In his Big Picture blog, Patrick Goldstein underlines the slow, steady slide of movie newspaper advertising, and the (further) trouble this spells for newspapers, if/when such advertising eventually becomes, as one studio marketing chief predicts, a seasonal expenditure. I know, I know… “the sky is blue, water is wet.” What else is new? If newspapers in general are doomed, from a readership/business model perspective, of course it stands to reason that an abandonment of advertising will be a contributing cause of their demise. Still, there are some interesting details in the interstices. Pam Levine, Fox’s co-president of marketing, gives smart answers about the evolving logic behind print media ad buys, and cites notable exceptions in the form of Slumdog Millionaire and Marley & Me.
Tangentially, I would only take exception with Goldstein’s assertion that Fox is held in high regard for its marketing savvy. Fox Searchlight? Yes, absolutely. Notwithstanding its superb work on Marley & Me, however, 20th Century Fox has taken such great steps toward authoritarian “message control” that they frequently border on all-out suppression; it often seems as if they’re actively attempting to help eradicate film critics once and for all.
Fair game if that’s their druthers, I guess, whatever… except that it doesn’t really seem to be helping their movies at the box office on a consistent basis. Take, for instance, last summer’s almost non-existent critical/ancillary campaign for The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Am I to believe that more aggressive, non-TV-related outreach — including print advertising, to help reach older fans of the TV series, who might now have families, and not be surfing IGN for updates on a weekly basis — couldn’t have helped push the movie’s total domestic haul past $21 million?
There was a brief hullabaloo a week-plus ago when it was announced that promotional postcards for writer-director Adam Rifkin’s Look (releasing to DVD May 5 via Anchor Bay) were being rejected by the U.S. Postal Service for obscenity.
These are those postcards, which eventually arrived in my mailbox in two separate envelopes, each marked as “sexually oriented advertising.” Great, so now my postwoman knows thinks I’m a perv. If you ask me, this is totally a fix-is-in publicity stunt, a feeling the above-linked video in which Rifkin allegedly first finds out about the decision doesn’t do much to dissuade. Yes, black bars cover the thong-clad butts, but there’s the impression of willful envelope-pushing, of previously tested boundaries being poked — otherwise, why go with the cost of a multi-card mailing campaign at all, instead of an embedded viral email campaign? (Not sure, incidentally, why the first postcard rates an exclamation point, but not the second one; if one legal revelation is more shocking than the other, surely it’s the latter, no?) That said, this is a smart play, and certainly a net win for all involved: Rifkin can appear aggrieved, act shocked and get publicity for his film (look, I’m writing about it), and the USPS can score a few points with all the Sam Brownback, James Dobson and Roberta Combs types.
Slightly screwy, unadjustable embed code aside, the dialogue-tree trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (above) really shouldn’t have the start-up freeze-capture of the above two dudes, since it’s adult film starlet Sasha Grey who plays the high-end flesh-peddler offering the film’s centerpiece transactional attraction, but what are you gonna do? Pushing the notion of an hourly-rate comparison between Gray’s character and her boyfriend, a personal trainer, is a good tack, and not at all thematically irrelevant, since the movie underscores our shared societal obsession with money and security (are they the same?), all against the backdrop of a crumbling economy.
The film itself, which I caught earlier this week, is intriguing on a couple levels — more on it soon — but also kind of an unfulfilled premise. It works chiefly as a crystal-clear, extended metaphor for Soderbergh’s view of the (legit) film industry, but it also left me wanting more. From the hip, I’d slot it somewhere between Bubble (which I rather adored) and Full Frontal (which I rather didn’t) in Soderbergh’s recent dig-vid experimental canon.
