Move over, John Favreau. Hold off, Christopher Nolan. It's Joss Whedon's turn to be King of Hollywood for a day. Whedon has just helmed the record-busting "The Avengers," what is sure to be one of the biggest summer blockbusters of all time. Now the writer/director of so many geek favorites should have the clout to pursue some of his own pet projects, right? Well, maybe and maybe not. Whedon fans breathlessly speculating about the prospects of a "Serenity 2" or a "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog: The Movie" should take a minute to remember that Whedon's track record at the box office hasn't been great. "Cabin in the Woods" has only made $38 million, enough to recoup its budget. "Serenity," however, the only other movie Whedon has directed, did not.
The runaway success of "The Avengers" is as much due to hype and branding and the momentum of the existing Marvel franchise as it's due to the actual quality of the picture. More than one review noted that the feature felt like filmmaking by committee, driven by corporate mandate more than personal artistic vision. Sure, Whedon's sensibilities turned out to be a perfect fit for the material, but all that means is that he's now made himself one of the go-to directors for superhero movies, like Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughan. He might have the chance to make some studio-funded personal projects, but they’ll come with a lot of strings. Whedon is nowhere near the level of a Tim Burton or a Steven Spielberg, who are proven box office draws, who can get big, expensive movies off the ground on the strength of their reputations alone. And I don't think he's up there with Favreau or Nolan yet either, who have managed to get the studios to foot the bill for some pretty risky non-franchise films, made between individual installments of the superhero series those directors have been the lynchpins of.
However, Joss Whedon's more personal projects aren't all that big and expensive. A few older scripting jobs aside, the films he's been associated with to date have all been pretty modest affairs, that don't come with the $150 million plus price tag of something like Christopher Nolan's "Inception" or Jon Favreau's "Cowboys & Aliens." Whedon already has his next film wrapped up, a microbudget, black-and-white indie adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," featuring a gaggle of actors who have showed up in his previous projects, including Nathan Fillion, Amy Acker, and Fran Kranz. It has no distributor at the moment, but I expect we’re going to see it premiere on pay-per-view or pre-theatrical VOD sometime in the fall. I don’t see why Disney or Marvel wouldn’t be willing to pay for a “Cabin in the Woods” sized project as part of a deal to get Whedon on board for an “Avengers 2.” However, the way that they’ve been shuffling directors around for their next round of superhero movies, I don’t think they’d pay for anything bigger.
Whedon could jump ship to other studios and franchises. If there’s anyone who should be in charge of rebooting “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” it’s him. Or finally getting a “Wonder Woman” movie into theaters. Heck, I think Warner Brothers would let him mastermind a whole “Justice League” series of films if he wanted. That would be a lot of fun, but I like Joss Whedon better when he’s pursuing original projects, setting up those niche, cult-worthy properties like “Firefly” and “Dollhouse” that have won him so many fans. Whedon doesn’t have to stay in the filmmaking realm either. He could go back to television and try to launch another series. He could make web videos or write comic books for the rest of his days, satisfied that he’d reached the top of the pop culture mountain.
Right now Joss Whedon is mainstream, he’s a hitmaker, and everybody loves him. However, he’s got a ways to go before he can really be considered a major player in the film world. What his latest success gives him is an opportunity, one I hope he takes advantage of. Being the guy who pulled off “The Avengers” is all very well and good, but Joss Whedon being best known for making Joss Whedon movies would be the best outcome for him that I can think of. If he wants that, of course. One of the things I appreciate about Whedon has always been that he’s so versatile and he’s so comfortable in so many different arenas, I have no idea what he’s going to do next.
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Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
In Praise of "Providence"
The last Alain Resnais movie I wrote about was "Last Year in Marienbad," a conceptually intriguing, but altogether maddening piece of surrealist cinema. The film was designed as a puzzle with no answer, depicting a series of events, some repeated with different variations, without ever giving the audience the proper context to draw any concrete conclusions about them. Resnais's subsequent 1977 English language feature "Providence," has many of the same themes and ideas, but presented less abstractly. There is a comparatively straightforward narrative, with a conclusion that is very helpful in untangling everything that came before. It's not as daring and subversive as "Marienbad," but I found "Providence" to be a far more satisfying experience.
The film begins with an old man named Clive Langham (John Gielgud), a famous writer and intellectual who lies in bed alone on a stormy night. He can't sleep, and is perhaps ill and dying, so he turns his attentions to the trio of Claude Langham (Dirk Bogarde), a pitiless prosecutor, his unsatisfied wife Sonia (Ellen Burstyn), and a soldier, Kevin (David Warner), who Sonia seeks as a lover after Claude fails to convict him for a strange killing. We jump, temporally and spatially, to the court room, to the couple's home, to a city street, following the development of this venomous love triangle. They seem to inhabit a country at war, but we never learn which one, and though the story appears to take place in the modern day, it's difficult to be sure.
Are these characters and places from the new novel that Clive is writing? We hear his commentary on the story as it unfurls, chastising Claude for his numerous faults and goading on Sonia's infidelity, but Clive only appears to have a limited amount of control over the events. He can call for certain scenes to be replayed, but the characters have strong minds of their own. Certain elements keep recurring that he rejects, but cannot escape. There are numerous references that point to Claude and Sonia being Clive's real son and daughter-in-law, and perhaps the old man is exerting some surreal, god-like power over their actual reality. Or is Clive merely dreaming and reliving memories? Or is he secretly one of the characters in this bitter domestic drama? Is he all of them? The final scenes appear to hold the key, but how can we be sure that they are any more real than the rest of the film?
