9/04/2007

Anticipating MIFF

The Milwaukee International Film Festival runs from September 20-30, and tickets will go on sale tomorrow. This is the fest's fifth year, and although I have lived in Milwaukee for all that time, I have never seen any films at the fest. This is partly a product of my dislike of film festivals, which I find tend to inflate people's estimations and evaluations of films in their atmosphere of appreciative discovery. I don't like large crowds, and I've seen too much crap that festival guides touted as essential viewing. I would rather catch the films that will have theatrical releases on my own schedule, and I resent paying inflated admission prices to see things I might not rent if Hollywood Video carried them and I had all night to watch movies. I admit that this is a little eccentric and silly, and that there are many great films that one can only see at festivals. Partly this avoidance is also a product of my formative years in Toronto, a town with a truly great festival next to which Milwaukee's looks pretty rinky-dink. Anyhow, I have decided to throw myself into this year's festival, to give it a real chance, and catch up with some of the international cinema that has been touring the circuit. Now the hard part: choosing what to see.

There are good and bad things about going to a fest like this one. There will be no discoveries here, certainly not of major American independents or foreign auteurs. Most of the films here have screened already at more important events. Lots of the MIFF entrants were on the slate in Toronto a year ago, and many of the American ones that didn't were at last winter's Sundance. European films that didn't play at the TIFF might have been at Berlin, Rotterdam, or Karlovy Vary. This means that a large number of the films screening here have been reviewed fairly widely. I have been collecting these in my del.icio.us, under the tag miff. Of the major festival circuit names, the best known here are probably Hang Sang-soo and Lars von Trier. Local boy Chris Smith will be here with his new film, his feature debut, The Pool. The fest guide describes it a "neorealist tale" shot in India. Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep will be showing, as will The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1979 American indie that is credited with inspiring Robert Redford to make Sundance into a showcase for American regional cinema. There are docs, shorts, local films, and a small series in tribute to Willem Dafoe, a Wisconsin native who went to UW-Milwaukee before dropping out to join an avant-garde theater group, and then going on to his career in movies. Unfortunately, none of these mumblecore films we have been reading about in blogs and newspapers seem to be turning up here this year. I have seen some of them on video, and think I want to save my judgment until I have seen some in the theater. The small screen might not be their ideal format. (I assume Hannah Takes the Stairs will be here before long, given the amount of publicity it has had.)

More MIFF blogging is to come, I hope. Stay tuned.

***

Some other items:

-A new semester has begun. I am teaching one course, Principles of Media Studies. This is my third semester at it, and for this installment I have added a day on Facebook. I was thinking of replacing the group class blog with a discussion board in a Facebook group but sort of chickened out. It's still not clear to me how students and teachers will interact in the online social-networking environment, and I don't want any students feeling like I have invaded their space. I also didn't want to compel any of them who might be reluctant to get on Facebook to participate there. Some of them are trying to protect their time by avoiding that stuff, and I applaud them for trying, I guess.

-The summer television offerings have been so good that our usual habit of catching up on shows we have missed on DVD has been put aside. (Last summer's discovery was BSG.) I'm working out some ideas about Mad Men, my favorite of the season by far. It's worth watching its credit sequence if nothing else, clearly in the Bass tradition but very contemporary at the same time. I also like the psychological machinations of Damages, and its superb acting by Glenn Close. And The Hills and Newport Harbor amaze in every installment with their gorgeous mise en scene, classic soapy plotting, and vapid characters. One cannot turn away.

8/09/2007

Hating on Jezebel James: the Laugh Track as Bad Object



The Return of Jezebel James faces way higher expectations than the typical sitcom. Amy Sherman-Palladino's previous show was Gilmore Girls, a series whose characters, especially the three generations of eponymous women, were among the most vivid, engaging, witty, and human on TV. For many viewers, Rory, Lorelai, and Emily were such good TV friends, and we will miss them for years and years. The thought that ASP might deliver us a new bunch of killer characters is just too exciting, especially now that GGs is gone.