The latest on the leaked digital online version of Wolverine, from The Wrap, is that it’s a month-old work print. The FBI is involved, along with the Motion Picture Association of America. And of course the studio itself has several of its own investigators working the beat, too — unsavory arm-twisting types, if they’re smart. All are hunkered down, chasing what is being called “at least a half dozen leads.” So they’ll collar someone, eventually. And the excuse will be how the movie was initially only copied for friends, and not meant to be shared, blah blah blah. If the person is in a position to cough up major money (not likely), they’ll be sued for that; otherwise, I like to imagine it’ll be like The Net, with Rupert Murdoch‘s tech Gestapo destroying the offending party’s online profiles, wiping out bank accounts and changing any and all annotations regarding their drug allergies. And yet…
There’s a part of me that… I don’t want to say identifies with, but maybe silently roots for the criminal underdog in a situation like this? I have to think I’m not alone in this regard. I know piracy is a huge problem and concern for the industry I cover (though the shakedowns over cell phones without cameras at all-media screenings three days before a film’s release have, mercifully, slowed), and I’m not daft enough to fail to recognize its impact on studios’ bottom lines. But with industry aligned against them, and all their marshaled resources, I guess I admire the anarchic, open-source, tech warrior spirit of those that would still try to enact massive duplication-for-profit schemes, because there’s clearly an element of fuck-you, catch-me-if-you-can competition to their endeavors. Hollywood makes all kinds of movies glamorizing master swindlers (Ocean’s Thirteen, Duplicity, et al), but when something like this is pulled on them they always turn to the feds, and start pulling all the strings that will assist them in future favorable protective legislation.
I guess I’d call it the Terry Benedict factor; in livelihood crimes of this type (i.e., no gunplay, kidnapping or violence, but clearly for profit), when the details are removed and they’re boiled down to their barest essence, there’s typically a hungry, entrepreneurial mover/schemer on one side and on the other someone who’s kind of a douche, or at least a rube. In this equation, Hollywood studios are the latter, plain and simple. And it’s not just a rich guy/poor guy thing; it has something to do with the fact that they haven’t instilled a proper cultural respect for what they do, and their products.
Do you like movies about movies? Or, even more, movies about people talking about movies? Then Gerald Peary’s talking-head documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism might provide some interest, though Variety‘s South by Southwest review, by Joe Leydon, also brands it “once-over-lightly fare,” and posits it could play better as an educational aid rather than a cineaste’s feting. As it should be, perhaps — the more people have a grasp of the value of informed and rooted film criticism, the better. There’s a time for wonkish, inside-the-Beltway self-celebration, but given the death rattle of this occupational siege, this isn’t that time.
Within hours of its online sell-through site for its classic DVD archive going live, Warner Bros. was swamped with demand that crashed its site, according to Anne Thompson. Well, sure. Were they really surprised? This is the great untapped resource of studios with deep vaults, and the Hollywood equivalent of Big Auto sitting on and/or muffling emergent technologies until it figures out how to wring every last dollar out of existing platforms and mediums. If Hollywood worked at creating actual, lasting fans of cinema rather than merely chasing the short money offered in Hot-Shit Videogame Adaptation XIII, they’d be able to even more lucratively leverage these vast reservoirs of captured entertainment, for generations to come. Warner Bros.’ initial slate of 150 films never before released to DVD includes everything from 1943’s Mr. Lucky, with Cary Grant and Laraine Day, and 1962’s All Fall Down, with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint, to 1986’s Wisdom, with Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez.
In quarter-hearted fashion (the entire piece reads like a sigh, frankly, a fact that I dig), Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton takes a stab at the recent flare-up in film blog pissing matches, and concludes it’s cyclical, and wearying. Without waging into the breach myself — because, truly, I care not — I will say that the incidents cited in this piece, and others like them, are exactly why I find so many film blogs kind of tiresome, and it reminds me of two other things:
1) The old saw about the politics of academia — that the squabbles are so nasty because the stakes are so low.
2) My firm belief that “Toldja!” is the scrappy, upwardly-mobile middle class intelligentsia’s equivalent of the rotted celebrity bitch line “Do you know who I am?,” and its unironic deployment, especially in print, is a sign of mental inferiority, tackiness and/or low self-esteem.
An email from the French Embassy’s Los Angeles Film and TV Office landed in my inbox this morning, with an invitation to a screening of Jacques Doillon’s Ponette… held on March 6. Further ignoring the fact that it was in Valencia, I really wish this invite had arrived, you know, in advance of the actual screening, since Doillon was there in person.
