Mr. Wagner’s Final Cut

Yes, I am reviving MWFC

2009-06-25T20:24:00.002-05:00

It has been two years since I posted here, but my reasons for reviving this dormant little blog are happy ones. For one thing, in 2007, some weird events in my personal life had the effect of short-circuiting my filmmaking plans (along with, well, lots else). Also, I began devoting more and more of my attention to the atheism blog I administrate, The Atheist Experience, and as my time was stretched rather thin, I decided MWFC was the thing to go on the old back burner.

The good news is that I'm more or less back in the saddle where my film work is concerned. I have rededicated myself to my documentary, Bloody Work, throwing myself back into my research with a gratifying gusto I must confess I was afraid I'd lost in the wake of personal crises. (That it took two years to get my mojo back is an indicator of how crazy things got, but I'll leave that there for now.)

In the end, I think the delays have been all for the best. Call me the endless optimist. Today there are better cameras (more on that later), better post-production software, and more people I've met in the Austin film scene that I'm eager to work with. I think I'm capable of doing better work overall than I was before my hiatus.

I'll be posting here intermittently, not necessarily daily, but as often as I'm inspired to. One thing I plan to share here is some of the exciting research I'm doing on Bloody Work. I'll also post some of my opinions on the current state of film, though, as before, I hope to avoid making this just another lame movie review blog, which I never wanted it to be in the first place. However I will, I imagine, write posts directing people toward good movies they're likely to have overlooked. I'm a huge fan of The Criterion Collection, for one thing, and I believe there's a whole great world of filmmaking out there no one is experiencing, because their attentions are too bombarded with hype about the latest Transformers bombast, or similar Hollywood franchise. Hey, if you like those movies, fine. I'm no cinema snob. But then...I am too.

George Lucas exhibits Jedi powers of irony

2007-05-10T05:13:00.000-05:00

Okay, I haven't seen Spider-Man 3, and to be honest, don't plan to. But this has got to be the most wacked-out thing I've ever read. From IMDb:

George Lucas has joined the major newspaper critics in their negative appraisal of Spider-Man 3. In an interview with FoxNews.com's Roger Friedman, Lucas said, "It's a silly movie. ... There just isn't much there. Once you take it all apart, there's not much story, is there?"

Uh...

Shooting begins on Bloody Work

2007-04-25T02:07:00.000-05:00

On a drizzly Sunday, April 22, Bloody Work had its first official day of shooting in downtown Austin, in a parking lot at the corner of 3rd and Brazos. Not exactly the most glamorous location, but in 1885, it was the location of the home of Dr. Johnson, his family, and his cook, Eliza Shelley, who lived in a little house behind the main house. And that's where she became the Servant Girl Annihilators' third victim on the night of August 30.

With the aid of sound man extraordinaire Peter Heitman, I shot about an hour of Jeanine Plummer giving us some basic information about Eliza's murder, the discovery of the body the next morning by Dr. Johnson's niece, and some salient points about the crime scene. Jeanine was a lot more nervous in front of the camera than she thought she'd be, but I was able to coach her and nudge her into her comfort zone, where she could get through her spiel without stumbling over her words too badly. Shooting this was, as she said, very different from what she's used to as a tour guide. Being directed on film (well, HD, actually) was nerve-wrackingly new to her. But she said she enjoyed the experience a lot and was looking forward to future shoots, when we plan to go to other crime scene locations around the city.

The only potential clusterfuck occured when Peter called early in the morning to announce that his microphone of choice, a nice little battery powered body mike, had been broken by the last bozo he loaned it to. If we were to get any good sound, he'd need an AC outlet. It was either that, or use a hand held mike, and I didn't want Jeanine standing there holding a mike and looking like a CNN reporter. Already downtown, I did a little hurried scouting and persuaded the manager of a swell little shop on Congress, Tesoros Trading Co., to let us run our 100' extension cord out the back door and into the parking lot. As a result, Peter captured Jeanine's voice to perfection. Hooray! So if you're in Austin and looking for a knick-knack place to blow your money at, do stop by Tesoros. They're the movie's first official "Special Thanks" recipient!

In all, a modest but, I thought, auspicious start to production. Very eager to get the rest of it in the can now!

A reason to live and start blogging again

2007-02-09T17:12:00.000-06:00

Judging from a very big hint in their latest e-mail newsletter, it appears that The Criterion Collection are planning to release Berlin Alexanderplatz!

Well, if that weren't enough, things are moving forward on Bloody Work at last. I'll post updates here as well as at my MySpace page, as events warrant.

MWFC: That's a wrap!

2007-01-01T13:29:00.000-06:00

As my web activites are becoming a bit of a strain on my schedule, I'm having to cut out that which is least active and important. That would be Mr. Wagner's Final Cut. So I'll be taking the blog down here in a few days, and as there are maybe only two or three of you visiting any more, I'm sure you can understand. It's not that I'm not passionate about film; I am. It's just that my passion is directed more towards making my own rather than blogging about the rest of the industry right now.

Anyone seeking updates on my in-production documentary Bloody Work can do so at my MySpace page from here on.

Cheers, and happy new year!

Those wacky Weinsteins!

2006-12-12T01:21:00.000-06:00

You gotta love Bob and Harv. If there's one thing Hollywood's favorite blustery librul Jewish Democrats love more than spending too much money to acquire independent movies at Sundance and then not releasing them, it's just, you know, fuckin' with people.

First, they announce that their new post-Miramax shingle The Weinstein Group will be launching a new company to release "faith-based" movies, meaning Christian movies. So all the Christian Right hand-wringers who've been bemoaning librul Jewish Hollywood and its librul Jewish agenda to undermine American values had about 48 hours in which to scratch their heads in confusion. Then — haha, suckers! — the other shoe dropped with their announcement of the release of the cheapass slasher movie remake Black Christmas on December 25.

Nikki Finke at LA Weekly wasted nary a moment to go into a full end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it fit of blog apoplexy.

Shame, shame, shame on Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and their distributor MGM's Harry Sloan, for opening a holiday-themed slasher movie on Christmas Day... And the entertainment industry wonders why it continues to have a huge PR problem as promoters of garbage?... Still, I don't understand: just how many disturbed human beings does The Weinstein Company and MGM think actually want to go see a gory movie on December 25th.... Is the intended audience supposed to be non-Christians?

Well, when you consider that the most recent movie made for an intended audience of Christians, The Nativity Story, has been sinking like the Bismarck, that might not be a bad plan after all. Nativity's weak business (barely $16 million in its first 10 days) has left New Line wondering if that vast Passion of the Christ audience might have already been Raptured away. And who's to say Christians won't go to Black Christmas just as eagerly as anybody? After all, they don't seem to want to see a movie about the baby Jesus released in the Christmas season, so maybe a mindlessly retro bit of slasher movie stupidity will be just the ticket to take the bad taste of eggnog, obnoxious relatives, and ugly gift sweaters out of everyone's mouths. Bob and Harv didn't get to be Bob and Harv by being idiots, you know.

It will, of course, be very amusing to see what Nikki Finke thinks of whatever gets released as part of their "faith-based" line.

Press the eject and give me the tape

2006-11-22T00:30:00.000-06:00

No, this isn't a post about Bauhaus, but about the death of VHS. This might come as a surprise to many of you who probably thought VHS had died some time ago. It might be more accurate to say that it has been on its deathbed, wasting away, and has now, with one long, low rattle, shuffled off this magnetic coil at last.

The format, rather astonishingly, lasted three solid decades. It had no real competition at all in the 90's from laserdisc, an expensive and cumbersome format that appealed only to hardcore movie dweebs like me. But when DVD emerged in the late 90's, inexpensive and crisp, packed with loads of goodies and easy, instant, clickable navigability, VHS began hemorrhaging market share until 2003, when DVD finally passed it decisively. Now, pretty much any retailer left that matters has decided to pull the plug. Simply by being granted no shelf space, this venerable format is officially obsolete. (Practically, it has been so for a few years.)

Ah well. You had a nice little world-conquering run there, VHS. But in the world of technology, it's hard to go back when you've been presented with something new, shinier, and better. I actually find it difficult to watch VHS these days; the image quality is literally that bad, even worse than I remember. And I've been enjoying higher-quality video for over a decade now, several years longer than most members of the public, who didn't discover the joys of higher resolution until DVD came along. I bought my first laserdisc player in 1991 (!), so as long as 15 years ago, I knew tape was on its way to the bin.

But now that it's actually, really, no-kidding-this-time, honest-to-goodness dead — I don't know — I'm a teensy bit sad. I had some good, dweeby adventures with VHS, obsessively taping my favorite movies and TV shows off cable and creating lovely labels on my laser printer. My rows of uniformly and chronologically labeled MST3K episodes are like my own personal shrine to shake-your-head geekdom. Even though those shows remain the only tapes I still watch at all — and that, only because many episodes aren't on DVD yet, and when they are, the tapes will be retired — I'm still a little sorry to see it go. Thanks, VHS. You did good, and you'll be fondly remembered.

A farewell to Altman

2006-11-21T11:27:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to lament the passing of maverick director Robert Altman, director of such classics as M*A*S*H, Nashville, and The Player, as well as other respected films like Short Cuts, Thieves Like Us, Gosford Park and this year's A Prairie Home Companion. He was making films right into his 80's, which I hope to be lucky enough to do. Altman said of his life behind the camera, "I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film I didn't choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition." Of course, even an admired veteran like himself took his share of abuse from arrogant studio execs; his film The Gingerbread Man was taken away from him, cut badly, and flopped as a result, proving that even a filmmaker with a sterling track record and the admiration of all his peers isn't immune to being abused by the system like any wet-behind-the-ears first-timer. (The Player's very bitter tone was all too clearly informed by some of Altman's own worst experiences.) We've lost one of the great ones; hopefully we've got many more years of Scorsese to soften the blow.

It's the big PS3/Wii launch weekend...

2006-11-16T18:27:00.000-06:00

And I just bought a GameCube! That and a boxed set of three Resident Evils for 100 bucks total. Ha!

So while a zillion game geeks will be freezing their asses off outside the nation's Best Buys waiting for the highest of high-tech, I'll be nestled in, playing Resident Evil Zero and 4.

Hey, don't get me wrong. A Wii, an XBox360, and a PS3 are all on my want list. It's just that I'm not such a hardcore gamer that I have to have the newest system or the hottest new game right goddamn now. Also, I really see no point at all in even owning a PS3 or a 36o until I've got one of these in my den. So I can wait, happily, for the prices to come down, and in the meantime, I've got all kinds of gaming goodness to keep me happy. Hell, I've still got my N64 and my Dreamcast, and play 'em both.

A Bloody Work update, at last

2006-11-15T10:50:00.000-06:00

Haven't been around here for a couple of months, mainly because I've had nothing too exciting to report — just business as usual — and the film industry as a whole hasn't been doing anything sufficiently outrageous to get me riled up. But I do, at long last, have something of an update on how the documentary is coming.

Much of what I'm calling my "preliminary" research is done; now I'm looking more closely at individual pieces of the research to eke out more details, confirm facts, deny unfounded claims or myths, that kind of thing. I'm also underway on prepping a teaser trailer, which, when done (New Years-ish, I hope), will be shown on an official site as well as my MySpace page and YouTube. I want the thing to go completely viral.

Adam Dooley and Ryan Krueger of IllusEffects Studios here in Austin are creating a replica of an 1870s-80's vintage axe to be used as the hero prop in the trailer, and ultimately the feature's appropriate re-enactment scenes. These guys are amazing. Ryan showed me a photo of a gigantic model he made of a temple-like structure that's about 12 feet on a side and composed entirely of styrofoam. It looks like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. He drew up the plans for it in AutoCAD, then output the information directly into this amazing 3D modeling machine that automatically scultped the whole damn thing using hot knives. It's truly jaw dropping what can be done these days. These guys will be working with me on the feature, for sure, and we've discussed plans as elaborate as a complete 1885 miniature reconstruction of the Congress Ave. section of downtown Austin, including the Capitol (which was just being built at the time).

Anyway, there will be more to come, and hopefully more frequently, as the next several months progress.

Holleran's world, where criticizing lies and defamation is "fascism"

2006-09-11T07:09:00.000-05:00

Box Office Mojo is one of the web's more useful film sites, for those folks who are really interested in daily box office receipts down to the dollar, and for charts detailing the performances of various films and entire genres over the past several years.

But BOM has a blemish, and it takes the form of critic and columnist Scott Holleran.

There are two things that can severely damage the credibility of any critic of the arts. One of these is the inability to separate art from personal ideology. This does not mean that if, for instance, a critic sees a film whose politics he considers unsound, he has no business making those points in his critique. What it means is that when a critic allows his own ideological views (whether political, religious, philosophical, what have you) to give him a distorted idea about what's really going on or not going on in the work of art he's critiquing, then his credibility suffers. It's something, admittedly, that one must work on, but it's important if you like to think of yourself as someone who considers fidelity to truth more important than whose banner you happen to be waving. For example, I consider myself a good liberal, but I just don't trust the work of Michael Moore; he raises excellent questions, but he makes you wade through lots of bullshit to get there. So while I fall on Moore's side of the political fence, I don't allow that to blind me to where his films fail his audience.

The second thing is the use of hyperbole. Holleran's bad about this. You'll see what I mean shortly.

The column that inspired this post is one responding to the firestorm of criticism that was leveled against Disney and ABC for their two-part film The Path to 9/11, broadcast yesterday and today. Just as the movie itself is full of falsehoods, so is Holleran's attack on its critics. Holleran, never a guy to bury his lead, throws his first hyperbolic punch in his opening paragraph.

Free speech be damned, U.S. government officials proclaimed in a letter threatening the Walt Disney Company: take your movie off the market or risk the wrath of the state. That is the gist of the latest assault on individual rights, another advancement toward fascism.

Cripes! What Orwellian imagery, right off the bat! Here come the jackbooted government stormtroopers to shut down those poor filmmakers and TV executives who only want to exercise their Constitutional rights! Clearly, swastikas and thought police are just around the corner. Is no one safe from their depradations? Why, why do they hate our freedoms so?

Okay, let's take a brief return trip to the planet Earth and examine just how badly Holleran is distorting already.

The movie has been castigated for passing off falsehoods as facts. Holleran soft-pedals this as follows.

Like most docudramas, it contains elements of truth and fiction in a selective depiction of the event. Apparently, among these is the assertion that the Clinton administration chose not to respond militarily against the Islamic terrorist responsible for attacks on the United States. The manner in which the point is portrayed caused the censorship.

The term "selective depiction of the event" is Holleran's euphemism for what could be more accurately termed "irresponsible inclusion of flat-out lies and misrepresentations." Among the non-truths dramatically portrayed in the film are scenes in which:

hijacker Mohammed Atta is passed through check-in by American Airlines personnel at Boston's Logan Airport, despite a warning flashing on their computer monitors. According to the 9/11 Commission report, this warning came while Atta was boarding a plane in Portland, Maine, to Logan. Also, it's the wrong airline. Atta flew US Airways Express, not American. The scene as depicted strongly suggests that negligence on the part of American Airlines makes them partly culpable for the attacks. If I were running American's legal department I'd be filing this morning.
Clinton administration officials refuse to authorize the CIA to capture Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Sandy Berger is specifically portrayed as being the individual at fault, when in fact he simply did not do what the scene shows him doing. Again, the scene is quite possibly actionable libel.

Okay, there are more, but this isn't a political blog and I just wanted to set out a couple of the more egregious examples of the falsehoods in the film that have drawn such criticism.

Holleran first lie is one of implication. His opening paragraph suggests that critics of the film in government (whom he later unambiguously identified as Democrats, just so there's no mistake which side of the bread he has buttered) have specifically threatened some kind of retaliation ("the wrath of the state") if ABC did not pull the movie. This is quite simply a lie. The strongest critics of the movie (the ones who are actually, you know, defamed in it) have stated quite forcefully that they believe the movie should be pulled unless its inaccuracies are corrected. But from what fevered fantasy does Holleran get his threats of fascistic police-state wrath? Read this and see if you can tell me where any Democrat speaks of dire consequences for ABC or Disney. From New York's Charles Schumer:

"I haven't seen it, but from everything I've heard it's not down the middle. It's not fair at all. And to have a film that seems to be biased and take one side put on by a network seems to be the wrong thing to do... You can't take a film that's supposed to report on something that's so real and so close and make it into fiction. That's beneath ABC's dignity."

Hmm, well, maybe CNN is part of the librul media, so perhaps they just left out the bit where Schumer added, "And if you don't cancel the show right away, we'll throw the whole goddamn bunch of you into Gitmo! See how you like that, suckers!"

Another distortion of Holleran's is to suggest that only hyper-partisan fascist brownshirt Democrats are the ones attacking the movie. In point of fact, prominent conservatives like Richard Miniter and Bill Bennett (yes, Bill Bennett) have been critical as well. Miniter, interviewed by Wolf Blitzer (himself no friend to the left), said quite unambiguously, "If people wanted to be critical of the Clinton years, there's things they could have said, but the idea that someone had [Osama] bin Laden in his sights in 1998 or any other time and the -- Sandy Berger refused to pull the trigger, there's zero factual basis for that."

Even actor Harvey Keitel, who plays the doomed John O'Neill, was so skeptical of the original script that he ended up hiring his own researcher, which led to his rewriting a lot of his own dialogue.

So clearly, the problem with this movie is that it lies. It lies through its teeth about the most profound event in American history since the Civil War, an event about which Americans deserve and are owed nothing less than the absolute, unvarnished, verifiable truth. This last is a point Holleran doesn't seem to feel is all that important, though. "None of that matters now," he writes. Listen to this over-the-top eruption of emotionalism he follows with.

...the movie is under siege and every freedom-loving American must defend Disney's right to air it. By sending the letter, these government officials — who ought to be censured and removed from the Senate — are using the authority of the state, i.e., the power of law enforcement, to violate free speech.

Again, just so there's no mistaking: Holleran is lying. No one has threatened the use of law enforcement against either ABC or Disney.

What they have done is demand the film be factually corrected or cancelled, which — and this is just one of many instances of irony that comes up reading Holleran's nonsense — is exactly the response Republicans had in 2003 to a miniseries entitled The Reagans, which they attacked for, you guessed it, factual inaccuracies. But all they have done is make the demand, because, legally and Constitutionally, they can't do anything more than that. As ABC has been able to go ahead and broadcast the show anyway, they have clearly not been censored. So the little graphic there with the word "CENSORED" melodramatically plastered across the ABC logo is just another teensy-weensy lie. Tsk tsk tsk.

(Also, don't you love the ironic little hypocritical touch where Holleran accuses Democratic senators of "fascism" for wanting ABC to fix-or-pull the movie, then promptly says they should be "censured and removed" from office? I sure do!)

In Holleran's world, what's good for the Republican gander is not so good for the Democratic goose. I tried searching BOM's archives for a column by Holleran regarding the flap over The Reagans (which, incidentally, was pulled before broadcast due to the criticisms, only to air later in a lousy time slot on Showtime). I wanted to see if he felt Republicans criticizing The Reagans were a bunch of "state-sanctioned bullies," "fascist senators" and "Washington's thugs," engaging in "an outrageous injustice" involving"censorship" and "government control of speech." I couldn't find one, but that could be because of BOM's search engine protocols. For all I know Holleran wrote exactly such an article excoriating Republicans in exactly the same vituperative language he uses to flay the Democrats.

But somehow, I doubt it.

Finally, one last punch to get in before I go. Notice how Holleran is trying to make this a free speech issue. This is clearly the most disingenuous aspect of his entire rant. Yes, free speech is "inalienable"; that's perhaps the one factual statement Holleran makes. But it cuts both ways. You may have the right to be a lying partisan hack, but the person who attacks you for your lies and points out the facts has the same free speech rights too. The "freedom" to be deceptive and irresponsible does not absolve one of the moral responsibility to be honest, particularly when your lies have potentially harmful consequences. There are already enough wacky conspiracy theories and other gibberish circulating about 9/11; does our culture benefit in any way by being offered yet another set of untruths, packaged as entertainment and seemingly validated by their appearance on a presumably respectable television network?

And finally, "free speech" is not an absolute, despite its first-amendment enshrinement. Lie under oath in the witness box, and you can go up on perjury charges; whining "but you're attacking my free speech!" will get you nowhere. Pin up a bunch of posters around your neighborhood falsely accusing your neighbor of being a pedophile, and expect to get sued into oblivion. (And quite possibly hospitalized.)

Moreover, it may be your Constitutionally protected right to speak your mind, but no one has a Constitutionally protected right to broadcast TV movies. That is understood as a privilege, by the very nature of the fact that not everyone can do it or is able to do it. In America we expect people in positions of authority and privilege to be responsible and honest, to be straight shooters, whether they are newspaper editors or popular celebrities or influential senators or police officers or presidents or, hell, even our bosses at work. And when they are not, which happens all too often, we resent it, it makes us angry, and we speak out about it.

That's what's at the heart of everything we hold dear about America, including, yes, our speech rights and all the rest of it. It's a shame Scott Holleran doesn't feel that responsibility and honesty are necessary, as long as those whose politics he doesn't like are the ones taking the damage.

Are Austin-shot films jinxed or something?

2006-08-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

Despite the persistent fantasy Austin entertains about itself that it is the "third coast" of filmmaking, the most recent batch of high-profile movies shot in Austin have not fared terribly well either critically or commercially. And the trend doesn't look to be reversing or leveling out.

First there was the disaster that was Disney's The Alamo, a $100 million epic that ended up being so focus-grouped to death that it was rendered incoherent in the editing, and died at the box office, taking in less than a quarter of its production budget. This one really hurt, because it was the most massive production to come our way ever (I walked the sets, and it was really the kind of experience to get an aspiring director pumped about filmmaking), and there was no doubting the dedication of director John Lee Hooker to historical fidelity and narrative integrity. Trouble is, every time those qualities come into contact with the suits, the suits Windex them into oblivion.

Richard Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly has done all right, but not stunningly. Reviews have been mixed, and after several weeks the movie has yet to expand past 263 screens (the original plan was for 1500), having grossed just over $5 million. It only cost about $15 million to shoot, but with Matrix-man Keanu in the lead, there's no reason why Warner — the very same studio — couldn't have pumped the link to the cerebral-SF crowd and gotten the take up to $15-$20M by now.

Now comes word that Fox is actively trying to bury Mike Judge's Idiocracy. It goes without saying that there has been a lot of anticipation among Judge's fans for his followup to Office Space. Does Idiocracy suck that badly? Or is Fox operating under the bizarre notion that, since Office Space tanked in theaters but became a monster DVD hit, the thing to do is go for a deliberate theatrical flop with Idiocracy in the hopes that DVD history will repeat itself? I mean, WTF? Yes, any of us in this business knows the business makes no sense. But I think we all assumed that Hollywood likes making loads and loads of money. How hard would it have been to put Idiocracy on 1000 screens with "From the director of Office Space!" screaming at you from the one-sheet? Too hard for Rupert Murdoch's bean counters, evidently.

Finally, there have been the smaller indie films, none of which has done jack or squat. The Quiet opened on a meager 7 screens this weekend, to mostly shite reviews. This one was done by Burnt Orange Productions, a company affiliated with the University of Texas. Their hook is they keep budgets down by hiring film students as PA's, not paying them but giving them academic credit. Small wonder the LA members of The Quiet's crew constantly ridiculed the Austin crew for not being up to speed. No doubt they'll take their reports back home with them, further damaging Austin's rep as a worthwhile place to shoot your film.

