributes. But perhaps not quite as developed is a study of how readers and film-watchers have changed over that same time period.

Consider, for example, something as simple as establishing shots on television. If you watch something as recent as Seinfeld, you'll notice the preponderance of establishing shots. The exterior of Jerry's apartment, the diner: these are some of the show's most iconic images. Compare that to "Souvenir," the eighth episode of the third season of Mad Men. If you haven't seen it, here's Alan Sepinwall on the cinematography of this episode (sans significant spoilers):

Included in the stylistic template of "Mad Men" is a reluctance to use establishing shots. Though we occasionally see the outside of the Sterling Cooper building, most scenes don't get any kind of transitional image to tell you, "Okay, now we're moving from here to here" or "Okay, we're back here on the following morning." It's not always that noticeable because the show does such long scenes, but there were several sequences in "Souvenir" where we just followed either Betty or Pete throughout their day, bam-bam-bam - no establishing shots, no dissolves or other obvious transitions, just one quick cut after another of their frustrated, empty lives.

I'm not saying that a lack of establishing shots is postmodern or that Mad Men is postmodern because it lacks establishing shots. But, in a way, this episode only works for sophisticated TV viewers who can follow extremely quick cut jumps, a skill which may require having watched countless hours of television to understand the conventions of the medium.

So what similar examples are true of readers? We may be more distrustful of narrators than readers of forty years ago. This questioning of authority is connected with the fact that, to paraphrase DFW, we're been marketed to very effectively for the entirety of our lives. Which came first? Authors going out of their way to make narrators inherently distrustful or readers learning not to take the written word at face value?

And since this post was inspired by a conference called Footnotes, let's think about footnotes. Reading used to be a basically linear activity. Except for reference books, you started reading on the first page and kept going until the end. Unless, of course, the author incorporated footnotes and endnotes, like DFW did, in a conscious effort to disrupt the narrative flow. But the way we read on the internet is unrestricted and deviating. I click from one page to another, with half a dozen tabs open at once. I do most of my reading on devices that can perform a multitude of tasks. It's surprisingly rare that I read one thing at a time, without distractions. Blog posts and, especially, Twitter seem to cater to this limited attention span reading environment. How will our reading expectations affect contemporary and future literature?

Inglourious Basterds

I was perhaps unreasonably excited for Inglourious Basterds. This happens just about any time one of my favorite writers/directors/actors/podcasters/bloggers takes on a project that means something to me. Will Ferrell making a movie about the ABA in the '70s? The concept sounded awesome at the time, even though that movie, it turns out, sucks. So when I heard that Quentin Tarantino was making a movie largely focused on American Jews, well yeah, this would be the type of thing that I would get excited about. But it turns out that the Nazi context slightly tempered my enjoyment of the film. Not necessarily because I consider it inappropriate to make entertaining movies about the Holocaust, but because any context at all makes Tarantino's hallmark violence and gore just a tad bit uncomfortable. It's a feeling I didn't get while watching any of his other movies, but it made this one just a tad bit awkward.

But the frame of reference isn't my biggest issue with this film. I'll let the excellent Matt Zoller Seitz explain what drives Tarantino movies:

Tarantino’s talk is not just the fuel of his movies: it’s the engine, the wheels and most of the frame. It’s where the real dramatic and philosophical action takes place. The gunshots, car crashes and torture scenes are punctuation.

And despite the mixed metaphor, I agree with his point wholeheartedly. To show you why he (and I) thinks this, here's a montage of this dialogue compiled by Seitz:



So we run into a problem when the majority of the dialogue in a Tarantino film is spoken in either French or German. The problem, specifically, is, I don't speak French or German, and I imagine that this is true for most of the American audience. So even though some pretty spectacular things are done with the subtitles--in addition to the incomparable Tarantino plot and camera-work and two Mexican standoffs--it's just not the same. Tarantino cuts the audience off here from what it most connects with. And it's this gap, more than any Holocaust squeamishness, that keeps this movie from being great. It comes close, but it's not great.