"Providence" benefits from an extremely strong cast, full of British and American acting luminaries. There are lots of interesting psychological angles to play with here, and the actors go at it with gusto. Elaine Strich plays both Helen, Claude's dying mistress, and Molly, Clive's departed wife, with a certain detached amusement. I especially enjoyed Dick Bogarde's perpetually sneering, condescending Claude, who can't seem to go five minutes without lobbing dry insults at someone, but finds himself in a stalemate with Burstyn's Sonia, who is more amorphous in construction but no less willful. David Warner is at his most soulful as Kevin, who finds himself a pawn for all the other characters to push about as they like, his personality occasionally subsumed entirely when the author needs him to stand in for someone else. And there's Gielgud of course, who gives us Clive as gleeful sadist, as frightened mortal at the edge of the abyss, and finally as a humbled, regretful father.
If there was any issue with the language barrier for French director Resnais, there's no indication of it. The script is extremely literate, sophisticated, and executed flawlessly. Resnais's trademark surrealism neither hampers nor distracts from it, but rather provides an interesting complement, from ominous Gothic music to the ambiguity of the physical spaces where Clive's story takes place. In some respects "Providence" is just as confounding as "Last Year in Marienbad," offering plenty of hints, but no real answers as to what is real and what is only a dream. However, this time we have a clear emotional arc to follow, that of Clive Langham, as he wrestles with his inner demons projected, or perhaps embodied in his ever-shifting characters. "Providence" has all the familiar earmarks of an end-of-life memoir, a remarkably bitter and cynical one. And that was enough to get me invested in the fates of these terrible, impossible people.
I got off on the wrong foot with Alain Resnais, but he's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors. I appreciate the way that he experiments with the narrative, playing with meta and non-linearity long before it came into vogue in the 1990s, and with a far more intellectual approach than I've seen anyone else manage yet. Resnais's films have been hard to find, but they've been rewarding. I still can't stand "Last Year in Marienbad," but I admire the creative impulse behind it, which is hard at work in "Providence." I have the awful suspicion that I may have connected more easily with this film simply because it was in English. I guess I'll just have to go and dig up more of Resnais's work to find out.
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The film begins with an old man named Clive Langham (John Gielgud), a famous writer and intellectual who lies in bed alone on a stormy night. He can't sleep, and is perhaps ill and dying, so he turns his attentions to the trio of Claude Langham (Dirk Bogarde), a pitiless prosecutor, his unsatisfied wife Sonia (Ellen Burstyn), and a soldier, Kevin (David Warner), who Sonia seeks as a lover after Claude fails to convict him for a strange killing. We jump, temporally and spatially, to the court room, to the couple's home, to a city street, following the development of this venomous love triangle. They seem to inhabit a country at war, but we never learn which one, and though the story appears to take place in the modern day, it's difficult to be sure.
Are these characters and places from the new novel that Clive is writing? We hear his commentary on the story as it unfurls, chastising Claude for his numerous faults and goading on Sonia's infidelity, but Clive only appears to have a limited amount of control over the events. He can call for certain scenes to be replayed, but the characters have strong minds of their own. Certain elements keep recurring that he rejects, but cannot escape. There are numerous references that point to Claude and Sonia being Clive's real son and daughter-in-law, and perhaps the old man is exerting some surreal, god-like power over their actual reality. Or is Clive merely dreaming and reliving memories? Or is he secretly one of the characters in this bitter domestic drama? Is he all of them? The final scenes appear to hold the key, but how can we be sure that they are any more real than the rest of the film?
"Providence" benefits from an extremely strong cast, full of British and American acting luminaries. There are lots of interesting psychological angles to play with here, and the actors go at it with gusto. Elaine Strich plays both Helen, Claude's dying mistress, and Molly, Clive's departed wife, with a certain detached amusement. I especially enjoyed Dick Bogarde's perpetually sneering, condescending Claude, who can't seem to go five minutes without lobbing dry insults at someone, but finds himself in a stalemate with Burstyn's Sonia, who is more amorphous in construction but no less willful. David Warner is at his most soulful as Kevin, who finds himself a pawn for all the other characters to push about as they like, his personality occasionally subsumed entirely when the author needs him to stand in for someone else. And there's Gielgud of course, who gives us Clive as gleeful sadist, as frightened mortal at the edge of the abyss, and finally as a humbled, regretful father.
If there was any issue with the language barrier for French director Resnais, there's no indication of it. The script is extremely literate, sophisticated, and executed flawlessly. Resnais's trademark surrealism neither hampers nor distracts from it, but rather provides an interesting complement, from ominous Gothic music to the ambiguity of the physical spaces where Clive's story takes place. In some respects "Providence" is just as confounding as "Last Year in Marienbad," offering plenty of hints, but no real answers as to what is real and what is only a dream. However, this time we have a clear emotional arc to follow, that of Clive Langham, as he wrestles with his inner demons projected, or perhaps embodied in his ever-shifting characters. "Providence" has all the familiar earmarks of an end-of-life memoir, a remarkably bitter and cynical one. And that was enough to get me invested in the fates of these terrible, impossible people.
I got off on the wrong foot with Alain Resnais, but he's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors. I appreciate the way that he experiments with the narrative, playing with meta and non-linearity long before it came into vogue in the 1990s, and with a far more intellectual approach than I've seen anyone else manage yet. Resnais's films have been hard to find, but they've been rewarding. I still can't stand "Last Year in Marienbad," but I admire the creative impulse behind it, which is hard at work in "Providence." I have the awful suspicion that I may have connected more easily with this film simply because it was in English. I guess I'll just have to go and dig up more of Resnais's work to find out.
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Sunday, May 6, 2012
And Now, "The Avengers"
There's not much point in watching "The Avengers" movie if you haven't seen or aren't at least familiar with the other Marvel movies in this series, which began with the first "Iron Man" in 2008. It's the previous movies that do the dirty work of introductions and establishing character arcs for the superheroes Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). None of them really get much development in "The Avengers," as most of the brief moments for character building are reserved for the team members we haven't really gotten to know yet: supersoldier Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), deadly spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), dead shot archer Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and the new Bruce Banner/Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).
