intertribal | Entries tagged with the shit movie industry

The Oscars: I didn't get what James Franco and Anne Hathaway were trying to do - especially James Franco, who was practically rolling his eyes/falling asleep the entire time - but then I thought, maybe this is some kind of meta-commentary on the Oscars.

Franco is playing the guy who's all "psh, the Oscars are such a sham, man, it's all just a prop for the big Hollywood production companies/middle-class sensibilities, I don't even watch the Oscars" on an Oscars blog, and Hathaway is playing the Hollywood shill (president of the high school Hollywood club?) who just loves everything with her "woo-hoo"s and artificial giggles. So maybe that's what they were aiming for. Interesting strategy.

Current Music: "Black Steel" - Tricky

Nicole Sperling on Box Office Misses:

On paper, they were destined to be mega-hits. "The Tourist," "How Do You Know" and "Gulliver's Travels" should have heated up the box office during the cold and snowy final weeks of the year, drawing audiences to the multiplex with the promise of A-list stars, romance and, in one case, family-friendly comedy.

Instead, all three films — each of which cost $100 million or more to produce — underperformed or downright flopped with critics and U.S. moviegoers, squelching holiday cheer at two of the major Hollywood studios as smaller-budget projects such as "True Grit" and "Black Swan" enjoyed sold-out Christmas-week runs.

The lesson for moviemakers?

People don't want to see bad movies they've already seen a million times? People actually respond to positive recommendations, and maybe the movie review biz should actually try and push interesting movies? The movie industry should try to make interesting movies?

These days, there's no such thing as a sure thing.

Oh.

"In all three cases, the films skew to the classic model for a financially successful movie: well-known names, large budgets, prime release dates. What really happened in each case is the movie missed the mark," said Bruce Nash, president of Nash Information Services, a movie financial tracking and research company. "In all three cases, it was a quality problem."

"Just because you've got a lot of people available doesn't mean you can put anything in front of them and they'll go," said veteran marketing executive Terry Press. "People have acted like Christmas is the promised land, and it can be, but the movies still have to deliver because audiences can always stay home and play with their new gadgets."

Hahaha.

Well, I saw Avatar, but at least it was for free.

And let me tell you, the animals in that movie were so bad ass. They do all the leg work - those Navis would be fucked without 'em, let me tell you, and they seemed to come and help the Navis out of the goodness of their hearts - and all they get as a reward is death. This one Navi loses TWO "pets" in like five minutes. And it's like, oh, you're bonded with the animal now. If by bonding you mean rape rite, then yeah, sure, you've "bonded." And now that you're "bonded" with the animal you share its thoughts. And by "share its thoughts" you mean "take over its brain and tell it what to do."

The corporate-soldiers, meanwhile, just look at animals and go "omg monster!" and shoot.

The animals deserve to take over Pandora and kick all the rest of them dumbasses off.

I do agree with some reviews that have pointed out the worst thing about this movie is Jake Sully's character. Poor Michelle Rodriguez, bless her heart, has a much better character. Even Sigourney Weaver's scientist woman is better. I wish I could say there were good characters among the Navis, but they were all awfully drawn. They were basically just every-non-white-culture-mashed-into-one-super-exotic-culture, and they weren't anything beyond their rituals and animal control. They're just culture. No personalities. Unless you count "jealousy," because one of them has that.

The problem with Jake Sully's character isn't that he's clearly struggling to control his Australian accent, but that he becomes the "bridge" between the corporate-soldiers and the Navis. Why does he become this? Because he literally takes on the genetic code of the Navi. So if you can't literally become the Other, then there's just no hope of understanding them as anything but savages. I think my favorite part of the movie was Michelle Rodriguez pulling away from bombing the Navis, because "I didn't sign up for this." She's got no avatar. She just decides, on her own, that she has a moral objection to what's going on and decides to do something about it. Jake Sully decides to do something about it because he's become one of them and gets to have sex with one of them. In other words, vested interest, and whatever it's called when you can only be kind to someone because you directly relate to them. This is pathetic, useless, dishonest conflict resolution. And okay, I like Everlast's "What It's Like," but when movies use this trope it becomes Wife Swap, and I'm sick of it. You shouldn't have to physically become another person to keep from blowing them up.

This only works - and even then only at a, like, 10% level - in movies like Saw. Where it's like, haha, you played with the lives of others, now your own life will be blasted out of you. When it's "poetic justice." And believe me, I am not sold on poetic justice either, but it's better than use-your-new-outlook-on-life-as-a-playground for your own personal fulfillment. Cuz then you're just a colonist, bada bing bada boom.

