Your favorite movie sucks

[Janet]

I love Mistery Train and like some others. These days it takes a lot to talk me into seeing a new vampire movie. I saw too many crap ones when I was studying them. A friend talked it up and I love John Hurt. I enjoyed seeing my city, and one of my friends' bands got a shout-out, so that was nice. John Hurt was his usual wonderful self, but the Marlowe conceit was rather pointless, as was the end of his story.

Mostly what I remember is one scene where Swinton's character sees a mushroom growing out of season and makes a big deal of it. I wanted to shout, "Welcome to global warming in Michigan!" Especially since when I watched it I had new blooms on my dahlia after the first snow.

[The Lone Ranger]

Heh. I had a slightly different reaction to the mushroom scene.

My thought was, "Why are you surprised that you've found some Amanita muscaria fruiting a little out of season (especially given that it wasn't, really)? What you should be surprised by is that it's growing well away from any trees, given that it's a woodland fungus which grows in symbiotic relationships with trees, especially pines."

[lisarea]

Here are a nother couple of articles.

Why it's all Gremlins' fault:

The ongoing failure of the PG-13 rating / The Dissolve

What it means (this is about women, but the point could be applied to a lot of things):

The Women of Hollywood's Men's Men's Men's World | Women and Hollywood

[Janet]

I saw an ad for the new Clint Eastwood film the other day and thought of this thread. As long as he's alive, there will still be middle budget, middle brow pictures.

[lisarea]

I guess you could say Clint Eastwood is a sort of auteur, but he's not a particularly innovative director as far as I know. He makes the kind of movies he makes, which are known formulas, pretty traditional storylines. He's just famous and gets to do what he wants to, as long as that's what he wants to do. And also, he's really old and decrepit. I am going to do a search real quick now to make sure he hasn't died since I started typing.

But I don't think middlebrow movies are going anywhere. I'd probably classify about 30% of big box office movies as middlebrow. Like the sort of movies where a studio buys some existing property like a best selling book and then hires a director to make it into a standard genre movie. (And sometimes fires a director for not cooperating with the committee and hires a more compliant one, which makes me both LOL and despair.)

As money is concentrated into fewer, larger budget movies (and 'mid budget' for movies still means tens of millions of dollars), they depend more and more on investors, who are unlikely to take too many risks. They're going to have beancounters and marketing assholes in there to ensure that everything sticks to a proven formula, they'll make changes based on audience feedback and things like that. And the more movies stick to proven formulas, the more people expect that and feel cheated or assume a movie is bad when it doesn't conform to that. (Which is something I suspect happened with Only Lovers Left Alive. I still haven't seen it, but from the complaints I saw, it sounds pretty consistent with Jarmusch's style of non-plot centered movies, where he creates the general ambiance of a genre but then subverts it by leaving out the major elements you expect to see, or doing them all po-mo. You guys would HAAATE The Limits of Control.)

But, you know, without new filmmakers trying new things and people seeing and elaborating and expanding on those things, we're just going to be stuck pretty much forever with the formulas we have now. And that just really, really sucks. Imagine if we'd stopped a hundred or fifty or even twenty years ago.

Film is a relatively young medium, and there are so many things left to try, but it's like we're just stopping, like it's a dead language that we're just going to codify right here, where it stands, and put the prescriptivists in charge.

[Dingfod]

This new Clint Eastwood film is based on a real guy, Chris Kyle, a Navy Seal sniper with the most kills of any American sniper in history. (Simo Hayha laughs at his meager kill totals). I haven't seen the movie, but the real Chris Kyle was an unremorseful asshat, and real fucked up in the head. He was supposedly murdered, shot at a shooting range in Texas by a fellow veteran suffering PTSD.

[Watser?]

Also it is not allowed to criticize this sniper: ‘Let ISIS rape you’: Conservatives deluge ‘American Sniper’ critics with harassment and threats

[lisarea]

This is about a year old, but it's new to me:



Soderbergh is one of the rare directors who has worked throughout his career on both major studio productions and auteur projects, so he's particularly qualified to speak on the topic. He breaks down the the trends really well, and makes some really compelling arguments about what is wrong with the system as it is.