In two and a half hours, "The Avengers" never slows down, but then again it can't really afford to. Director Joss Whedon has the unenviable task of juggling seven primary characters, at least as many secondary players, and maneuvering everyone into position for the great big team-up and showdown that Marvel fans are lining up to see. The giant world crisis that starts the party is a fairly generic alien invasion. Thor's megalomaniacal brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), last seen being soundly defeated by the god of thunder in last year's "Thor" feature, has returned with some new toys, intent on unleashing an army of newfound alien allies on the human race, and conquering the planet. The first step is stealing a supernatural energy source called the Tesseract, a big glowing MacGuffin cube, from Nick Fury's espionage agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., and brainwashing a few scientists and Hawkeye into becoming Loki's new minions.
In a movie that exists entirely to take advantage of all these different superheroes existing in the same universe, and that has almost no effect on any of their stories individually, the pleasures are two-fold. On the one hand, it's a treat to see all these different characters meet and interact, throwing one-liners at each other and having some contentious early skirmishes before finally finding their team dynamic. And then we get to watch them go to work, getting into fights with Loki and the alien invaders. The last act of the film is one giant battle sequence in downtown Manhattan, and an absolute joy to watch when we finally get there. But it's the getting there that's the tricky part. A lot of these characters are bringing a lot of baggage with them, and answering the lingering questions and accounting for all the loose ends from "Captain America" and "Thor" takes up a lot of time.
Whedon isn't entirely successful at getting all his ducks in a row. Captain America is clearly in the middle of a bumpy adjustment to the modern world and acting more hostile than usual, which is acknowledged, but has no effect on what's going on. Thor has the most personal stake in Loki's machinations, and the writers make sure that he gets his one-on-one scenes with his brother, but there's no time to get into any depth. Bruce Banner gets a very small character arc. Tony Stark gets one too, if you're paying close attention. Surprisingly, the one character who has the closest thing to a full subplot turns out to be the Black Widow, who is perhaps more concerned with getting Hawkeye out of Loki's clutches than saving the world. Even though the story is as simple as it possibly could be, there's still the constant feeling that there's too much going on and too much to keep track of.
But when the picture works, it works. The big, wild comic book spectacle is often senseless but always satisfying, and Whedon keeps finding ways to add those important little character moments, making sure that everyone gets their moment in the sun and their share of the good quips. Zak Penn gets a writing credit, but any Joss Whedon fan will recognize his dialogue and humor in a second. Nobody gets enough screen time in an ensemble this large, but all the performances are solid, and there is exactly the right proportion of Tony Stark behaving like an ass and the Incredible Hulk reveling in carnage and Loki grinning in villainous anticipation.
If you are a fan of the previous movies, it's worth seeing "Avengers" for the payoff for all the unexplained cameos and odd bits of extraneous plotting that were shoehorned into "Thor" and "Iron Man 2," in order to set up this movie. Sitting through the first half can be tedious, trying to keep up with the minutiae of the a plot that really doesn't matter much in the end. But when the action kicks into gear, and the Avengers are fully loosed on their enemies, you couldn't ask for a better way to start the blockbuster season.
---
In two and a half hours, "The Avengers" never slows down, but then again it can't really afford to. Director Joss Whedon has the unenviable task of juggling seven primary characters, at least as many secondary players, and maneuvering everyone into position for the great big team-up and showdown that Marvel fans are lining up to see. The giant world crisis that starts the party is a fairly generic alien invasion. Thor's megalomaniacal brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), last seen being soundly defeated by the god of thunder in last year's "Thor" feature, has returned with some new toys, intent on unleashing an army of newfound alien allies on the human race, and conquering the planet. The first step is stealing a supernatural energy source called the Tesseract, a big glowing MacGuffin cube, from Nick Fury's espionage agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., and brainwashing a few scientists and Hawkeye into becoming Loki's new minions.
In a movie that exists entirely to take advantage of all these different superheroes existing in the same universe, and that has almost no effect on any of their stories individually, the pleasures are two-fold. On the one hand, it's a treat to see all these different characters meet and interact, throwing one-liners at each other and having some contentious early skirmishes before finally finding their team dynamic. And then we get to watch them go to work, getting into fights with Loki and the alien invaders. The last act of the film is one giant battle sequence in downtown Manhattan, and an absolute joy to watch when we finally get there. But it's the getting there that's the tricky part. A lot of these characters are bringing a lot of baggage with them, and answering the lingering questions and accounting for all the loose ends from "Captain America" and "Thor" takes up a lot of time.
Whedon isn't entirely successful at getting all his ducks in a row. Captain America is clearly in the middle of a bumpy adjustment to the modern world and acting more hostile than usual, which is acknowledged, but has no effect on what's going on. Thor has the most personal stake in Loki's machinations, and the writers make sure that he gets his one-on-one scenes with his brother, but there's no time to get into any depth. Bruce Banner gets a very small character arc. Tony Stark gets one too, if you're paying close attention. Surprisingly, the one character who has the closest thing to a full subplot turns out to be the Black Widow, who is perhaps more concerned with getting Hawkeye out of Loki's clutches than saving the world. Even though the story is as simple as it possibly could be, there's still the constant feeling that there's too much going on and too much to keep track of.
But when the picture works, it works. The big, wild comic book spectacle is often senseless but always satisfying, and Whedon keeps finding ways to add those important little character moments, making sure that everyone gets their moment in the sun and their share of the good quips. Zak Penn gets a writing credit, but any Joss Whedon fan will recognize his dialogue and humor in a second. Nobody gets enough screen time in an ensemble this large, but all the performances are solid, and there is exactly the right proportion of Tony Stark behaving like an ass and the Incredible Hulk reveling in carnage and Loki grinning in villainous anticipation.
If you are a fan of the previous movies, it's worth seeing "Avengers" for the payoff for all the unexplained cameos and odd bits of extraneous plotting that were shoehorned into "Thor" and "Iron Man 2," in order to set up this movie. Sitting through the first half can be tedious, trying to keep up with the minutiae of the a plot that really doesn't matter much in the end. But when the action kicks into gear, and the Avengers are fully loosed on their enemies, you couldn't ask for a better way to start the blockbuster season.