An arresting bereavement drama refracted through the eyes of a little girl, this film is an absolute heartbreaker, and features one of if not the most affecting child performance I’ve ever seen. Victoire Thivisol (look at that face!) plays 4-year-old Ponette, who must come to terms with grief following the death of her mother in a car accident. She gets little sympathy and support from her atheistic father, who just dumps her with her aunt while, wrapped up in his own denial and anger, he goes back to work. Ponette’s aunt and her young friends confuse her with a mixture of religion and fantasy, to the point she ends up believing that her mother will soon be coming back to visit her.
It’s been years since I’ve seen the movie, and though I don’t at all doubt its staying power, I do ponder whether this is a case of actual performance, or just deeply superb, marionette strings manipulation-as-direction. Thivisol won the Best Actress Award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival, but four years old is awfully young, and the movie, largely in the contrast drawn between Ponette and her father, has a lot of substance to say about so-called truths that crumble into uncertainties when adults are called upon to try to explain them to children. It’s for this reason that I would have loved to talk to Doillon.
Earlier this week I caught John Maybury’s The Edge of Love, which opens this week in Los Angeles and next week in New York, for an interview with Matthew Rhys, and to be honest I wasn’t that hot on it, though it had
nothing much to do with the performances. I may or may not get around to reviewing it a bit more properly next week, so until then, some thoughts:
At its core, the film is a World War II-set love quadrangle melodrama centering around the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), Thomas’ childhood pal Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley) and a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who insinuates his way into Vera’s heart. It’s nicely constructed, but a bit too long at 111 minutes. Mostly, I just wasn’t a fan of the script
— though intrigued by bits and pieces of what it puts under the microscope (particularly the notion of homefront, “non-heroic” men grappling with returning veterans, who themselves are
grappling with societal re-entry), I felt like the love stories and all the romantic friction were melodramatic, and poorly sketched. I also couldn’t wrap my head around a character
like Caitlin, and why she would permit (and even encourage) an
emotional infidelity between her husband and putative best friend, and then retain any legitimate sense of
shock/betrayal when things got physical. The trailer doesn’t do full justice to Angelo Badalamenti’s score; it makes the film look spliced together from outtakes of The End of the Affair and Atonement, which isn’t so great a thing in my book.
The problem, in the plainest terms, with Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, is that it confuses fidelity to the source material with narrative propulsion. There are plenty of great books, or story ideas, that just don’t make compelling movies, and this is certainly an example of one. The film is a pretty, cool-looking rocket with an unlit fuse; it never gets off the ground. For those not primed to already give it a full-thrust embrace, does the surfeit of “cool” amount to anything more than just a decent time at the movies? Does it stick with you in any lasting fashion? Do you care about what has happened to the characters? No, I would submit that it doesn’t, and you don’t.
Uneven performances don’t help, but the film doesn’t create a convincing enough dystopian backdrop — either through sheer breadth, or perspicacious detail — to really sell the weight of its alleged doomsday drama, especially coming on the heels of something like last summer’s The Dark Knight. Even for kids who came of age at the end of the Cold War, in the Reagan era, the conflict of nuclear brinksmanship never loomed quite as large, front-and-center, as the new, present-day threats of international terrorism. The anxieties of the world today feel more diffuse and asymmetrical, so if you’re going to build your film around a superpower standoff — the type of conflict that would be the result of a massive, systemic conflict between two intractable nation-states — you’d better be prepared to do at least a bit of heavy lifting, story-wise. Watchmen does not; instead it gives us a couple digressive character backstories, and fritters away time on Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescuing some people from a burning building… yawn.
Recently eying the tagline “Are you man enough to say it?” from the poster for I Love You, Man sent my mind pinballing back to 1998’s There’s Something About Mary, and Lee Evans’ line reading about Cameron Diaz when he’s outed as a handicap faker by Matt Dillon’s dickish, tooth-capped gumshoe: “I love her, maaaaaan!” This is of course exactly the right combination of plaintive shamefulness and manic defensiveness, as any guy who’s ever loved/lusted after an unattainable hottie and struggled to get out of “Friendship Alley” can absolutely attest.