And oh, I know, he's our "avatar." As far as the writing goes, none of the Navi characters have enough substance to be anything but exotic Others, so yeah, getting the audience to relate to the corporate-soldier-world is mission accomplished, bucko. When the Navis are written as glorified plants, that's what you get. When Pandora is just a playground, that's what you get. Your audience will relate to the humanoids whose attributes go beyond RIDES THIS BEAST and HAS MOHAWK.

From an Arcade Fire song, "Black Mirror":
"Please show me something that isn't mine - but mine is the only kind that I relate to."

There are many, many other problems with the story, but this is what immediately popped to mind for me. Ultimately, pretty forgettable and yikes, way way too long. I didn't think any of the visuals were worth writing home about - good for the moment, but so is black light - they're goddamn CGI, and some of the early scenes of the avatars looked downright sloppy. Give it an Oscar in technical achievement if you must, but let's not mistake technical achievement for movie, ok?

Current Music: "Fast As You Can" - Fiona Apple

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Not Avatar.

The God Save Roman Polanski Movement is in full swing:

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, said that for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.

While Mr. Polanski had committed “a grave crime,” Mr. Lang said, “he is a great creator and artist, and there’s a sentiment here that pursuing someone for a crime committed 30 years ago, in which the victim has decided to drop the case, is unreasonable, a kind of judicial lynching. In Europe, it would be unimaginable to punish someone in a situation like this.

“Sometimes the American justice system shows an excess of formalism,” Mr. Lang said, “like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly. It sometimes lacks equity and humanity.”

And they're going to plead their case to Hillary? This Hillary? Good fucking luck. I hope she roasts them like marshmallows. And I don't even like Hillary.

Current Location: Work

Ok, this article is a few months old and it's from Entertainment Weekly and I read it in a hair salon, but that doesn't mean it doesn't raise an interesting point.

Name any recent horror hit and odds are that female moviegoers bought more tickets than men. And we're not just talking about psychological spookfests like 2002's The Ring (60 percent female), 2004's The Grudge (65 percent female), and 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose (51 percent female). We're also talking about all the slice-and-dice remakes and sequels that Hollywood churns out.

''I don't think there was anyone who expected that women would gravitate toward a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' says Chainsaw producer Brad Fuller of the 2003 remake, which became a female-driven $81 million hit. ''For us, the issue now is that it's harder for us to get young men into the theater than women.'' And female audiences stay loyal. ''I've seen married women who are, like, 35 years old at horror movies and they're like, 'Oh, our husbands are with the kids and we all came out together,''' says Clint Culpepper, the president of Screen Gems, which is releasing a remake of the 1987 slasher film The Stepfather in October. ''Men stop seeing horror at a certain age, but women continue to go.''

The article goes on to give some pretty ridiculous, flat-footed reasons for this: 1) oh, it's about the empowerment of the final girl! 2) it's an excuse to cuddle up with the boyfriend. The second explanation contradicts the data presented; the first explanation is old news. As a woman who goes to horror movies, I don't think either has got anything to do with anything, but all I can really say is "I like horror!"

I've always thought there's something more bizarre going on, whatever it is. Like, does it matter that The Ring, The Grudge, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose all feature female "monsters"? Nobody seems to talk about that aspect of "women and horror" because we're so stuck on the protagonists, but it's an interesting thing to look at. The Exorcist is a classic example (I read a reasonably good analysis about that one for class, but then the analysis concluded that what made Reagan horrific/powerful was that she was masculinizing/masculinized, and I was like, *groan*). So is Carrie. The really scary ghosts in The Shining are female. The really scary ghost in The Sixth Sense is little Mischa Barton. Even Rosemary's Baby features evil within Rosemary (and personified by the nosy female neighbor). The Omen is one of the few horror movies where the evil is totally masculine, although of course it's a little boy. The Descent featured a bunch of fairly gender-neutral subhumans, but there was a lot of bloody women killing other bloody women in that movie, IIRC. Regardless of what drives writers and producers to fill their movies with female monsters (I think for the most part that's a different issue), I wonder what these monsters reflect about the female audience.