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Friday, May 4, 2012
Worst "Avengers" Related News Today
I hate Twitter sometimes. I hate the way it seems to bring out the worst in people, the way it amplifies small mistakes and thoughtless comments into huge, inescapable, Big Deals. I was perfectly happy conflating Samuel L. Jackson with his screen persona of the cool, eternally badass, righteous African-American hero. And then he had to go pick on New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, and he had to use the saddest, stupidest reasoning to dismiss Scott's negative review of "The Avengers." This is not on the level of a Mel Gibson or Charlie Sheen meltdown by any means, but good grief. What the hell was he thinking?
Scott's review is hardly a rant. Jackson's appearance as Nick Fury is described briefly, but not specifically critiqued. Most of the piece reads as a weary chastisement of the excesses of the larger superhero genre, but Scott certainly reviews "The Avengers" itself in considerable detail, and acknowledges plenty of positives along with the negatives. I can't see anything that would have caused Jackson to take this particular review so personally. Perhaps the fact that the New York Times published a hefty, laudatory profile of Jackson last week titled How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre has something to do with it. But why would Jackson expect positive notices based on that? A.O. Scott's reputation as a reviewer would be totally undermined if he was beholden to his publication's agenda, and couldn't critique as he pleased.
Or maybe it was the overwhelming, all-consuming levels of hype that have been building for the last several months. It seems like the entire media universe has been centered on "The Avengers" these last few days. Financial analysts have been gleefully tabulating the box office returns from overseas, where the movie opened a week ago in many territories. There has been a glut of midnight screening reports from last night. You can't browse any entertainment site today without coming across scores of reviews, interviews, reaction aggregators, trivia pieces, guides to "The Avengers" characters, Marvel movie retrospectives, and on, and on, and on. It's the culmination of a massive, carefully orchestrated marketing campaign that has been going on for years to turn "The Avengers" into the event film to end all event films.
In this sea of feel-good self-congratulation, the few published negative reviews stick out like a sore thumb. They go against the scripted narrative, and that must have irked. Maybe that's what prompted Jackson to break the unspoken but long understood rule that artists should refrain from getting into these kinds of kerfuffles with their critics. The critics do not critique for the benefit of the artists, but for the audiences, and are only beholden to them. And other critics, of course, who can help expand single reviews into longer discussions and the occasional spats. Actors and directors and marketing geniuses have a financial interest in how their product performs, and are thus disqualified from participating in the discourse. Their job is to drive the hype, and that means they have an obvious bias.
I don't know why on earth Samuel L. Jackson would think it was okay to do this. True, the traditional print critics have lost a lot of their influence in recent years, and summer blockbuster season is the time of year when critics tend to matter least, as populist spectacle holds sway at the multiplexes, but that doesn't mean their function is any different - to cut through the hype and give people an honest opinion. A.O. Scott did his job and spoke his mind. Jackson's reaction, on the other hand, though probably also completely honest, may actually have been counterproductive to his ends. His tweets have diverted attention away from the movie, far more than A.O. Scott's one negative review would have ever managed by itself. Right now, on "The Avengers'" opening day, Google tells me that there are over two hundred articles talking about the online Twitter war between Jackson and Scott instead of the onscreen fisticuffs between the Marvel superheroes and their enemies.
At the end of the day, the facts remain as follows: Samuel L. Jackson tweeted his displeasure at A.O. Scott's "Avengers" review and called for his removal as a Times' staff critic. When a respondent argued that Scott was entitled to his own opinion and that a big box office total doesn't indicate quality, Jackson shot back, "Actually, sometimes it DOES!” Cue the steam coming out of my ears.
I'm still going to see "The Avengers." I'm probably going to see plenty of other Samuel L. Jackson movies in the years to come, but now I know that Jackson's just another fallible human being, who probably shouldn't be on Twitter.
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Scott's review is hardly a rant. Jackson's appearance as Nick Fury is described briefly, but not specifically critiqued. Most of the piece reads as a weary chastisement of the excesses of the larger superhero genre, but Scott certainly reviews "The Avengers" itself in considerable detail, and acknowledges plenty of positives along with the negatives. I can't see anything that would have caused Jackson to take this particular review so personally. Perhaps the fact that the New York Times published a hefty, laudatory profile of Jackson last week titled How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own Genre has something to do with it. But why would Jackson expect positive notices based on that? A.O. Scott's reputation as a reviewer would be totally undermined if he was beholden to his publication's agenda, and couldn't critique as he pleased.
Or maybe it was the overwhelming, all-consuming levels of hype that have been building for the last several months. It seems like the entire media universe has been centered on "The Avengers" these last few days. Financial analysts have been gleefully tabulating the box office returns from overseas, where the movie opened a week ago in many territories. There has been a glut of midnight screening reports from last night. You can't browse any entertainment site today without coming across scores of reviews, interviews, reaction aggregators, trivia pieces, guides to "The Avengers" characters, Marvel movie retrospectives, and on, and on, and on. It's the culmination of a massive, carefully orchestrated marketing campaign that has been going on for years to turn "The Avengers" into the event film to end all event films.
In this sea of feel-good self-congratulation, the few published negative reviews stick out like a sore thumb. They go against the scripted narrative, and that must have irked. Maybe that's what prompted Jackson to break the unspoken but long understood rule that artists should refrain from getting into these kinds of kerfuffles with their critics. The critics do not critique for the benefit of the artists, but for the audiences, and are only beholden to them. And other critics, of course, who can help expand single reviews into longer discussions and the occasional spats. Actors and directors and marketing geniuses have a financial interest in how their product performs, and are thus disqualified from participating in the discourse. Their job is to drive the hype, and that means they have an obvious bias.