So where do things stand now? Well, Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce has a still-untitled Iraq War project shooting right now (after numerous delays and crew shakeups — I almost got the storyboarding job on it), and there's the Rodriguez/Tarantino horror teamup Grind House. The latter will at least appeal to those directors' fans, but it may not be enough to pick up the industry's enthusiasm for Austin as a location, not to the level of production the city enjoyed in the first half of this decade.

The format war: gee, never saw this coming! [/sarcasm]

2006-08-11T15:55:00.000-05:00

The latest news about the HD-DVD/BluRay format war is that industry analysts see the whole thing ending in a "stalemate", with, as the linked BBC article puts it, "neither format [gaining] the upper hand and that the rivalry will do damage to the market for high-def DVDs overall."

This didn't have to happen. Competition is certainly a necessary ingredient in any free market economy. But you would think that the business world would be one in which people learned from history, and that in the interest of making money, different groups backing rival formats with the same ultimate goal — providing high definition for the ideal home theater experience — would try to reach common ground to make the whole shooting match a success.

Now no one stands to make money and everyone stands to lose. Consumers, seeing this stalemate in the offing, will hold off from buying either format. They will wait for a winner, and then when one never appears, they will lose interest. Couple this situation with the mediocre reviews that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have both been getting out of the starting gate, and add to it the fact that the business seems to have collective amnesia regarding Beta-vs-VHS and DVD-Audio-vs-SACD, and you have a recipe for failure.

Next prediction: everyone will retrench and look to the XBox360 (supporting HD-DVD) and PlayStation 3 (supporting Blu-Ray) to settle the issue once and for all. When if they'd had a little foresight, there never would have been a issue needing settling. Sigh.

* snicker *

2006-08-07T14:47:00.000-05:00

I understand she also calls herself an actress.

Lengthy blog drought moistened by Gibsonian public display of douche-baggery

2006-08-01T18:01:00.000-05:00

I know I haven't been the world's most active cineblogger, but that's what comes from actually trying to make your own movie. Anyway, as there's been very little to involve me lately on a film-fan level (I have yet to see a single solitary summer movie; I just can't muster up the energy) apart from buying that fan-fucking-tabulous Criterion DVD of Mr. Arkadin, I thought I'd at least throw in my two pesos on Mel Gibson's flamboyant act of career suicide.

A wise chappy once said that alcohol doesn't put words in your mouth, it lets the words that are in your brain come out of your mouth. Gibson's "I'm not an anti-Semite" apology, even in the longer director's cut version, will only seem sincere to people who think Lindsay Lohan means it when she says it really, truly, honestly, I-swear-to-god isn't all-night partying and cocaine binges that's made her so creepily thin. Gibson's mea culpa is, I'm sorry to say, just like those of any public figure caught out in an embarrassing situation involving them being themselves. It's solely in aid of image rehabilitation, not rehabilitation of any other (read: sincere) kind.

Back in the day, I was a Mel Gibson fan as part of my usual geek repertoire. He was Mad Max, which was the most important thing, and also Martin Riggs, though to be honest I've never been that big a fan of the Lethal Weapon franchise. I was even pretty impressed with his Hamlet. But in recent years, culminating in that wretched Jesus movie, too many aspects of his personality that are, ahem, less than pleasant (say, his sexism, homophobia, and "not an anti-Semite" anti-Semitism) have really turned me off to him. Shame. The guy could have saved it all had the Mad Max 4 project ever gotten off the ground, too.

So, yeah, if I needed any more reason not to care about Mel Gibson any more, I guess I got one.

Christian movie flap outstupids itself

2006-07-05T20:17:00.000-05:00

Okay, so you'll remember about a month ago I snarked over a tempest that had sprung up in a teeny-tiny teapot over a Christian film reportedly getting a PG rating for no reason other than that it had Christian content, and how Donald Wildmon and other Christian Right attack dogs were predictably pouncing on this as a prime example of how evil librul Hoolywood lives to gang up on poor defenseless put-upon Christians.

As stupid as the initial flap was, it has, amazingly enough, gotten stupider. Evidently, Congress has done such a fine job of solving all of our nation's other pressing problems — the Iraq Debacle, skyrocketing gas prices, restoring New Orleans, Dick Cheney's aim — that they now have the free time to "revisit this ratings process." Wow! Remarkable how a group of religious extremists who have politicians in their pockets still have the cojones to whine that they are somehow oppressed. But that's the wonderful you-can-have-it-all-and-still-play-the-martyr world of the fundamentalist, ain't it?

Okay, here's what's going on, courtesy of Martin the Oracle. (Actually, it's Martin the Guy Who Knows a Thing or Two About Fundies and Can Make Some Pretty Confident Educated Guesses.) The producers of Facing the Giants aren't the least bit upset that their movie got a PG. After all, it's not as if a PG limits distribution or attendance in any way; hell, an unescorted toddler can walk into a PG movie entirely legally. This is all an opportunistic publicity stunt. Let's be real. Facing the Giants is a tiny-budgeted independent movie with no stars. At best, it was looking at very limited theatrical release, followed by a quick drop onto DVD where it would while away its days on the racks of Christian bookstores. In other words, we weren't exactly looking at Narnia-sized box office, and to get that, studios customarily spend tens of millions anyway. Suddenly, Giants gets a PG, and the producers think, "Hello! If we made a big media stink about this, and got Wildmon and Dobson and all the rest of the outrage merchants in on it, as well as a few pandering right-wing Congressmembers, then viola! We'll get colossal amounts of free advertising in the form of news items that we never could have paid for in a million years, and we'll be reinforcing that vote-getting meme that we're the victims of persecution by long-haired fag-enabling godless Jew lefties! Sweet!"

Hey, can't say I blame 'em. For all I know, it's what Jesus would do.

A new roommate?

2006-06-29T17:10:00.000-05:00

This handsome devil is Adicus, and, depending on how well he adapts to his new surroundings (he's really, really timid and shy right now) as well as — most importantly — how well he gets on with Midnight, my Springer, he may be moving in. He's just the kind of dog I dig: mellow, non-hyper, quiet, entirely willing to curl up at your feet and sleep the day away while you work. Of course, right now, he hasn't been bold enough to get much past the laundry room. But we'll see if he lightens up and gets more comfortable in the days ahead.

Blu-Ray...uh-oh.

2006-06-22T14:50:00.000-05:00

Wow. Check out this review from The Digital Bits.

The Fifth Element. The title was an amazing bit of reference work on standard DVD, and that Superbit version was awesome. Obvious choice, right? Should look amazing in HD. Yeah... it should. But it doesn't. In fact... I'm not going to come out and say it looks like crap, but it is easily the worst looking high-definition title I've seen yet, and I've seen 30+ titles now. The image is muddy looking, lacking in crisp, clean detail. The colors don't quite pop off the screen like they should. Just a mess. Okay... I will say it. It looks like crap. Sony should never have released this title like this.

Ouch....

My former industry is starting to look like Hollywood!

2006-06-19T17:50:00.001-05:00

Some of you are aware that I was in the comics business in the 1990's, where I did an alt-comix series called Hepcats that got good reviews but never sold. Then as now, phrases like "sex scandal" aren't something you'd ordinarily associate with a business like comics, which customarily evokes images of spotty geeks wearing faded Star Wars T-shirts, whose closest contact with girls is in the porn they download and the Boris Vallejo posters on their walls.

But last fall (I'm so outside the loop I've only just heard about it, of course), an incident happened at a convention in Ohio that sounds right out of some Hollywood gossip/scandal rag. The accused is a guy I knew well.

A full-fledged news report on the incident is here. But it's long, so for those of you who don't want to click over and spend 45 minutes reading it, the gist is as follows: a fellow named Charles Brownstein, one of the industry's most respected figures, stands accused of getting blindingly drunk as a skunk and trying to rip the shirt off an upcoming female comics artist in a hot tub.

I knew Charles very well when I was in the biz. At the time, he was a plucky lad of only 15, but so self-possessed, intelligent, mature and driven in his goals that he immediately made a profound impression on me and several other artists and industry movers and shakers. He certainly had his shit together better than most folks I know twice or three times his age. And, unlike a lot of highly intelligent and driven teens (certainly unlike myself well into my 20's), he wasn't a smug egoist. He published a fanzine for which he interviewed me and every other creator of note. Now, at 27, he heads up the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which, in the 90's, mostly devoted its efforts to protecting retailers and publishers of adult comics from prosecution but now seems to have its net thrown a little wider.

If the accusation is true — and no one, even Charles, is debating it — then I'm very disappointed in him. It would certainly be an incident I'd have considered wildly out of character for him. However, he has made a public apology which sounds honestly contrite — unlike that you usually tend to hear from real celebrities caught in similar circumstances — and has by all accounts been doing all he can to atone for the incident and make sure everyone knows he is truly sorry for his undeniably appalling behavior.

Not surprisingly, there are folks simply not in a forgiving mood about an incident like this, and the sad thing is, they appear to be manipulating the victim (who went through something humiliating enough as it is). The main organization in the other corner is called Friends of Lulu, dedicating to helping women artists get a leg up in a highly male (let alone male-geek) dominated industry. According to the Comics Journal article...

Friends of Lulu Vice President (of Industry Issues) Ronée Garcia Bourgeois was responsible for bringing the incident to the public's attention Dec. 26.... The reactions provoked by the post among followers of Bourgeois' column were predominantly compassionate but further subdivided into two categories: 1) the avowed desire to wreak Batman-like vengeance against the perpetrator, and 2) perplexity as to where to direct that vengeance or even what exactly was to be avenged. Referring to the alleged perpetrator as a "pervert" and a "leech," Bourgeois said, "I think he should burn. And as soon as I can, I will [identify him and his organization]."

It's one thing to want to get to the bottom of things and find out the facts of an incident. It's another thing entirely to go into wild-eyed lynch-mob mode and pre-emptively convict the accused in the infamous Court of Public Opinion. The problem is further muddied by how the whole investigation has been handled...

Why would Soma call off police, then later express public frustration at the lack of official response to her molestation? Did she think that police procedure would have allowed for some satisfactory action short of criminal prosecution? Did she later find that the incident had done her more psychic damage than she had initially realized — that she needed resolution more than she had thought? Soma is again the only person who can answer those questions, and for the time being, she is not talking on the record.

Then, this observation from my former colleague Colleen Doran, who is absolutely not an apologist for sexual predators, having had her share of unwelcome male attention throughout her career, due in large part to her unusual status as a gorgeous redhead in a business overrun with sex-hungry young guys. (I spent many evenings sitting on the phone listening to Colleen relate disturbing stories about a certain publisher....)

In February of this year, the witness, Ken Lillie Paetz [either the "boyfriend" or "friend" of the alleged victim, depending on what report you read, who was present at the time of the groping and physically restrained Brownstein], and Charles Brownstein stood at my table at the New York Comic Con, and had a friendly, 20 minute conversation with me, talking comics and other inconsequentials in a perfectly normal manner in front of dozens of witnesses....
If Mr. Paetz believed Mr. Brownstein was a sexual predator who was a danger to his girlfriend or anyone else for that matter, I can’t imagine why on Earth he would have carried on this cordial discussion that ended in a warm handshake with Brownstein mere months after the alleged incident.
Moreover, since Ms. Soma’s primary intention is to “make sure (Brownstein) never works in this business again” I am afraid even the Supreme Court does not have the power to grant her wish to have him blacklisted.

Wow. What a sad, sordid affair, and I hope it finally resolves in a fair way to all involved, and that the people who appear to be using the victim for whatever political agenda they're after think twice before they cause her more damage. It just goes to show how rolling snowballs get bigger and bigger, until you can't see the pebble they initially formed around any more.

But boy...this is all so Hollywood, isn't it.

Donald Wildmon puts the "fun" in fundie!

2006-06-12T19:50:00.000-05:00

Here's something fun. It's always fun when the "Reverend" Donald Wildmon and his cronies at the American Family Association get their panties in a twist. But this one is sweet.

Wildmon sent out an "Action Alert" — which is an e-mail that goes out whenever they want their sheep to bombard some misbehaving, librul, faggot-enabling movie studio or TV network with a dose of fundamentalist righteousness — about the PG rating that the MPAA recently gave to the low-budget Christian indie film Facing the Giants. Yeah, they're freaking out over a teeny little PG!

What was the vile crime for which those nasty Jesus-hating Jews in the movie business are penalizing this innocent little film? Well, it's like this...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is now warning parents of movies which contain a reference to the Christian faith, equating Christianity as being on the same level of sex, violence and profanity when it comes to objectionable material. [emphasis in original; Wildmon loves his boldface fonts]

A quick check of the rating reveals that the PG was assigned for "some thematic elements" — to wit, the open Christian proselytizing in the movie was something they felt non-Christian audiences might like to know about — which in Wildmon's paranoid mind equates to a full-scale assault on Christianity itself. As the good "reverend" notes...

The MPAA is controlled by Hollywood moguls known for their bitter opposition to Christianity.

Uh, yeah. This would be the same MPAA that gave the 2002 Jesus-in-small-town-America movie Joshua, as well as the $25 million-grossing animated Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie, a G. And the same MPAA that gave Mel Gibson's snuff-porn epic The Passion of the yeah yeah yeah... an R, when any other movie with a similar volume of sustained graphic violence would almost assuredly get an NC-17. But hey, this is right-wing fundie world, where facts aren't invited if they get in the way of the fear-mongering that brings in the donations. Right?

Now, with Wildmon being America's most high-profile pathological homophobe, it's at least refreshing that he found something to complain about other than the evil homos, right? ...Oh, wait a minute...

A new family film featuring miracles and a pro-God theme has earned the PG rating because it would offend non-believers. The MPAA refuses to give movies which promote the homosexual lifestyle a similar warning. In other words, MPAA warns parents if a movie has Christianity presented in a positive manner but refuses to warn them if homosexuality is presented in a positive manner.

Good grief, what planet does this cretin live on? I know that's a pointless question when dealing with a wackjob assmonkey like Wildmon, as the only obvious answer is "Not this one!" So consider it a rhetorical question. In any case, I can't think of a gay-themed film that's come out in the last few years that's gotten anything less than an R. Can you? Brokeback Mountain. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Boys Don't Cry. Bound. Velvet Goldmine. Longtime Companion... R's for all, unless I missed one. I don't think homosexuality can be featured as a prominent theme in any film and not earn less than an R.

Now I'm no fan of the MPAA. Their guidelines are nebulous, arbitrary, and tend to penalize small movies for content that expensive studio movies are given a pass on. But that isn't the real issue with Wildmon.

Remember, Wildmon's mission is to convince affluent, conservative, white suburban SUV-driving Christians that they are America's most vilely oppressed minority, assailed from all sides by evil lefty long-haired freaks. And the only way to fight this horrible oppression — a PG rating? why, no one will be able to get in! — is to "send an email to the MPAA asking them to stop their anti-Christian bigotry." (After all, who knows more about being a victim of bigotry than a rich white Christian?)

Oh wait. There is one more way to fight...

If you think our efforts are worthy, would you please support us with a small gift?

No problem, Don. Just as soon as my dog gets through squatting.

"Ben's Letter" video now online

2006-05-26T16:13:00.000-05:00

Nice to do some blogging that isn't a rant for a change. Longtime readers here will remember the video shoot for Austin band 54 Seconds and their single "Ben's Letter," which I blogged about working on back in November. Well, said video is now done and streaming at the band's site. It's been heavily compressed and is real pixelly, but it's up. The broken window I designed is right at the tail end; looks pretty convincing, if I do say so, though that's mostly Jen White's gifted videography. Check it.

So, have you heard the one about George Lucas and his minions being assholes?

2006-05-18T16:30:00.000-05:00

So the news comes out that, this September, after enduring nonstop complaints from fans, Lucasfilms will be releasing DVDs of the original theatrical versions of the first three Star Wars movies. You know, the ones without the dodgy CGI and where Greedo doesn't shoot first. Now we hear that the DVDs are simply going to be ports of the 1993 laserdisc transfers, and are not even going to be encoded for 16:9 anamorphic widescreen. They will be released as 4:3 letterbox transfers only. They're not even putting in the tiniest effort to bring the source materials up to current levels of quality.

So basically, here's George, acting all magnanimous in throwing a bone to his legion of fans who have wanted the original movies we all grew up with on DVD for years and years, simultaneously showing his contempt for those same fans by releasing the movies in the crappiest substandard quality he can get away with. You can read the whole ugly story on The Digital Bits.

If The Phantom Menace didn't make me say this already: Bite me, George.

First pic with the new digital camera

2006-05-06T23:30:00.000-05:00

And it is, naturally, of my radioactive dog. I picked myself up the Panasonic DMC-TZ1S today. It's a mid-price, 5-megapixel model, but with more than enough bells and whistles for my needs. Apparently it's the first model of its size and price range to allow 10X zooming. So I guess that'll be a good thing if I ever become a filthy voyeur or sexual predator and want to give myself plenty of head start in my getaway.

The only thing is that I noticed, when I opened up this shot in Photoshop to resize it, that it was already at 72 dpi. I hope there's a way I can reset this to 300 dpi, which will be desirable if I ever want to take pictures for print publication somewhere. No worries, though. I'm not really that huge a shutterbug. I was just sick and tired of buying disposable cameras to take still pictures with when everything else I do is as high-tech as I can make it. Seemed silly.

Bloody Work teaser banner

2006-04-26T05:01:00.000-05:00

No, the annihilatorfilm.com site is not up yet. Will let you know.

It's the Apocalypse, no doubt

2006-04-26T03:58:00.000-05:00

I've completely dweebed out and set myself up a MySpace page. Ghod help me.

The latest writer's fad: plagiarism!

2006-04-24T19:14:00.000-05:00

John Scalzi was among several bloggers last week who made the world aware of some dumb, dumb, dumb girl named Lori Jareo, who wrote a dreadful novel-length piece of Star Wars fan fiction titled Another Hope and, in an act of ballsiness heretofore unseen in publishing, offered it for sale on Amazon, where the listing, astonishingly, is still up as of Monday evening!

Though Jareo herself clearly got wind of all the bad ink she was getting through the blogosphere for her actions — literally no one defended her — and promptly took her personal site down, I can't believe the book is still up on Amazon, where I'm beginning to think the staff is hired specifically for their cluelessness and indifference to the concerns of customers, publishers, or the law. (Amazingly, the book is still up on both Barnes and Noble.com and Powells.com too. Are Lucas's lawyers in cryosleep or something?)

But now, even more amazing is the story of some 19-year-old chippie at Harvard who signed a — wait for it — half-million dollar book deal for a couple of chick-lit books, one of which has been revealed to have significantly plagiarized passages.

Get a load of this girl's excuse.

"When I was in high school, I read and loved two wonderful novels by Megan McCafferty, 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings,' which spoke to me in a way few other books did. Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel ... and passages in these books," Kaavya Viswanathan, 19, said in a statement issued by her publisher.

"While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities."

Oh, please! She was "surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities"? I imagine that I am expected to believe that, while she was writing those similar passages, one of two things happened — she either blanked out and forgot she had ever read the McCafferty books, so much had they taken control of her mind that their "internalized" content was just pouring out in defiance of Viswanathan's free will, or, her brain has actually been possessed by plagiarism demons from the fourth level of hell, near the back in the ghetto reserved for bad hip-hop artists who sample Sting songs from the 80's.

In any case, this is the kind of lame excuse a junior high schooler would give caught with shoplifted items under her sweater while walking out of a grocery store. I just don't know how those got there! I must have put them there to free up my hands — and then forgot!

But what's really disheartening is that the girl's nascent writing career isn't going to suffer for this at all. Is her publisher doing the ethical thing by dropping her and tearing up the contract? No, no. They're just letting her revise the book for future editions. What procedure they have in place to ensure the revisions won't simply be more regurgitated "internalized" content from someone else is unclear.

Why is this, you wonder? Well, if there's one thing we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that dishonesty pays. First the scandal was simple lying, with guys like James Frey and Stephen Glass just making shit up, passing it off as true, then banking cash when the "controversy" hit the media and their sales soared as curious book buyers snatched up their crap to see what all the fuss was about. Now, this "oops, you mean I copied that? so sorry" routine is going to boost the sales of the girl with the hard-to-pronounce name as well, mark my words.

Meanwhile, hordes upon hordes of undiscovered, talented writers desperately trying to realize their own personal original visions will continue to labor in obscurity, most never getting a book deal at all, let alone one with a half-million dollar advance. Life is unfair, and the cream sinks to the bottom, it seems.

Oh well. Silent Hill sucked. Life goes on.

2006-04-23T00:29:00.000-05:00

If there was any video game-based movie I feel I had a stake in, it was Silent Hill. I'm a devoted fan of the games, having played all four multiple times each. I don't think I've ever had as spine-chillingly memorable a time doing anything related to the horror genre as I've had playing those games. After the crushing disappointment of the Resident Evil movies, I had cautious optimism about Silent Hill. Early interviews with director Christophe Gans seemed to point to a guy passionate about the material and determined to do right by it.

Sadly, this movie goes down as Just Another Failed Game Adaptation. If the best video game franchise can't even get a good movie made from it, I think Hollywood and video games should be kept away from each other for good, preferably by restraining order.

Gans may be passionate, but here he's done the impossible. He's taken Silent Hill — which is not only the most frightening horror video game ever made but quite possibly one of the most frightening horror entertainment experiences in any medium, games, books, or movies included — and made it boring. The video game is scary as hell. The movie has — I cannot stress this enough — not one single solitary scare, and indeed, a few of the intended scares come off as silly.

The movie has the look of the game down just fine. The production designers have replicated the game's foggy, deserted streets and dingy derelict buildings perfectly. But Roger Avery's script (and here was a guy who took great pains to warn fans he was not a huge devotee of the games) suddenly feels the urge to explain everything in exhaustive detail. So, instead of piling on suspense and scares, it piles on exposition. And I mean, piles it on. We get endless talky scenes of back-story and history, and yet the more the movie attempts to clarify the whole history of Alessa and the cult that victimized her and turned her into an evil malevolent force, the less coherent it all seems.

Gans's devotion to reproducing the game's visuals makes him forget that there will be a sizable audience who sees this without ever having played the game. And to them, no concessions are made. Non-fans of the Silent Hill games are given no clue as to why the town changes appearance, or why it's inhabited by poison-spitting faceless monsters and other weird beasties. To non-gamers this will be the most nonsensical movie ever, despite Avery's endless info-dumping dialogue.

But worse than info-dumping dialogue is Obvious Dialogue, where the writer assumes his audience is suffering from Downs Syndrome and must have everything spelled out no matter how obvious it is. In one scene, Cybill (the cop from game one, who has a much different fate here) has just found a drawing by Rose's missing daughter in a slot at the hotel desk.

Rose: "Where did you find this?" Cybill: "Room 111." Rose: "We have to go to Room 111!"

Well, duh.

Rose has her momentary lapses of intelligence, too. Early on, while Cybill is in the process of gunning down an advancing monster (one of the acid-spitters from game two, looking dead perfect, naturally), Rose runs off. Hmm. You're in a deserted town that you now know to be inhabited by weird monsters, and you run away from the one person with a weapon. Smart.

Then there are all the little moments of plot convenience. Rose finds a working flashlight in a drawer in the school. Rose's husband, played by Sean Bean in a thoroughly unnecessary subplot, is looking for the Silent Hill police archives in a neighboring town. They won't let him have them, so he breaks in to the office at night (shades of The Ring) and, lo and behold, there's the box he's looking for, right there on the top of the stack in the first room he enters. Why would they even have those? Because they're needed as a Plot Device, of course.