Jezebel James, which premieres on Fox in the spring of 2008, is enticing us as well with actors many of us love already. Parker Posey, a comedienne from the Christopher Guest troupe, has done her adorable thing in what seems like dozens of quirky little films, of which The Daytrippers and Clockwatchers are favorites. And Lauren Ambrose is already beloved of many Six Feet Under viewers. These two play the leads; Scott Cohen, another indie film actor (Kissing Jessica Stein) and a GGs vet (Lorelai's love interest Max Medina) is a supporting player. Good enough. Unfortch, a few scenes have been online since May and no one seems to like them. Now the promo reel embedded above has surfaced and more voices are joining the chorus of disappointment.

It's way too early to give up on Jezebel James, and maybe the reason it's being held back till spring is that Fox and the producers want to tweak it. But I want to think for a minute about why people dislike the clips they have seen, which I think is pretty revealing. The consensus is that the big problem is the show's style, and in particular its traditional three-camera style with audible audience laughter punctuating the funny parts. I hesitate to call this a laugh track, because it could be actual studio audience sound. But everyone is calling it that, so that's what I'll call it, whether it's real or "canned" laughter. It doesn't really matter, because stylistically it's the same no matter the source. For many viewers, the laugh track is objectionable, an obstacle to their liking the show. And they're not afraid to say how Jezebel James can be improved: shoot it like The Office or 30 Rock and lose the laugh track. It's like the show is wearing a bad toupee, everyone knows it's a toupee, and it should just take the damn thing off already and be bald. Doesn't it know that it's much hipper now to be bald than to wear a toupee?

The laugh track is one of those things everyone is supposed to agree about. It's lame and corny to lard on fake laughter and an insult to the audience to be told when to laugh. Right? Think of the movies about TV production that have scenes in which a tasteless producer directs a technician to bump up big laughs after a certain line (The movies I'm thinking of are Manhattan and The TV Set, but there are surely others). "Now a mild chuckle. Ok! And a big guffaw!" This is always a way of expressing TV's underlying banality and phoniness, its pandering and artlesness. This idea of the laugh track is integral to the ideological positioning of TV as the idiot box, as the low art Other to cinema, literature, etc.

But is the laugh track really so bad? Television has always had a big disadvantage over cinema: the lack of a large audience in one space. Anyone who has seen a great film comedy in a theater full of appreciative spectators knows the power of the crowd's affection for a film. A film seems better when received so well. Television, for all of its appeals, lacks this power. Sure, many viewers watch in public spaces like bars and dorm common rooms and laundromats, but the typical (and stereotypical) situation of television viewing is in domestic space with the set as an electronic hearth. How many people can sit around a hearth? So the laugh track has an important function: to give the TV viewer the feeling of being surrounded by others, a feeling of community. In this respect it's not much different from applause, cheering, booing, and other forms of audible audience response.

And consider how many great television shows have used the laugh track. Is All in the Family a lesser show for having laughter on its soundtrack? Is M*A*S*H or Cheers or Seinfeld? Even if these shows' creators might have wished to do without them (M*A*S*H in particular; in the UK it apparently aired without a laugh track), a laugh track was part of our experience of all of these programs, and I don't think it diminished them particularly. I find it hard to imagine Happy Days, one of my favorite shows in childhood, without the live studio audience's interaction with the performers, in particular their lengthy applause upon Henry Winkler's entrances as the Fonz, their woo-woo-ing in response to kissing, and their hearty laughter at big punch lines. The traditional sit-com is a theatrical format, and good sit-coms exploit the aesthetic potential of the stage, including its address to a present audience.

Some people think the laugh track is "telling us when to laugh," and to be sure it might help with this function. But there are many ways in which comedies, whether on stage, in film, or on TV, tell us when to laugh. Actors pause, scripts have punch lines, music sets a tone. A laugh track is merely one device among many. It doesn't suit every kind of show. A laugh track on The Office would be detrimental to its effect of awkwardness. But shows like Scrubs and Malcolm in the Middle have no laugh track and yet tell us when to laugh in other ways, especially with their wacky music.