Then of course there's the serial killers, the last refuge of the male "monster." For all their apparent immortality, these guys are not metaphysical, horrifying, all-powerful and all-present ghosts that seem to kill by the sheer fear they inflict. Like zombies, they're beatable. Serial killers also aren't demonic in any frightening way - the jury is out on Freddy Krueger, I suppose, but he's not literally summoning Satan like Reagan. I personally don't find serial killer movies very scary, but more importantly, I frequently root for the serial killer. For all this talk of empowerment, a lot of people go to serial killer movies to watch annoying teenagers get killed. Sure, you'll say "don't open the door!" but it's to protect yourself from the jump, not because you give a shit about Girl In Halter Top. No one goes to see horror movies for the protagonists. They go for the monsters, for the slow creeping death, for the fear.

It's terribly ironic that the article mentions Lars von Trier's new Antichrist as another horror movie with a female protagonist - for many reasons, not the least of which is that Charlotte Gainsbourg is "the Antichrist." Listen to a bunch of male studio execs trying to figure out why women want to see their movies and they conclude meekly that "The appeal is in watching women in jeopardy and, most importantly, fighting back" - all I can do is laugh. That's like seriously arguing that rape/revenge is feminism in disguise. It's a fundamentally dishonest assessment of the horror experience. What made The Descent phenomenal was that no one survived. Is Naomi Watts really fighting back in The Ring? Remember, Samara/Sadako "never sleeps."

Spoon-Fed at the Cinema:

I know, I know. School’s out. People want an easy good time, free air-conditioning to go with their expensive snacks, a little escapism in a time of stress. These are the truisms of summer, invoked every time some pointy-headed grouch complains about the prevalence of sequels, or superhero movies, or big, dumb popcorn spectacles. We like big, dumb popcorn spectacles.

Or course we do — even the pointy-headed grouches among us. But those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

The big lesson of the summer of 2009 is that those qualities, while they may be desirable in some abstract, ideal way, don’t pay the bills. The studios, housed in large and beleaguered media conglomerates, have grown more cautious as the economy has faltered, releasing fewer movies and concentrating resources on dependable formulas. Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established cultural brand.

What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! (That George Simmons giant-baby comedy is called “Redo.”) Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.

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.

There is nothing else to say. Any further discussion — say about whether it’s a good movie or not — sounds quaint, old-fashioned, passé. Get a clue, grandpa.

I'm also a grumpy old man, apparently.

The studios hate the Oscars for a different reason than I do, yet I understand their plight...

It wasn’t so much about admiration for the picture itself, though there was plenty of that. Insiders read the snub more as a rejection by the academy, once comfortably regarded as an adjunct of the industry that created it, of what the inner circle does best: Build complex, monumental films that move millions.

But the academy gave no points for popularity. And the company folks noticed.

As little as a year ago, the prestige that came with an Oscar contender could seem worth at least a small financial loss to studios that could always make up for it with their summer hits.

In tougher times, not so.

Maybe we should just split the annual "film awards". We can have one batch devoted to popular box-office hits, rewarding the especially stellar and accomplished among them. Media darlings and people who are famous for doing nothing can present. Fireworks and acrobats on stage, possibly animatronic elephants. Then we can have another batch devoted to movies that are actually good; not good-hearted, but well-made and well-acted and well-written even if no one sees them, with very little fanfare and no red carpet and no mush, for God's sake, no mush.

And if there must be awards given to feel-good movies that are not actually good in a merit sort of way, but aren't box-office smash-ups either, then they can have their own separate shindig. The Yay! Awards, or some such thing. Maybe the Academy can take over there, since they consider themselves the guardians of mass morality. They need to let go of the whole "artistic achievement" thing, though, cuz that is something they just don't do.

Carpetbagger (the NYTimes film awards moron) describes the Oscars as "a ceremony that can feel oddly reassuring in the face of difficult economic times." Yeah. Definitely the Yay! Awards.

---

A sad HAHAHAHA to the idea that Pete Carroll is a "specialist" at the University of Southern California, $4,415,714 salary aside. Specialist at what? Being a dick-face?

The idea of him teaching class reminds me of American Lit (Differentiated!) in tenth grade, which was taught by one of the football coaches. He was kind of a sad, stern guy. Never let the class sidetrack him into discussions about the team. He would just chuckle, all dark and grim like we're atheists in foxholes, and say, "Now, guys. What about Huckleberry Finn." Looked somewhat like Major West of 28 Days Later. He had a dogmatic approach to most of the books and was impatient with getting these points - which were above the heads of most of the students, but below mine (not to be too cocky about it, ha ha) - across when most of the class was like, "Catherine [of A Farewell to Arms] is like a Cadillac - she's easy". He liked me, though, gave me an A on everything and kept all my papers (even the horrendous Catch-22 in-class paper I wrote where my thesis was something like, Yossarian is a liberal - seriously, goes down in my memory as the worst thing I ever wrote). I feel like he was fond of The Grapes of Wrath - he seemed down with listening to Rage Against the Machine's "The Ghost of Tom Joad." So I guess it can be done.