Over at Moving Image Source, Anthony Kaufman has up an interesting piece on the death of VHS, through the emblematic prism of the shuttering of famous Kim’s Video, and how as the format goes, so too do films like Costa-Gavras’s 1972 Uruguayan political thriller State of Siege become effectively extinct.
With this shrinkage in accessibility comes a collective constricting of the (inter)national cinematic consciousness, so goes the theory. Slow rot. And yup, I’m an offender too, as I’ve seen no André De Toth films, to my knowledge.
Surely there is much to be made for the often shoddy treatment Universal
and Paramount have shown their (deep) vaults… the neglect of catalogue titles, not the dress-up given titles they do release to DVD. Warner Bros. at least tries to really consistently reach out to true, older cinephiles. But
I’m also, somewhat fancifully, of the Darwinian notion that quality,
like hope, eventually floats. The key word being eventually. There are certainly films — many of which Kaufman mentions — worth fighting for as the march to digitalization continues. But a solid
percentage of what vanishes “into the ether,” as Dave Kehr says, might just frankly deserve to… just
the way the canon of Jeff Speakman will eventually vanish with Blu-ray. My $.02.
Hopelessly busy today, so not really any time for any sort of in-depth Oscar analysis. I think it’s obvious, though, that Hugh Jackman ruled; he emceed with grace and charm, and presided over some nice song-and-dance bits. And the five-for-the-price-of-one introductions for the acting nominees was inspired — a cool touch. It’d be interesting to see that extended to the screenwriting and directing categories at some point down the line. Also, Kate Winslet’s terribly myopic Best Actress victory for The Reader was totally preordained, of course, but AMPAS voters’ selection of the beautifully shot but ploddingly obvious Toyland as the best live action short film only underscored the hard-boiled truth of the joke about how they’re such unremitting suckers for anything Holocaust-themed; Toyland was without a doubt the least interesting of the five finalists.
How do I know that Watchmen, its release problems now settled, is going to print mad money when it opens March 6? Because I saw it last night and its screenings — and when various industry players get to see the film — have become referendums on reputation, power and pull. It’s achieved hot-shit status to folks who wouldn’t know the graphic novel source material from Batman. Director Zack Snyder killed it with 300, to the tune of more than $450 million worldwide, and that accrued cred plus the Internet geek factor give Watchmen some Dark Knight-type momentum; even at two hours and 42 minutes, it should be the biggest R-rated grosser of 2009, easy. And no, none of the above is directed at any of my pals screening the film this evening; just more of a general realization-type thing, after overhearing various studio suits and chest-puffed-out below-the-liners. More soon…
I’ve talked before about how runaway producer credits, aka vanity credits, are the new STD of the movie industry (most notably here, and here as well). Understandably, many producers aren’t exactly thrilled to chat about the subject, lest they be seen as taking shots across the bow at their own. Lakeshore Entertainment honcho Gary Lucchesi isn’t much different, but his take on the matter did offer up an interesting comparison that I hadn’t previously pondered. To wit:
“I’m on the board of directors for the producer’s guild so it is an
issue,” Lucchesi admits. “It’s become more profound now because it takes so much more to
get a film made. Twenty years ago, if a studio made Henry Poole, it
would be [with] a producer who’d have an overall deal with the studio. He’d
bring the project in, and if an executive liked it, they’d make the
movie. And there would be one producer or perhaps a team, not a
plethora of producers. Nowadays, on a movie like this, we brought it to
Lakeshore, where Tom [Rosenberg] and I take a producer credit. And then there were other
people — Tom Lassally was (director Mark Pellington)’s manager, who actually introduced the material to Mark, so he had a credit. And then Gary Gilbert brought in some
money, so he got a credit. Most of the executive producers are money
people, and if you have to cobble a movie together you all of a sudden
have seven or eight credits. So I get it, I understand it, I don’t like
people that didn’t contribute getting credits, but on the other
hand we’re a little bit like Broadway now — there are angels, and they
throw money at it, and if the movie gets made it’s good for everybody.