Even if the laugh track is aesthetically legitimate, as I have argued, no one can claim that it's particularly fashionable. As I have blogged previously, there is a new kind of TV comedy that I called the anti-sit-com. In place of a theatrical style, we have something that TV creators and critics love to call cinematic. Shooting is with a single camera, like a movie, they say (never mind that movies are shot with multiple cameras all the time). In place of the laugh track we get awkward silence (The Office), comical musical cues (Scrubs), and humorous voice-over narration (Arrested Development). Not constrained by shooting live in front of a studio audience, the writers now can "punch in" little scenes of fantasy or flashback.

The problem with Jezebel James seems to be that it's not this kind of show. To many people this signals failure, but Amy Sherman-Palladino isn't trying to make something like My Name is Earl; that's not her thing. She says she's trying to make something like Cheers. I say, great! Cheers was smart and verbal and clever and it never pandered. We need more shows like Cheers. But Cheers isn't what's on television today, and a show like it might not work in 2007 or 2008; if this is true, it's a pity.

Ultimately, what I think the negative reaction to these clips reveals is how thoroughly the idea of quality TV being cinematic has taken hold. Theatrical style used to be the marker of television quality, but no more. Now to seem serious and worthy, a television show has to be "like a movie." That's television's loss, and ours. I hope it won't force Amy Sherman-Palladino to choose between making the show she wants to make and making the show we think she ought to want to make.

More more more:

Wikipedia: Laugh Track

TV Party: History of the Laugh Track

WSJ on Charlie Douglass, inventor of the laugh track, upon his death in 2003

NPR's On the Media on same

Blog entry on the Jezebel James session at the TV Critics Assoc. mediafest

Pics from same

7/31/2007

Blogging here doesn't seem to be part of my routine this summer; I hope to be back in a more regular pattern of posting when school is back in session. In the meantime, my micro-blogging continues at Twitter and at my always casual Tumblr site Fraktastic, I have posted videos and a few thoughts to mark the passing of Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Much of my summer has been taken up with moving and other house-related tasks, and these have been claiming much of my mental energy. I haven't made it to the movies often enough (Ratatouille is the last one I saw in the theaters). And although I love some of the summer shows (Big Love is especially good this season, and So You Think You Can Dance rivals Idol as a performance spectacle), we often end up spending some of our media time on HGTV programs about decorating makeovers, which appeal to the new homeowner areas of the brain more than those that appreciate good television as such. If I totally lose my mind, I will be sure to post a lengthy discourse comparing the aesthetics of Color Splash and Divine Design, the two shows I most highly recommend. If you share my domestic frame of mind, I also can recommend Tracy Kidder's masterful 1983 book House, a narrative of residential architecture and construction in 1980s New England, and William Alexander's The $64 Tomato, a humorous memoir of a part-time gentleman farmer in upstate New York.

The other thing I have been doing is working on the Coen Brothers chapter of my book, and a propos of that, here are some movie-themed t-shirts for you from Last Exit to Nowhere including one for the Hotel Earle (Barton Fink), Hudsucker Industries (The Hudsucker Proxy, which I probably like more than you do), and Little Lebowski urban achievers (The Big Lebowski). Other fictional t-shirts from Last Exit include The Overlook Hotel (The Shining) and Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner).) (via Fimoculous)

6/21/2007

This new AFI top 100 films list should probably be beneath my notice, but it pisses me off so much I just have to say my piece. First, the existence of cultural hierarchies is probably inevitable but their codification in numbered lists is entirely avoidable and always inane, whether E! is rating the 100 hottest bods or eggheads are rating philosophers or scientists. What, for instance, could it possibly mean that one of the LOTR movies is one notch better than West Side Story? Could it really be that they are almost, just not quite, of exactly equal value? This sort of quantification is moronic no matter who is doing the counting. (I'll tip my hand here: if I'm holding DVDs of each, I'm way more likely to pop in West Side Story.)