I don't know why on earth Samuel L. Jackson would think it was okay to do this. True, the traditional print critics have lost a lot of their influence in recent years, and summer blockbuster season is the time of year when critics tend to matter least, as populist spectacle holds sway at the multiplexes, but that doesn't mean their function is any different - to cut through the hype and give people an honest opinion. A.O. Scott did his job and spoke his mind. Jackson's reaction, on the other hand, though probably also completely honest, may actually have been counterproductive to his ends. His tweets have diverted attention away from the movie, far more than A.O. Scott's one negative review would have ever managed by itself. Right now, on "The Avengers'" opening day, Google tells me that there are over two hundred articles talking about the online Twitter war between Jackson and Scott instead of the onscreen fisticuffs between the Marvel superheroes and their enemies.
At the end of the day, the facts remain as follows: Samuel L. Jackson tweeted his displeasure at A.O. Scott's "Avengers" review and called for his removal as a Times' staff critic. When a respondent argued that Scott was entitled to his own opinion and that a big box office total doesn't indicate quality, Jackson shot back, "Actually, sometimes it DOES!” Cue the steam coming out of my ears.
I'm still going to see "The Avengers." I'm probably going to see plenty of other Samuel L. Jackson movies in the years to come, but now I know that Jackson's just another fallible human being, who probably shouldn't be on Twitter.
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Thursday, May 3, 2012
Pinterest is Not For Me
The image bookmarking/sharing social networking site Pinterest has become a thing, a very big thing, very quickly. I got curious and thought I'd take a look. It's a primarily female user-driven site, and the featured content reflects this, a colorful cornucopia of fashion and food and decorating ideas, each represented by a "pinned" image of a new hairstyle or piece of clothing or eye-catching bauble. Many images link to items for sale or tutorials for crafts and other projects, often provoking its creatively inclined users to document their own efforts at using or replicating what they find on the site. There are sections for event planning, redecorating, makeovers, and so forth. Scores of blogs are devoted to Pinterest projects in progress. So, at first blush, Pinterest looks like a nice cross between project-oriented social sites like Ravelry, with a more graphics-oriented interface like Tumblr.
I'm not really the crafty type, but Pinterest's "About" page suggests that the site could be used as a digital scrapbook, a way to collect and organize images I like. Now what images does a media junkie like collecting? Movie posters and promotional material, of course. I'd just been thinking about movie posters, having written up a post on Mondo for this blog that I ultimately decided to scrap. I have a folder full of assorted movie images that has been sitting on my hard drive for years, that I've never really done anything with. Pinterest sounded perfect for organizing them into something coherent. First, however, I had to check to see whether "pinning" copyrighted images was allowed.
Pinterest's Terms of Service make it clear that the images pinned by individual users are afforded no protection, and Pinterest claims the right to do what they like with user-submitted material. That's fairly par for the course these days, but not a significant concern in my case because I'm not putting any of my own images on the site. However, users also assume the risk for pinning any copyrighted offsite content, and from various articles I clicked through on the subject, it's not clear whether pinning is more like the Google Images thumbnails, which are considered Fair Use, or if they amount to traffic diverting appropriation of those images, which is definitely not.
I debated with myself. Surely the movie posters would be all right. They're promotional material, plastered on every entertainment news site like Deadline and Variety, every movie organizing site like Flickchart and Icheckmovies, every database site like IMDB and Rottentomatoes. No movie blogger on the planet thinks twice before adding poster or screenshot images to their reviews, with the appropriate credit of course. A pinnable movie poster image, though larger than the usual preview thumbnails, would still be nowhere near the same dimensions as a full-sized movie poster, like the ones currently hanging on my living room wall. Moreover, the images were the property of giant, faceless media corporations, not some poor photographer who stood to lose significant revenue from the rampant online dissemination of their images.
But that was no excuse and I knew it. Putting up a poster image of "Cabin in the Woods" on Pinterest wouldn't be like adding one to my review of "Cabin in the Woods," because it was the image itself I was sharing, not something used to illustrate my analysis or commentary, which would be allowed under the Fair Use rules. It wouldn't fit the news, education, or information exceptions either, really. Also, putting the image up on a social networking site devoted to sharing images, with the full knowledge that it would probably get "repinned" by others would be going far beyond personal use. Just because everyone else is pinning up copyrighted content, and if you scroll through Pinterest for more than a few seconds you can confirm that for yourself that this is the case, doesn't mean I'm was prepared to take the risk myself.
I'm not saying I agree with the copyright rules, and I've certainly operated in some gray areas before, but this is one of those instances where I feel I need to act with some caution, and I'm glad looked before I leaped. Just because Pinterest happily promotes and facilitates content sharing doesn't mean that they're ready to handle the consequences, or that they're operating in the best interests of their users. One of the reasons that Pinterest has become so popular so fast is because it's so easy to use, and it's so easy to use because it doesn't have the same content safeguards in place as sites like Facebook or Deviantart, where the photos and artwork are all user-generated.
Sp Pinterest looks like a lot of fun, but I think I'll wait until it works out some of these IP issues first, or at least until it's been around long enough to work out some happy medium with the big companies, the way Youtube has, more or less. Better safe than sorry.
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I'm not really the crafty type, but Pinterest's "About" page suggests that the site could be used as a digital scrapbook, a way to collect and organize images I like. Now what images does a media junkie like collecting? Movie posters and promotional material, of course. I'd just been thinking about movie posters, having written up a post on Mondo for this blog that I ultimately decided to scrap. I have a folder full of assorted movie images that has been sitting on my hard drive for years, that I've never really done anything with. Pinterest sounded perfect for organizing them into something coherent. First, however, I had to check to see whether "pinning" copyrighted images was allowed.
Pinterest's Terms of Service make it clear that the images pinned by individual users are afforded no protection, and Pinterest claims the right to do what they like with user-submitted material. That's fairly par for the course these days, but not a significant concern in my case because I'm not putting any of my own images on the site. However, users also assume the risk for pinning any copyrighted offsite content, and from various articles I clicked through on the subject, it's not clear whether pinning is more like the Google Images thumbnails, which are considered Fair Use, or if they amount to traffic diverting appropriation of those images, which is definitely not.