Don't See Movies That You Know Are Bad

From A.O. Scott's recent The New York Times article, "Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema:"

Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established
cultural brand.

In the case of the comedies, raunchy or romantic, the

genre functions as the brand, and in the case of “Up,” the Pixar label, almost

uniquely in today’s Hollywood, carries its own cachet and appeal. But otherwise
(and to some extent in these cases as well) the last few months have been a
festival of the known, the stuff you already bought and, from force of habit or
loyalty or maybe even satisfaction, decided to upgrade.

[snip]

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of
creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy.
In bottom-line terms, this is a distinction without a difference. A movie that
people will go and see, almost as if they had no choice, is a safer business
proposition than one they may have to bother thinking about. In this respect
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is exemplary. It brilliantly stymies
reflection, thwarts argument, arrests intelligent response. The most interesting
thing about the movie — apart from Megan Fox’s outfits, I suppose — is that it
has made nearly $400 million domestically.

This last point might be the most important one Scott makes. There's only way to break this cycle of the movie studios spoon-feeding films to the public that appeal to the lowest common denominator, that gain approval based on marketability and not quality, that are familiar and un-inventive and bad: we need to vote with our wallets. Transformers received some of the worst reviews I've seen. I made an exception to my long-standing rule of avoiding movie reviews before actually seeing the film in order to read Roger Ebert's reaction, because I had heard that he offered such a thorough evisceration that his review turned out to be way more entertaining than the actual movie. And yet, the movie was a success because it earned tons of money.

The saddest part about the rise of a system which rewards studios for playing it safe is that we miss out on what should be cool films. I had about 8,000 G.I. Joes as a kid. They were my favorite toy, by far. The only way to keep me from seeing a movie based on my favorite childhood toy would be to inform me, in various ways, that this movie stinks. Paramount managed to achieve that. By refusing to let reviewers see the movie in advance and by releasing an awful trailer, Paramount communicated to me that they had decided to rely on nostalgia and familiarity--and not good movie-making--to draw in viewers.

If we want better movies we need to stop seeing movies that we know are bad.

How We Remember War

There's really no objective reason to connect these two things I'm about to compare. It might be nothing more than an accident that I happened to, on the same day, read a The New York Times story on the day after it was published and watch an Israeli documentary first released in June 2008. But the topics are similar (and, more important, distinct) and I'll take advantage of the happy coincidence of running across them on the same day, in order to think through how we remember war.

I find war monuments to be just about the most interesting things in the whole wide world. They reveal in a very tangible, very visible way how these major human events are thought of, in retrospect. That would be interesting enough in its own right, but, I posit, war memorials do more than that. As times passes and first-hand knowledge of these wars fades, these memorials play a huge role in determining how the wars themselves are remembered. That's why I found this The New York Times article about a dispute over the inclusion of a bronzed representation of a South Vietnamese fighter in the Veterans Memorial Park of Wichita, Kansas so interesting. Some American veterans want to maintain the American identity of the Park. Some Vietnamese-Americans want to have their cooperation in the war effort remembered. And according to The Times, "after long, tense talks, a compromise emerged last month at City Hall: the monument will sit just outside the John S. Stevens Veterans Memorial Park (named for a former local official and veteran), set apart from the rest of the memorials by a landscaped, six-foot earthen berm, with no sidewalk between."

I'm not sure which side is in the right here. The important point is that this decision matters, and that the players involved (in addition to Monica Davey and the editorial staff of The Times) recognize that, more than 34 years after the last of the American personnel was evacuated from Vietnam, we're still struggling to come to terms with how our official memory of this event will be formulated.