More significant, though, this list speaks by exclusion to say what a "movie" is: very little silent, nothing shorter than feature length, nothing avant-garde or experimental, no documentaries, few films that would make anyone uncomfortable (Kubrick excepted, of course, but he's an Artist), and lots of movies that boomers remember fondly from repeat viewings upon their release, revival, or regular TV broadcast. The taste in evidence here is not simply "good" but good according to a certain group of film-goers. There are very few films aimed specifically at women, children or young people, poor and immigrant audiences, and racial and ethnic minorities. The list reflects the power and privilege of those who created it. It also reflects their bourgeois liberalism, ridding us finally of the weight of The Birth of a Nation, once thought to be the greatest film ever made and now no longer in the top 100--not even as good as Tootsie or Star Wars or, gasp, The Sound of Music! So many of these films are the sort that massage the aspirational do-gooder values of blue-stater upper-crusties, movies that advertise the virtue of the movies, their function to promote progressive middle-class mores. I have in mind here films like 12 Angry Men and On The Waterfront, In the Heat of the Night and The Best Years of our Lives, Schindler's List and Network: Films of Social Significance. But, please! If positive messages were the key criterion in valuing art, then a zillion earnest poems would be the betters of the likes of Griffith, whose value has certainly been overrated but not by as much as this list implies. This sort of list fatally excludes what Manny Farber called "termite art" (see this nice gloss on the topic by Girish): movies people love that aren't embraced by official culture, movies with an underground sensibility, movies that are honest and true without being earnest or moralizing.

Perhaps what rankles me most, though, is that this list reflects a generational bias, including lots of sentimental boomer favorites like It's a Wonderful Life, The Graduate, The Wizard of Oz, and anything starring Humphrey Bogart. I wonder how it will look upon revision a decade or two hence. Will Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Dirty Dancing edge out To Kill a Mockingbird and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? I wouldn't mind if they did. Then it will be up to a new generation of upstarts to get all huffy about those damn Gen X'ers with their Slacker and their Nirvana making like they invented post-adolescent alienation.

***

Now for the part you were expecting: here are some films I would put on this list instead of all the earnest message movies and boomer nostalgia trips. Hypocrisy, I know, to object to lists only to propose entries for my own. I don't think these are better in any objective sense than the ones chosen for the AFI's list. I just like mine better; this is about my taste, not my imperious pronouncement of what is or is not a great film.

Hitchcock is the top of the heap of American filmmakers and it would not be inappropriate to have several more of his films here. I would start with Shadow of a Doubt for sure.

Welles: my favorite is not Kane but Touch of Evil. Kane is show-offy and the main character is put at too great a distance from the audience. I get that this is the point of the film, but I find the good/bad man represented in Hank Quinlan to be more interesting, and I admire Touch of Evil's surrealistic qualities.

Ford: I prefer My Darling Clementine to The Searchers. The representation of the Indians in The Searchers still makes me cringe, and Max Steiner's score always seems schmaltzy to me, especially when it repeats the main theme in the minor key. I also don't think this kind of list can do without Stagecoach. While we're at it, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are each better than perhaps 90 or 95 of the films on this list.

Hawks: the five most outstanding are Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo. All five should be on this list ahead of Bringing Up Baby, which is also wonderful. Howard Hawks is one of my big faves.

There are several incredibly major directors not represented in this list. The ones that strike me as most egregious from the sound era alone are Josef Von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and David Lynch (I grant that the AFI top 100 will never do justice to the silents). This list needs Blonde Venus, You Only Live Once, Trouble in Paradise, Meet Me in St. Louis, Rebel Without a Cause, Magnificent Obsession, and Blue Velvet--at the very least. Meet Me in St. Louis would be on my all-time top ten. Minnelli's The Band Wagon is pretty essential, too, and as a self-reflexive 1950s Technicolor MGM musical is every bit as great as Singin' in the Rain.