(Also he does other stuff too. I just found out about that and have not watched it beyond the seductive disclaimer, "I acknowledge that what I have done with this film is both immoral and illegal," so that link is just totally me using as my personal bookmarking service.)

[livius drusus]

Highly relevant to this thread, Soderbergh is doing TV now. He's the producer-director of The Knick on Cinemax. I only saw the first episode when they did a promotional airing of it on HBO (who even has Cinemax; it's been a punchline for two decades) and it was excellent. Obviously I'm going to dig anything set in a turn-of-the-century New York hospital and I can't vouch for the rest of the series, but it was good enough that I'll get it when it comes out on home video.

[lisarea]

This is a very compelling argument:

Why We Need Diversity Incentives for Film and Television | Indiewire

Narratives are fundamental to how we understand pretty much everything, so it really is in the public interest to do whatever is necessary to diversify them. And this is an awesome idea. The film industry is publicly subsidized, so there is a very good argument that the public should be more accurately represented at least in terms of creators.

Later, we can come up with a compelling argument for subsidizing nonlinear story arcs and stuff like that. But this is a good start for now.

[lisarea]

Oh, man. And here is Roger Ebert talking about narrative in a piece he wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica in 1978.

Beyond Narrative: The Future of the Feature Film | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert

It's long, but Ebert was smart and I agree with at least almost everything he says here. Also it's interesting to see how his perceptions hold up today, and how influential our assumptions are about what film is or is supposed to be. Auteur theory was still pretty new to most people at the time, and it's just something I'd always taken for granted. In fact, I remember being confused about it when I first heard of it because I couldn't imagine what the alternative was. But hey, even the ideas of narrative in film and being able to parse moving pictures were new once too.

PS Right now, Persona is on Hulu and 3 Women is on Netflix, in case that makes anyone want to watch them.

[lisarea]

The Academy Awards also suck!

The Oscars 2015: What They Tell Us | Film Forum

They're kind of like the Hollywood version of those creepy companies that give out employee awards to those who best toe the line.

[lisarea]

I have been thinking about the Academy Awards because I am stupid and tortured myself a little bit by reading some stuff.

And here is my fondest wish: That sniper movie wins Best Picture. Then, the next morning, in the harsh light of day, the nation collectively notices that this is what is wrong with America. As a result, we immediately stop invading other countries and murdering people there, and we dismantle the entire Hollywood system for funding and for even considering awarding "Best Picture" to a movie by a director who disrespects his craft so much that he did this. WHAT THE FUCK.

Anyways, so then the day after tomorrow, we can start using our vast national resources to do something productive instead.

Mostly make better movies, but I guess feed people and whatever too.

[Dingfod]

That way we could feed the hungry people of the world some whirled peas.

[Ari]

As most have probably heard by now, Birdman has won best picture.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse, I mean I hear it's a good movie and yet it's the Academy basking in how hard and tormented it is to be a white male actor.
Given the Academy is 90 something percent white and 77 percent male, it seems like no more than a ribon for being the best at the white male circle jerk known as Oscar.

[Stormlight]

Let the right wing hatred begin!

“Birdman,” the offbeat Alejandro G. Iñárritu film, won Best Picture at the 87th Academy Awards today (Feb. 23) and immediately sparked a backlash on social media by fans of “American Sniper,” including ugly racial remarks.

The controversy also took on political overtones. Protesters were mostly conservative, pro-military types who were fanned by Fox News and Sean Hannity.

Protesters blamed everyone from President Obama to “liberal Hollywood” for what they saw as “American Sniper’s” snub.

“Real Americans had given the Oscar to American Sniper,” one irate supporter wrote on Twitter.

[Kyuss Apollo]

On the other hand there are the movies that don't get made because the filmmakers are just too far ahead of their time. Like Jodorowsky's Dune.

Salvador Dali as the mad emperor of the galaxy? Orson Welles Baron Harkonnen? David Carradine as Leto Atreides? Set designs by HR Giger?