I know what my contribution is, and I think that at the end of the day
we all know who the actors are… I get the problem, but it’s because
our business is so much harder now.”
Is it really harder, though? More movies are made than ever before, it’s just that studios are looking to let other people spend the bulk of that money, and plug films into their distribution pipeline, right? So outside of its tentpole releases — big summer fare, genre offerings and a handful of awards-bait contenders — they don’t really care what names are on posters and press kits. If it’s actually markedly more difficult to get movies made these days, wouldn’t honest-to-God hands-on producers want to be more proactive about protecting their credit? “Fine line” and all, I get it. But no one gets to scratch a seven-figure check (or bundle the same) and just call themselves a special effects coordinator, do they? So where’s the outrage, or even leadership on this issue? Just throwing this out there…
I’m doing some file brush-up and vacuuming — the electronic age, records-sweep equivalent of brush-clearing, which would warm Dubya’s heart, I’m sure — and I came across this pulled tidbit from an interview last summer with Jonathan Levine, writer-director of The Wackness, in which he talks about prescription medications like anti-anxiety and anti-depression drugs. I didn’t run it at the time because it came during a digressive sidebar pocket which dipped into some (shared) state-of-the-world bewilderment, but it merits another look for a very important and intriguing reason. Set in 1994, and centering around an unlikely friendship between a teenage dope dealer and one of his clients, a therapist, the film doesn’t specifically take an anti-psychotropic drug stance, but from talking to Levine it’s clear he believes they’re over-prescribed. His comments:
“Well, it’s something that we definitely tackle. The early ’90s were a time when pharmaceuticals were becoming more and more a part of psychiatry, you know? And I think that Dr. Squires resists giving Luke medication, but at the same time at the end of the movie he’s on medication himself, and to me this was a question that needed to be asked, and what we really tried to do was resist any sort of judgment. You have one person who it isn’t right for, and one person who it is right for, but I think certainly it begs the question who needs this, and are people getting this who don’t need it? Squires asks Luke if he wants to handle his problems the way Rudy Guiliani handles the city, and sweep everything away, and that to me is allegorical for what anti-depressants do. But the flip side of that is that I see a movie like Garden State, a movie that I love, where a guy quits doing his medication at the beginning of the movie, and it’s this whole revelation for him. And look, a lot of my friends are on this stuff, and I have been on stuff like this as well — and that doesn’t ring true to me at all. So I just think that we wanted to resist pat answers, because I don’t know where I stand on that question. I’m just examining something and don’t have an answer. And sometimes I think that’s what movies need to do.”
The most interesting thing here for me is Levine’s admission to personal experience with these types of prescription medication, which is a heartening thing. For so many folks there’s still a stigma about anti-anxiety or ADHD drugs, but a closeted discussion is the most dangerous debate and does the public the most ongoing disservice, as I think Heath Ledger‘s tragic death proves. If more people around were aware of… not just some vague, amorphous “struggles,” but Ledger’s actual diagnoses, and medications, does anyone doubt that wouldn’t have been over-prescribed (by different doctors, no less) in the manner that he was? Levine’s right, the truth — both externalized, and within ourselves — is so often grey, and what works for one person might likely not for someone else, even a family member. We’re just scratching the surface of biogenetic diagnosis. But painting in broad brushstrokes, or refusing to acknowledge — publically, or just to loved ones — drug-treated conditions does no one any service, and should be consigned to the past.
Hot news today: Christian Bale does not much like Shane Hurlbut, the cinematographer on Terminator Salvation, it seems. An epic, rafters-shaking scream-down, truly. I’ll give Bale a pass on about three-fifths of this captured rant, maybe more, because filmmaking is a tough, high-tension business, and when a quality take or moment is ruined by either some technical glitch or an entirely preventable screw-up, as I’ve witnessed a couple times, it’s hair-pullingly maddening.