The 2008 Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir follows director Ari Folman as he attempts to overcome the official memory of Israel's 1982 Lebanon War. This film has gained a measure of notoriety for being an animated documentary. The animations and illustrations are routinely breathtaking--especially the repeated use of a toxic yellow, hinting equally at the trauma of the original event and the danger in remembering. But the documentary is important for reasons far beyond the decision to offer the tale in an animated form. At the start of the film, Folman finds himself unable to recall his involvement in the war. His memory is stirred through conversations with friends and fellow-soldiers, and he slowly pieces together what happened in Lebanon and what he did or did not do. The film contains conversations with psychologists and trauma experts who explain that the human brain can turn off, in a way, certain disturbing memories. The psychological basis of Folman's memory outage is fascinating, but I can't help but think that the official Israeli policy of embarrassment and silence contributed to the difficulty with which an individual soldier finds himself able to remember what happened. This is a case of an individual digging through the standardized national memory, in order to arrive at a more personal--and, perhaps, more authentic--memory of an important event.

Random Recommendation: Gunnin' For That #1 Spot

It's a beautiful day in New York City, 70s and sunny--the kind of day we've gone without for the last three weeks. How did I choose to spend the spectacular morning hours of this glorious day? I sat on a chair in my bedroom and watched a documentary on Hulu, specifically, a documentary on Hulu called Gunnin' For That #1 Spot. This 96 minute film--produced and directed by Adam Yauch, of Beastie Boys renown--follows a group of 2006's most highly-touted high-school basketball phenoms as they prepare for an elite exhibition game hosted by this country's most famous outdoor basketball court, Harlem's Rucker Park.

The film is divided into two main sections (not counting Hulu's intrusive and annoying ads; this is the first feature-length film I've watched using that site, and it might be the last, at least for a long while): interviews with eight of the high-school players along with their respective coaches, trainers, older brothers, parents, entourages, etc., and game footage of the exhibition contest. Except for a few moments, the game footage section is by far the less interesting portion. (Most of these fascinating moments involve Michael Beasley, now of the Miami Heat, as he alternates between outplaying his elite competition and trash-talking it.) It's of a high-school all-star game, which means that there is very little defense on display, but, more important, Yauch's heavy-handed directorial decisions result in quick-hitting action lacking any sense of coherence, with countless unnecessary multi-angle replays sprinkled in for good measure.

The first 50 minutes or so are much stronger, featuring interviews with high-school athletics experts on topics ranging from the business of ranking prep basketballers to the intense media scrutiny young players face today. But it's the interviews with the athletes themselves which makes this project worthwhile. I don't know if Yauch and friends deliberately delayed releasing the film for nearly three years past the date of the Rucker Park exhibition, but it turned out to be a smart move. As the introduction to an interview with Yauch on Hulu's blog notes:

If you’re a hoops fan, you may recognize some of the players featured: Four of them are pros — Jerryd Bayless (Portland Trail Blazers), Michael Beasley (Miami Heat), Kevin Love (Minnesota Timberwolves) and Donte Green (was with the Sacramento Kings) — and another two, Tyreke Evans (Memphis) and Brandon Jennings (playing in the Italian League), are participating in the NBA draft tonight. (Kyle Singler will remain at Duke; Lance Stephenson starts college in the fall).

This familiarity is an important point, as basketball fans get to see pretty extensive interviews with prominent young NBA players. I might be alone in this assessment, but I think it's great to see an 18 year-old Kevin Love talk to his mother about the girls that throw themselves at him when he visits Los Angeles. That's really the most interesting part of this project, seeing athletes interact with the media before they're completely comfortable with it. This film doesn't document the standard athlete-interview cliches--high-school is really the last time you get to see these players before they're media-trained. This documentary, of course, functions are part of their training and some of the differences evident over the course of the movie are striking. My favorite part of the film is the footage of Jerryd Bayless announcing his intention to attend the University of Arizona for college. In the middle of the proceedings, a middle-aged man (his coach? his father?) leans over and tells the best high-school player in the state of Arizona to look up when he talks. And yet, in Yauch's interviews filmed only a few month later, Bayless looks completely comfortable in front of the camera. It's hard to tell from this film how these players develop as basketball players from the time their high-school careers end to the point when they reach the NBA or major college ball, but it's easy to see how they learn to deal with the attention that surrounds them, from press conferences, to magazine covers, to interviews, to, yes, even documentaries produced and directed by a Beastie Boy.