I debated with myself. Surely the movie posters would be all right. They're promotional material, plastered on every entertainment news site like Deadline and Variety, every movie organizing site like Flickchart and Icheckmovies, every database site like IMDB and Rottentomatoes. No movie blogger on the planet thinks twice before adding poster or screenshot images to their reviews, with the appropriate credit of course. A pinnable movie poster image, though larger than the usual preview thumbnails, would still be nowhere near the same dimensions as a full-sized movie poster, like the ones currently hanging on my living room wall. Moreover, the images were the property of giant, faceless media corporations, not some poor photographer who stood to lose significant revenue from the rampant online dissemination of their images.
But that was no excuse and I knew it. Putting up a poster image of "Cabin in the Woods" on Pinterest wouldn't be like adding one to my review of "Cabin in the Woods," because it was the image itself I was sharing, not something used to illustrate my analysis or commentary, which would be allowed under the Fair Use rules. It wouldn't fit the news, education, or information exceptions either, really. Also, putting the image up on a social networking site devoted to sharing images, with the full knowledge that it would probably get "repinned" by others would be going far beyond personal use. Just because everyone else is pinning up copyrighted content, and if you scroll through Pinterest for more than a few seconds you can confirm that for yourself that this is the case, doesn't mean I'm was prepared to take the risk myself.
I'm not saying I agree with the copyright rules, and I've certainly operated in some gray areas before, but this is one of those instances where I feel I need to act with some caution, and I'm glad looked before I leaped. Just because Pinterest happily promotes and facilitates content sharing doesn't mean that they're ready to handle the consequences, or that they're operating in the best interests of their users. One of the reasons that Pinterest has become so popular so fast is because it's so easy to use, and it's so easy to use because it doesn't have the same content safeguards in place as sites like Facebook or Deviantart, where the photos and artwork are all user-generated.
Sp Pinterest looks like a lot of fun, but I think I'll wait until it works out some of these IP issues first, or at least until it's been around long enough to work out some happy medium with the big companies, the way Youtube has, more or less. Better safe than sorry.
---
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Playing the Top Ten Game
The British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine Top Ten Poll is for your serious cineastes only. Every ten years, since 1952, film professionals around the world have been polled for their top ten lists of the greatest films of all time. The results are compiled and printed in Sight & Sound magazine to coincide with the anniversary of their first publication in 1932. The Sight & Sound poll has given us an interesting look at which films have been considered the absolute essentials of cinema over the years, which titles have been passing fads and which titles have some up again and again. There have been six polls to date, and 2012 will see the addition of a seventh.
There has been some quiet buzz going around as various critics speculate as to what might make this year's poll results. Roger Ebert has weighed in on his choices. There have been a scattering of the usual articles bemoaning "Citizen Kane's" stranglehold on the top spot, which it has occupied since the second poll in 1962. There's a great piece over at Criticwire, which asked various critics to replace only a single entry from the 2002 poll, and explain which title they would drop and which they would add. At first, the exercise looks a little daunting, but then, reading the responses, I knew exactly what my answer would be.
I've quietly avoided creating serious Top Ten lists, qualifying choices as personal favorites or being non-committal as to their importance. Declaring some films the best of the best seems like such an act of snobbery. And there's always been that lurking fear in the back of my head that I don't really know what I'm talking about, that I haven't seen enough films and I don't know enough about the individual works and their significance. Or, that I don't know enough about filmmaking and film theory to adequately measure their merits against each other. I have no formal film education, and the only studying I've done has been self directed, strictly as a hobby. However, looking over the past Sight & Sound polls, there is only one film on any of the lists, Marcel Carnè's "Le Jour Se Lève," that I haven't seen. And I do have some pretty strong opinions about most of the others.
So, let's make a list.
Eisienstein and D.W. Griffiths were important innovators, but my vote for the greatest silent era filmmaker would go to Charlie Chaplin, who told the most humanist, most universal stories that have lost none of their impact over the years. If I had to pick one of his films, after making my sincere apologies to "The Gold Rush" and "Modern Times," I'd choose the eternally endearing "City Lights."
The greatest of all silents, however, is "The Passion of Joan of Arc," still one of the most intense cinema experiences I've ever had. It broke filmmaking rules left and right, and was a complete outlier from the established schools and styles of the day. And after all this time, there's still nothing else quite like it, even from Carl Dreyer, who went on to make more deeply spiritual, but far more sedate films.
I never understood all the fuss over "Metropolis," as it is perfectly clear to me that the best film Fritz Lang was ever responsible for was the psychological thriller "M," his first sound film, one of the vital links between German expressionism and film noir. It remains a crime film of rare delights, offering thrills, suspense, a little social satire, and some occasional, startlingly modern black humor too.
The advent of sound was really the last major technical leap of any importance to cinema. After that, it was various film movements that had the most influence, and the most important of them all was Italian neo-realism, which was about making films of substance above all else. Visconti's "La Terra Trema" and Fellini's "La Strada" are unforgettable, but Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" remains the most iconic and emblematic of them all. It topped the first Sight & Sound poll in 1952, and it still belongs there.
This would not be an honest list from me without the inclusion of an animated film, and in many ways they never got better than Walt Disney's second feature, "Pinocchio," a visual tour-de-force that was the culmination of so many different disciplines and techniques and ideas. Along with "Fantasia," this was Disney at its most ambitious and daring, pushing the medium to new places it would rarely venture to again.
Now after Neo-realism, we come to the New Wave, which began in France and traveled around the globe ushering in a new filmmaking era. I've tried, but the New Wave films confound me. But on their periphery, comic filmmaker Jacques Tati was making movies around the same time, and from a totally different, unique perspective. "Playtime" is his most popular film among critics, but I prefer the gentler, more organic "Mon Oncle."
It would be very easy to go down a list of the most influential directors and pick the best films of each, but that would be a cheat. However, there are a few directors that must make appearances. One is Stanley Kubrick, a genre and a movement in and of himself. My favorite of his films is "The Shining," a childhood favorite, but I think, deep down, his greatest directorial feat remains "2001: A Space Odyssey."