But then Bale crosses the line, somewhere around the time he re-tees things up, starts asking questions he apparently doesn’t want answered, and seemingly makes a charge at Hurlbut. “I’m tellin’ you — I’m not asking, I’m telling you,” Bale bellows, and then, “I’m gonna fucking kick your ass if you don’t shut up for a second.” (Err… you’re the one talking the most, dude.) Hurlbut maybe should have just turtled, taken his public dressing-down, avoided eye contact and said nothing, walked away, etcetera. Instead he makes the mistake of trying to meekly re-explain his screw-up. Whoops… kerosene. This fire burns too long, though; clearly, Bale is a guy who just hasn’t been told to shut the fuck up in a long, long time. Meanwhile, director McG kind of comes off as a pussy here, no? Why isn’t he in the midst of this?
Does Dakota Fanning — all dolled up in angst-y, Kool Aid-colored locks — have an agitated drunk scene in the PG-13-rated Push, opening next week? Why yes, yes she does. And while she’s a good actress, it tells you she probably hasn’t yet tied one on in real life, bless her soul.
After cleaning up with various critics groups and other film-honoring bodies, and going 1-2 at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, commercial juggernauts Wall▪E and The Dark Knight both got relegated to somewhat unfortunately expected, consolation-type booby prizes: a Best Animated Feature nod for the former, and a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Heath Ledger for the latter, among a mess of other, lesser nods. And that sucks, for different reasons. The rejection of Wall▪E shows the stranglehold that the actors’ branch has on voting (the thinking: “no actors = we’re not voting for it for Best Picture, since it didn’t employ as many of us”), while the stiff-arming of The Dark Knight, especially in light of the embrace of past commercial hits, underscores ingrained genre snobbery, pure and simple. Below are the top-shelf domestic narrative nominations:
More thoughts later, and in the coming weeks, certainly, but the Best Supporting Actress nominations clearly offer mostly confirmatory love on the part of AMPAS voters — Cruz and Adams are recent nominees, and Tomei a past Oscar winner. Taraji P Henson’s nomination for a solid but unexceptional performance in a very Mammy-ish role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is depressing, but indicative of the weird love that film is getting.
Struggling with a friend and colleague earlier this week to understand the astonishing $34 million opening weekend gross of Paul Blart: Mall Cop — a near-$10,000 per screen average, and a number that I hear surprised even Sony’s in-house number-crunchers, by a significant margin — this was the best I could come up with:
“My only theory (which is admittedly not a very good one) is that in the same way that Christmas releases will boost the returns of certain films — since families are together and looking for something to do that doesn’t involve more talking about Uncle John’s new boyfriend or Aunt Sally’s recent DUI — maybe folks gearing up for the Inauguration celebration wanted a collective mental health break, a way to definitively check out of the real world for a bit, and laugh at the fat guy who couldn’t slide all the way across the floor. I’d be fascinated in the complete regional box office receipt breakdowns on the movie, and urban vs. rural, etcetera. Of course, I think this cracked theory could only account for a couple million dollars, so I don’t know — maybe Kevin James is morphing into the new Tim Allen, i.e., the TV star turned “safe” movie lead, in kind of bland, middle-of-the-road, family-friendly fare. Didn’t see that coming…”
For the second year in a row, Michael Kunkes and Editors Guild Magazine polled recent Oscar-winning and -nominated guild members, along with a sampling of film critics, to gauge the prevailing award-winds in the three catagories of guild achievement recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Best Achievement in Film Editing, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. My free-form thoughts:
“The Academy Awards for Sound and Sound Editing are seemingly frequently linked to brawny and/or fantastic movies — adventures that unfold in clamorous fashion, or at least require a handful of discrete tracks — while Film Editing Oscars are inextricably linked to Best Picture nominees. And there’s usually laudable work found therein; after all, the editing is a big part of the success of those films, commercially and critically. So while I think The Dark Knight can be justly lauded for its evocation of urban terror and lingering menace, other films, like Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Zhang Ke Jia’s gorgeously pieced together Still Life, also located telling visual rhythms and quieter aural palettes that no less summoned specific time and place.