All of the exposition and clumsy plot contrivances simply pad the running time out to over two hours, while spending as little time as possible in the Otherworld for which the games are famous. Here's another failing I cannot stress enough: where the hell was Silent Hill in Silent Hill? Why are we listening to Alice Krige doing her endless Cruella DeVille routine when we should be trapped in terrifying dark corridors or fleeing monsters down misty back alleys? This stuff gets started just fine in act one, then stops when the script settles into a talk-fest.

Much from the video games appears in the movie to please fans, but only at the most superficial level. It's as if Gans pored over each game, saying, "Okay we'll use that, gotta have that creature, okay, and how about a Lisa Garland cameo!" But that's where the homage stops. The school? The hospital? Yeah, they're there, but wasted. Radha Mitchell literally runs through the hospital (which, for some reason, is about 200 stories underground) in the third act, until she encounters the nurses...who look great, in their prosthetic makeup, but move in such an absurd way I kept expecting them to break into a dance routine like some Janet Jackson video. And Pyramid Head? Jesus Henrietta Christ, how do you waste Pyramid Head!?! He has two scenes, does one cool thing where he grabs a woman and tears her skin off like a candy wrapper — then it's bye-bye. He's gone from the movie after that!

By the time we're well into the protracted act three, in which a mob of mad cultists is threatening to burn Rose's daughter alive, any resemblance between any of the Silent Hill games and this movie is purely coincidental. I saw a post from one guy on Rotten Tomatoes suggesting the filmmakers must have come down with ADHD and thought they were making a Hellraiser movie instead. Couldn't have put it better myself. The movie degenerates into one cheesy line of bad dialogue after another at this point. I just cannot listen to a mob of people (and where did this mob come from, anyway?) shouting "Burn the witch! Burn the witch!" without thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail!

I'm hurting. I'm angry. I'm bitter. The video game movie that should have been a masterpiece is just another disasterpiece. I don't know how everything that was so awesome in the game got so badly lost in translation. Is it too much to hope someone, someday, will do another Silent Hill movie that will nail the whole thing, not just the perfect set design? Maybe. I'm going to play the game again, to remind myself why I love Silent Hill in the first place.

HD-DVD apparently underwhelming

2006-04-21T02:15:00.000-05:00

The reviews are coming in for the first wave of HD-DVD players and discs. And the reviews are, well, "meh" in quality. Not bad, just more along the lines of, "Yes, it looks better than DVD, but not that much better." Also meeting with disapproval are appallingly long load times in the one-minute range, though to be fair, this will likely be one of the first things fixed in second generation hardware.

Most amusing is this account on The Digital Bits of an exchange between the webmaster and his wife.

I was watching The Last Samurai on Tuesday night, when my wife Sarah came home from work.... Anyway, she walked into the home theater and sat down to soak in the picture and sound for a bit. Then, after a few minutes of watching, she turned to me and said, "So this is HD-DVD?"

"Yeah."

"It looks good and all, but I don't know... I guess I don't see what the big deal is."

"Well... it looks more like film. More like it should."

"Yeah, but doesn't regular DVD look like film too?"

"Sure, but not as much as this does."

"Well... I don't know. I guess I just don't see what the big deal is. I could live without it."

We'll see what fate has in store...

A little rant clarification

2006-04-20T00:58:00.000-05:00

In the wake of my preceding rant, I ought to clarify that, in fact, HD-DVD technology itself is something I'm excited about. I've long been looking forward to true 1080p high definition home viewing, and I hope there's a resolution to the format war of some sort soon so I can know which way to invest. So the preceding really shouldn't have been called an "anti HD-DVD rant." If I'm "anti" anything, it's the way certain studios are clearly lusting after the opportunity to use this dazzling new technology in the most meretricious manner possible, and one in which the artistry of films is devalued to the maximum degree in favor of using movies simply as a tool for other revenue streams.

No clarification on the F-bombs, though. I enjoy those when they're necessary.

An anti HD-DVD rant with high F-bomb content — enjoy!

2006-04-19T23:33:00.000-05:00

So I've been keeping tabs — somewhat — on the HD-DVD rollout that has begun tentatively this week. I have no imminent plans to buy. I've been thinking, like a lot of folks, that I'm just going to wait and see how the dust in the format war settles. But I would like to see some of the units in action. There was nothing at my neighborhood Best Buy this week, and I refuse to darken the door of Wal-Mart. So maybe later in the week I'll trek out to one of our fine city's specialty retailers like the Home Theater Store, where I'm sure the sales staff is sick of guys like me wandering in and gawking at all the glorious high-end tech toys we can't hope to afford.

But tonight, I was reading a few articles on the rollout, and initial sales reports, while not exactly orgasmically glowing, are favorable. Still, when it came to the part of one article on Video Business Online discussing the bells and whistles that studios plan to include on future releases, I stopped cold at the following:

Among the examples of new features the studio is considering are, for example, allowing a user to connect to the Internet and trick out a car and then insert that car back into the film so the movie would include their creation.... [Universal Studios Home Entertainment president Craig] Kornblau called DVD bonus features “yesterday” and said HD DVD will change how consumers watch movies by allowing them to personalize objects in the film and connect online with friends to share opinions while watching the film—and, he emphasized, it will do it by the end of this year.... That connectivity also could open up new promotional opportunities for studios, which could allow users to click on a car or pair of shoes or any other item on the screen and connect online to a Web site for more information and to make purchases.

What. The. Fuck!?

Okay, let's stop a minute here.

What is a movie? Is it simply a product? In the eyes of the studios, I imagine that answer must be "yes". But is it also an art form, a medium that storytellers use to tell stories? If it is — to any teeny tiny minute degree — the latter, then what in the holy hell are these asshats at Universal thinking by getting all excited by the idea of people "personalizing" movies? Sure, the example given was for an upcoming release of one of the Fast and the Furious movies, which I suppose no one in his right mind would call art and everyone would agree are clearly nothing more than cash-cow products to shore up Universal's bottom line in the summer season.

But where do we stop with this? Can you imagine the lunacy if people were allowed to "personalize", say, Peter Jackson's The Return of the King, by, say, putting their kids in the middle of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields? There we are, right in the middle of one of the movie's sweeping crane shots, with a hundred thousand men and orcs going at it in hot-blooded combat...and suddenly, right in the middle of it, two warriors stop fighting, take off their helmets, smile, and wave at the camera! Look, everybody! It's the kids!

I mean, how fucked is that?

All this hype about "changing how consumers watch movies" and "personalizing" films reflects a masturbatory love of the technology for its own sake that loses sight of what the movies themselves were actually meant to be: self-contained entertainment experiences, assembled by teams of creative people under the guidance of a director following a vision, with a goal towards telling a story!

And did you notice the flack's use of the word "consumers" in the preceding quote, instead of "fans" or "audiences" or even "people." That's right. To the studios, watching movies isn't about sitting back and winding down at the end of the day with a good and compelling story. It's all about generating more consumerism. Buy buy buy! Hell, everything is a revenue stream. Who gives a shit about the whole notion that if a director or a screenwriter wanted a particular style of tricked-out car or pair of shoes or whatever to be in their movie, they'd have put it there in the first goddamn place? Nah, do it yourself! It's the high-definition experience! After all, why should Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott be the only guys to decide what goes into making a Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott movie? Why shouldn't the almighty consumer have a say? Democracy is good, right?

And let's not stop there. Let's move on to e-books. Don't like the way Stephen King's new novel ends? Rewrite your own ending and edit it back into the book, then go online and chat live with your friends about it. Hell, respect for artistic integrity and creative vision are so "yesterday." Everything's just a product, so if you can switch around and match other products to your taste, like your clothing and accessories and food and home decor, why not change your favorite movies and books to your taste too? Welcome to the HD future, where movie studios are like Burger King: have it your way!

You know, I think a better idea would be that if Joe Blow thinks he can make a better movie than Peter Jackson, then Universal ought to just give him the money to make his own fucking movie rather than giving him the opportunity to fuck with PJ's using his fancy HD-DVD remote. In the meantime, this whole fantasy the studios have of reducing the movie experience to that of video games or online shopping seems to have given me all the reason I need to not by HD-DVD anytime soon...or later. It should also give every director pause...and a sense of urgency to make sure any contracts they sign include a clause preventing such "personalizing" of the films they make. Assuming they are filmmakers of integrity and not hacks. I fully expect the Brett Ratners and McG's of the world to be right there in the HD circle-jerk with Universal.

Bloody Work: Research continues

2006-04-12T15:25:00.000-05:00

Not much to blog about lately, other than that I'm back to work on researching the film. The Austin History Center has a glorious treasure trove of old photos (though none, sadly, specifically pertaining to the SGA murders — the Holy Grail of crime scene photos just don't seem to exist). The downside is they charge out the wazoo and back in again for scans. Well, no one ever said filmmaking was a cheap hobby. In any event, the history of Austin in the late 19th century was quite colorful and this material will really go a long way to giving the movie a rich historical context in which to examine the murders. Later on this week I'm going to head out to Oakwood cemetery, where, if you know where to look, you can find the marker for the killers' most tragic victim, 11-year-old Mary Ramey. As the Statesman reported on 8/30/1885, the bastards "dragged the child into the wash house adjoining, ravishing her, and then drove an iron pin into both her ears, killing her in a short while." Maybe it's a good thing we don't have all the crime scene photos.

Should be on track to shoot my first interview by the first week of May or so.

Legal downloads! (And they're already screwing 'em up.)

2006-04-04T00:10:00.000-05:00

For the first time, movie lovers can legally download feature films. As I've touted this before as an inevitable evolutionary development in film distribution, I'm happy to see it finally exists. But why am I not more enthusiastic? Because again, the industry has gone apeshit with DRM and is slapping ridiculous restrictions on the films you purchase through Movielink and CinemaNow. From the article I've linked:

Usage rules remain restrictive for the movie downloads, which are encrypted and in Windows Media format. Although the files can be burned to a DVD, that disc is just for backup and will not be recognized by a DVD player. Movielink users can put the movie on up to three PCs, which is verifiable since the file connects to the service for a license each time it is loaded onto a computer. CinemaNow users are limited to the PC onto which the movie was downloaded. In both cases, an appropriately networked home could view these digital movies from any connected television or computer screen.

Which immediately prompts the question: If they're charging me the same amount of money for the download as I'd pay for the DVD, why wouldn't I just buy the DVD, especially when I can't burn the downloaded movie I allegedly "own" to DVD in any way that my DVD player will recognize?

Clearly what these folks are envisioning is the digital living room of the future, when everyone will presumably have their PC's hooked up to their plasma screens in the den and everyone's collection of everything — movies; music; hell, even your children and pets — will be in the form of digital files on hard drives. And then what happens when your hard drive crashes? The only disc copy you can have is one that simply stores the movie as data, to be loaded onto a new hard drive instead of just being able to be popped into a DVD player and watched? And then what if your replacement hard drive won't play back the movie downloads you "own," because the DRM doesn't recognize your new hard drive?

Sorry, but for now there are so many things about how this is being launched that I see as half-assed (among other things, neither movie service is Mac or Linux compatible) that I don't think the current programs are ready for prime time. I can understand slapping the sort of DRM on the movies that won't allow anyone to post them to newsgroups or P2P or BitTorrent or that sort of thing. But for chrissakes, if I'm being asked to shell out $20 for a movie download, then what I want, quite simply, is a straight-up "VIDEO_TS" folder from which I can burn a DVD to watch to my heart's content. After all, when you buy music from iTunes, you can listen to the tracks not only on your iPod, but burn up to seven copies of the album on CD (and yes, those CD's aren't just "backup"; you can play them on any goddamn player you have). I mean, it's simple. If I'm being asked to buy these downloads, I should be allowed to watch them in whatever way I choose. Why is that hard to figure out?

UMD dies, surprises no one

2006-03-30T23:13:00.000-06:00

If Sony's PSP handheld console weren't enough of a disappointment to the gaming world, now comes word that the UMD format for movies is on the cusp of extinction. Which surprises me not at all. Why would anyone want to pay 30 bucks for a movie on a rinkidink little disc that can only be played on one piece of hardware, when for $15 or $20 you can buy the same movie on DVD, which can be played on home decks, laptops, and any number of portable players, and which feature all those juicy extras and bells and whistles? If anything surprises me, it's that so many studios committed to the format in the first place, before the PSP had had a chance to show its performance muscle in the marketplace. Presumably there was an expectation that the PS2's lightning would strike twice, and PSP would become the next iPod among portable doohickey fans. Oops. Oh well. I wouldn't get much out of watching a movie on a 4-inch screen. Can't imagine why anyone else would. But watch. I bet Steve Jobs will be the guy who makes it work — again.

Catching up on a lazy March: random movie musings

2006-03-25T11:34:00.000-06:00

No, I haven't blogged in two weeks, as I've needed a breather and have been busy with other stuff. When work is slow, I donate myself to science, which I've been doing over the last couple of weeks, and that's always like going to camp, but with needles. Still, easy money, and a chance to concentrate on creative things during the long hours of downtime. Happy to be back in the swim now, though, and throughout April my bloody work on Bloody Work will resume in earnest. I plan to have at least one interview in the can before the month is out.

Here is some of what's been on my mind, cinematically speaking, over these last 15 days.

• Bite this! Superman Returns? Bleh. X-Men: The Last Stand? Yeah, whatever. Mission: Impossible III? Don't make me laugh. The DaVinci Code? Okay, that one's a given. But is there anyone out there who still hasn't realized that the sleeper monster hit of the summer is going to be none other than...
It just doesn't get any better than this! This may be the most honest movie Hollywood has made in decades. As everyone has already pointed out, you know exactly what you're getting with that title. And when you add to the movie's self-aware cheese value the presense of Sam Jackson in full badass mode, and a studio thoroughly conscious of the unprecedented level of advance internet fan buzz and responding to it by scheduling reshoots specifically to get a hard-R rating — well, there's just no way this can miss! I mean, it's snakes...on a plane! $50 million opening weekend, minimum.

• More horror-related good news. Though I didn't win the Silent Hill poster contest (and yet it's eeenteresting how similar the poster they seem to be using looks to mine — scum! where's my money!?), I'm still stoked about the movie, which opens the week before my birthday. The trailer is pure bliss if you're a fan of the game, really capturing the look and mood and creep factor! In even better horror news, that dreaded remake of Suspiria looks like it's no longer happening. Sometimes, the forces of good win one. And, after a long dry spell, it looks as if John Carpenter is back in the saddle with two features on his plate! Huzzah!

• The post-Oscar Brokeback curse continues. It seems that the worst enemies of Brokeback Mountain are turning out to be not so much homophobic Christian fundies, but the movie's most ardent supporters themselves. First, author Annie Proulx publishes that petulant, embarrassing rant that got the entire blogosphere talking (and not in a flattering way), and now it turns out that co-star Randy Quaid is suing the producers for allegedly misrepresenting the earnings estimates of the film so they could get him for far below his usual fee. While I find it baffling that a man with Randy Quaid's experience in the business would be caught off-guard that people in Hollywood — gasp! — lie about money, what's more interesting is how all the love that this movie had gotten before Oscar now seems to be waning bigtime, as its biggest boosters collapse into sour-grapes whining and infighting. Shame, because that movie's merits should be its legacy, not the behavior of stupid people who happen to be associated with it.

• Asian cinema continues to dazzle me...even when it's not across-the-board brilliant. And it continues to get easier and easier to find the best movies over here. Perhaps the most stunning and unique movie I've seen recently: Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital, in which a young medical student who's suffering amnesia after an auto accident that killed his girlfriend discovers that the body on his dissection table in gross anatomy class is none other than hers! By literally digging into her remains, he begins the process of digging into his past, who he was as well as who she was, and what they meant to each other. The themes concern exactly who we are in relation to the bodies, the machines we inhabit. The student, played with focused intensity by Asano Tadanobu, barely has any personality left at all due to his amnesia; he's like a human blank slate, an uninhabited body going through the motions of a day. So are we nothing more than our accumulated memories? Without a past, is there any person inside us at all? Beautifully directed, with some of the best cinematography I've ever seen in a Japanese film, and, given the subject matter, not nearly the exercise in grisly death imagery you might expect. You should absolutely check this out. I'd go so far as to say it would have easily deserved a Best Foreign Film nomination, if I thought the Oscars were all that important any more.

I was less satisfied by Marebito, from Takashi Shimizu, who gave us the chilling Ju-on and its markedly unchilling U.S. remake The Grudge. I give the movie all props for a swell premise and for being shot on the fly in eight days. A video-obsessed loner (played, coincidentally, by Vital's director Tsukamoto) who tapes everything around him all day long, and only ever sees fit to view the world through his viewfinder and on his monitors, records a grisly suicide in a Tokyo subway station in which the victim drives a knife into his eyeball. It appears the victim saw something that paralyzed him with fear, and the video geek becomes obsessed with discovering what it was. He ends up venturing into the dark tunnels (dating from WWII) beneath the city, where he discovers a feral young girl chained to the wall. (The US art, as you can see, drapes a blanket chastely over the girl and doesn't actually attach the chain to her leg, because the MPAA has a strict rule that no movie poster art is allowed to depict violence against women.) He brings her home and eventually finds she'll only consume blood. Great idea, but as it goes on, the movie's explanations become more contrived and confused, and the final act crumbles into some J-horror clichés — many of the type Shimizu established in Ju-on, ironically — and nonsensical explanations that suggest unbelievable relationships between the characters. Still, it's worth at least a look on DVD, if only to see the most twisted excuse for a love story made in recent memory.

I've read that Shimizu's latest, Rinne (Reincarnation), flopped abysmally upon its Japanese theatrical debut, indicating that the J-horror thing is well and truly over and done with. Still, I'm eager to see it, as well as The Loft, the latest from the understated genius Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who gave us such cerebral thrillers as Pulse and Cure.

Finally, those amazing folks at Criterion keep the Japanophilia running at full steam with more movies by Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa on their slate. Having already given us one of the best DVD releases ever with Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, as well as Ozu's Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds, Good Morning and Early Summer, they're now bringing out the much-demanded Late Spring. Plus this year will see long overdue DVD remasters of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Truly these are good times to be a Japanese movie übergeek!

See everyone again soon — much sooner than two weeks.

Come on, people, it's only the Oscars

2006-03-10T17:51:00.000-06:00

Okay, so the ceremony is over for another year, and Crash pulls an upset and wins. Fine. Whatever.

But the Brokeback supporters aren't yet willing to let go. Among the latest challenges to the loss is a weird claim, similar to the "hanging chads" controversy of the 2000 presidential elections, suggesting that Oscar voters are boobs who misread the voting ballot and voted for Crash when they really really meant to vote for Brokeback. The following image has been making the rounds online.

Personally, I find the ballot (assuming it is an accurate reproduction of what the real ballot looked like, and there's no evidence of that) easy to comprehend. You follow the black arrow. But maybe when I'm old and stupid, I might make such a mistake. I'll let you know when I'm old and stupid.

Next, a group of Brokeback supporters have successfully solicited thousands of dollars online to place a full-color ad in next weeks' Variety that looks like this.

Well, that'll show 'em, won't it?

Look, I'm delighted to see any movie garner a following of passionate fans who will get behind it to this degree. That's wonderful. But this has nothing to do with the relative merits of either movie. It has to do with placing too much importance on the wrong thing — to wit, the Best Picture Oscar. Here's the deal. Brokeback Mountain exists, and it will always exist, for this generation and future ones to see. It has made its mark on film history, and the loss of a glitzy but increasingly meaningless industry award has no bearing on that legacy. For those who think its loss is a grave injustice, newsflash: it's not the first one in history. Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction? Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan? Chicago over The Pianist? There are more examples over the last 78 years of Oscar getting it wrong than getting it right.

I've often said, and many of my friends seem to agree, that regardless of whatever awards a film may have on its mantlepiece, if that movie isn't on my DVD shelf then said awards aren't that special to me. I'm not more likely to hold a movie in higher regard than another one simply because it has "Academy Award Winner Best Picture!" emblazoned on the DVD package in 48 point type. If I had a choice, right now, between watching Oscar winner American Beauty or the couldn't-get-near-the-Oscars-with-a-ten-foot-pole Big Trouble in Little China, could you guess which I'd pick?

Brokeback's legacy doesn't lie in a gold-plated statuette. It lies in the hearts of the audience that loves it. Life goes on.

Since I'll be doing something else Sunday night...

2006-03-02T18:11:00.000-06:00

I really don't have a horse in the Oscar race this year. I felt heaps of personal gratification when Spirited Away won the very first Best Animated Feature award. And naturally, the Best Picture for The Return of the King, which was really an award for the achievement of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, made my inner geek squee. But this year, while I think by and large there are some good movies up, it isn't a ceremony to get all excited about, with the exception of John Stewart's hosting. And this will be the easiest ceremony to handicap in ages. Herewith, my predictions.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney for Syriana

Best Supporting Actress: Tossup — either Amy Adams for Junebug or Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener. I'm leaning toward Weisz.

Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain

Best Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

There. Three years ago, when my then-roommate was working on The Alamo (interesting to recall how that notorious megaflop was at the time really expected to represent at the Oscars), the crew had an Oscar pool and I helped her on her entries. We won it and split $180 between us! Wish that were happening now; I feel more confident now than I did then. And I'm not even all that excited about it.

Damn damn damn!

2006-02-26T18:40:00.000-06:00

Darren McGavin has died. Yes, I know Don Knotts has died too. And that's a huge loss to the comedy world. But I was always less into Andy Griffith than Kolchak, the Night Stalker, whose show was a direct inspiration for The X-Files. What a bummer. But both men were in their 80's, a long healthy life we should all hope to have. Ah well. So long.

Update, Monday evening 2/27: Good grief! The Reaper really cut a swath over the weekend. In addition to McGavin and Knotts, we lost Dennis (McCloud) Weaver as well as the brilliant science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. What up? Maybe this would be a good week to stay indoors. I'm gonna go hug my dog or something.

Biggest lamers on net found!

2006-02-22T00:53:00.000-06:00

A bunch of goofballs with too much time on their hands have launched the website craignotbond.com to protest in the most petulant fanboy fashion the casting of Daniel Craig as James Bond. While I thought Brosnan was a fantastic Bond (his movies not exactly canonical, though), it's pretty pathetic to slag an actor, particularly when no one has even seen a frame of film he's shot yet. Much of the website is a pretty uncool exercise in character assassination against Craig himself, most of which appears to be motivated by the fact he doesn't have Brosnan's male-model looks. They also mock a lot of the roles he's already done, as if versatility in an actor is a liability. As anyone's who's seen Munich or Layer Cake can tell you, Craig's acting skills should not be in doubt. And however "odd-looking" these webdweebs think Craig is, I'd bet he's probably handsomer than they are. They do not, of course, post pictures of themselves nor identify themselves by name. There's nothing like having the courage of your convictions, eh?

This kind of stupid bullshit is fanboyism at its worst. So who cares if these dinks boycott Casino Royale? Millions of people will see it anyway, and those with brains will know not to judge Craig in the role until they've actually, like, seen him in the role. And as for Craig not being good-looking enough for the role...since when was that the criterion? Connery and Brosnan were handsome and tough, Moore had the handsomeness but no depth (never a hair out of place on that man).

But it might interest these folks to realize that Ian Fleming himself (you know, the guy who wrote the Bond novels, which I bet no one associated with this dickless "boycott" has read) didn't exactly see Bond as a Calvin Klein studmuffin. Fleming described Bond as looking something like musician Hoagy Carmichael, whose photo is to the left there. One can imagine heads exploding over at the craignotbond.com ~~guy's mother's basement~~ offices if a big-nosed guy like this was cast as double-oh-sebbin.