From the New Wave came New Hollywood, but also New German Cinema, and a slew of strange young German directors. Perhaps none of them was stranger or more talented than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had a tremendous output over his short and troubled life. The best of his films was "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," an unusual and striking romance. The 70s yielded many classics, but I've never found another film of that era to match "Ali."
I have said before that I sometimes wish that Akira Kurosawa's bleak epic "Ran" was not my favorite of his films, but it remains unparalleled among his works, and though I dearly love the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi and Kon, Kurosawa is unparalleled among the Japanese directors. "Ran" is a beautiful film, operatic in its scope, and devastating to behold in its carnage and destruction.
And because I think it really did change my life a little bit, "Synecdoche, New York."
My Top Ten:
City Lights, Charles Chaplin, 1931
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928
M, Fritz Lang, 1931
Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948
Pinocchio, Ben Sharpseen, et al., 1940
Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati, 1958
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, 1974
Ran, Akira Kurosawa, 1985
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman, 2008
---
.
There has been some quiet buzz going around as various critics speculate as to what might make this year's poll results. Roger Ebert has weighed in on his choices. There have been a scattering of the usual articles bemoaning "Citizen Kane's" stranglehold on the top spot, which it has occupied since the second poll in 1962. There's a great piece over at Criticwire, which asked various critics to replace only a single entry from the 2002 poll, and explain which title they would drop and which they would add. At first, the exercise looks a little daunting, but then, reading the responses, I knew exactly what my answer would be.
I've quietly avoided creating serious Top Ten lists, qualifying choices as personal favorites or being non-committal as to their importance. Declaring some films the best of the best seems like such an act of snobbery. And there's always been that lurking fear in the back of my head that I don't really know what I'm talking about, that I haven't seen enough films and I don't know enough about the individual works and their significance. Or, that I don't know enough about filmmaking and film theory to adequately measure their merits against each other. I have no formal film education, and the only studying I've done has been self directed, strictly as a hobby. However, looking over the past Sight & Sound polls, there is only one film on any of the lists, Marcel Carnè's "Le Jour Se Lève," that I haven't seen. And I do have some pretty strong opinions about most of the others.
So, let's make a list.
Eisienstein and D.W. Griffiths were important innovators, but my vote for the greatest silent era filmmaker would go to Charlie Chaplin, who told the most humanist, most universal stories that have lost none of their impact over the years. If I had to pick one of his films, after making my sincere apologies to "The Gold Rush" and "Modern Times," I'd choose the eternally endearing "City Lights."
The greatest of all silents, however, is "The Passion of Joan of Arc," still one of the most intense cinema experiences I've ever had. It broke filmmaking rules left and right, and was a complete outlier from the established schools and styles of the day. And after all this time, there's still nothing else quite like it, even from Carl Dreyer, who went on to make more deeply spiritual, but far more sedate films.
I never understood all the fuss over "Metropolis," as it is perfectly clear to me that the best film Fritz Lang was ever responsible for was the psychological thriller "M," his first sound film, one of the vital links between German expressionism and film noir. It remains a crime film of rare delights, offering thrills, suspense, a little social satire, and some occasional, startlingly modern black humor too.
The advent of sound was really the last major technical leap of any importance to cinema. After that, it was various film movements that had the most influence, and the most important of them all was Italian neo-realism, which was about making films of substance above all else. Visconti's "La Terra Trema" and Fellini's "La Strada" are unforgettable, but Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" remains the most iconic and emblematic of them all. It topped the first Sight & Sound poll in 1952, and it still belongs there.
This would not be an honest list from me without the inclusion of an animated film, and in many ways they never got better than Walt Disney's second feature, "Pinocchio," a visual tour-de-force that was the culmination of so many different disciplines and techniques and ideas. Along with "Fantasia," this was Disney at its most ambitious and daring, pushing the medium to new places it would rarely venture to again.
Now after Neo-realism, we come to the New Wave, which began in France and traveled around the globe ushering in a new filmmaking era. I've tried, but the New Wave films confound me. But on their periphery, comic filmmaker Jacques Tati was making movies around the same time, and from a totally different, unique perspective. "Playtime" is his most popular film among critics, but I prefer the gentler, more organic "Mon Oncle."
It would be very easy to go down a list of the most influential directors and pick the best films of each, but that would be a cheat. However, there are a few directors that must make appearances. One is Stanley Kubrick, a genre and a movement in and of himself. My favorite of his films is "The Shining," a childhood favorite, but I think, deep down, his greatest directorial feat remains "2001: A Space Odyssey."
From the New Wave came New Hollywood, but also New German Cinema, and a slew of strange young German directors. Perhaps none of them was stranger or more talented than Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had a tremendous output over his short and troubled life. The best of his films was "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," an unusual and striking romance. The 70s yielded many classics, but I've never found another film of that era to match "Ali."
I have said before that I sometimes wish that Akira Kurosawa's bleak epic "Ran" was not my favorite of his films, but it remains unparalleled among his works, and though I dearly love the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi and Kon, Kurosawa is unparalleled among the Japanese directors. "Ran" is a beautiful film, operatic in its scope, and devastating to behold in its carnage and destruction.
And because I think it really did change my life a little bit, "Synecdoche, New York."
My Top Ten:
City Lights, Charles Chaplin, 1931
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928
M, Fritz Lang, 1931
Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948
Pinocchio, Ben Sharpseen, et al., 1940
Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati, 1958
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, 1974
Ran, Akira Kurosawa, 1985
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman, 2008
---
.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Slightly Short of "Haywire"
The star of Steven Soderbergh's latest action film "Haywire," is professional MMA fighter Gina Carano, who has no need of a stunt double. She shines in every fight scene, every chase sequence where she's called on to pull off one physically demanding stunt after another. Unlike so many other female-led action movies, it's clearly the physically capable Carano who is doing all the work, so she is immediately believable as Mallory Kane, a professional covert operative who plays the spy game for a living. Well, that is until Carano starts getting more and more dialogue, and you realize her acting skills are nowhere near the same level as her fighting prowess.