Taste the Happy, Michael

Via Kottke, here's the trailer for a soon-to-be-released documentary about Arrested Development.



Judging from the trailer, it seems the documentarians aim to uncover why America didn't love this show as much it should have.

UP

In between arguing about Raul Ibanez's relationship to both bloggers and steroids and laughing at the similarities between 30 Rock and The Muppet Show (it wouldn't at all surprise me, by the way, if 30 Rock manages to work in a reference to that blog post next season), the internet's been focused on deconstructing Pixar movies and What They Mean.

Is Pixar sexist, because their movies haven't featured a female protagonist? At least some people think so.

Is the Kevin character in UP, as Hunter Stephenson put it, "a Nod to the LGBT Movement?" Hunter Stephenson, obviously, thinks so.

Is Pixar even more sexist than we originally thought two paragraphs ago because their 2012 film, The Bear and the Bow, which finally features a female protagonist turns out to feature a female protagonist who is a princess? Linda Holmes thinks so.

It's important that people are thinking about what our contemporary fairy tales mean. Louis Althusser, in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, describes the ways in which a ruling class maintains it's hegemony: "However, it is not enough to ensure for labour power the material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be reproduced as labour power. I have said that the available labour power must be 'competent,' i.e. suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production." He goes on to relate the ways in which the dominant culture inculcates it's values and ideologies, mentioning--in addition to the obvious ones like the army, police force, etc.--as examples of Ideological State Apparatusses:

• the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),
• the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private "Schools")
  
• the family ISA,
• the legal ISA,
• the political ISA (the political system, including the different Parties),
• the trade union ISA,
• the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
• the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)

So yes, our cultural artifacts, including kids' movies, matter.

But it's important to investigate them in the right way. With the exception of Stephenson's Kevin theory, the focus has shifted away from the movies themselves. Speculative grumblings about a movie that won't be released for thirty months doesn't help anyone. Holmes's post reflects almost entirely on herself and her feelings, which would be fine if it hadn't masqueraded as a comment on UP and Pixar's upcoming movies.

All this chatter only distantly related to the source material detracts from the film itself and what makes it special. The touching wordless montage retracing the steps of the Fredericksen marriage. The simple Pixar storytelling which is never simplistic. The rounded characters with motivations. The protagonist who--while not a woman--takes the form of an elderly gentleman. (What's the last animated film to do that?) The call for adventure.

What is readily evident in UP is quite good. There's no need to look at the film for what it is not.

Wolverine's Origins Are Surprisingly Boring

With the release of the season's first big budget movie event, summer has arrived. If the initial film's quality is indicative of what will follow, it'll be a tedious season. There's nothing wrong with X-Men Origins: Wolverine; it's just boring. After witnessing the release of approximately 10,000 superhero movies in the last five years, the genre feels tired. Or maybe formulaic and trite iterations of the genre just seem more obvious after watching some truly cool things happen to superhero movies recently.

There's not much to say about the movie itself--I got the sense that the narrative didn't matter, even while I was watching it unfold. That's a problem with prequels in general (we know, for instance, that Wolverine can't die), but this film didn't do itself any favors by failing to reveal anything interesting about any of the characters or, really, forgetting to exert any effort towards the goal of making the viewer care about the narrative or the characters.

The good thing about bad movies is that it allows movie critics to strut their stuff a little. We're lucky to be living in a time with some wonderful movie writers. So instead of spending more time thinking about this utterly forgettable film, let's read together some good writing about a film.