Still. It's hard to imagine Pete Carroll teaching English.

---

Paul Wolfowitz is a raving lunatic and a piece of shit. "The reason the terrorists are successful in Indonesia is because the Suharto regime fell and the methods that were used to suppress them are gone." Can somebody staple his mouth shut, please?

Seriously, Wolfowitz, DIAF.

Current Music: "Smooth Criminal" - Alien Ant Farm

Title from the ever brilliant KSK. Talk about my only light in dark times.

From the NYTimes (Oscar-Nominated Films Deliver Triumphant Tales for Dark Days): "And the best-film nominees this year — give or take “The Reader,” which has the Holocaust as a central concern — reflect an appetite on the part of the Academy, and by proxy, the public, for a nice, big chunk of uplift... Consumers who are motivated by the laurels heaped on these films to plunk down increasingly scarce disposable income will leave the movie house with the message that circumstance is just that, and no match for the indomitability of human will. The films are built on individual successes — kids from the slums who better themselves, a television celebrity who finds his inner newsman, a newborn who overcomes old age and the midlife closeted man who steps into the light — that accrue to the greater good. That message, that darkness can be overcome by individuals working for the common good, is not so distant from the current collective impulse."

Why did How Green Is My Valley beat out the "vastly superior" Citizen Kane for Best Picture in 1941? Why, could it be because How Green Is My Valley had a more uplifting message about family togetherness?

I assign the entire Oscar committee to watch Hot Fuzz, and meanwhile I guess I'm rooting for The Reader, even though I've never seen it. Ha ha ha.

Current Music: "Bite the future and fuck the past."

So, the Oscar Noms are out. And we're back to our regularly-scheduled Oscars: crappy, mundane, and appealing to the saccharine better angels of our nature. Remember last year? When there were movies like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood and The Assassination of Jesse James and 3:10 to Yuma and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the running for awards, and even the standard fare was the fairly un-standard Atonement? Remember how great that was? Well, no more. I mean, look at that Best Picture list. It's about as propagandistic as the Oscars get.

I suppose in some ways this old way is better, because actually having a horse in the race last year was too tense for my taste. I think the best movie I saw this year was Synecdoche, New York, and of course it's not nominated for anything, because that's the kind of movie that scares the Oscar committee. Actually, no, I have one horse - Encounters at the End of the World, for Best Documentary. That's a tie with Synecdoche, New York for my favorite movie this year. But Encounters won't win for the same reasons Synecdoche wasn't nominated: too existential, too lacking in a conventional narrative, not "life-affirming" enough.

So I guess I'll be watching for the dresses again.

______________________

On the homefront:

______________________

Good news 1. Apparently Obama's going to close down Gitmo Bay. Amazing, right? I thought so.

Good news 2. Caroline Kennedy is Outie McOuterson. For the record, I don't care if it's illegal housekeepers, taxes, a sick uncle, or the stench of nepotism. I would be happy enough never hearing from anyone with the surname Kennedy ever again. Ever.

Good news 3. None.

Current Music: "California Dreamin'" - the Mamas & the Papas

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awkward-sauce
I know this doesn't actually mean anything for the long-term, but it amused me.
in the deed the glory indeed
Writer's Block: The One Movie Everyone Should See
oh, American (Swiss?) cruelty!
women and horror, some thoughts and numbers
a.o. scott: grumpy old man
they'll only get one finger while I'm shifting gears
that's a tomato... no wait, that's a fetus.
horses coming in in all directions, white, shining, silver studs with their nose in flames.

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a sense of joy and then a panic

a sense of joy and then a panic

Entries tagged with the shit movie industry

awkward-sauce

I know this doesn't actually mean anything for the long-term, but it amused me.

in the deed the glory indeed

Writer's Block: The One Movie Everyone Should See

oh, American (Swiss?) cruelty!

women and horror, some thoughts and numbers

a.o. scott: grumpy old man

they'll only get one finger while I'm shifting gears

that's a tomato... no wait, that's a fetus.

horses coming in in all directions, white, shining, silver studs with their nose in flames.