While I bemoan the departure of Brosnan — hell, I bemoan the shittiness of the last three Bond movies overall, plus the producers' idiotic choice to turn down Quentin Tarantino's offer, which, had that movie been made, would have racked up more box office than all the previous ones combined — I'm open to a newer, rougher, tougher, nastier Bond who will fuck people up and not mess around. Hell, Craig has already broken two teeth in a fight scene for the movie. If that isn't throwing yourself into your role, I don't know what is. I kind of wish he'd leave them unfixed, just to piss these guys off more.

Annihilator title revision, thank ghod

2006-02-17T00:43:00.000-06:00

As I just couldn't get over how much Annihilator sounded like some Dolph Lundgren movie from the 80's, I've finally figured out the title I like for the documentary — and it was staring me right in the face, from the very first newspaper headline about the crimes. The actual title for the movie will now be Bloody Work: The Unsolved Mystery of the Servant Girl Annihilators. That still allows for the actual killers' media names to be part of the title without any risk of sounding cheesily Dolphish.

Of course, it's just like me to have changed my mind on the title after dropping 27 bucks to register domains under the old one. There's a Homer Simpson moment for you. Well, hey, I can still use those domains. You can rest assured my usual filmmaking skillz are just a teensy bit less disorganized than this.

I'll continue posting kewl historical info about the crimes here over the next few weeks, and this blog will still be the home of my production diaries when that begins as well. I intend to have an official movie site up soon, too.

Feeling very auteurish and stuff right now!

If he builds it, will they come?

2006-02-15T13:23:00.000-06:00

Just read this article from News 8 Austin about developer David Cuddy and his elaborate plans to build several sound stages on about 250 acres of land near Neiderwald. It's great, in that the Austin area does need full-fledged state of the art production facilities of the type Cuddy plans. The Austin Studios in the old hangars of what used to be Robert Mueller airport are, like so much else in the Austin filmmaking "industry," pretty half-assed. But the immediate concern is whether facilities like this will actually lure a few productions to this area for a change. There's a lot the city and the state need to do to get studio and quality indie productions happening here again. Right now, there is simply no work. Is part of the reason we don't get more projects shooting out here the lack of first-rate sound stages and post houses? Could the construction of some bring in the work? I'm rooting for Huddy. It's cool to hate developers in Austin, but not when they're developing something kickass. You go, bud.

Annihilator: The first murder

2006-02-12T20:33:00.000-06:00

So this ought to start you off with a little taste...

From the Austin Daily Statesman, January 1, 1885, comes the first of many news reports abut the serial killings that were to be attributed the "Servant Girl Annihilator" (or "Annihilators"). The body of Mollie Smith, a "light-colored mulatto" about 25 years old, was found "nearly nude" by an outhouse roughly fifty paces outside the bedroom where she had been sleeping with her commonlaw husband, Walter Spencer. The assailants — and there were probably two here — first bashed poor Spencer's face in with some kind of heavy object, either a brick or metal pipe. Mollie was then dragged outside; she apparently put up a heroic struggle, but she wasn't heard to scream (there were other people asleep in the same house). This indicates the assailant probably was covering her mouth while dragging her outside. Spencer came to some time later, noticed Mollie missing, went for medical help himself (his facial bones had been cracked up pretty good by the blows), but didn't find Mollie's body until the morning.

A number of interesting questions about this event. For one thing, a bloody axe was found on the floor by Mollie and Spencer's bed. Since Mollie was still alive when she was being dragged out of the house, she wasn't killed until she had been taken out by the outhouse. Where she was killed...with an axe. (One out-of-town newspaper reports she was so hacked up her body was falling to pieces as it was being lifted into a casket, but that can't be confirmed and is probably an example of the kinds of lurid reporting you see in Victorian era newspapers.)

This suggests the killer either went back inside to leave the axe on purpose, or, perhaps, went back inside to do something else (subdue another victim? look for valuables?) and left it behind either uncaringly or accidentally. But moreover, it strongly suggests two assailants. Spencer was not hit with the axe but some other object. The axe had definitely been brought to the scene by the assailants; everyone living at the house testified no one there owned an axe. So whatever the other object was that struck Spencer, it must have been brought and taken away, since there were no reports of another bloody weapon on the scene. So, if there were only one assailant that night, we're left with the spectacle of a man dragging the thrashing, panicked Mollie outside while covering her mouth to stifle her screams, and simultaneously schlepping a big axe and whatever he hit Spencer with. Seems implausible. Two men that evening are more likely.

Spencer recovered, only to be arrested as a suspect then released. (No one really thought he did this or any of the subsequent murders.) There were other arrests, other suspects, and more ghastly killings to come.

Announcing Annihilator!

2006-02-08T18:19:00.000-06:00

The journey of a thousand miles begins with blah blah blah. I'm really excited. Today I officially announce my next film project, the feature documentary Annihilator: The Unsolved Mystery of the Austin Axe Murders.

Two things about this project have me super-excited. First of these is that I have always, up till now, pursued narrative filmmaking projects, and I never really thought of myself as a "documentary filmmaker." But then I realize that the distinction is meaningless. If you're a filmmaker, you're a filmmaker. Period. There's nothing carved in stone that says a director can only pursue one area of the filmmaking art. Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese made documentaries, and Scorsese has also made a concert film and (in one admitted lapse of judgment, though I imagine the check was wonderful) a Michael Jackson music video.

The other thing is that it's amazing to think that virtually no one in Austin today knows that this city had its very own Jack the Ripper, who went about his nasty business a full three years before Jack did. (Some armchair sleuths think that the murderer — murderers? — who came to be called the "Servant Girl Annihilator" fled justice overseas and picked up his old trade in Whitechapel, but I find that doubtful.) The more I've read about these killings, the more my filmmaker's bells have been going off. What a fan-fucking-tabulous subject for a documentary. There was simply no question — Holmes is on the case! I'm officially underway on my research, and as writing and shooting commences, I'll post updates here. This will be one kickass movie. If I do say so myself. I can't wait to get it made. I can't wait for you to see it.

Addendum: I admit there is something about the current working title that sounds a bit like a PS2 game or a Dolph Lundgren movie. "Servant Girl Annihilator" was, in fact, the name given the killer(s) by writer O. Henry, living in Austin at the time. As there is strong evidence that at least two killers were involved in some of the killings, I considered Annihilators plural, but thought that didn't sound quite right. The Servant Girl Annihilator just sounds like some bad imitation-Argento cheapass Italian horror movie, and The Austin Axe Murderer is too bland, like an episode of some History Channel show. Any readers with better suggestions will find me receptive.

Cake and Ice Cream of the Dead

2006-02-04T23:29:00.000-06:00

Yoiks! To think Saturday has almost passed and I didn't notice this on IMDb until almost midnight. Today was George A. Romero's birthday! Happy 66 to the Zombiemeister! Here's a filmmaker who's a legend in his field, and spent years being chewed up and spat out by that ultimate zombie of all zombies, the Hollywood system. I'm happy to see him back in the saddle making movies again, even if it's late in life.

Dumbest thing this week

2006-02-03T06:49:00.000-06:00

Can't this guy figure out the concept of "turn it down"?

This week on that reality-TV hit, Fundies vs. Hollywood...

2006-02-03T00:46:00.000-06:00

Funny bit in IMDb's news today. That gay cowboy movie is actually doing decent business in Montana, a state so red it's almost infrared. Here's a lengthy quote to spare you clicking over.

Contradicting predictions by commentators that Brokeback Mountain would not attract ticket buyers in red-state strongholds like Montana, the film has actually performed strongly in many of those areas, distributor Focus Features has maintained. (Fox News commentator John Gibson remarked: "I think most people do not want to go into a darkened room with a tub of popcorn and munch away watching two guys get it on." His colleague Bill O'Reilly has opined that the film has received critical praise because the media "want to mainstream homosexual conduct." And he predicted, "They're not going to go see the gay cowboys in Montana.") However, the online magazine Salon today (Thursday) quoted the manager of the Wilma Theater in Missoula as saying that the film grossed $33,006 in its first four weekends there — "one of our best starts for a movie we've ever had." In the conservative town of Kalispell, the film opened last Friday with $3,656. In the town of Whitefish, it took in $2,312 and beat out the three top national draws, including the No. 1 film, Big Momma's House 2.

Hilarious. The piece then goes on to debunk the notion that Hollywood is a town populated entirely by librul fudgepackers, by mentioning that some observers think there may be enough homophobes in the Academy who'll refuse to watch their Brokeback Oscar screeners that the film may be denied its universally-expected Best Picture statuette. It could happen. Then again, it's not like the Weinsteins have a high-profile nominee they can steal it for this year, the way they stole Spielberg's Best Picture for Saving Private Ryan.

Back with other religious-right-goes-nuclear news after the break. (Commercials zapped by BlogiVo.) Welcome back. As you may have heard, fundamentalist hand-wringer Donald Wildmon and his organization of angry-email-senders The American Family Association have been crowing over NBC's cancellation of the series The Book of Daniel, which they didn't like for its (in their words) "depiction of a pill-popping Episcopal priest, his unbelievably dysfunctional family, and a recurring appearance of a ‘Jesus’ character described as ‘sardonic’".

Now, here's the thing. As much of a godless liberal as I am, I happen to be all in favor of the right of Wildmon and Co. to try to get a show taken off the air if they thought it portrayed Christians in an insulting way. Just as I think African-American groups, or gays, or Jews, or Wiccans, or Hispanics, or atheists, or any group who feels they're being maligned, stereotyped, or attacked in a TV show should do the same thing. And just as I think the producers of The Book of Daniel ought to have the right to continue to create their show and seek either a more supportive network, or go via Internet distribution, or DVD, or otherwise, if they feel that criticisms coming from a special-interest group are unjustified and their show's cancellation unfair. That's the fugged-up thing about freedom of speech: it applies to people who don't see eye to eye with you, too!

But...you know...I seem to remember something. Remember back before Mel Gibson released his Catholic snuff film The Passion of the Christ, when the Anti-Defamation League was expressing concerns that the film might be anti-Semitic? Remember that? And wasn't it, if not Wildmon himself, certainly right-wingers cut from the same cloth, who were attacking the ADL for expressing their concerns about the movie's depiction of Jews? Hmm? I seem to think it was.

So what's good for the (Christian) gander isn't necessarily good for the (Jewish) goose, it would appear. Ah well. Double standards. Where would religious fundamentalists be without 'em?

Moira Shearer

2006-02-01T15:35:00.000-06:00

This will only probably mean anything to classic movie fans, but dancer Moira Shearer has died. Shearer was the star of The Red Shoes, a fantasy/romance film by seminal British filmmakers the Archers, better known as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell and Pressburger made 17 movies together, most of which rightfully belong on the list of Greatest British Films Ever, and their works ran the gamut from exciting action adventure (The 49th Parallel, The Battle of the River Plate), to romantic melodrama (Black Narcissus, I Know Where I'm Going!), to far-out artsy-fartsy experimentation (The Tales of Hoffman). The Red Shoes is considered their masterwork, a movie Martin Scorsese calls one of his all-time favorites, and one which Kate Bush named a whole album after. And it's in a genre that few "serious" filmmakers worked in in those days: fantasy.

Yes, on the surface, it's a straightforward romantic-triangle movie about a ballerina, the Svengali empresario who makes her a star, and the composer whose music makes her dance. But its overtly melodramatic elements go down convincingly because of the overt inclusion of fantasy. The 17-minute ballet sequence is one of the most famous setpieces in history, a dazzling display of color and pre-CGI visual effects that is still wondrous to look at in the post-Peter Jackson age. Indeed, the whole movie is thought of as having some of the finest use of Technicolor in all cinema. (The Archers also delved into fantasy filmmaking in Hoffman and Stairway to Heaven.)

I remember, ten (choke! gasp!) years ago, going to see a whole lineup of Powell/Pressburger films with my friend Hollye at the now-closed Texas Union Theater, as part of a retrospective program UT-Austin's film program was running. To see these old movies on a theater screen — The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, now one of my all-time favorites, was also one of them — is the kind of privilege that just doesn't come along any more. It's just one more awesome thing that no longer exists in this town, that those of us who have lived here for years have come to lament.

Moira Shearer was 80. But the few films (with the possible exception of the badly dated Peeping Tom) she made with the Archers are timeless. I think I'll pop the Criterion DVD of The Red Shoes in my player tonight. And if you consider yourself a classic movie fan and haven't seen it, you really ought to add it to your Netflix queue.

Yet more articles about Bubble with titles punning on the word "bubble"

2006-01-31T18:07:00.000-06:00

The rest of the entertainment mediasphere has taken note of Bubble's yawnerrific box-office performance. In an IMDb piece today, we read:

Mark Cuban, who owns Magnolia and the Landmark Theatres chain, said in a statement, "We are very happy with the results so far of this first day-and-date release, and while theatrical performance was not as high as we would have liked, it compared favorably to other similar films released this weekend."

Which it didn't, actually, as a quick scan of the weekend's numbers will clarify. In any case, I'm still intrigued by the strategy; I happen to think the world of Soderbergh, Cuban, Landmark, and what 2929 Entertainment and Magnolia Pictures are all doing to try to increase the profile of indie films. I'm thinking, though, that instead of their multiplatform release plan, which clearly hasn't worked as was hoped, they might have done better to try my vending machine idea. Hell, I bet Cuban could afford it!

Bursting a Bubble?

2006-01-29T15:22:00.000-06:00

It looks like the folks who thought it was a very bad idea for Steven Soderbergh and 2929 Entertainment to release their new low-budget indie film Bubble simultaneously on cable, DVD (that will actually be out Tuesday), and theatrically may be smugly enjoying a bit of I-told-you-so today. Released admittedly very conservatively on only 32 screens, Bubble's weekend take was around 70 grand, for a per-screen average of $2,208. That would put it on the lower end of per-screen averages for the weekend's top ten; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, now in its 8th weekend, had a per-screen of around $2,076.

By contrast, a couple of other platform release indie movies this weekend totally popped Bubble (cute, huh? — I could write for Hollywood Reporter with quips like that!). Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story owned Soderbergh on a mere three screens with a per-screen of $20,295, while Lars von Trier's Manderlay racked up a $7,558 average on only two screens. Considering that Soderbergh is an Oscar winner, and that Bubble has gotten wider mass-media coverage mainly due to its risky release strategy, this performance could be considered a big disappointment. The devoted art-house crowd had two other movies it preferred to see, and the mass audience who flocked to Soderbergh films like Ocean's [Insert Number] and Erin Brockovich stayed home. Maybe they were just a little creeped out by that baby-head trailer.

It also seems a vindication of the idea that, while audiences seem to bitch more and more about the unpleasantness and expense of theater-going, that window between theatrical and DVD releases still matters in giving a release legitimacy. I don't have any figures on Bubble's HDNet viewership or DVD pre-orders yet. But it would seem the lesson of this weekend is that theaters still matter, but if audiences can see your movie by staying home, they will.

Heard something awesomely gross today

2006-01-27T22:48:00.000-06:00

So there was this dead homeless guy found in a park in Austin some years ago. Anyway, it became clear, from the fact that his head was in a state commonly referred to as "bashed in," that foul play was involved. Due to the advanced state of the body's decomposition, identification was difficult. For instance, the flesh from the victim's hands had separated from his body, and the only way the medical examiners could get fingerprints from him was for one of their guys to slip the victim's hand-skin over his own hand as if it were a glove, and do the prints that way!

That's the kind of cool stuff you learn when you're a film and TV freelancer, without, like, actually having to see (and smell) it face to face the way the actual detectives and coroners did. Today I worked on a shoot for the Discovery Health Channel's forensics show Skeleton Stories, where I listened to some swell interviews with Austin D.A.'s who recounted tales of grisly local crimes I never knew a thing about. These folks really are passionate about justice. If I ever get my head bashed in by a lunatic, I hope they're on the case!

I have an inkling the work situation here in Austin will be better for 2006. A good start already, and my listing in this year's Texas Film Commission directory is bigger, new and improved, tastes great and is less filling. Nice to feel optimistic. From interviewing music celebrities, to hanging out in pools on South Padre surrounded by nubile and incoherent spring breakers, and listening to stomach churning stories of death and depravity, I wouldn't want to work in any other business. Now if only it were just a bit more regular...

HD-Suicide?

2006-01-22T17:03:00.000-06:00

Check this article over at Dark Horizons and marvel at the idiocy. Yeah, that's how to get a new format off the ground: screw over the early adopters!

Sundance neither the be-all or end-all

2006-01-19T21:34:00.000-06:00

Sundance is going on right now, and truth to tell, I wouldn't mind being there. I'm sure there are some awesome movies being premiered. And a handful of filmmakers will go home with the brass ring — their picture bought for distribution and a development deal for another — well in hand. But there's a lesson about putting all your eggs into one basket to be learned here, too. An L.A. Times article gives hopeful auteurs a reality smack today, pointing out that precious few Grand Jury Prize winners have actually gone on to have, you know, a filmmaking career:

For all its acclaim, the Grand Jury Prize was not intended to reward filmmakers whose movies are likely to make millions of dollars, said Geoffrey Gilmore, the festival's director. Rather, the awards are designed to call attention to works with bold, creative ambition — and the directors behind such indie movies are likely to find a rough road in an industry driven by the bottom line.
"The jurors are looking for films that are taking risks," Gilmore said. "It's not surprising that these films don't always do so well in the marketplace."

Of course, you could say the same for the Cannes Palme d'Or, one recent winner of which — Gus Van Sant's Elephant — only took in $1.2 million theatrically in the US. It's the age-old battle between art and commerce being duked out again. The problem is that too many artists shun too fanatically the commercial realities of the vocation they have chosen to pursue. Movies are neither just an art form nor just a business; they are both. The people who want to succeed don't "sell out," they just learn how to draw a balance between the two. They are also the people who are sufficiently self-confident to refuse to take no for an answer.

Every buyer balked at a theatrical release for Livingston's "Paris Is Burning," a documentary about drag queens. "After it won the Grand Jury Prize, nobody was interested still. It meant nothing," Livingston said. "I talked to many distribution types and was told it would never make any money." Livingston distributed the film herself, and when it generated standing-room-only screenings in New York, Miramax decided to buy the film. "Paris Is Burning" turned into a documentary hit, grossing more than $3.7 million.

Now that's how you rise above the pack. Too many indie filmmakers seem to have this idea that simply by screening at a festival, the brilliance of their filmmaking genius will be undeniable to all, and all they have to do from that point on is hold court in the hotel bar while distributors line up to genuflect, contracts in hand. Weeeeell, reality is more like this: you have to sell yourself. This involves doing tasteless things many serious artistes can't abide. Schmoozing. Networking. Pimping. It means taking exactly the same kind of risks to sell your film as it took to make it in the first place. It means being bold and maybe earning the ire and jealousy of other filmmakers whose criticisms of you, if they were at all honest, will in fact be rooted in envy that they didn't think of what you did to succeed first.

Of course, sometimes you may put out that effort and your film still won't make it. But at least you'll know you gave it the best try you could, rather than always wondering what might have happened had you only tried. Whether it's Sundance or any other festival out there, the festival itself will not do your heavy lifting for you. Only you can do that.

Bashin’ II: Fundie Boogaloo

2006-01-19T14:08:00.000-06:00

In the ongoing saga of right-wing Christian gay-hate focusing on Hollywood, this little piece of irony offered for your consideration:

There is an independent Christian film getting ready to make the rounds titled End of the Spear. It's based on a true story about five missionaries who were slaughtered by an Amazonian tribe. Setting aside the issue of how missionaries have done plenty to ruin indigenous cultures over the ages, the plot goes on to detail how the murdered men's families went back to the tribe to continue their mission, thus providing an example of courage, forgiveness and selfless love that stands as an example to all Christians today. And I can see how this message would resonate with a lot of Christians. Just not the right wingers.

For you see, there's a controversy already brewing about this movie. It seems that one of the lead roles is played by an actor named Chad Allen, who's — you're way ahead of me, aren't you — gay. So, led by a pastor in Florida, a campaign is underway to persuade the producers to "rectify this unfortunate situation" (exactly how is unclear, as the film is already in the can and ready for release). A scolding letter has been signed by about 100 pastors. But remember, they're not homophobic!

I admit to being a little puzzled myself as to why a gay person would affiliate himself with a religion that preaches he should be killed. Well, I know actors have to take the work wherever it's offered. Still, it would seem that there are people in the Christian community who would prefer End of the Spear's message of unconditional love be amended. You deserve love and forgiveness if you murder my family. But not if you're a fag. Go, Jesus!

Addendum: The numbers are in, and for the day following the Golden Globe awards, Brokeback Mountain leapt to #1, its per-screen average nearly three times that of last weekend's topper Glory Road. No, Mrs. B, America isn't going to see these movies, are they?

Superman Returns the new standard of Hollywood fiscal lunacy

2006-01-18T21:17:00.000-06:00

I admire Bryan Singer, pretty much. I mean, I thought The Usual Suspects was a little overrated, but still a good movie. And Singer is a guy who rose from the indie ranks and hit it big.

But still, if you thought budgets in the range of $200 million were absolutely out of control, when you start to push $300 million, you need to be taken out back and roughed up a little, if only to have a little sense knocked into you. Three hundred million dollars!? That is the direction the rumor mill has Superman Returns' budget headed towards. Yes, King Kong might have made jaws drop at $207 million, but at least Peter Jackson delivered three hours of non-stop ass-kicking for the investment. If SR becomes the first movie to hit the $300M price point, how can it possibly make its money back? I mean, it could end up clicking with audiences better than Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies have done, but how likely is that? Even Chris Nolan's Batman Begins, one of the most well-reviewed comic book movies ever, only took in $205.3 million domestically, towards a worldwide $371.9 cume. SR would have to take in over $600 million globally to break even at a $300 million budget — not categorically impossible. But way riskier than I'd be happy with, were I an exec with any sense.

Hollywood is in a quandary. Theater attendence remains ho-hum, because people are tired of the expense, the ads, the crying babies, and the asshole in the row behind you smacking his popcorn or talking on his cell phone. Ticket sales aren't disastrous, but disappointing, and yet production costs for the tentpole, hopefully-franchise-launching movies all studios desperately want in order to remain players continue to spiral into orbit.

Just to give you an idea: Egypt is the 31st country, out of 192, on the IMF's list of national wealth ranked by gross domestic product. Its GDP is recorded at just over $282 million. This means that more money is about to be spent on a single Hollywood movie than the wealth produced individually by 161 nations in a year.

Stupefying.

It had better not suck.

Holy meltdown, Batman! What did I tell you?

2006-01-17T18:14:00.000-06:00

LOL and other overused internet abbreviations. The Religious Right has wasted no time going apeshit over alla them sinful faggots taking home Golden Globes.

This shit is particularly hilarious:

“Last night Hollywood exposed its own corrupt agenda. (It) is no doubt out on a mission to homosexualise America.”

Apparently, watching a movie with gay characters in it will — horrors! — turn you gay! And Hollywood wants to turn everyone gay because — er — because — well, they don't quite say.

Here's more cluelessness.

“Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit,” Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, said. “None of the three movies — Capote, Transamerica or Brokeback Mountain — is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $25 million (£14.2 million) in ticket sales. If America isn’t watching these films, why are they winning the awards?”