*sigh*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08

[lisarea]

OK, but I just looked that guy up, and I know who he is. I've seen at least a couple of his movies (El Topo* and Santa Sangre definitely, and possibly a couple others a long time ago). He is pretty definitely what people call a "cult movie" director, in that he makes movies that a very small subset of people love passionately, but a majority hate.

I'm guessing, based on admittedly limited information, that that movie would have been a complete financial disaster. Then or now. Not saying bad, but not at all what I'm guessing a lot of people are imagining based on information about the actors and the special effects and such. The movies of his I've seen and remember do not have a clear linear narrative, contain very little exposition, and are exactly the kind of movies that make audiences mad because they don't contain the sort of widely used Hollywood tropes that they take for granted.

A whole lot of people, when they go to see a movie, expect a lot of things that they're not even consciously aware of. They expect a specific introduction-obstacles-resolution type of story arc. They expect a clear and generally relatable protagonist. They expect some kind of discernible moral or message. They expect a linear storyline, even when it's not presented in order. They expect loose threads to be tied up. They expect to be able to distinguish what is supposed to be literal and what isn't. They expect any symbolism or metaphor to be clearly explicable (so, basically, if something is used symbolically or something, they expect that it's a simple stand in or reference to something else). And those expectations are so ingrained that if one of them is missing or tweaked, you can maybe get away with it and that will be the defining thing about the movie. But more likely people assume it was due to incompetence, like the director forgot or didn't know how to do it.

So I would just bet that, had that movie been made the way he wanted to make it, 'dune' would be a synonym for 'boondoggle'.

* LOL the Wikipedia entry for El Topo has at least one glaring error about the fundamental premise of the movie, and I am not going to fix it. I will leave it there as a testament to how stupid Wikipedia is.

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by Stormlight

Let the right wing hatred begin!

Lol, REAL Americans (TM) hand the leadership of Congress to a foreign Prime Minister.

[Janet]

I'm sure Jodorowsky's Dune would have cost a ridiculous sum of money. It already had by the time they tried to get Hollywood to finance the rest.

I still think you should watch the documentary, though. The most fascinating thing about it comes near the end where they detail all the other films that were based on Jodorowsky's work and the team he put together. He created, with comic book artist Moebius, H. R. Geiger and Dan O'Bannon, a huge book of what the film would look like. Several copies of it floated around Hollywood and Geiger and O'Bannon themselves recycled some of it for Alien. Still, the side-by-side comparisons are pretty damning evidence that the studios just flat our stole the ideas.

[lisarea]

Oh no! I am totally planning to watch it, and there's no doubt in my mind that he was ripped off, just based on what I've seen about it so far. In fact, this reminded me that I should go find some more of his movies to watch, because I did like the ones I saw, and also because I just read a couple of interviews with him and I am really liking that guy.

My beef, really, is that those committee movies are all watered down, recycled, but very well financed iterations of things others have done better, but people are used to that and it's what a lot of them want.

I just don't think that, if he'd made the movie he wanted to make, audiences would have accepted it. I do think it probably would have been very entertaining. The ones I've seen were. But you know, the people who think this movie would have been awesome should go watch some movies he's actually made to get an idea of how his ideas might have played out in a narrative. A lot of people actually get mad when narratives don't fit what they're expecting.

From a financial perspective, cutting him off and stealing his ideas makes perfect sense. That way, they could use his ideas in movies made by more compliant directors, in the context of more traditional narratives, without the significant financial risk of putting out a movie that was actually creative and unexpected.

And that's exactly why the movie industry is so dull and repetitive. Because the investors don't take risks, they don't give directors real creative control, and they only finance projects with a good projected ROI, which means they only finance movies that have, effectively, already been made a bunch of times.

The vast majority of the film industry is controlled by people who don't care about film, and it shows. I would be soooo happy if people saw this and it inspired them to look beyond major Hollywood studios and actually care about the state of cinema. The narratives we consume have a huge effect on our culture (and individually, on our perceptions themselves), so anything that gets people to look at Hollywood critically is a good thing. And selfishly, I love movies and I want better ones.