Of post-1970s independent film, the only two entries here are Pulp Fiction and Do The Right Thing, and both are stuck in the bottom 10. This suggests that indies have done a bad job of inserting themselves in the canon (or, as detractors have been saying for awhile, that they're not so interesting, really). I especially admire Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes and John Sayles, but I'm not sure where to put them or which of their films belong. Ebert is apoplectic that Fargo is off the list, but of the Coens' films I am easily as fond of The Big Lebowski, and also big on Miller's Crossing and O Brother. Chuck likes Lone Star, and I do too, but something about that film comes across as a bit preachier than the best of Sayles (my fave is Passion Fish). On the topic of independents, I'm no huge fan of Cassavetes, but he is another obvious omission.

Finally, genres that get short shift: the gangster film (nothing from the 30s!), the women's picture/chick flick, horror, B-movies, westerns, broad comedies (e.g., Tashlin, Airplane!, Farrelly bros.), and contemporary-ish action movies like Terminator 2 and The Matrix. I am pleased that Spielberg is represented so well but he gets too many entries; I'd gladly trade his Private Ryan for Stella Dallas or The Exorcist.

(Since I did count: I have seen 87 of the top 100 films. I'm not going to list all the ones I haven't, but I'll tell you the two I feel most ashamed of: Gone With the Wind and Snow White. I know, I know.)

6/11/2007



Too bad about The Sopranos. The second part of Season 6 had been almost flawless, with carefully doled out moments of revealing raw emotion and violence arising organically out of the narrative situations. But the finale was an awful disappointment. After jerking our chain for an hour with hints and allusions (the orange and the cat said Godfather to me) and false starts to fill us with dread, after stretching to make banal political points via A.J.'s laughable identity crisis, after squishing Phil Leotardo's head under the wheel of his own vehicle in a move more worthy of splatter films, after cranking the Journey and planting the notion that Meadow might parallel park them all to death, the screen just goes black and the sound cuts out, and that's it for Tony and Carm and Med and A.J. and everyone, dead and alive. Does Tony live or die, does he go to jail? Yeah, one of those. An end but hardly an ending. Not artful but arty, and totally unlike the classic novels to which snooty critics would so often compare the show. The show's comedy is typically darker than black, but now it's at our expense. That's it; like the characters might say, what are you gonna do?

6/02/2007



David Remnick in the New Yorker pays tribute to The Sopranos, "the richest achievement in the history of television." I wonder about the extent to which Remnick has canvassed this history. Has he watched all nineteen eps of My So-Called Life? Would he so confidently assert the equivalent for any other form, for a film or a play or a novel or a concerto? Or is it that television is so generally devalued that any outstanding work seems like it could be, unproblematically, best evs?

Battlestar is calling it quits after one more season
. Another welcome blow at the infinity model. I really want to like the show again, so I'm looking forward to the final season, the "third act," and not giving up yet despite my strong negative reaction to the ending of the season just past.

Movie Midpoints is a screen capture quiz using the middle frame of each film. I do badly at these things, so I'm glad that it comes with answers. I think I might do better with larger images, but it's still fun.

Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen are interviewed on Fresh Air about Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up. See also this bunch of interviews etc. in Wired.

TechCrunch sez Facebook is the It website, the new Google: "Much of what we know as 'Web 2.0' will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook." The story here is the launch of Facebook Platform, which integrates all kinds of other functionality--Twitter, Last.fm, etc.--into one's Facebook page. Read all about it at the Facebook blog. It seems now that the age barrier is crumbling as old folks flock to the site (e.g., see Jeff Jarvis's gushy thoughts). It's certainly not too late for you, old-timer latecomers.

Jimmy Wales is interviewed by Charlie Rose (beginning around 19:45) about the future of Wikipedia and the way money is made online. He compares Facebook and MySpace around 24-25 min., praising the former. He talks about open source around 27-28, praising Firefox in particular.

And there will soon be 300,000 books published in the USA each year, reports Publishers Weekly. One of these days, among these will be mine. I just signed a contract with Columbia UP for my volume on indie cinema, loosely based on my dissertation. Keep your eyes peeled.