Uh, pardon me a moment, you stupid bitch. (Do you mind if I call you that? I could go with "Mrs. Bitch" or just "Mrs. B" if you prefer.) Let's take an actual look at Brokeback's box office performance, shall we? Over the Martin Luther King Day holiday 4-day weekend, Brokeback had a per-screen average of $10,309. That's the highest per-screen average of the top 37 films! Keep in mind that Brokeback is still playing on fewer than 700 screens, compared to the 2000-3000-plus saturation release of big-budget blockbusters. So it's in fewer theaters, as are most serious dramatic films, but it's selling more tickets per showing than almost every other movie out there. And it's been having that kind of draw ever since its initial release. Look at the numbers yourself to see how it's outperforming nearly everything.

Another inconvenient fact that Mrs. B ignored is that Brokeback's production budget was only around $14 million. Its box office cume right now is just over $32 million. So even while it's still in limited release, it's well into profits, which is more than can be said for most $100 million-budgeted event pictures that Hollywood churns out. Something like 80% of movies released to theaters lose money. Brokeback is not one of those movies.

As for Transamerica, it's still in super-limited release, only on 9 screens nationwide so far. But its per-screen average over the MLK Day weekend was $12,239, even higher than Brokeback's! Nope, nobody's going to see these movies, obviously.

You'll notice that the referenced article is from the London Times. What you need to understand is that the Religious Right is a gang of thugs who make Americans as a breed look like idiots. Sophisticated, cultured Londoners read this article and shake their heads and chuckle at us. The fundies are an embarrassment to us on a global stage, especially when they have their meltdowns in front of reporters and television cameras. We look as benighted as the radical Islamists who make their women wear burkas. Here we are, supposedly the world's superpower, and we're populated by hordes of medievalist assclowns.

I cannot imagine being a right-wing Christian. Their lives are governed by two emotions, hate and fear, and their every public utterance is laced with ignorance or deliberate denial of empirical reality. And the sad thing is, like the alcoholic or cokehead who insists he has no problem, they mistake their hate for love, and their fear for strength. They genuinely baffle me. Do they really, really think that if they watch a movie with gay men or transgenders as lead characters, they will come out of that theater "homosexualized"? The mind boggles at such a dysfunctional view of reality. Yup, Brokeback ends, the credits roll, and Joe Fundie looks over at his wife Jane and sees...a stranger. Who is this woman sitting next to him? And how could he have felt love or attraction to her for all these years? Something in him is...changing. And as he staggers dazedly out of the theater and through the lobby, his eyes drift across a one-sheet for the next movie starring The Rock. And he feels a funny tingling...down there...

Oh boy. I almost pity them.

Almost.

Goldenfully Globular

2006-01-17T00:32:00.000-06:00

I care about as much for what goes on at the Golden Globes as I do the Daytime Emmys. But they are usually seen as a precusor to who's going to walk home with Oscars. And thus, it was entirely unsurprising that the Globes bestowed top honors to Brokeback Mountain. Which is perfectly fine, if the movie is in fact good enough to deserve it. I'll see it eventually, since every report I've had from friends of mine, not just the press, has been glowing. Excessive hype is what turns me off, not the idea of gay cowboys. But that's the problem here; awards season is every bit as predictable as the three-act structure of a boilerplate Hollywood script. Find the movie getting the biggest buzz, and there's your winner.

Still, there are surprises lurking in each awards show, and Felicity Huffman's win for the little-seen Transamerica is one of those. This probably means she'll get on the Oscar ballot, at least. And though I'm utterly outside the loop when it comes to network television, I have a huge love for HBO's awesome Rome, and I wish it had gotten something.

So, with most of the major awards going to movies about gay or transgendered characters, next up will be Michael Medved's unctuous bloviating about evil librul Hollywood being "out of touch" with traditional American Values, and perhaps the requisite cluck-clucking on Fox News and like-minded media niches. Nothing if not predictable, this business.

Playing the Meme of Four

2006-01-11T02:12:00.000-06:00

Okay, boys and girls. This is a game I found here. Time to get some group participation going. It's called the Meme of Four. Give it a shot. Maybe we'll get to know each other a little better. Oh, one thing. Being that this is a movie related blog, I've added some questions not in the original list to the bunch. They're at the tail end.

Four jobs you've had:

Record store clerk

Night watchman

Comic book artist

Assistant director, film

Four movies you could watch over and over: (It's actually painful for me to have to stop at four here, but dem's da rules.)

The Great Escape

Seven Samurai

Night of the Living Dead (only the original, of course)

Blade Runner

Four places you’ve lived:

Great Yarmouth, England

Dubai, U.A.E.

Singapore

Houston, Texas

Four TV shows you love to watch: (I don't really love to watch TV at all, but I have some favorites, and there's nothing here that insists they be currently-running shows. Again, too many "honorable mentions" to list here.)

Black Adder

Monty Python's Flying Circus

The Young Ones

The Prisoner

Four places you’ve been on vacation:

London

Hong Kong

Tokyo

Honolulu

Four blogs you visit daily:

Pharyngula

The Whatever

Media Matters for America

The Panda's Thumb

Four of your favorite foods:

Thai

Chinese

A burger I make myself, with sliced habaneros. Yes, you read that right.

A good old fashioned barbequed sirloin steak, with lots of veggies.

Four places you’d rather be:

Strolling through the British Museum...

...or the National Gallery of Art in DC

On set directing

Curled up snugly in bed, with either (depending on mood) a good book or a brunette

Four albums you can’t live without:

Brilliant Trees by David Sylvian

A Love Supreme by John Coltrane

Wind & Wuthering by Genesis

Skylarking by XTC

Four vehicles you’ve owned:

1982 grey-and-black Toyota Corolla (my first)

1980 blue Buick LeSabre (hand-me-down from the folks)

1993 white Toyota Celica (my favorite, still missed)

1993 teal Ford Explorer (sturdy, but not long for this world)

Now here are the extras I've made up, for movie buffs and pros. Fittingly, there are four.

Four movies you love that your significant other hates: (As I'm single I get to bow out of this one for now, but I'm dying to see what other folks say. When I was married, it seemed my wife hated anything I liked and herself liked total shit. One of many, many, many reasons it was a short marriage.)

Four hugely popular movies that you don't like:

Forrest Gump

E.T. (I fucking hate this!)

Jurassic Park

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Ignore if not applicable — Four video games that rocked your planet:

Deus Ex

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

Shenmue

Resident Evil: Code Veronica

For industry pros, mainly — Four actors you'd do anything, short of murder, to work with:

Robert de Niro

Daniel Day-Lewis

Patrick McGoohan

Jenna Jameson (wink!)

Your turn!

More Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD fun

2006-01-09T16:12:00.000-06:00

The Consumer Electronics Show 2006, a veritable Disneyland of technogeekdom, was held last weekend, and the lion's share of the attention was centered on the upcoming HD home video formats. One writer on CNET has wryly commented that while the players are producing stupefingly gorgeous video, the units themselves look pretty fugly.

HD-DVD looks like it's going to be first out of the gate, releasing its first players in late spring at an average MSRP of $400-$700, a price point that is surprising everyone. (Even the first DVD players in 1997 were higher.) This is seen as an obvious attempt to undercut the Blu-ray faction by hitting the streets first with much less expensive hardware. The first Blu-ray players are due later in the year at a breathtaking average price-point of $1800. But still many analysts are predicting Blu-ray will prevail, with better copy-protection than HD-DVD, among other things. The X factor? Gamers.

Sony's PlayStation 3, due around late spring/early summer, will, as all game geeks know, include a Blu-ray drive, while Microsoft — ever the contrarian — has announced it's throwing its weight behind HD-DVD and will release an external HD-DVD drive for the XBox 360. Immediate problem: this is a peripheral, which will cost more in addition to the $400 an XBox 360 already costs, while the PS3 will have Blu-ray built in.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard have thrown up their hands, said "Fuck it," and announced their support for both formats.

Then there's the upcoming Macworld Expo (go Mac!), where Steve Jobs will do his usual routine of announcing all their amazingly cool, top secret stuff, little of which is ever fully secret but, hey. In addition to expected announcements about a new line of turbocharged Intel-powered laptops and some new iPods, there could be elaboration on the company's HD plans (they're behind Blu-ray). Jobs has hinted at Apple's moving boldly into the "digital living room" thing.

So...lots of activity on the HD geek front. We'll see where the proverbial dust settles.

Meanwhile, here are some cool pics the Digital Bits guys took at CES. Technoporn! Yum.

Hallucinogens + Japan: "...drill the wax which was pulled."

2006-01-07T02:32:00.000-06:00

Yes, it's 2:30 ayem and I'm up.

I love Japanese cinema, except, really, for anime. (I mean, it's good if Miyazaki does it, but I'm lukewarm on most of the rest of it.) But even I marvel at the extremities of oddity that emerge from the land of the rising sun. Such is the case with Executive Koala, whose website I discovered during one of those rambling late-night surf sessions during which one is both insomniac and bored. Like tonight.

First, allow yourself to contemplate this still...

Then marvel to the surrealism of this synopsis, which I unearthed via a bit more Googling.

"Tamura is an average divorced salaryman in Japan - and also a man-sized, suit-and-tie wearing, upright-walking koala bear. Though not a human being, he's a successful businessman with ventures overseas who refuses to play office politics. He hopes to marry his girlfriend, Yoko, and raise a child. His visions are of an ordinary life with an ordinary company until his ordinary retirement. But when his girlfriend turns up dead one morning, the police finger the Executive Koala as their prime suspect. Tamura runs from Detective Ono and fights to prove his innocence. Tamura wants to know why there are gaps in his memory. Is he a murderer? Does he have multiple personalities? And what does his bartender (the frog) and his boss (the rabbit) know about the two-hundred year old terrifying secret behind the EXECUTIVE KOALA?"

Huh!

Now you'd think from that still you were getting either some kid's movie, or maybe a bit of snarky "Adult Swim"-style college-oriented bit of goofiness in the South Park or Invader Zim mold. Doesn't seem to be the case. They seem to be selling this as a straight-faced thriller/drama!

What is most bizarre to me is this. As any filmmaker will tell you, it's tough to get a movie made. Lengthy meetings are taken. A prospectus is drawn up, line-item budgets revised repeatedly. Financing is secured, if you're one of the lucky ones. Escrow accounts are opened, accounting firms hired. Distribution deals must be arranged.

Now, imagine someone in the industry in America — either Hollywood or indie — at any point in time during the pitching process, making the above pitch.

The mind reels. And yet, all of the machinery I described as having to be set in motion to make a film was in fact set in motion in Japan, towards the production of Executive Koala.

I'm not trying to prejudge the movie's merits at all! For all I know, this is some manner of left-field magical realist brilliance to put the wildest imaginings of Luis Buñuel or Alejandro Jodorowsky to shame. I kind of doubt that — but my point is, as hard as it is to make a film there are people on earth who can make something as loopy as this! I stand in awe.

Skipping over to the movie's own site, I basked in the oddity of the trailer, and decided to have some fun subjecting some of its Japanese text to one of those shot-in-the-dark online translator bots, which rendered the following:

The tag of well Siyuntarou Kanai "it was and the wrestler" recorded スマッシュ hit, as for this foolish animal movie series the イケる, with as for production each company thought. Then, what is made next? The fact that it surfaces then is "the koala". Why? "It is and the wrestler" after all, "it is?" and if, they are marine products ones, the movie is made the element of date, "it was and?" the maniac passed excessively. In addition the advertisement copy is and "is ill-smelling and is the め! "Those which are. ウ it is in ウケる one, as for the person who is pulled to think, the っ drill the wax which was pulled. Then! To be whether and so on compared to, it is lovely, with Mammalia "koala" which the woman likes essentially as a leading part in the audience straddle issues. Furthermore unexpected, that koala section chief.

"Audience straddle issues"? I am so all over this movie!

Boy, it's late...

Vote for me! Vote for me! Me! Me! Me!

2006-01-06T21:32:00.000-06:00

Despite the dismal track record for video-game based movies — like, there hasn't been a good one yet — I'm hopeful about the movie based on my personal favorite franchise, Silent Hill, coming out just days before my birthday this year.

Tri-Star has done an interesting thing with this picture. They set up a contest on the official website for fans to design their own one-sheets for the film, using art and text files provided. I think the winning design will actually be one of the posters used in theater lobbies across this great nation of ours. The winner might get something else too. But — screw it — I designed one. And now it's up for voting. So click here and vote for my design, right this very instant. And if I win, then maybe, if the movie sucks, we can all say, "At least the poster was cool."

P.S.: Apparently you can vote once a day, every day until the contest ends! So hold nothing back! Vote early and often!

Plasma screen as surrogate penis

2006-01-05T14:14:00.000-06:00

It'll be hilarious the day these things get so big the walls they're mounted on come crashing down.

The Oscar telecast might not suck this year!

2006-01-05T10:24:00.000-06:00

Because John Stewart is hosting!

This is probably the first thing Hollywood's done right since...well, the last time they did something right.

Naturally, the awards themselves will be entirely predictable. I'll lay even odds that Brokeback Mountain takes Best Picture, and better than even odds that the Religious Right and Fox News immediately goes into apoplexy railing against evil secular liberal Hollywood trying to promote the Gay Agenda and tear down Gawd, mom, and apple pie.

First batch of Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles announced

2006-01-04T16:14:00.000-06:00

Here they are, from all of the various studios that have climbed on board. Some crap throwaway Hollywood choices, a smattering of unusual classics. (Interesting to see Leone's For a Few Dollars More announced — a title that MGM infamously screwed up on its initial DVD release, and which has not since been corrected domestically, though an SE exists in region 2 — without similar announcements for A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.) All in all, not enough yet to make you ditch your DVDs, and DVDs will of course remain viable for the long haul, I think, just as CDs have. But it will be worth seeing which way the early adopters swing, and following the progress of the format war thereafter. I plan on waiting till Christmas at the earliest to make my choice, and perhaps even early 2007. Don't wanna back the wrong horse, you know.

HD format war meets public indifference

2006-01-04T00:13:00.000-06:00

While websites like The Digital Bits have been keeping track of, and providing often scathing critical commentary on the looming High Definition format war — which I bet a lot of you didn't even know was happening — it turns out that software manufacturers and studios face an even more prosaic, and potentially tougher, form of uphill battle when it comes to selling the next generation of discs to the public. And a format war is now almost certain to doom both emerging technologies, as this piece at CNET explains.

First, a format war primer. Now that DVDs are entrenched in just about every home in America, having enjoyed the fastest and most enthusiastic mass market penetration of any home entertainment technology ever (over 100 million players have been sold in the US since DVD debuted in late 1997, a figure that doesn't include DVD drives in computers or game systems), it's clearly time to establish a new home video format in order to get you to ditch the huge DVD collections you've already invested gobs of money in, and buy your favorite movies all over again in HD.

Now, that snarky comment isn't entriely fair, I must confess. Because the new formats have been on the drawing boards for years now. Most people, especially folks who have dropped money on 16:9 big screen TVs, would probably be surprised to hear that DVDs are not high definition video. They're massively clearer, of course, than VHS or even laserdiscs ever were. But they still use the standard definition analog NTSC encoding standard (PAL in Europe). This allows you, at best, 480 horizontal lines of resolution. The reason DVDs have to use either the NTSC or PAL standards is because of the MPEG-2 compression the video has to undergo in order to be stored on the disc, and because most everyone is still watching their DVDs on their old analog televisions which understand NTSC or PAL, with its 30 fps frame rate that differs from the 24 fps frame rate used by movies.

But the digital age is coming fast — all broadcast and cable is expected to be entirely digital by 2009 — washing away NTSC and PAL the way that big asteroid washed away the hapless dinosaurs. And the new discs are poised to take full advantage of the technology. Blu-ray is one of the formats; HD-DVD the other. Both formats have advantages and disadvantages to be ironed out from a manufacturing and marketing standpoint. But both, technologically speaking, have mad storage capacity (Blu-ray is said to allow for multiple, not just dual, layers, upping the ante to the 200 GB range) allowing room for much higher resolution video codecs than MPEG-2, providing true 1080 line resolution. Word is, from people who have seen these playing at trade shows, that it will make you faint dead away.

Problem: two formats, just like VHS and Beta. And the developers of each have been mulishly stubborn in reaching common ground, forcing studios and other developers (like computer and game companies) to choose sides. For a while it looked like Blu-ray had a decisive upper hand, especially after both Apple and Sony (for the PS3) hopped on. But, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, late last year several movie studios began hedging their bets, announcing their support for both formats. All the while, public-advocacy DVD websites continued to yell at these guys to get their shit together, or see a technology that could truly revolutionize the home theater experience go the way of SACD and DVD-Audio. ("What are those?" you ask. Precisely.)

But now we see a new wrinkle in the picture. Those clever satellite and cable companies — spurred by TiVO — have been making more on-demand movies and programming available to their subscribers, and people are going for it. So much so, in fact, that on-demand is already impacting and slowing down the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of DVD sales. Now when cable and satellite finally go fully digital and HD formatted, on-demand is expected to be so pervasive, even becoming the public's #1 viewing-habit-of-choice (I'm hearing rumors that networks are considering rendering the old practice of "schedules" and "time slots" utterly extinct), that the concern now is consumers will vastly prefer on-demanding a movie they want to see far more than they'll be interested in buying a $25 disc of that same movie which, in all honesty, they're likely to watch only once. And why shouldn't they? They'd simply be carrying over viewing habits they already practice.

So are Blu-ray and HD-DVD already doomed? I don't think so. There's too much cash and R&D effort already invested in the formats. But I think the halcyon days of DVD making everyone and his dog a big movie collector are waning. I remember in the 90's that, as a laserdisc owner, my hobby of collecting movies in a high quality home video format was rather unusual and kind of a snob-appeal thing. This decade, DVD made an elitist hobby a mass-market fad. But go to any place that sells used DVDs, and you'll see piles of copies of mainstream Hollywood movies, while very few copies of, say, Criterion or other speciality label or import titles — the kinds of things the movie snobs who collected laserdiscs were interested in 12 years ago.

What I think will happen, as far as movies and home theater are concerned (expect much bigger market acceptance in video games), is that you'll see HD disc formats become, as laserdiscs were in the 90's, a snob format for the real movie buff, the folks who'd rather watch Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles (who even frickin' know who those guys are) than Adam Sandler or Ben Stiller. And the mainstream public, the folks who will buy 7 million copies of The Wedding Crashers on DVD this week and trade them in to the used-disc store a month later, will settle into the on-demand/Netflix routine. And that's fine. As long as there's a format of choice available for everyone, I suppose.

Anatomy of a disappointment: Showtime's Masters of Horror

2006-01-02T17:41:00.000-06:00

I'm a huge fan of horror movies, although there are precious few horror movies I actually go see. My tastes tend to run to movies that successfully surround you in a frightening, oppressive atmosphere, and creep you out via the power of suggestion — the minority of what gets made — rather than simply seeking to shock you with appalling gore — the majority. Not that I don't appreciate a good gorefest, but that sort of thing has to be done very cleverly and stylishly for me to find it anything other than cheesily exploitive. Red dye and Karo syrup cost a filmmaker nothing, thus any no-budget video hack can slap together a gore movie and call himself a filmmaker. Good horror filmmaking is like anything else: it succeeds via the filmmakers' understanding of the language of cinema and storytelling excellence. Throwing guts at me and calling yourself transgressive will usually earn you a sneer, monstrous egotist that I am!

So it was with some cautious apprehension but general optimism that I looked forward to Showtime's heavily ballyhooed series Masters of Horror, whose brief was that it would be a series to allow the finest horror directors free rein to take off the gloves and do what they do so well. That the series has not, in fact, accomplished that is a greater disappointment to me than any of the particular episodes and whatever individual flaws they might have.

As I don't want to take up hours of your time detailing every episode so far shown and going into each and every nitpick I have in anally-retentive and eye-glazing detail, I'll pick out the two episodes I was looking forward to with the greatest enthusiasm and explain my disillusionment with each. I'll start by saying that sometimes having high expectations can be a thing to lead to disappointment no matter what. But I think it's sad we live in a world where the reality of what kind of entertainment we get makes low expectations the only sensible approach.

First of these is Jenifer, directed by Italian giallo master Dario Argento. Argento is a cult director if ever one existed. Virtually unknown among the great unwashed, he is as close to a deity among the committed horror geek community as you're likely to find. His 1977 masterpiece Suspiria is an exemplar of both what he's so excellent at, and what it is that mainstream American audiences simply would not get about his approach to horror cinema. Argento is not a director known for gritty realism of the sort that American audiences demand. You'd never get a Silence of the Lambs or Se7en out of him. What Argento makes are almost horror fantasies, films that exist in an exaggerated nonreality where wide-eyed about-to-be-murder-victims run dazedly around overdecorated, garishly lit sets to the strains of pounding synthesizer-based prog-rock music, while their killers set up wildly and unnecessarily complicated means of offing them that would confuse even Rube Goldberg on a good day. His best movies are meant to play like actual nightmares; eschewing strict logic for the confusion of violence and disorientation. In Opera, the killer, obsessed with a young ingenue, forces her to watch him kill all her friends by tying her up and taping needles under her eyes so she can't close her eyelids! Why? Because it's fucked up.

Thus it is that Argento's reputation as a "master of horror" has something to do with the bloodiness of his films, to some extent. But it is principally rooted in his approach to the language of cinema. It isn't just that his films' victims meet graphic deaths. It's in how those deaths are crafted, staged, lit, shot, and edited. How they are scored and sound designed. It may be style over substance, but to Argento, that's how he gets the job done. To him, a horror film is about feeling the experience, not understanding it on an intellectual level. Like a madder version of Hitchcock, whose dictum was to "put the audience through it." Show one of Argento's movies to a friend of yours whose only experience with horror is the Friday the 13th or Elm Street franchises, and he'll whine that the blood looks fake, or that the acting is lousy (of course it is; Italian movies record no sync-sound as S.O.P., and all dialogue is ADR'ed, not necessarily by the actor who's onscreen). But the dyed-in-the-wool horror fandom revere him without exception. They understand something mainstream viewers don't.

So now the tragedy: Jenifer, the first Argento-directed work likely to reach a substantial American audience in about 25 years, sucks. And it sucks because at no time does it allow Argento an opportunity to do the kinds of things he's known for, that make him the "master of horror" that this whole series is supposed to be honoring simply by being on the air in the first place. Not once do we get one of Argento's showstopping setpieces, on a par with the famous (and revolutionary at the time) Louma crane shot from 1982's Tenebrae (in which the camera pulls away from the window of a house, goes over the roof of the house, peers in several other windows, then comes to rest in a room on the other end of the house, all in one take). Nor do we get the delerious music, although the episode is scored by the same musician from the 70's band Goblin, who scored most of Argento's classics. What we get is a thoroughly bland and predictable story about a succubus who invades the life of a police detective, to the boredom of all.

After the tragedy, the irony. I suspect Argento's trademarked excesses were kept in check mostly because of a blasé script that never created a platform for them to be displayed. But I also expect that they were kept in check by network execs and producers who feared that Argento's normal style would be too over-the-top for American TV audiences, and thus made sure he'd never be able to go as hogwild as he's capable of doing — you know, to really be Dario Argento. If so, isn't the show betraying its own intent? It reminds me of the fate of John Woo, who, after establishing a rep in the late 80's as the world's greatest and most daring action director simply by exercising no restraint in piling on where most action films held back, came to America from Hong Kong, and made the stylistically castrated yawners Hard Target and Broken Arrow, two action movies so generic in their execution there was no reason for them not to have gone straight to video. (By the time he made Face/Off, American studios were finally letting Woo do his thing, but by then the style he'd pioneered had been totally knocked off by Robert Rodriguez and gone passé. By the time Woo made M:I-2 for Tom Cruise, all the fans he'd made from The Killer and Hard Boiled had dismissed him.)