[lisarea]

We went to see Mulholland Drive last night, and it made me think about that Flavorwire article that slimshady posted before. It really is a perfect example that is of the sort of things that we lose when we lose the sort of mid-budget auteur filmmaking that lets a director tell their story their way and gives them the resources to tell it.

The budget was apparently $15 million, which is barely above shoestring in terms of movie budgets, but imagine what it would have been like if Lynch had had to have beancounter approval at every step. It does not have a single, clear, unambiguous storyline. It doesn't fit together in a single obviously coherent way, and it doesn't tie up the 'loose ends' for you. And that's the point of it, and what makes it great.

But it's also not the kind of movie that home release can do justice to. It really deserves to be seen in a theater with a surround sound system and a thirty foot screen. It's immersive and lush and it doesn't translate well to a TV screen or--heaven forfend--some kind of mobile device.

That is the sort of thing that we'll be missing out on as a result of mass commodification of movies, where you've got financiers who don't care about or understand filmmaking driving the industry and not taking chances on anything that falls outside some narrow range of formulas and devices that have been used a million times before and that appeal to the broadest possible audience.

Also, advance warning that I have not even watched that documentary Seduced and Abandoned that they mention in the article, but once I do, I am probably going to have a spike in being mad about this, and come complain more.

Here's the trailer:

Seduced and Abandoned Trailer - YouTube

[Dingfod]

I doubt One Last Train to Rob, starring George Peppard and John Vernon, is or ever was anyone's favorite movie, but I happened to catch the beginning of it on some obscure TV channel called GRIT. Movie's opening scene begins with George Peppard forcing himself on a resisting Diana Muldaur. Her resistance was weak, she succumbed to his manly charms in less than 30 seconds. ¡Oh boy, do I want to see the rest of this.

[lisarea]

And then today, I saw this:

Why Theaters Are Refusing to Book Godard's Moneymaking 3D | Thompson on Hollywood

Which reminded me of the affirmative action post from before.

The movie studios AND theaters don't just respond to popular demand. They create it. They decide, ultimately, what type of movies the public will be exposed to, and what formulas people acclimate to. (Like that whole Star Wars thing that solidified the reign of the stupid hero's journey.)

Anyways, Godard's movies don't fully click for me yet, so I wasn't exactly moving heaven and earth to see Goodbye to Language, but I would have gone if I'd seen it playing anywhere near me. (I will watch it when it comes to Netflix in the next week or so, but it's not going to be in 3D as intended, so I don't expect it to be my Godard revelation.)

But there are a shitton of 3D theaters nearby. We drive past like a billion giant, kitted out multiplexes every time we go to see a movie, and tons of them have 3D screens. But all the showings are for the same few big Hollywood blockbuster style movies, just like they do with everything else.

I wish they'd just dedicate some tiny amount of resources to showing something besides the same three or six or whatever movies over and over. Sort of like those broadcast regulations where stations had to provide equal time for editorial content and dedicate some small amount of programming to educational or community interest. Which I know movie theaters are different from the broadcast spectrum, so it's not as easy to regulate them, but somebody should figure out how.

I've figured out everything else. Somebody else figure out how to legally impose mandates on big theater chains.

OKAY. I HAVE LIKE 90% SOLVED THIS PROBLEM. YOU ARE WELCOME.

[lisarea]

Hey. Hey you guys. You should go read this article.

The Tyranny of Pew-Pew: How Fun Fantasy Violence Became Inescapable | Village Voice

I can't really speak to the accuracy of the details, because I haven't seen all of maybe most of the movies he's talking about, but it seems generally credible. And it is ON TOPIC.

It touches on the Star Wars phenomenon, where the Joseph Campbell brand Hero's Journey arc became practically Hollywood mandatory.

Plus? Plus? It's causing outbreaks of rage paroxysms on the internets, which is something I always like to see.

There has actually been a slow trickle of articles criticizing similar trends (this one really got people in a huff, for example) that people immediately dismiss as baseless snobbery or callous outrage bait.

But you know, if a whole bunch of people are writing outrage bait articles about the same fundamental premise, even if they are being overly strident, maybe it isn't just a bunch of different people who just happen to have the same delusion.