5/29/2007

Among my summer projects are two book chapters, an article, and a move into a new house (just around the corner, but still). One of the book chapters is about the Coen brothers, so perhaps there will be Coen brothers blogging here in the next couple of months. But my attention has been elsewhere lately and will probably continue to be elsewhere for a little while. In the meantime, here are some links.

TV Squad has a description of the opening scenes of Veronica Mars season 4 that the producers shot for The CW to check out. The description suggests that Veronica would have been the only character on the reboot version of the show, basically an FBI procedural.

Tickle Me Elmo on Fire is disturbing.

Wikipedia on film noir is pretty good.

Jason has been blogging up a storm. Here he is on The Wire, Lost, the TV season's ratings, and Hollywood box office figures.

Henry Jenkins offers a Cultural Theory of YouTube.

5/20/2007

The unjustly maligned sequel is the topic of a virtual roundtable at the Bordwell-Thompson blog in which I am a participant along with other students and alumni of the film studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We answer such questions as "Are all sequels in the arts automatically second-rate?" and "Do sequels automatically equal predictability?" and "Are sequels part of a larger trend toward serial narrative?" In short, no, no, and yes, but please do click over and read what we have to say. Here's a portion of my contribution.
In the contemporary era of media convergence, serialized storytelling is becoming a mainstay across media and genres. Serial narratives supposedly facilitate spreading franchises out across multiple platforms. The media franchise demands long-format storytelling that can be spun off in multiple iterations. The rise of sequels is a much larger issue than a bunch of directors trying to make lots of money or audiences having unadventurous tastes–sequel/serial franchises are a central business model in the media industry today, supported and encouraged by the structure of conglomeration and horizontal integration.

5/18/2007

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers. I'm terrible at these things but they're lotsa fun. I love when Clint Eastwood says, "blow your head clean off." That's #44 if you feel like ffwding.

Flickrvision is awesome.

Wikipedia: Films Considered the Worst Ever. Like much of Wikipedia, this entry has a strong bias toward the recent and the present, but this is still fun to look over.

Piz, a fictional character on Veronica Mars, is now a music critic for Pitchfork, as fluxblog points out. This has something to do with Piz's offer of an internship at p4rk in this week's ep and the show's being mistaken about the location of the website's offices. Also, Veronica is indeed dunzo. It was once great, and I have missed that Veronica for many months already. But seriously people, come September there will be dozens of new shows to watch, and at least a few of them won't suck.

Jonathan Gray in Flow: TV shows are boys and girls even before they're born.

The Onion: Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things.

"Indie Minute" is a newish column at College Humor: "It's pretty corporate to be indie- just because everyone is doing it. So, if you really want to be indie, you have to start shopping at Hollister, eating at Red Lobster and seeing movies at Showcase Cinemas." (via 'fiddle)

5/17/2007

Jason Sperb at Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope has written a review of an essay by Julia Lesage in Jump Cut about web 2.0 tools for film and media scholarship (especially social bookmarking and blogging.) I left a comment there, so click over if you want more thoughts on that.

Chris Cagle (whose own blog is Category D) has responded in a separate post at Dr. Mabuse with some thoughts about blogs, including a taxonomy of the functions of academic film blogs: 1. Scholarship; 2. Popularization; 3. Heterodoxy; 4. Film Culture. Scholarship refers to blogging that is basically the promotion of traditional work, or that takes its form. Popularization presents scholarly work to a non-expert audience. Heterodoxy uses blogging as a way of exploring scholarly concerns that don't find a place within established institutions of scholarly discourse. And film culture engages with cinema on lay terms, i.e., on the same terms as non-scholarly blogs.

I would add another kind of taxonomy: in general blogs combine two features, prose and links. As prose, blogs can take the form or reviews, polemics, expository writing, etc. Scholarly blogs can adopt the prose style of scholarly These forms can include links, but blogs can also function in a way that makes the links the main event. Blogs function as filters when a blogger makes a habit of scanning news, blogs, calls for papers, viral videos, whatever, and blogs the ones he or she finds interesting. Some people find this stuff more useful than others (I can't get enough of it), but just about all bloggers do it sometimes. I see filtering as potentially scholarly (calls for papers) and potentially "film culture" (passing along news items) and often a cross between the two, especially when one studies such things as viral videos and the contemporary media industries. (You might think of this entry as filtering since its main purpose is to point out a pair of blog posts elsewhere.)