I have hopes for Argento's return to form, though. He has since announced to the orgasms of fans everywhere that he is now in prepro on Mother of Tears, the long-promised third film in his "Three Mothers" trilogy, which so far includes Suspiria and Inferno. I'm nervous about his use of American screenwriters, whom I fear may supress Argento's stylistic flourishes under a tediously explained "logical" storyline. But if said screenwriters are real fans of his, unlike the writers of Jenifer (one of whom was its star, the congenitally bland Stephen Weber), we may be in for a real comeback!

Next we come to John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, from a script by Scott Swan and Drew McWeeny (who's known for posting to AICN as "Moriarty"). Here we have a case where a true "master of horror" does, in fact, a fine job, but is let down by weak material. The episode has a neat premise: a film researcher heavily in debt and in danger of losing his theater is hired by an eccentric gazillionaire — played with gusto by the great Udo Kier, doing that decadent Eurotrash thing he's perfected since the early 70's — to track down the only existing print of an obscure film titled La Fin Absolue du Monde (The Absolute End of the World), the one screening of which at a festival in the 70's drove its audience to mass hysteria and murder.

Thus the episode bears some similarity to the plot of Carpenter's underrated 1995 horror-satire In the Mouth of Madness, which was all about the relationship between art and audience. But I had a number of immediate nitpicks with Cigarette Burns; some minor — I found the protagonist miscast, though not disastrously so — but others larger. For one thing, Carpenter has long voiced his dislike for directing lengthy, expository dialogue scenes (which he calls "thankless"), and such scenes make up about 70% of the episode. Talk, talk, and more talk, and Carpenter soldiers through it all as best he will. Some of these scenes work fairly well, in that Swan and McWeeny do come up with dialogue that builds upon the mystery they're developing surrounding this deadly film, and Carpenter has the scenes shot and lit effectively. It's almost enough to make you ignore the similarities not only to In the Mouth of Madness but also The Ring and Videodrome.

There are a couple of other scenes where Carpenter is allowed to drop a real surprise in our laps, also. Despite the overall talkiness of the script, and despite Carpenter's reputation — going back to Halloween — for preferring the power of suggestion to graphic explicitness, there's one beheading scene here that's probably the most brutal thing Carpenter's ever put to film. And it shocks not because it's so grisly, but because, in the context of what we've been watching, it's sudden and unexpected, yet it fits in logically with the story's overall premise about the effect this lost film has upon those obsessed with it.

But the biggest problem with Cigarette Burns is its facile ending. Throughout the story, I kept thinking to myself, "You know, they're building up the mystique of this lost movie to such a humongous level, I bet they'll never pay it off at the climax." And they don't. All along, we've been getting speeches about how dangerous this lost movie is, about how its equally mysterious director wanted to go beyond film narrative and assault his audiences, about how film as an art form should not be about simple escapism but a true force for changing the world, demolishing comfortable preconceptions, and just plain rocking your boat.

And then Carpenter and the script make the mistake of actually letting us see some clips from the movie in the final scene (once the protagonist has rather anticlimactically located it for Kier). And what do we get? Well, you know, garden variety shots of mayhem, violence, people in cages screaming, an angel having its wings cut off (a supernatural element to the story that is never built upon satisfyingly). All in all it looks like the kind of thing you'd see in any music video from a Scandinavian death metal band. And this kills the whole show. The function the lost movie served in the story was that of a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin, and that it should have remained. They should have never actually let us see any of it, because as long as its supposedly insanity-inducing content was allowed to exist only in our imaginations, it was a scary concept. To show it at all took that away from us, and robbed the element of the story that was its entire driving force of the force it had.

Carpenter is limited in other ways here as well. Widely known for his excellent use of the 2.35:1 scope aspect ratio, here he's forced to use the standard 16:9 aspect ratio that's become the HDTV norm. So much dialogue is required to develop the story and build up the mystery surrounding the lost film that Carpenter is given little to no time to build scenes using the kind of slow-burn suspense he's employed in movies like Halloween, The Thing and Prince of Darkness. In the end, while it's great to see Carpenter back in the saddle and masterfully directing even middling material, it's a shame that middling material was what he had to work with. If Cigarette Burns had been a feature — and it shows signs of straining to be one — Carpenter would have been able to display what a real "master of horror" is capable of. But then I bet you anything the goddamn MPAA would have never allowed him to get away with that beheading scene.

And a Happy New Year to you, too!

2006-01-01T13:43:00.000-06:00

I'm not much for "resolutions," if only because I think the term is silly. But a new year is always a fresh beginning, if nothing else, an opportunity for renewal and new achievements. My goals for 2006: make at least two films, with luck, three. Hey, if Takashi Miike can do it, so can I! (heh heh)

Martinus Lupus

2005-12-31T02:08:00.000-06:00

I'm cool with this, even if the person who put it together can't spell to save his frickin' life.

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Yet another state outsmarts Texas

2005-12-29T16:38:00.000-06:00

This time it's Washington, which has come up with a rather direct plan to entice productions to actually shoot there instead of neighboring Vancouver. Just offer money! From IMDb today:

After seeing several films set in Seattle actually being shot in Vancouver, B.C., about 120 miles to the north, the Washington state legislature is considering a measure that would set up a $5-million fund to be used to attract more filmmakers to the state. Filmmakers would be able to receive up to $1 million for virtually any production shot in the state providing that amount does not exceed 20 percent of the actual money spent in the state. "This has the possibility of bringing tens of millions of dollars into the state economy," Don Jensen, president of Alpha Cine Labs, a post-production company in Seattle, told Bloomberg News.

Meanwhile, on Texas' slate of current shoots, lots of not much.

Here's hoping for a better 2006.

Some grim facts about shorts

2005-12-22T20:33:00.000-06:00

Read a sobering article in Hollywood Reporter about how shorts, particularly those streamable on the web, are no longer the calling card aspiring filmmakers have hoped. And they probably never were.

The gist of the article is this: The proliferation of short film websites has robbed indie shorts of much of their mystique. Now, I have, in many of my previous posts, touted the internet as a fantastic distribution avenue for small films in a world where theatrical and other large-scale distribution is simply closed to them. The downside, it appears, is not only a glut of product, but the fact that most of that product is fanboyish and not the sort of thing studio execs or high-powered producers would flock to in a search for new talent. I learned some good things from this article, I can tell you, that will certainly influence my own filmmaking plans in 2006.

1. Make something original, not a lame fanfilm or spoof. One point the article drives home is that too many of these shorts are fan spoofs of popular movies or TV shows. There must be a zillion Star Wars fanfilms, running the gamut from cheesy spoof to serious attempts at making something respectful to the source material. But in the end, fanfilms are all they are, and they're not likely to land you your Big Break, even if well-made.

2. Make absolutely the best short you can make, don't just gather a bunch of your friends together and shoot them doing inane things with your $299 Best Buy camcorder. If your sincere goal is to make actual theatrical motion pictures for a career, what a producer is going to want to see is real craft. If they can look at your film and immediately conclude that they're looking at the work of a filmmaker with real talent who deserves a development deal, that will literally separate you from 99.9% of the rabble. So write a strong story. Get a DP to actually light the damn shoot. And forget the Lars von Trier aesthetic; use sticks (aka a tripod) instead of doing the whole thing handheld. Do everything you can so that your short looks like the work of a filmmaker, not a fanboy (or -girl). And if spending money is what's worrying you, then think of it in terms of what you're prepared to invest in your future. Is it your burning desire to see a movie you directed playing at the megaplex down the block? Then what's that worth to you?

3. For chrissakes, have your next project ready! This, to me, was the galvanizing lesson of this article, as it's a trap even a skilled aspiring filmmaker can fall into. Many of the filmmakers interviewed for the article sheepishly confess to not having anything ready when a producer popped the question, "So, what else ya got?" They had concentrated so hard on their shorts that they literally hadn't thought ahead to the feature they wanted to make, which, irony of ironies, was entirely the goal that the short was supposed to bring them closer to realizing! A greater Homer Simpson "D'OH!" moment I don't think you could have. So the smart filmmaker's plan ought to be to make your short, then before you shop it around, have at least one and preferably two feature film screenplays finished and in your attache case for the moment that question is popped. What this says about you to a producer: "This person's prepared!"

4. Finally, persevere, persevere, persevere. Say you make your first short. And it's good. But it's not enough to open the desired doors. No big. Not the end of the world. Make a second short. Then a third if you have to. A fourth. A fifth. Persevere. And think of the advantage of having a DVD making the rounds in Hollywood with not one but five of your shorts on it. You now are an aspiring filmmaker with a body of work. Five directing credits instead of one. You're serious. It's obvious. And even if all this isn't enough to sway a studio yet, it may very well impress the hell out of an independent production company eager to finance the first feature of a hot new talent.

So while this article may seem depressing to those of us still clawing our way up, I think the sensible thing to do is roll with the changing times. Know what's feasible for you at this point and what isn't, and work within what is. And at all costs, keep making movies.

So long, Richard Pryor

2005-12-10T18:21:00.000-06:00

Well, this is a shame. I remember Silver Streak and Bustin' Loose fondly, and I'm always impressed when someone gets the "rubber brick throwin' muthafucka" reference. Thanks for the laughs, Rich. And we should all do our bit to support MS research.

O the irony!

2005-12-10T14:40:00.000-06:00

After whining and kvetching a month ago about how little-to-nonexistent work is in Austin for local crews, I got — and lost — three job offers in as many days. One was a reality show who called and asked for a résumé; they never called back, and I assume it was because I wasn't available for all of the days of the fairly long shoot they had scheduled. Then some lady from ABC called for one of their reality shows, needing a driver, only to tell me the following day they were going to go with the "one guy [they] already had" (which made me curious as to the tone of desperate relief she had when she first called — "Oh, thank God I found you!" is something women say rarely enough to me it tends to build up expectations when they do.)

Then — then, I lost a job literally by a matter of five minutes. A coordinator I know fairly well (cool person) left me a voicemail looking for a PA for a one-day commercial shoot today, the 10th. I called back five minutes later to hear she was under serious pressure from the producer and had already hired someone else. "I'd much rather work with you, but I can't just call this person back and tell them I don't need them." No, you can't, of course, which is why you're a cool coordinator and the lady from ABC ought to take a page out of your book. Ah, well. That's life. Still, had I taken that call, I'd be working instead of blogging today.

Anyway, the silver lining is that I just got an e-mail from someone in San Francisco looking for PA's for a week-long thing in January. I probably won't get it either, but I fired off my résumé to them immediately so we'll see what comes of it. In any event, I appreciate that I got this notice, like, a month in advance, instead of its being the usual night-before, last-minute "We need a guy — wait, no we don't!" thing.

And there's the little matter of this being more job offers arriving in the last week than in the several preceding months combined. Let's hope this bodes well for 2006. With two projects of my own in development as well, I hope to be much busier than usual in the first few months of the new year!

Balls!

2005-12-07T00:32:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times (registry required to read whole thing):

Mel Gibson, whose "Passion of the Christ" was criticized by some as anti-Semitic — and whose father has said that the Holocaust did not happen — is developing a nonfiction mini-series about the Holocaust.

Scorsese’s never won one either, so quit whining

2005-12-06T02:53:00.000-06:00

Had my attention called to a campaign underway by a group of feminist filmmakers under the banner of Guerilla Girls who are putting up billboards in Hollywood for Oscar season, complaining that women and minorities are vastly underrepresented in The Biz, and get neither the opportunities nor Oscar acclaim that white males do. Were they to pop up out of their gopher hole for long enough they'd notice this inequality is rife the world over. But what do you hope to accomplish with a billboard? I'm a white guy, and no one's offered me my big time studio development deal yet, let alone given me an Oscar nod. The world is unfair, and all you can do is work your ass off to achieve your goals and dreams. And if the movers and shakers don't give you the recognition you feel you deserve, maybe you've got the wrong priorities. Don't make films to win awards. Make films to make films. If awards come your way, be gracious and grateful. But if you're putting your hunger for acclaim over your passion for your work as a be-all and end-all, then you're just in it for your ego and that will show to everyone you meet and work with.

In any event, it would seem the post-Oscar career trajectories of such ladies as Halle Berry, Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei (I had to look her up to remember her name), and (after Aeon Flux) quite possibly Charlize Theron should be depressing enough to steer many smart women away from an Oscar victory as a desirable goal. And besides, Oscars aren't necessarily about who's the best of their year, as anyone who's squirmed through Forrest Gump can attest. It's about who's got the most aggressive and effective campaign to buy all the Oscars they want, a fact proved time and again by Los Bros Weinstein. Remember how ol' Harvey stole Steven Spielberg's Best Picture Oscar right out from under his nose in 1998, to the reverberating whap! of jaws hitting floors nationwide in disbelief? But to this day, people still speak in reverential tones about the brilliant Saving Private Ryan. Does anybody talk about Shakespeare in Love anymore, let alone remember it?

As a good liberal, I'm all for folks banding together to fight the power when it comes to disparity and inequality. But I think the most sensible attitude for any filmmaker to have towards the Oscars would be that of the European director (whose name, ironically, escapes me, though I think it was Godard) who once famously said, "Hollywood? Oh, yes. That's where they give Charlton Heston awards for acting."

Not that I'd reject one if they gave one to me someday. But you know...it's about priorities.

Stop pissing away money on billboards, Guerilla Girls, and spend it on your films instead!

The future for indies: Buh-bye, Sundance, hello web!

2005-12-05T02:20:00.000-06:00

The Sundance Film Festival has, for about 15 years now, been the place for indie filmmakers to get their wares seen, and so many prominent careers have been launched from within its snow-covered auditoriums it's staggering. But are those days over? Looks like it. More and more, Sundance has become the place for major studios to show off their "prestige" releases while at the same time allowing them to claim the sort of art-before-commerce cred usually reserved for the indie crowd. In other words, don't look for too many more precocious Hispanic kids with $7,000 home movies to even get in, let alone secure major development deals.

Robert Redford's brainchild recently announced its 2006 premiere lineup, and what do we have? A bunch of good stuff, I'm sure, but, in the words of IndieWire (emphasis added)...

...Sundance organizers made the announcement today, also unveiling the roster of high-profile, often star-driven, titles that will screen in the event's Premieres section...

Get that? Sundance has, it appears, been assimilated. If you have to have a "high-profile, star-driven" movie to be considered an "indie" film by the festivalistas these days, where does that leave, you know, the real indie filmmakers?

I'll tell you. The internets!

Have you heard about this little Finnish flick called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning? Go have a look. This is a feature-length Star Trek parody, as you might have guessed by the title, shot by a bunch of Finnish Trekkers (I swear, you couldn't make this shit up!) over a period of seven years, with CGI effects work done on their Macs and PCs. Downloadable for free over their website, it has now become the most viewed Finnish film in history, with an audience of over 3 million so far!

Now one has to make allowances for a few mitigating factors. For one thing, this is the latest in a long lineup of Star Wreck movies, so it comes from a fairly established fandom subculture. (If the filmmakers needed a particularly obscure prop they couldn't afford to buy, it was usually a matter of days before someone mailed it to them.) But there are several other factors to consider, too. While the movie itself is a free stream, a great many folks who watched it were perfectly willing to support these guys with a DVD purchase. Also, there's the sheer size of the viewership. Translated into $8 movie tickets, this viewership would have accounted for $24 million in US box office had the movie been released that way (a full $11 million more than this season's joke Aeon Flux did in its opening weekend). But — here's the kicker — had it been released theatrically, it's a safe bet 3 million people wouldn't have gone to see it! And, by allowing viewers to simply download it, they've eradicated the piracy factor — you can't pirate what anyone can get for free! — while tapping into a fan base of whom a large portion will be happy to fork over the price of a DVD as an altruistic support-the-artists gesture, and because they like the movie. (The IMDb page for Star Wreck shows an average viewer rating of 7.7 out of 10.)

By comparison, I decided to look in on the current status of three of the 2005 Sundance Festival's highest-profile alumni — Hustle & Flow, The Squid and the Whale, and The Dying Gaul — to see how their performance, both financially and critically, compares to that of this web-distributed fanfilm. First, a quick hands up from those of you who have heard of none of these movies. Okay.

Of the three, the $8 million-budgeted hip-hop drama Hustle & Flow is faring the best. Critics like it, and so do audiences (7.3/10 IMDb rating), and since it's been in limited release, it's taken in $22 million. Also, star Terence Howard is being pushed as an awards contender.

The Squid and the Whale is a huge critics' darling, and audiences who've seen it like it too (7.8/10 on IMDb). But that audience has, so far, been very small; it's only made about $3.2 million in its first month. Off a $1.5 million budget, that's fine, as they're already profitable. But in terms of asses-in-seats, it's still far fewer than a million people, and this is a movie with stars, including an Oscar nominee (Lauren Linney) and winner (love of my life Anna Paquin).

Finally, The Dying Gaul is faring least well. Starring Patricia Clarkson — who's been in virtually every low-to-mid budget movie made in this country since she did Being John Malkovich — the movie's only got a 6.1/10 IMDb rating, and, conservatively released on only 20 screens, hasn't even made 200 grand in three weeks. Critics have been far less enthusiastic, too.

Conclusion? If a little labor-of-love web feature can reach a bigger and more supportive audience than many of the movies that not only get selected by Sundance (a jaw-dropping average of 26,000 movies are vetted and rejected by the festival every year), but then go on to secure the brass ring of a theatrical distribution deal while there, then the question for indie filmmakers to ponder is: Wherefore Sundance? Should you even bother? Certainly, you should acknowledge the festival's stature in the industry and make your movie as if you were fully confident of its securing a berth on its sanctified lineup. But is it the end of the world if you can't even come close to getting in? I think not. Because sitting on your desk right in front of you is the world's largest multiplex. If you, as a filmmaker, are confident of your film's quality, and you take the time to learn how to use internet publicity to your advantage, then there's no reason your movie can't reach a vast audience by bypassing the traditional festivals-to-theaters distribution paradigm entirely and going right into people's homes, over their cable modems.

Insta-DVDs redux

2005-11-29T23:37:00.000-06:00

Thought this was an interesting little tidbit on IMDb's news page today, given my recent modest proposal on being able to buy a DVD of the movie you just saw in the theater lobby. Emphasis added.

Disney CEO Robert Iger has continued to downplay the importance of a film's box-office receipts and to urge that studios shorten the length of time it takes for a film to move into the home video market, where the largest profits lie. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Iger said that he has proposed that theaters begin selling DVDs of the movies they are screening at their concession stands. "They think we are out of our minds," he conceded.

Heh. I'm sure!

But do you have to be an OT-VIII to buy it?

2005-11-24T23:05:00.000-06:00

This is, quite simply, hilarious. The Japanese know how to do a DVD special edition, I can tell you! Feast your eyes on the War of the Worlds Emergency Box. In addition to the two-disc version of the Spielberg/Cruise movie, you get a special kit to help you survive when the Martians invade: a keychain with a whistle on it, a pair of work gloves, and — wait for it — an AM/FM radio with hand-powered LED light! And all for only ¥23,100 (that's about $185). It just makes me want to jump up and down on a couch!

I can't wait to see what kind of special edition they whip up for Showgirls!

Massachusetts smarter than Texas, again

2005-11-24T13:58:00.000-06:00

It isn't just things like civil rights and gay marriage that separate a state like Massachusetts from one like Texas. This, from IMDb today: Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on Wednesday signed a new law providing tax incentives intended to lure Hollywood filmmakers to the state. After signing the legislation, the governor remarked, "Grab your popcorn and soda, because Massachusetts is ready for its close-up." The bill calls for income and corporate excise tax credits to producers based on the number of local workers they employ and how much the filmmakers spend in the state during production. Today's (Thursday) Boston Herald quoted Don Stirling, who heads the state's Sports & Entertainment Commission, as saying, "With this film incentive legislation, we have the economic resources to attract more and more movies to Massachusetts."

I certainly like the bit about being "based on the number of local workers they employ". Nice one. Will anyone in our own state legislature step up to the plate? Maybe. When monkeys fly out of my butt.

Apparently there's a big holiday tomorrow

2005-11-23T13:44:00.000-06:00

For those of you who celebrate it, have a safe and enjoyable day. I myself will be enjoying staying home, curled up with my animals and a good book or two, or maybe the brand new King Kong DVD, which is ossom! No traffic or airport lines for me! Suckers!

The “Ben’s Letter” shoot: in which your courageous cineblogger masters many animal fears

2005-11-21T16:01:00.000-06:00

So how did you spend your Sunday? I spent much of mine perched on a chair in a room in the Omni Hotel in downtown Austin, with nothing between me and twelve stories of empty atmosphere but a single pane of glass. Granted, it felt like good, sturdy safety glass. But I could still, you know, see through it.

I'd never art directed before (if that's what you'd call this), so I was looking forward to creating a fake "broken window" effect for this video for my pals in the band 54 Seconds. I love their music, which I generally find tuneful and upbeat, but I'm not sure about their predilection for really depressing videos. Their last video, for the song "Better?", ended blissfully with a girl shooting herself in the head but failing to kill herself, winding up instead institutionalized with brain damage. Now we have vocalist Spencer Gibb hurling himself angstfully from a high hotel window (they restrained themselves by not actually making Spencer do that bit), where his spectre then haunts the Omni lobby, eternally singing his plaintive song to confused passers-by. Goodness!

Anyway, the first step in my FX exercise was to put down a layer of tint, and cut it into the rough shape of broken shards. The idea was that the untinted glass would give a dazzling performance as the broken-out part.

As you can see, putting this into practice involved the lunatic act of standing on a chair directly in front of a twelve-story yawning chasm. I discovered many things this day. One of which was the axiom "Don't look down!", which is something we all think of as just a stupid thing people say in movies, actually does work when it has to. As long as I kept my eyes fixed on my work, there was just no time to dwell on how frickin' high up I was. As the work pressed towards evening and the lobby got a little dimmer, it got easier still. Essentially I just got wrapped up enough in the work that I gave myself no time to scare the hell out of myself. I felt like Kane in Kung Fu. You have mastered mind over matter, Grasshopper!

Okay, I didn't really feel like Kane in Kung Fu, but I enjoyed saying I did.

After laying down the film, I used acrylics, the most loathsome paints known to man (but quick-drying and easy to peel!), to create the jagged edges. Just keep looking straight ahead, Martin....

Almost done...just a few more edges to go....total work time approaching four hours even.

The finished window...and I'm outta here, folks. Enough of this cruel world for me! And don't forget to tip your waitresses.

Since the shoot was scheduled as an all-nighter — a schedule with which my circadian rhythms were, for a change, not in tune — I went home, walked the dog, grabbed some shut eye, and then went back to the hotel around 4:45 a.m. to strike the set. Peeling everything off, which required nearly half a bottle of Goo Gone, was infinitely more of a hassle than putting it up. But I was told by director/DP Jen White it all looked spectacular on video! Which was the goal. I also got to see some terrific examples of filmmakers' homemade resourcefulness in action, including an amazing rig cobbled together by Jen and Bill Orendorff that suspended the camera face down from, I kid you not, about eight or ten helium balloons (and anchored with fishing poles) which floated up at least ten stories! This was used for Spencer's dead-on-the-ground shot, and ought to look amazing. To rent a crane that could've achieved the same effect would have cost thousands.

So by 7:30 a.m. on Monday, it was a picture wrap. Down and dirty overnight indie filmmaking, Austin style! Thanks to Bill for the photos, and everyone else on the crew for a good time. Some of you are racking up some impressive IOU's, which, rest assured, I will call in someday with all the ruthlessness at my disposal. And to you folks at home, I'll let you know when the video is ready for viewing.