Like this bit, from Slate reviewer Dana Stevens:

Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine, the first X-Men movie directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), is remarkably lame. At least three of its images are clichéd enough to have already been parodied on The Simpsons: the hero silhouetted against the sunset as he carries his girl to safety; the aforementioned climactic showdown on top of a nuclear reactor (unfortunately, unlike Homer, no character here is wearing a muumuu); and the hero shouting "Nooooo!" over his beloved's body as the camera pulls up to the heavens.

Or how about national treasure, Roger Ebert:

At least, you hope, he [Wolverine] has an interesting vulnerability? I'm sure X-Men scholars can tell you what it is, although since he has the gift of instant healing, it's hard to pinpoint. When a man can leap from an exploding truck, cling to an attacking helicopter, slice the rotor blades, ride it to the ground, leap free and walk away (in that ancient cliche where there's a fiery explosion behind him but he doesn't seem to notice it), here's what I think: Why should I care about this guy? He feels no pain and nothing can kill him, so therefore he's essentially a story device for action sequences.

It's really worth reading Ebert's entire review; it's nice that our most famous movie reviewer is also probably the best.

While Stevens and Ebert focus on the Wolverine movie, David Foster Wallace in an article titled "F/X Porn" takes on the big-budget sequel as an idea. After a lengthy analysis of why he loved Terminator 1 and hated Terminator 2, DFW explains his theory of Special Effects Porn. Here goes:

The point is that head-clutchingly insipid stuff like this puts an ever heavier burden of importance on "T2"'s digital effects, which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center, which in turn means that even more money and directional attention must be lavished on the film's F/X. This sort of cycle is symptomatic of the insidious three-part loop that characterizes Special Effects Porn --

ONE: Astounding digital dinosaur / tornado / volcano / Terminator effects that consume almost all the director's creative attention and require massive financial commitment on the part of the studio;

TWO: A consequent need for guaranteed megabuck ROI [Return on Investment], which entails the formulaic elements and easy sentiment that will assure mass appeal (plus will translate easily into other languages and cultures, for those important foreign sales...);

THREE: A director -- often one who's shown great talent in earlier, less expensive films -- who is now so consumed with realizing his spectacular digital vision, and so dependent on the studio's money to bring the F/X off, that he has neither the leverage nor the energy to fight for more interesting or original plots / themes / characters.

-- and thus yields the two most important corollary formulations of the Inverse Cost and Quality Law:

(ICQL(a)) The more lavish and spectacular a movie's special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects. For obvious supporting examples of ICQL (a), see lines 1-2 of this article and/or also "Jurassic Park," "Independent Day," "Forrest Gump," etc.

(ICQL (b)) There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources. The number of supporting examples of ICQL (b) is sobering. Have a look, e.g., at the difference between Rodriguez's "El Mariachi" and his "From Dusk to Dawn," between DeBont's "Speed" and "Twister," between Gilliam's "Brazil" and "Twelve Monkeys," between Bigelow's "Near Dark" and "Strange Days." Or chart Cameron's industry rise and artistic decline from "T1" and "Aliens" through "T2" and "The Abyss" to -- dear Lord -- "True Lies." U.S. entertainment media report that Cameron's new "Titanic," currently in American release, is (once again) the most expensive and technically ambitious film of all time. Doubtless, Britons have been pricing trenchcoats and lubricants in anticipation of its arrival in the UK.

I apologize for the lengthy excerpt, but I think it's worth it.

Here's hoping that there'll be some decent movies this summer.

Your illiteracy has screwed us again, Charlie!

Back let's say two months ago, I had never seen an episode of The Wire. The only things I knew about the show were that there is a cool/interesting character named Omar and that they pronounce the word "shit" in a peculiar way. Now, about 43 viewing hours into the series I have a much better sense of what the show is about and why it has been consistently ranked as one of the very greatest achievement in the history of American television. I am in the process of filling a gap in my cultural literacy.