To me, Slumdog Millionaire was mad and invigorating, on all levels of editing and mixing, down to the creative use of subtitles. A bit off the beaten path, though, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married made a big impression on me. With its source music and at once casual and unnervingly intimate style, the movie conjures up — in refreshing ways — the tension and jocularity, joy and anxiety of large-scale familial gatherings. Similarly affecting was the sound and picture editing in Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York, which was integral in the creation of a world in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character manufactures an entire cityscape in an abandoned hangar, even as he ages and finds himself plagued by an undisclosed health crisis. Both of these films were, if you’ll excuse the invention of a word, grand tapestral efforts, which is to say thoughtful, carefully plotted affairs serving perhaps more esoteric masters.”
For the full, fully worthwhile read, including the thoughts of the estimable Myron Meisel and Wade Major, click here.
The phenomenon of runaway producer credits is a topic of special interest to me — maybe because it feels too much like the situation in high school where a couple loafers glom onto the work of others on a group project, and it thus strikes a nerve — so it’s worth noting that the recent indie flick Yonkers Joe tallies a dozen top-lined producers, including star Chazz Palminteri, and that’s not counting a line producer and two associate producers.
Still, I tend to give independent films more of a pass, and I think others (to the extent anyone else cares about this) do too. Why? Because there are more side deals to be made, many more gears to be greased when making a film outside of the studio system. And that sometimes means making deals with unsavory characters, or simply asshats that want a spread of personal pictures with Keira Knightley and Jessica Biel, and are willing to dole out a couple million dollars to get them. So those guys get producer credits — hedge fund managers and dotcom cowboys, multimedia tycoons and silver-spoon business scions — because “filthy rich bore” or “necessary evil” are credits deemed too insensitive. And that’s fine, in my book. If suffering wealthy dullards is the price of a go-it-alone shot at great art that Hollywood studios want to make, I’m not going to hold it hard-and-fast against the real-deal players that lent these guys the same credit they take.
But, on a knee-jerk level, if I see a dozen names on a studio film, I think overkill, and immediately start scanning for the star’s manager, or some other corporate glad-hander who somehow manages to accrue two dozen credits a year, despite not being part of a start-up, self-sufficient production shingle. There’s no reason, to my mind, that an originally conceived studio film with no labyrinthine source material backstory needs 10 producers. There just isn’t.
I’ve talked with a lot of producers about this issue, both on the record and off, and while many are pissed about it, a lot more are awfully touchy. “Don’t rock the boat, whaddya gonna do, go along to get along,” they seem to say, in ways both fancy and abstruse. In this regard, Hollywood is like the Mafia, or a corrupt police union; there’s an unspoken code (“Those who need to know know“), and there’s less interest in exposing credit-mongering than exposing those who want to expose it.
Stuck as I presently am without a car, I got duped big time last night — baited with the promise of a meal at a superlative sandwich place, and thus tricked into going to the mall. Which, let’s be honest, guys, is the worst. For me the true urge to shop for clothes comes around like a Smurf baby, once in a blue moon, and if there’s one thing worse than shopping for some item of clothing you need — a new shirt, or suit — when you don’t really want to be there, it’s watching someone else shop for clothes. Terrible, just awful.
Feigning potential interest in some overpriced neckwear, though, I wandered off in Nordstrom’s, and began walking figure-eights through the men’s shoe department, which inexplicably has a bank of televisions posted in a corner pocket, and also alongside one wall. Averting my eyes from Texas’ impending bowl victory, I looked at one screen, and wondered why Liam Neeson seemed to be talking on the telephone. “Oh,” I realized, “it’s a movie trailer… for Taken.” I was most decidedly not taken, even with the sound turned all the way down. Watching it, I did my best to supress a yawn.
I just saw the trailer proper now, in talkie form, on television, and even though it’s action intercut with Neeson saying some bad-ass shit, about how his skill set will allow him to track down and kill his daughter’s Parisian kidnappers, nope, it’s still confirmed… Liam Neeson talking on the telephone doesn’t, on a purely gut level, make anyone want to see a movie. Quite the opposite, in fact. Taken releases January 30, from 20th Century Fox.