It's Martin Scorsese's birthday!

2005-11-17T02:08:00.000-06:00

He's America's greatest living filmmaker, and he's named Martin! It gets no better than that!

Insta-DVDs!

2005-11-17T01:54:00.000-06:00

Okay, here's an idea.

A new movie hits theaters. You go to see it. You like it, you really, really like it. You think, when this comes out on DVD, I'll buy it.

Then you go into the lobby, and there's a machine. You slip a ten dollar bill into it, plus maybe your ticket stub as sort of a proof-of-purchase thing...

And the machine burns you a copy-protected DVD of the movie you just saw. With bonus content. Plus it prints out artwork you can slip into a keepcase when you get home.

Cool? Yes? No? Piracy killer? Or enabler? Theater saver? Or wrecker?

Discuss.

Considering the audience

2005-11-17T01:33:00.000-06:00

Interesting article (the internets are full of them) from IndieWire, one passage of which deals with the concept of different versions of a film being cut for different audiences. A clip:

Prior to the release of Joe Wright's "Pride & Prejudice" in the U.K. two months ago, the film's producers, Working Title, decided to shorten the original romantic ending of the movie, apparently feeling it was a bit too sappy for British audiences. Focus Features on the other hand, which opened the movie over the weekend in the U.S., kept Wright's original ending, releasing a different, slightly longer version of the film in this country. In a statement to indieWIRE Wednesday, a Focus spokesperson explained that in the U.K., "audiences prefer a less overtly romantic wrap-up, so the filmmakers had prepared the movie accordingly." Standing by their decision to release the film with the more romantic coda Stateside, the Focus spokesperson added, "What's most gratifying is that, wherever in the world 'Pride & Prejudice' is being shown, critics and moviegoers are enjoying this classic love story." Such decisions, reiterating how audience reactions are anticipated and accommodated ahead of major film releases, are increasingly commonplace in Indiewood, as a panel of insiders discussed Monday night at a New York Women in Film and Television seminar.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's a foolish filmmaker who ignores the audience and chains himself to his auteur pretensions. That way lies madness, and movies like this. For my own currently-in-prepro HD short, whenever someone reading the script came upon a bit they found confusing, I'd ask them straight-up, "What do I need to do to make that less confusing?" And that process continued until those criticisms stopped. Filmmaking is like any other art form: you have to communicate ideas meaningfully.

But there's something about the way Hollywood will focus-group a movie to death that smacks of treating them like kitchen appliances. Here's the red one for people who like red, and here's the one without the built-in can opener for folks who don't like all that clutter. When you tailor a movie to perceived audience tastes, are you make the best decision for the quality of the movie? Or are you just trying to pander to boost whatever meager profits you stand to make anyway?

And — most importantly from my point of view — are the filmmakers being consulted about these changes, or are they all marketing and studio driven, without respect for whatever the director's and screenwriter's vision for the story might have been? It wouldn't be anything new to see directors having their films taken out of their hands and chopped to pieces due to some whim of a studio exec or marketing survey. It's a shameful Hollywood tradition going all the way back to Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. If changes are inevitable, the best thing producers and studios can do is trust their creative talent. In the case of Pride & Prejudice, it sounds like the director was okay with all of this, so that's fine. But if he hadn't been, I can easily see the studio thumbing their nose at him and saying, "Well, we're doing it anyway." And perhaps they would have been right, perhaps not. The danger any artist runs into is that you get so close to the work, you can't often take the detached perspective needed to see what would be best for its ultimate success. But on the other hand, sometimes you're completely confident in what you want, and you have to fight idiots who want to vandalize what you've worked so hard to create.

There's not a smart director alive who doesn't want his film to be embraced by a large audience, even the ones who cop the auteur attitude. A good director appreciates a producer and marketer who wants to work with him on maximizing his film's potential. Because in the end, everyone wants the same thing: a popular movie.

Studio executives prove good math skills irrelevant to job market

2005-11-16T14:11:00.000-06:00

Instead of fretting over DVD release windows, just stop making insanely expensive crap!

There's an interesting piece over at the New York Times about the ever-shrinking window of opportunity films have in which to succeed or fail. As the Times has one of those websites where they want you to register before you can read anything, I'll sum up.

Studio films, being increasingly expensive to make, are under greater pressure to return their investment faster and faster, due to competition from pirates and even the legitimate DVD market. A movie's theatrical success can now, in most instances, be predicted not by the end of the opening weekend, but by mid-afternoon on opening day. But the shortening of the window between theatrical and DVD release has actually damaged theatrical business; most moviegoers are perfectly happy to hang loose and wait for a new movie on DVD. So it's DVD sales that are now keeping Hollywood afloat. But, strong box office is usually the thing that determines strong DVD sales (especially as most DVD's in America are bought at the Great Satan, Wal-Mart, which I can probably guarantee you isn't carrying titles from labels like Anchor Bay or Blue Underground).

So it's a dilemma, kind of like the old "you can't get hired without experience, and you can't get experience if no one hires you" thing.

The expense of filmmaking (I can understand how a movie like The Return of the King costs $100 million, but how did we get to a situation where the average Hollywood production is costing nearly that?) and the difficulty most of these studios are even having staying in business is what's accounting for the nonstop reliance on franchises and remakes. If you haven't got strong examples of either, you're in a serious state of assfuckery. Just ask Paramount, whose recent attempts at franchise-building (Tomb Raider) have gone over about as well as a best man at a wedding reception who decides to make his entire speech/toast a series of homo and fart jokes. This is one studio desperate for Spielberg and Lucas to get the lead out and produce the fourth Indiana Jones, I can tell you!

I don't think it's possible for Hollywood to go back and widen the DVD window to give movies a little more room to breathe in theaters. Mainly, because the toothpaste is already out of the tube. And also, if a film flops in theaters, it becomes even more important to rush that DVD onto the racks before the corpse of the film starts stinking up the place completely.

As for eliminating the window entirely, which some producers are contemplating, there are certainly risks involved with that. Steven Soderbergh's next film, Bubble, is going to take the unusual route of being simultaneously released theatrically, on TV and on DVD. Already, some theater chains are rebelling, but this little experiment could provide low-budget indie filmmakers with a helpful roadmap to let them know how best to release a specialized-audience picture. What has been left out of 2929 Entertainment's grand plan is internet distribution, but I suspect that will come along soon, what with the success iTunes has been having selling television shows for the iPod. I'm very interested to see how 2929's grand plan works out for them. It won't eliminate theaters, of course, but letting moviegoers know they have multiple options available to them right then might just encourage their interest.

I think there's an easier way for Hollywood to stop worrying about falling revenues and the threat ironically posed by their own thriving aftermarket. It's two steps, basically. 1. Cut costs. 2. Stop making movies that suck. One of the most successful films in release right now is Saw II, of all things. Yes, it's a franchise, and it's horror, which guarantees it a built-in audience to a certain degree. But Lion's Gate's approach to film production in general — no huge budgets, treat each film with care and attention instead of tossing them out indifferently as instant tax losses a la Miramax — is smarter than Hollywood's overall. Saw II cost $4 million to make and has to date taken in $75 million. By contrast, Flop-of-the-Year Stealth cost $135 million and only took in $31 million ($75 million worldwide). Maybe before studios hire executives, they should pay closer attention to prospective candidates' SAT math scores.

With a little help from my friends

2005-11-15T12:56:00.000-06:00

As long as there aren't any big, "make you a living" jobs for film crews in Austin, there are still friends who pull together their own projects to keep the juices flowing and, most importantly, stay connected.

I'll be working this coming Sunday on a music video for my chum Spencer Gibb's fantastic band 54 Seconds, for their heartbreaking single "Ben's Letter". You should promptly buy everything they've recorded, either at their site or off iTunes. The album mystifyingly titled ep is a good starter.

I've never art directed before, so this should be interesting. I basically get to vandalize a room at the Omni Hotel in downtown Austin. Never fear; I'll fix it when we wrap. I'm sure to have plenty of photos and fun stories to post after it's all done. And the beat goes on.

From the "It Was Gonna Happen Sooner or Later" file

2005-11-12T23:44:00.000-06:00

Someone not named Quentin Tarantino makes film simply titled Fuck.

In the never-ending quest for edgy documentary material, filmmaker Steven Anderson (doubtless inspired by the recent hit The Aristocrats) seems to have been dealt a royal flush. He's been getting a lot of buzz for his movie examining the etymology of everyone's favorite profanity. The problem as I see it is that there will now be no possible way to further jade the festival crowd ever again. Unless ol' Quentin makes a G-rated movie about bunnies, or something.

I personally can't wait to see it. Any movie that interviews both Ron Jeremy and Pat Boone has got to be worth sitting through at least once.

I'm guessing it will probably be rated R.

World stunned by shocking newsflash: people like watching sex

2005-11-10T22:10:00.000-06:00

Been noticing the hilarious amount of press this week over a new study by something called the Kaiser Family Foundation, to the effect that the amount of sex on television these days is so prevalent that it's only a matter of time before the #1 rated network will be something like The Fisting Channel and, over on PBS, Bert and Ernie decide to come out. Kind of makes me think I might want to watch a few TV shows myself for a change. But then I know what would happen. I'd channel-surf for about two hours, think, Well, that was a waste of time, and go back to what I was doing beforehand.

Reading the study, you come across passages that make snarky phrases like "Way too much time on your hands, isn't there?" run laps across your mind.

The study found that 70% of all shows include some sexual content, and that these shows average 5.0 sexual scenes per hour, compared to 56% and 3.2 scenes per hour respectively in 1998, and 64% and 4.4 scenes per hour in 2002.

It occurs to me that sitting around meticulously timing sex scenes and working out mathematical percentages and stuff is not exactly what you're meant to be doing when you're watching them. I think the intended effect is meant to be, you know, a bit more visceral. I mean, how dweeby do you have to be to stopwatch this stuff? Good grief.

Anyway, I'm sure to the chagrin of the previously mentioned Parents Television Council (why do all the "ooo, sex is bad" groups have names with words in them like "Parents" and "Family"? — how do they think you're supposed to make a family!?), all this forniculatory copulational stuff cannot exactly be blamed for any increase in actual naughty behaviors. As the Washington Post reports:

In the slightly more than 1,000 shows scrutinized in the study, nearly 4,000 scenes had sexual content, compared with fewer than 2,000 in 1998, when the foundation started studying TV sex. And yet the rate of teen pregnancy in this country has plunged by about one-third during approximately the same time.

So, I guess the "For God's sake, won't someone think of the children?" argument has been intercepted before it could even get off the line of scrimmage. Fact, folks: Television shows don't take normal, sensible, well-adjusted people of any age and reprogram them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Your kids are not hard disc drives into which TV shows can install viruses that corrupt their system software and make them stop operating properly. If your kid is going out having wanton irresponsible sex, you should forget about what may or may not be on TV, and take a good hard look at your own parenting skills.

Hooray! Death Star close to exploding!

2005-11-09T13:53:00.000-06:00

From IMDb's news page today:

Blockbuster May Be on the Verge of Bankruptcy

Blockbuster released its most dismal quarterly report ever on Tuesday, so dismal that it even included a warning that it may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection. The company reported a loss of $491 million during the quarter, most of it due to a write-down related to its spin-off from former parent Viacom. In-store business, it said, continued to be down due to the elimination of late fees, and online business remained flat as the company was unable to attract more than a fraction of Netflix's subscriber base. The company said that it plans to reduce marketing costs and sell or shutter its smaller rental chains, Movie Trading, Video King and Mr. Movies.

I quit renting from Blockbuster way the heck back in 1989, before many of you may well have been born, for several reasons. Not the least of these was its self-serving hypocrisy. Here was this video chain that loved to masquerade as "your family video store," boasting about its refusal to carry "controversial" movies like Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, when all along its motives for doing so were all about pandering to the fears and prejudices of what they saw as being the most important customer base/revenue stream, moreso than any honest concern for "morality" or "decency." And anyway, their "family store" self-image never gave them any cause not to carry the most gory, violent, exploitive and misogynist no-budget horror films or Skinemax tease-sleaze "thrillers".

The same dishonesty carried over into their rejection of NC-17 titles. The MPAA, not any filmmaker's best friend by any stretch of the imagination, genuinely tried to create a respectable adult rating for movies with the NC-17. But Blockbuster quickly realized a precept also adopted years later by the likes of Karl Rove and the extreme right: you can't lose money by exploiting ignorance and fear. So immediately, out went the press releases decrying the NC-17 as an evil conspiracy by liberal (read: Jewish) Hollywood moguls to sneak filthy porn into the lilywhite homes of upstanding American Christians. And you won't find any of that filth at your family video store, moms and dads! Pow — the NC-17 was killed before it ever had a chance. Before long, Blockbuster was all but dictating to Hollywood how to make its films. When they were the top dogs in home video, no light ever turned green without a careful consideration of how well the rentals at Blockbuster would do, and how to make the kinds of movies they'd carry, and how to package those movies to please them. A video chain was setting the rules of how filmmakers got to make films!

It's offensive enough to me, as a consumer (much less a filmmaker), for a business to cast itself in the role of My Mommy. It's doubly offensive when their reasons for doing so aren't that they give a damn about films, or even about me, but simply the contents of my wallet.

The very last time I was in a Blockbuster, I was agog that on the in-store monitors, they weren't showing a movie, nor even trailers for movies. They were showing ads for Blockbuster! They already had me in the store, and yet they still felt like they had to bombard me nonstop with their own advertising. Looking for a movie to rent tonight? No, no! You want two or three... Shameless.

Die, Blockbuster, die. I look forward to dancing on your grave.

Naked.

Meme this: Music Appreciation Night

2005-11-09T08:55:00.000-06:00

Back in the 90's, before the DVD revolution, collectors of movies on home video were an elite bunch of proud cinema snobs who collected enormous and cumbersome artifacts called laserdiscs. I was one such, and made it my business to throw "cinema nights" for friends. The goal of this was not to float a keg and laugh ourselves silly over grade-Z crap and limp comedies (which really takes no imagination), but to expose people I liked to movies that were genuinely cool and good. So I showed a lot of Criterion stuff, and when I had a horror night it usually concentrated on giallo classics and obscurities like Bava's Black Sunday. Nowadays anyone and his dog can do this, so the gilt is off the lily, kind of.

But some friends of mine and I came up with an idea a couple of years ago that allowed this whole notion of exposing oneself to new and different works of art to thrive. We took to calling it by the stuffy academic title of Music Appreciation Night, or music night, since the only other name we could come up with (that I liked) led to all sorts of non-PC humor. One of the masterminds of this party meme was my friend Thad Engeling, who owns something like 5,000 CDs and is essentially a one-man music education (though I have never yet managed to inculcate in him an appreciation of jazz).

It goes like this. We get a small group together; I've found the optimum attendance is 4-5 people. Every time we've done it with more than five, it hasn't worked. People do what they do at regular parties: clump off into pairs and socialize, with the music no longer being the focus of the evening and instead serving the function music serves at any other party, that of background noise. We pull our chairs into a row in front of the stereo, dim the lights, and everyone plays a song from the stack of CDs they've brought in turn. Thad keeps a running playlist of the entire evening's tracks, and each attendee also burns a compilation CD of their own playlist for the other attendees. We go home with expanded horizons.

I can honestly say I've been exposed to more variety and more brilliant music this way than by any other means in my life. The sumptuous melodies of Vas (who pick up where Dead Can Dance left off but with even greater authenticity), the rhythms of Midival Punditz, the ambient soundscapes of Ishq, the gentle acoustic/electronic pop of Hungry Lucy; all would have gone unheard for life by me had we not had these little soirées. It goes without saying commercial radio will never do this for you.

I'd love to see if this little party meme makes its way through the blogosphere. Schedule your own music night and discuss the results. Maybe even post your playlists (not the songs itself, that'd be, like, illegal and stuff, Mr. RIAA Man). Then we could all expand our individual horizons even further.

And as soon as I get my living room in shape, I may start throwing cinema nights again, too.

The kind of thing bachelors worry about

2005-11-08T23:34:00.000-06:00

The dust on my living room ceiling fan, which I cleaned off tonight using an amazing innovation called a vacuum cleaner hose attachment, had gotten so thick it looked like it was growing hair. Should I be alarmed at this?

Austin: nothing going on, still

2005-11-08T19:03:00.000-06:00

Hi folks. No posts in a while, I know, but here's a subject near and not so dear to my heart, apropos to the whole state of filmmaking in Austin, Texas. Such as the fact that there isn't any.

If Austin weren't a wonderful place to live in so many ways, I wouldn't have spent so many years living here. And Austin likes to pat itself on the back for many things. There's our rumored music scene, which has led to the town's adopting the unofficial nickname of "Live Music Capital of the World." I remember seeing a lot of live music, oh, ten years ago, and I look in our local weekly "alternative" paper the Chronicle and see numerous live gigs listed. Do I get excited about much of it these days? Not really. But maybe I'm just getting old.

In recent years, though, Austin has started seeing itself as some sort of filmmaking Mecca. This isn't altogether new, of course. Filmmaking has been something of a vibrant underground activity around here for years, and as much as 20 years ago I recall coming up here for seminars and things, before there was a South by Southwest festival officially sponsoring them.

There is also a wealth of talent here. Simply loads of eager and enthusiastic film professionals in every category who love nothing more than to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in for 14 hours a day on a shoot in 104° heat and make movies. But for all the city's preening and posturing about the film scene here, there's just one thing lacking: an industry to support any of it. Hey, we've got great theaters, we have our adopted trophy celebrities, we have Quentin Tarantino popping up like a jack-in-the-box every now and again, and we even have a fake awards show. But what we don't have is a film industry. Which is why you see so many of Austin's underemployed film talent shooting mini-DV movies no one will ever see in their apartments with crews they can't pay.

You can have all the talent in the world at your disposal if you want to be a real filmmakers' town, and it will mean neither jack nor shit if there is no one investing money in productions. And by money, I don't mean the rinkidink $50,000 (or less) feature film budgets that most hapless indie filmmakers have to grit their teeth and live with. I mean, some serious venture capitalists putting $1 million and $2 million and even, fuck it, $8 million budgets together to help filmmakers make movies they can actually sell to a distributor. But I can tell you, from personal experience, that if you tell people in Austin that you want to produce an independent feature film, and they say, "Awesome, what kind of budget are you talking about?" and you answer, "I think $1 million ought to do it," their eyes go as big as dinner plates and they goggle at you as if you've just undone your fly and taken out your dick and there was a fish on the end of it. Shock! Horror! Disbelief! One muh-muh...did you say million dollars? To make a movie with? Are you mad? Who do you think you are, anyway? James Cameron? Why can't you do it for something reasonable...say, seven thousand? After all, Robert Rodriguez did.

Ah, and there's the rub. The Rodriguez curse. Now, let me clarify one thing right away. I like Robert and am damn proud of him. He and I were fellow cartoonists at The Daily Texan at the end of the 80's; I did Hepcats, which went on to spend the 90's as a money-losing but personally fulfilling alternative comic book, and he did Los Hooligans. He was always a great, easy going guy, even for many years after he hit it big. Though now I understand construction on the ivory tower is complete and the little people can no longer talk to him. But for a while, he was a down-to-earth guy and he did a lot to raise the profile of Austin in Hollywood's eyes. Kudos all around.

But the problem is the effect his D.I.Y. success has had on perceptions in Austin. Austin is still, and probably forever will be, intoxicated by Robert Rodriguez and the Myth of the $7,000 Movie. Again, clarification is called for: yes, Robert did shoot El Mariachi for a mere seven g's. However, the version of that movie anybody has actually seen — the one that Columbia released in 1993, and that's on DVD right now — cost in the neighborhood of $150,000, which is what Columbia had to spend to get that precocious little production into releasable shape.

Do you know how it goes, when someone wins the lottery, and the following week, hundreds of dimwits flock to the specific convenience store where that winner bought his ticket, thinking that perhaps since one winning ticket was bought there, that must be where all the winning tickets are hiding? This sort of foolish, magical thinking seems to permeate the minds of many people in what could loosely be termed Austin's filmmaking community. Hey, this guy Rodriguez just spent a little bit of money, and look where he is today! All I have to do is exactly what he did, and since I'm obviously as smart and talented as he is, I'm bound to have the same success! Easy!

The foolishness of this is partly what has led to the current bleak situation in Austin filmmaking. It's almost Troma-like, when the best our city can boast about are shot-on-video zombie movies. But there are other factors to blame, of course. As far as real productions are concerned, as you can see, not much is happening. Texas as a whole has been hemorrhaging major studio productions into Louisiana, which has offered Hollywood tax incentives from the gods. And of the few studio productions that do still come here, they are usually entirely crewed up by the time they arrive. The fine folks at the Austin Film Society and Texas Film Commission — what help are they to local crews? None at all. They're simply all too happy to pull on the kneepads and service these big productions any way they wish. Do they put forth any effort to liaise between local crews and studio productions? Do they actually have a representative who sits down with these production managers and says to their faces, "Hey, Hollywood, don't sweat it, we have gaffers, and production designers, and storyboard artists, and construction crews, and DP's, and AD's, and PA's, and pretty much anybody and everybody you could want to pull your shoot together!" No. They don't.

Austin has all sorts of potential as a real filmmaking hub. Naturally, I cannot find fault with the actual filmmakers themselves, who pull a shot-on-video zombie movie together simply because, hell, making something is better than making nothing. But until the real movers and shakers in this town start treating Austin film seriously as an industry rather than an exciting sideshow, and backing that up with credible financial commitments, filmmaking in Austin will have the same reputation as that of its "Live Music Capital of the World" boast. All talk. No walk.

Mad Max, the dictator-turned-homeless-man years

2005-10-31T17:21:00.000-06:00

Ah, I'm bummed. Somebody beat me to this.

The best of TV, from a bunch of people morally superior to you

2005-10-30T14:30:00.000-06:00

The Parents Television Council is one of those Religious Right "watchdog" groups who patrol the airwaves looking for moral terpitude from which to protect us. Dunno about you, but I certainly sleep better at night knowing that Brent Bozell and his cohorts have, at some point during the preceding day, seen something on television that appalled and offended them to their very souls, and, while I am drifting peacefully to sleep, they are curled in the fetal position with their Bibles, mumbling desperate, tearful prayers.

Every year these ~~assclowns~~ fine upstanding pillars of the community assemble their "10 best and worst TV shows list". You know they've had a great year when they boast that they couldn't even find ten shows to put in the "best" category.

Now, I should disclose something right here. I don't watch TV. My industry is film, which is related, I know, but the making of films and TV shows is a fairly similar process and I certainly feel a kinship with the poor grunts who work on them. As a PA I've worked on my share of TV shoots; the days are just as long and grueling, if not moreso, than for a feature. You wouldn't believe how much hard work goes into putting the dumbest programs on the air. One of the best shoots I ever worked on was for a brainless MTV prank show called Boiling Points; I wouldn't watch that in a million years, but I loved earning $150 a day hanging out on South Padre during spring break! What other job offers that kind of guilty satisfaction?

Having stated my solidarity with the poor crews, I'll happily confess: I just have no interest in watching 99% of the feeble crap dished out on the airwaves. I got rid of my cable as I couldn't justify the expense for something I was using less and less. Once in a blue moon, when a show comes on that does impress me (Deadwood), I know there will be DVDs soon to help me get caught up.