I've been thinking about cultural literacy because I just discovered, via J.E. Skeets's twitter feed, something called Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something. I don't know if it's smart to watch or read or peruse all of these things in one sitting--these are things you should have already experience, not a playlist for a Saturday night when the subway is running local or whatever. But the collection is cool because it is one guy's take on what internet literacy is for non-loser young people.

This list reminded me of an article written by Jim Emerson, on Roger Ebert's blog, about movie literacy:

On the "Brokeback Mountain" panel, I talked mainly about the film as a work in the tradition of the classical American Western, exemplified by John Ford ("Stagecoach," "The Searchers") and Howard Hawks ("Red River," "El Dorado"), and the Hollywood love story, as exemplified by Douglas Sirk ("All That Heaven Allows") and many others. You can't fully understand a contemporary work of art or pop culture unless you know at least something about its heritage -- just as Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" (which Roger Ebert dissected shot by shot with an audience during the conference) would be meaningless without the classic private eye movies and films noir it invokes and subverts, especially "The Big Sleep" and "The Maltese Falcon." "Brokeback Mountain" is not an "anti-Western," but (in the parlance of 1973), you could definitely say that "The Long Goodbye" is an anti-noir. It's like jazz: You have to know the notes Altman isn't playing to understand how he's riffing on and around the familiar melody of the generic private detective movie.

He then provides a helpful list of the 102 "movies I just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate.' I hope these movies are experiences we can all assume we share."

Movies Meet Marketing

There's a great article in this week's edition of The New Yorker, dated January 19, 2009, by Tad Friend, titled "The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer's playbook." The piece follows Tim Palen, Lionsgate's co-president of theatrical marketing, and it does that quintessential The New Yorker thing of using Palen as a means of investigating the marketing of films as an industry. Here's the money quote:

One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he's given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice "Fire the head of marketing." Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. "Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates, " one studio's president of production says. "So at green-light meetings it's a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, 'This director was born to make this movie.' "

And, on the topic of trailers:

Another problem with free samples is: what if the product isn't particularly remarkable? "How many great movies are there each year?" the trailer cutter David Schneiderman says. "We're in the business of cheating, let's face it. We fix voice-overs, create dialogue to clear up a story, use stock footage. We give pushup bras to flat-chested girls, take people's eyes and put them where we want them. And sometimes it works.

OK. So we know now that the goal of films is to make money--and not, you know, be good--and that advertising lies to us.

But what do these marketing folks think about us, American citizumers? Is there room for nuance? For subtlety? For experimentation?

No:

An unexpected corallary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer hve time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn't expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film's budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

Reading this article makes me question how I choose what movies to watch. I try to avoid movie reviews because I like going into the thing without previous knowledge. I want to decide for myself what worked and what didn't work. But are the trailers and commercials and newspaper ads commissioned and designed by the people trying to sell the movie any better? In a strange way, they may be. I may see the best joke in the trailer, but, after reading this article, I'm pretty convinced that the trailer won't actually have anything to do with the full-length movie.

And, just for fun, Gelf Magazine runs an occasional feature titled The Blurb Report, in which the magazine takes a look at the original context of excerpted movie blurbs. For example, here--from their Best Worst Blurbs of 2007-- is a quote attributed to Michael Wilmington of The Chicago Tribune regarding Norbit: "Eddie Murphy's comic skills are immense." And here is the complete quote: "Murphy's comic skills are immense, and 'Dreamgirls' shows he's a fine straight dramatic actor too. So why does he want to make these huge, belching spectaculars, movies as swollen, monstrous and full of hot air as Rasputia herself—here misdirected by Brian Robbins of 'Good Burger,' 'Varsity Blues' and that lousy 'Shaggy Dog' remake?"

That was just in case you still believed any form of marketing.

[Update: I didn't realize the Best Worst Blurbs of 2008 was out. But it is. Check it out, if you just can't get enough of out-of-context movie blurbs.]