So I’m a day late if not a dollar short in getting to this, but there’s no doubt that Chris Lee’s piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times about Ben Lyons will be well received by most of the film crowd intelligentsia, especially on the west coast. The piece opens by asking in straightforward fashion if Lyons is the most hated film critic in America, yielding at the end of its first paragraph to this conclusion: “Consensus is that Lyons, the son of New York film critic Jeffrey Lyons, is unworthy of the balcony seats once occupied by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on the TV mainstay that has rallied audiences into theaters for more than three decades.” It goes further downhill from there for the younger Lyons.
Somewhat naturally, the Times is late to the party. All of this is afterRoger Ebert basically put Lyons in the crosshairs in an October blog-post piece about the rules of film criticism and entertainment journalism. (Distilled, it’s basically, “Thou shalt not whore, or be an idiot,” two things with which Lyons has, at various points, been identified.) And this isn’t counting Erik Childress’ weekly Ben Lyons Watch, on eFilmCritic, or several other frequently trafficked Internet hit sites, most of which are mentioned in Lee’s 1,800-plus-word piece. Still, it’s fairly rare that print media (and the Times specifically) gets into the nitty-gritty of niche-culture wars waged largely on the blogosphere. Usually the real pulse of what people are murmuring is buried in a “trend” piece, or stacked up more comparatively, as if to purposefully lessen the blow. No such equivocation here.
All of which reflects more or less the chattering-class truth, I have to say. I’ve been privy to no fewer than five conversations at separate parties and/or professional gatherings where Lyons came under harsh direct fire, if not as the sole target of denigration then certainly as the chief one. Caveats? Well, let’s be honest: there’s an element of straight-up professional jealousy when it comes to the ease with which college washout Lyons, 27, has risen the ranks. In a profession where seemingly there is no such thing as terra firma, be it in print, online or on television, At the Movies is still a very plush gig, and many regard Lyons’ appointment there as a line-skipping affront.
Underqualified perhaps, but he’s not going to say no if offered the job. Who would? Still, two things could help Lyons, if more in the long-run than the short-run. First, if he exhibited more restraint with regards to the sort of gushing, simpleton praise he regularly doles out for rote studio product. I’m all for judging a movie on its own to-scale ambitions, and within the often comfier confines of its own fenced-in genre trappings, but one does have to still keep a broader context in mind, and apply an honest critical filter. Also, never give a publicist or PR flack reaction quotes immediately after seeing a film, or even verbally, for that matter. If I’m queried for something more than a simple yea-nay reaction on a movie, I will at times make available an advance, pre-publication copy of my review, or, failing that, a written, emailed response. You know, with actual sentences, not just exclamatory declarations or comparisons to previous box office hits. This helps ensure you don’t come off as a doof, calling everything “awesome,” or “a one-of-a-kind thrill ride.”
Second, surely it would help if Lyons just exhibited more a bit curiosity and application. A sizeable enough portion of film writers (and this includes both dyed-in-the-wool print critics and newbie e-critics as well) like to get into pissing matches about trivia knowledge, florid style or the ability to turn a phrase. So who’s the smartest critic? And is that the same as the best writer? Or the quickest analytical mind? Does it matter, in the end? What really rankles mightily, I think, is the ill-fitting breeziness of someone living a charmed life unearned. I’ve worked with people like that. We all know them. Intelligence and ability are great, very useful tools, to be sure. But if someone is working hard, and not only performing to the best of their abilities but also actively trying to get better at what they do, most reasoning people cut them a break. Lyons doesn’t come across as that guy. Is it any wonder, then, that in a country so fed up with still-President Bush and his off-the-mark, from-the-gut decision-making, the highest profile film critic who most obviously exemplifies the same sort of glad-handing, unexamined, hey-Dad-look-at-me! shuck-and-jive goofiness is a marked man?
It hadn’t really occurred to me, given my steadfast lack of investment in tabloid back-and-forth, but this holiday presents its own Jennifer Aniston versus Brad Pitt showdown, in the form of the Christmas Day releases of Marley & Me and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Also, it bears repeating that the “thriller of the year” sales job on Valkyrie is going to lead to lots of disgruntled ticket buyers, in my opinion.