So...since I admit I don't like television myself, why do I dog on groups like the PTC who, if you were to ask them, would doubtlessly innocently claim that they're only out there rooting for good wholesome entertainment? Well, partly it's due to their affiliation with the Religious Right, a group we all love to hate. But mainly it's because, as card-carrying RR-ers, they use only the most banal and superficial standards for critiquing shows. Sex, violence and profanity are pretty much it. Incidents of these things are checklisted, regardless of their contextual use in the shows. Any themes — even morally defensible ones — are usually lost in the PTC's obsessive cataloguing of content that triggers their "oh no Billy cover your eyes!" reflexes.

Here is their list for this year:

Now, note what's on the "worst" list: naturally, some of the most popular shows on the air. What's ironic about this is that the far right constantly castigates evil liberal Hollywood for being "out of touch" with what they call "mainstream" (but really mean "their own") values. But if this is so, why are these horrible, evil, amoral shows among the highest-rated? Could it be, perhaps, that most Americans do not, in fact, allow the television shows they watch to dictate their personal morality, but are simply capable of enjoying them as fluff entertainment, even if they have an off-color joke or three? (My parents, devout Episcopalians, love Two and a Half Men. I guess I'll have to phone them and tell them they aren't good Christians now.) Furthermore, could it be that parents are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what shows are or aren't appropriate for their kids without instructions from self-appointed morality cops like Bozell? Discuss.

Since I don't watch the idiot box unless I'm playing a DVD or XBox game, I thought I'd read what the PTC had to say about some of the shows on their "best" list. About the reality show (I really really hate that term, mainly as I know from firsthand experience working on the crews of some that most of them are actually scripted and/or staged) Three Wishes, this: "This fall, NBC showed us the heights to which reality TV can aspire with its wonderful new series, Three Wishes. The series follows hosts Amy Grant, Carter Oosterhouse, Diane Mizota, and Eric Stromer. Each week the team visits a different town and grants three wishes to various townspeople or the community itself."

Well, that sounds sweet, though I probably wouldn't be a good contestant on it as my first wish would be "I'd like to bang Amy Grant." But look at what they have to say about that evil #1 rated show C.S.I.: "Kicking off the May sweeps on April 28, 2005 with the episode entitled "Committed," C.S.I. delivered a disgusting and depraved hour of incest, murder and even cannibalism... C.S.I. routinely seeks to dwell in the depths of humanity's most dark and evil elements. In “Committed,” the writers sought to entertain the audience through a dark and twisted scenario. It is hard to argue the artistic value of such filth, and it is certainly never appropriate for innocent children to watch."

Though I cannot vouch for the accuracy of all that's portrayed in the show, and I wouldn't deny the use of lurid content to hook viewers (hey, it works!), part of the artistic value of this "filth" is that it is, in the end, a cop show, showing police officers heroically doing the most dangerous thing anyone can do for a living. As sickening as anything the show might depict, if any of the shrinking violets on the PTC's staff were to thumb through the content of some actual police files, they'd have fucking coronaries. Furthermore, C.S.I. has spurred public interest in forensic science and has even prompted juries to pay greater attention to forensic evidence.

So that's the artistic value of that "filth," Brent.

But hey, maybe you guys are right. We should all be watching Three Wishes instead. Then we could all just wish our world free of bad people and crime, and Amy Grant would fly up on her magic carpet and twinkle it all away with a wave of her glittery wand!

Grr. Arg.

2005-10-27T19:42:00.000-05:00

Martin removes, stores brain carefully in jar; manages to enjoy Doom

You know how certain movies come out, and everyone on Earth says "It sucks," and you go see it, and it's not half bad? I kind of had that feeling about Doom, a movie that quite unpretentiously doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a cliché-packed action movie based on a video game in which monsters get shot in dark corridors. Considering that Doom the game is about as reductionist a narrative experience as you could hope for — walk down very dark corridor; boo! monster leaps at you; shoot monster before you become monster chow — the fact that a 100-minute movie could have even been concocted from it is surprising.

I'm a little disappointed that they didn't go with the game's proper concept, that the monsters are actually devils from Hell, as opposed to rehashing some hackneyed drivel about Evil Scientists doing Evil Scientist stuff and learning to regret it. But for the visceral experience of replicating the gameplay — pow! splat! — it got the job done decently well, except for a climactic fight scene that isn't really very Doom-ish at all (more Mortal Kombat). And as threadbare as the story is, I was rather impressed to see the characters faced with a moral dilemma in act three, especially as the whole point of FPS video games is that they give you the cathartic rush of indiscriminate killing without sweating the moral stuff.

No, watching it wasn't nearly as gut-wrenchingly tense as actually playing Doom 3. But for all its predictability, the movie worked for me on the simple level at which it was meant to work, because I could tell these were fans of the game making it, not just cynical studio bean-counters who only saw a hot trademark to cash in on. Oh, I'm sure there was some of that thinking going on at the production end of things. And yet I can easily imagine loads of multiplayer fragfests occuring on banks of XBoxes in the honey wagon between setups. I think the creative team behind the movie really got the appeal of the game as only fans do, and approached the material with the right sense of laid-back fun. For a matinee, it was okay, really.

Now, I loathed the Resident Evil movie, mainly because — well — it played a lot like this movie: a mindless action fest, when it ought to have been a tense and terrifying horror movie. It seems to me that for a video game movie to work, it has to abide by the same guidelines that a literary or comic book adaptation would have to in order to work: understand the source material. Doom: fast-paced action game, gets a fast-paced action movie — check. Resident Evil: moody and creepy horror game with bursts of action, gets...a fast-paced action movie? No no no, not check, big X. Understand what it is you're adapting, filmmakers. Don't just assume that all video games are the same, and since you're making a video game movie, all you have to do is blow shit up. If you're adapting a game whose primary objective is the blow-uppage of shit, then by all means, make that movie. But if it isn't, then stick with the original concept: it's why that game is popular, after all.

As always, the problem is that Hollywood has now made so many bad game-based movies, by people who aren't fans of the source material and don't get what the fans enjoy, that a movie like Doom simply won't catch a break. Bad apples spoiling the batch, and all that. Well, whatever. I didn't feel ripped off seeing Doom. I got what I was expecting. Monsters. Exploding body parts. Gore. Would have liked to have seen Hell, though, rather than that "24th chromosome" nonsense.

Now, if the Silent Hill movie ends up playing like Doom, I'm gonna be pissed!

Yikes!

2005-10-27T16:41:00.000-05:00

Okay, so, fresh off my posts about how the internet will end up growing as a distribution outlet for feature films, here comes this news brief from IMDb that packs a pretty high "holy crap!" quotient. A snippet: "A system that would deliver movies and other content to home viewers on demand instantaneously was unveiled today (10/27/05) by Japan's Kansai Electric Power Co., the country's second-largest electric utility firm. The French news agency Agence France Presse reported that the company had developed a technology that can transmit a two-hour movie over fiber-optic cables mounted on power-transmission towers in half a second...."

Brave new world notwithstanding, half a second!? That means that in the time it takes you to read this sentence, you could have downloaded all six Star Wars movies!

I'm gonna go sit down... Oh wait, I am sitting down...

Poor little fella

2005-10-24T17:46:00.000-05:00

Hey, I understand. I hate going to the doctor too. All those needles and antiseptic.... Oh, wait, what's that? You just heard Hollywood's remaking Creepshow? Oh god...now you've got me depressed!

Improving the fate of indie film — part 2 of 2

2005-10-23T06:43:00.000-05:00

Long-winded preamble

Ah yes. The plan. It all boils down to digital projection.

Right now, in Austin, there are at least two screens that I know of that are projecting digitally. There may be more, which would be all the proof I need that I have to get out of the house more. But I know for sure of two.

One of them is at the venerable, UT-campus-area Dobie Cinema, which has been around forever and which will continue to be around for as long as the word "forever" has any operative meaning. I've seen it go from a tiny venue with broom-closet-sized auditoriums to its current state, now owned by Landmark, with four nice screens, each in auditoriums done up in clever if kitschy decor (one's ancient Egyptian, one's kind of goth-cathedrally looking, one looks like — well — a regular theater, and I can't really remember what the last one looks like except I do recall I saw all 4½ hours of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom in it, which should clue you in on just how kickass this theater is). Their digital screen uses, last I was there, a Windows Media 9-based projector. Looks all right. I've seen Russian Ark and The Eye on it, and while I was not, in common parlance, "blown away" (which I've always thought sounded too painful to be a good euphemism for "excited" or "amazed" or "real, real happy"), it did the job more than adequately.

The other one is state-de-la-arte DLP projection on one screen at a megaplex, Highland 10. They debuted it with the release of Revenge of the Sith. A smart move; you couldn't get tickets the first week for love or money. As it's kind of a drive from my place, I still haven't yet gotten out to see anything on it.

Anyway. One of the reasons bandied about for why theatrical attendance has fallen off while home theater has caught on has to do with the rapid technological advancements made in recent years in the latter, compared to the nearly nonexistent advancements in the former. Really, the last time I can recall a new technological leap appearing in theaters here was way way back in 1993 (pause a moment to indulge in depression over passing of time and accelerating onset of age), when Jurassic Park opened and debuted DTS sound here for the first time. The audience cheered at the crisp DTS trailer before the movie, and the subwoofers probably did bad things to everyone's kidneys.

But since then — well, we've had more theater closings and re-openings-under-new-management than technological sea changes. What used to be Austin's show-palace theater, the Arbor, was shut down and transformed into a Cheesecake Factory. (Which is a chain of overpriced restaurants, not, sadly, a porn studio.) The Alamo Drafthouse introduced the magnificent innovation of a full kitchen, a beer and wine menu, and no kids allowed. But these weren't so much technological innovations as much as "if I ran a movie theater it'd damn well have..."-style improvements upon the basic experience.

The slowness on the part of theater chains everywhere to adopt digital projection has mostly to do with expense. Each auditorium would, it is estimated, require a refit in the 'hood of a hundred grand to accommodate the new tech. But let's pretend money isn't an issue for a moment (a trick independent filmmakers get really good at, trust me), and imagine how widespread adoption of digital projection could improve the lot of independent film.

First, what if theaters were sent movies not as prints, but as enormous digital files downloaded directly from secure servers — granted, this would have to entail the creation of firewalls that would put the Pentagon's network to shame — to each theater's mainframe? (Geeks reading this will, no doubt, correct me ruthlessly if any of my computer terminology is stuck in the 20th century.)

This would be a Good Thing for indie distributors. One 35MM film print can cost a few grand, and while this isn't as big a speedbump for a studio with billions in assets striking 6000 prints of a surefire blockbuster like Shrek, it is an expense that automatically limits how widespread an indie distributor can get any of his low-budget, specialized-audience films. But if you eliminate the need to strike prints, indie distributors can stretch their tiny budgets much, much further. 35MM, while it is still the optimal choice, is just damned expensive. It's the reason so many indie productions don't even think of shooting on film these days.

Now...here's the clever part. (No no, it's clever. Watch.)

Let's say, with digital projection, you no longer need to have pretentiously titled "art houses" (which, in their current state, could best be referred to as "here's the out-of-the-way theater where we dump all the highbrow shit Jack and Jill Sixpack are too stupid to understand and don't want to see") for the purposes of screening smaller, independent films. Let's say you have a huge, huge megaplex, like one of these 18 or 24 or 30-screen monstrosities. Well, naturally, the majority of that is going to be taken up with Hollywood Product. No matter how big those megaplexes get, they still seem to need no fewer than five or six screens to properly abuse the world with this week's Marvel Comics movie.

But if the movies themselves aren't in the form of cumbersome, pricey 35MM reels, but digital files, life becomes a lot more flexible for the theaters themselves. Let's say Putative Blockbuster you've allocated four screens for turns out to be DOA, like Domino or The Island. Presto, you can yank that peesa shit from most of its screens and replace it with something more profitable in a day, without having to deal with the hassle and expense of a 35MM print that you're under obligation by the studio to have for two weeks at least.

What it also means is that one screen can show more than one feature, even within the course of a single day. And this is where life could get very fun for indie films. Imagine, if you will, that somewhere in the world there's a theater chain whose board of directors can actually mentally process the idea that in an 18 or 24-screen megaplex, one to two of those auditoriums could conceivably be devoted to smaller, independent, or non-mainstream films, and let's move on.

What could this mean in terms of improving an indie film's financial fortunes? I think plenty. But remember my disclaimer: this is all too sensible, and will never happen, because it would require both technological and philosophical innovations that this industry simply isn't poised to make. But in my ideal scenario, it's so crazy it just...might...work...

The math part!

For my example, I'm going to use an indie movie that's currently in what's politely termed "limited release": the highly-acclaimed Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom Roger Ebert confidently assures me will walk down the Oscar aisles for this. Using box-office figures for the weekend of October 14-16, 2005, Capote, in its third weekend, came in 22nd place on 30 screens nationwide with receipts of $363,876, for a per-screen average of $12,129.

Now, that doesn't sound like much, but in fact, that's phenomenal box office performance. By comparison, that weekend's #1 movie, The Fucking Fog, had a per-screen average of only $3,954. But ah, you see, being Hollywood Product, it was on 2,972 screens nationwide compared to Capote's mere 30. See, that's the thing about indie movies; they don't get the widespread play, but the people who love them damn sure turn out.

Now (I have to stop beginning my paragraphs with that word, I know), think about this. Let's say instead of Capote's being limited in its run to 30 rinky-dink "art houses", it can, due to the "bye bye prints" magic of digital distribution and projection, play on 1000 screens nationwide, on those auditoriums at the backs of the megaplexes that are reserved for such embarrassingly highbrow fare. And then, let's balance things out a bit and require a tradeoff for poor little Capote. Let's say that instead of owning the screen it's on, and getting five showings a day on it, as it would have in the 35MM print days, here, it has to share that screen with two other indie movies. This allows it and the two other movies a total of two screenings per day, like so:

Capote: 10:00 AM; Movie #2: 12:30 PM; Movie #3: 3:00 PM; Capote: 5:30 PM; Movie #2: 8:00 PM; Movie #3: 10:30 PM

So instead of getting, over the course of a weekend, an average of 15 showings, Capote is getting six at most. Because of this, let's reduce Capote's fortunes even more. Let's knock its per-screen average by a full two-thirds! Ouch. Hey, $4,039 is still a nice performance, and still better than that of The Ass Remake I Refuse to Dignify with the Name of The Fog. Now, let's look at how much money Capote takes in over a weekend, shall we? Drum roll, please — $4,039,000. Nice. Much nicer than $363,876. On 1000 screens, of course, but with fewer than half the showings, mind you.

Yes, I know this all pie in the sky stuff. But dammit all, it seems so...so...so feasible, you know, when you ignore little annoying facts like the necessity to redefine theatrical distribution and exhibition as we know it before it could even be implemented. But crazier ideas have been seen through to fruition before, you know. That we even have movies at all is attributable to just such crazy idea-making. For the world in which we live, I imagine DVD and the internets will have to be the great white hope for indie films, realistically speaking. But I'm just old fashioned: movies, still, are best seen in theaters, and it would be great if more movies had that chance, and if a better structure were in place to make it happen.

Cripes, that was long. Me for some caffeine.

Best. Commercial. Ever.

2005-10-21T00:31:00.000-05:00

Warning: probably NSFW.

Quickie: The science fiction movie canon according to Scalzi

2005-10-20T23:24:00.000-05:00

The brilliantly entertaining science fiction writer John Scalzi has just released his nonfiction work The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, and, like many books of that type, he's included his own best-of list or "Canon," a list of the 50 SF movies you must see before you die. This list is already circulating around the blogosphere, with everyone taking the predictable hits: "Why is [X] on there and not [Y]?"

Naturally I have my own critiques — 28 Days Later? I thinketh notteth — but overall the list seems fairly sound, and the book looks entertaining and quite thorough in its analysis of the history of SF in film. Can't wait to get my copy.

"Best of All Time" lists are a common critical tradition, and the tradition raises the question of why such lists ought to be prepared in the first place — as art is all a matter of taste, right? Sure, to a certain extent. But art never exists in a vacuum. The fact that not everything appeals to everyone's tastes is kind of beside the main point, which is that in every artistic field, there come certain examples of work that just plain make history. Either they just hit at the right time; or they strike a chord with the public and develop an enduring appeal; or, filmmakers, critics and academics can analyze them for revolutionary use of technique that goes on to influence later generations.

This is why you keep seeing many of the same movies like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Gone with the Wind popping up on lists like the AFI Top 100. They are, of course, widely beloved, but not by everyone. The den of your average doublewide is more likely to be inhabited by dudes drinking light beer and chortling to Happy Gilmore than by chaps in tweed furrowing their brows and gnawing their pipe stems over the existential angst of Through a Glass Darkly. But what's more important than these films' popularity is their enduring legacy of shaping the way films were made for years afterward. Influence, innovation, and artistry are more relevant than popularity when establishing a canon. A canon is not a "my favorites" list, it's a "most important to the art form" list. And a wise person will recognize when a work of art is important to history even if it's not their personal cup of tea.

So this is why, for instance, if I were coming up with a horror movie "canon," I'd have to add something like The Blair Witch Project, though I don't think much of it as a movie myself. Its importance in legitimizing indie film (to whatever small degree) and its influence upon microbudget digital filmmakers everywhere is indisputable. (Also, a horror canon would have to include The Exorcist, a movie I personally find silly, boring, and atrociously written, but whose status as a cultural bellwether one would have to be a fool to deny.)

Finally, the relevance of best-of-all-time lists is that, even if it's only to a very abstract degree, they give artists a consensus standard of excellence to aspire towards. I don't think anyone today (except a few pretentious wankers who shalt remain nameless) makes films with the explicit hope of ending up on such a list years hence. But show me a director — outside of, naturally, the obvious schlockosphere trolled by the likes of, say, Troma — who wouldn't smile at the thought that, someday, in fifty or 100 years, their movie is being taught at universities alongside the work of Welles, Scorsese, Fellini, and others, and I'll show you a lying liar.

Improving the fate of indie film — part 1 of 2

2005-10-20T09:05:00.000-05:00

A huge stumbling block for even a well-made independent movie is that of securing reliable theatrical distribution.

If no one ever sees your movie, it's a huge blow. You might as well have never made it. With distributors demanding a cast that includes at least one recognizable name — and that of a movie star; TV actors cannot cut it — and an easy-to-grasp, high-concept premise that can be easily advertised, it's getting next to impossible for little labor-of-love movies to find an audience. Every once in a while a fluke success like El Mariachi or The Blair Witch Project pops up, fills the fevered brains of eager microbudget filmmakers with unrealistic expectations, and voila, 2500 undistributable pieces of shot-on-mini-DV crap are ejected into the world with a squint and a grunt. I was an A.D. on one such, and it was painfully obvious to me all through the shoot that this little movie was going absolutely nowhere. What's more depressing, an unrealized dream, or a feebly-realized dream that will be greeted with categorical indifference by the world?

But...let's say you've made a good indie movie. Let's say you actually got a decent budget, maybe even a couple million bucks, got a credible name or two. And you shoot the thing, and it looks money. And you hit the festival circuit. And it sells. Someone hands you a check large enough to bring tears to your eyes, and you have a distributor!

Now what?

I happen to have worked on one like that, too.

I was a PA for a week on a $2 million family film called When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, about a 650-pound boy, shot around the Austin area in September/October of 2002. It was my first professional film crew gig, and the numerous subsequent jobs I've had have helped me to realize just how much — from a production/organizational/having your shit together point of view — of a wholly incompetently run clusterfuck that shoot was. But that's another tale for another day. What's salient to this post is that this was, by industry standards, a respectable kind of indie production. Decent low budget, a cast that included Eric "I'm in Everything But Somehow Still Have Spotless Cred" Stoltz and Jane Krakowski, then still hot off the set of Ally McBeal. The director, a goofball named John Schultz, had just directed something really, really stupid called Like Mike, which, like so many really, really stupid movies, was a studio production that had taken in $50 million. Schultz earned undeserved clout, that he later used to direct an African-American remake of The Honeymooners in 2005, a movie that currently stands at #29 on IMDb's "Bottom 100" list. I don't usually like to rag on directors when my own career is in its nascent stages, but as I haven't made the 29th worst movie of all time, excuse me if I feel justified in the use of such a mild sobriquet as "goofball".

Zachary's saga is then fairly typical of a small indie production. It did the festival circuit for two whole years at least, after which it was picked up by Echo Bridge Entertainment. I've never heard of them either. The IMDb page has a "limited" US theatrical release listed for January 21, 2005. Must have been really limited, as it never played here, the town where it was shot. I cannot confirm the reality of this release at all, as a search of Box Office Mojo, which tracks everything that plays in U.S. theaters even if it only hits one screen, turns up nothing. The movie's site now lists a DVD release date of January 3, 2006. (Addendum 10/22/05: Just found out that it's playing right now on England's Sky Movie cable service.)

So the long and short of it is that, three years and three months after it was shot, little Zachary will be dumped directly onto DVD. Its tweener child stars have by now flown through puberty, and one or two of them might even have their driver's license. And this movie is one of the lucky ones. Really makes all the sunburn (I earned the nickname Pinky for foolishly failing to apply sunscreen on day 1; by day 3 the set medic was ordering me to wear a hat) and those 15-hour days seem worthwhile.

The feeble distribution possibilities open to independent movies got me thinking — as I'm sure it gets everyone in this business thinking who works at this scale — about how these films could get a better chance at finding a receptive audience. Direct-to-DVD isn't such a curse, really, and even a number of studio films that didn't catch fire at the box office suddenly found a horde of enthusiastic fans on DVD (vide Office Space). But we still live in a world where playing in theaters is seen as a sign you've made a real movie; direct-to-video, even direct-to-DVD, still carries the not-exactly-unjustified taint of "Oh, couldn't get it in theaters, eh? Must really be crap!"

I've thought of a way to get indie movies into more cinemas that could work. The problem is, this isn't Utopia, it's Earth. And so it wouldn't work here, simply because it will never be implemented. It will never be implemented for, I think, two crucial reasons. It involves revolutionary new technology that theater chains have so far powerfully resisted, mainly for the entirely reasonable reason of expense. But mainly, my idea would never be implemented because it would require the entire industry to adopt a sea change in its thinking, to stop automatically shunting every movie ever made into two categories — the commercial, pretty much always studio-backed films that everyone really really wants to see (except when they don't, as the weeping producers of Bewitched and Stealth and The Island will attest), and the "art product" (I shit you not, I've heard that term with mine own ears) that no one except college kids and poncy intellectuals wants to see. My idea would require the industry to think of movies just as movies, either good or bad on their own terms. And that will never happen. But hey, dream with me here a little bit. Tomorrow, I'll outline my plan — which I've even worked out with, like, math and stuff — and we can all, for one bright, shining moment, live in the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be. And then, those of us who make movies will get right back to work, laboring over our labors of love with all the passion we can muster, regardless of what distribution opportunities await us — or don't, as the case may be. Because we'll never have the world we want unless we learn to work within the world we have, will we?

Okay...deep breath...inhaled...released...

2005-10-18T02:21:00.000-05:00

Apparently the rumors of a Weinstein-excreted Halloween remake have all been a tad premature. Still, the news was, for a while there, nearly as scary as the original movie. Of course, what is in the works (Halloween 9) doesn't exactly make me giddy with joy that life now suddenly has meaning and hope, either. Pointless sequels inspired by greed are only slightly lower on the food chain than pointless remakes inspired by greed.

In a related bit of news from the world of comedy, Sylvester Stallone is prepping Rocky 6.

Back soon with those promised posts about worthwhile remakes, and how new distribution strategies (that will never happen) could boost the presence of indie film.

I think I've found my next production designer

2005-10-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

Whoever creates something like this is a man after my own heart!