There is so much about "Haywire" that I liked and enjoyed, but its biggest flaw is inescapable. Gina Carano has a lot of raw potential, but she was not ready to anchor a movie like this. I could see her doing better in something pulpier and more stylized, like a Jet Li or Jason Statham vehicle, where her awkward line delivery and inability to emote wouldn't be such big stumbling blocks. In "Haywire," however, Carano is up against a full house of top-notch acting talent, and the contrast is too great to ignore. She has to fight and negotiate her way through several of Hollywood's best leading men, including newly minted A-listers Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender, plus Ewan MacGregor, with an assist by Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. I won't say much about the plot, because it's hardly of any consequence. The bigger question, you may wonder, is how on earth did all of these stars end up in a low-budget action movie together? Oh right. It was directed by Stephen Soderbergh, who everyone wants to work with before he finally decides to go through with his threatened retirement.
And he almost pulls off what he wants to with "Haywire." Whenever Carano is in the thick of the action, be it in one of her many fight scenes, or the long chase sequence that is the highlight of the film's second half, "Haywire" rivals any of the "Bourne" movies, and certainly beats other female-led action vehicles like "Salt" or "Hannah." The pace and rhythm of it are right, along with the wonderful use of the jazzy musical score, and the cinematography that is breathlessly kinetic without turning into a shaky-cam blur. Soderbergh goes for more realism this time, focusing on the thrills instead of the mood, as he did with "Out of Sight," playing to his leading lady's strengths. I really appreciated that Carano's fighting style and the choreography of her fights make sense for someone with her physique, and that they don't look like what Hollywood normally has its female characters doing. It's almost enough to make up for the rest of her performance. Almost.
I think there were ways that some of the acting issues could have been mitigated, but the fatal problem with "Haywire" is that it is totally Gina Carano's show from start to finish. She's the one who's onscreen almost the entire time, the one who the story follows as she travels aroudn the globe, the only constant in the story. All of her male co-stars are perfectly fine in their roles, but these are limited. If you''re a fan of Tatum or MacGregor or the rest, I'm sorry to say that none of them really get to do much beyond playing stock action film types. So whenever Carano's banter is off, or she can't quite get us to buy the sexual tension between her and her co-workers, there's no safety net. Something about Carano's line delivery in particular frequently feels off, to the point where it gets increasingly distracting.
Still, I can't fault Soderbergh for taking a chance on Carano, because she's clearly got a movie star in her. She looks right, both standing next to Michael Fassbender in an evening gown, and repelling an invasion of enemy infiltrators in camouflage paint. It's a thrill to see her in motion, fluidly climbing walls and leaping over rooftops without a hint of a wire assist. Some of her more dialogue-heavy scenes are better than others, which suggests that she'll probably improve with more screen time and experience. Compared to some of the male action stars we've seen over the years with similar backgrounds, she's not in a bad place. However, I think her gender does play a role in why it's difficult to make allowances for the fact that she's really an action performer first and an actress second.
---
There is so much about "Haywire" that I liked and enjoyed, but its biggest flaw is inescapable. Gina Carano has a lot of raw potential, but she was not ready to anchor a movie like this. I could see her doing better in something pulpier and more stylized, like a Jet Li or Jason Statham vehicle, where her awkward line delivery and inability to emote wouldn't be such big stumbling blocks. In "Haywire," however, Carano is up against a full house of top-notch acting talent, and the contrast is too great to ignore. She has to fight and negotiate her way through several of Hollywood's best leading men, including newly minted A-listers Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender, plus Ewan MacGregor, with an assist by Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. I won't say much about the plot, because it's hardly of any consequence. The bigger question, you may wonder, is how on earth did all of these stars end up in a low-budget action movie together? Oh right. It was directed by Stephen Soderbergh, who everyone wants to work with before he finally decides to go through with his threatened retirement.
And he almost pulls off what he wants to with "Haywire." Whenever Carano is in the thick of the action, be it in one of her many fight scenes, or the long chase sequence that is the highlight of the film's second half, "Haywire" rivals any of the "Bourne" movies, and certainly beats other female-led action vehicles like "Salt" or "Hannah." The pace and rhythm of it are right, along with the wonderful use of the jazzy musical score, and the cinematography that is breathlessly kinetic without turning into a shaky-cam blur. Soderbergh goes for more realism this time, focusing on the thrills instead of the mood, as he did with "Out of Sight," playing to his leading lady's strengths. I really appreciated that Carano's fighting style and the choreography of her fights make sense for someone with her physique, and that they don't look like what Hollywood normally has its female characters doing. It's almost enough to make up for the rest of her performance. Almost.
I think there were ways that some of the acting issues could have been mitigated, but the fatal problem with "Haywire" is that it is totally Gina Carano's show from start to finish. She's the one who's onscreen almost the entire time, the one who the story follows as she travels aroudn the globe, the only constant in the story. All of her male co-stars are perfectly fine in their roles, but these are limited. If you''re a fan of Tatum or MacGregor or the rest, I'm sorry to say that none of them really get to do much beyond playing stock action film types. So whenever Carano's banter is off, or she can't quite get us to buy the sexual tension between her and her co-workers, there's no safety net. Something about Carano's line delivery in particular frequently feels off, to the point where it gets increasingly distracting.
Still, I can't fault Soderbergh for taking a chance on Carano, because she's clearly got a movie star in her. She looks right, both standing next to Michael Fassbender in an evening gown, and repelling an invasion of enemy infiltrators in camouflage paint. It's a thrill to see her in motion, fluidly climbing walls and leaping over rooftops without a hint of a wire assist. Some of her more dialogue-heavy scenes are better than others, which suggests that she'll probably improve with more screen time and experience. Compared to some of the male action stars we've seen over the years with similar backgrounds, she's not in a bad place. However, I think her gender does play a role in why it's difficult to make allowances for the fact that she's really an action performer first and an actress second.
---
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