In addition to these categories, I think it's useful to see the function of blogging in terms of what it offers us that other forms of publishing do not. Scholarly blogs do several things better than journals, conference presentations, and books:
  • they respond to current events as they happen and follow no schedule but the blogger's
  • they have the potential to speak in a more authentic, spontaneous voice
  • they allow for the cultivation of an individual's persona and allow for the reader to follow that persona day by day
  • they are networked to other writers by hyperlink
  • they have comments and links that allow for instant reader feedback
  • they are not subject to any formal process of editing or review
  • they are available to anyone who is interested for free
As scholarship or conversation or filtering or personal journal, blogs by academics have the possibility to do things that traditional publishing can't do. But one thing that really excites me about blogging is that it can bridge the gap between scholarly and popular writing. As it happens, people who study media professionally and people who write about it professionally or just for kicks have many common interests. Blogs allow us to explore them together, and this has the potential to extend media scholarship beyond the often insular world of academia and assert its relevance. It also allows the scholar to write in a less formal style, and it's fair to say that scholarly writing stands to benefit from this.

5/15/2007

Gilmore Girls says goodbye tonight. The buzz about the final episode is bad. This NPR story is appreciative but pretty superficial and a little patronizing. Todd VanDerWerff at The House Next Door is much more thoughtful; he calls GGs "a vision of what we might like America to be -- a kind, loving place where everyone’s got something funny to say."

WSJ: the media industries are currying favor with bloggers in hopes of positive publicity. A nice description here about the producers of The New Adventures of Old Christine inviting "mommy bloggers" to their set. This would be the flipside to the controversy (prev.) about blogs challenging traditional criticism. Oh, those blogs! (via ehlevine)

CinemaTech: YouTube should share revenue with everyone, not just the A-list.

Top ten Star Wars t-shirts. (I like Chewy as Che.)

And if you're in Williamsburg, NY, in June you might want to look in on the Brick Theater's Pretentious Festival ("the most important theater festival on earth"), which is to include a production described as follows:
The Children of Truffaut thrusts eight characters drawn from 70's Continental cinema into a game of arousal, angst, bluster, pontification, and whimsy. Godard, Fassbinder, Fellini, and Tarkovsky each provide the atmospheric starting point for a male/female unit. Once the pairs are spawned, though, pretty much anything goes, especially transgression, nostalgia, and love. This ain't yer momma's arthouse—unless your momma is the lovechild of Marcello Mastroianni and Hanna Schygulla. In which case, I'd like to meet her. (75 min)


5/11/2007

The OMG of the week is this French YouTube video of people throwing cans in the trash. The "it's fake!" response doesn't diminish the OMG effect very much for me. So what? See also Guy catches glasses with face.

Big Love will air three flashback shorts in anticipation of its new season, first on On Demand and later on the web and on the regular HBO. My question for all such things is, if they are inessential for understanding the narrative of a series itself--and they have to be inessential because HBO is not going to risk the vast majority of viewers' incomprehension--why should I watch? I watched the BSG miniature New Caprica episodes and didn't know what to do with them. This kind of storytelling seems to be so much more driven by the desire to try out new distribution systems and media platforms than by a need to tell certain kinds of stories.

A review and appreciation of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at PopMatters makes clear just how impressive this work is, a shot-by-shot fanvid remaking Raiders done by kids in the early 80s without the aid of a VCR. They relied on memory and research and found many creative solutions to problems of recreating a blockbuster using the resources available to amateurs.

And two blog threads I meant to link to earlier in the week...better late than never:

1. I haven't read all the comments, but a number of posts at Kristina Busse's blog about fandom, fanfic, gender, and related topics make clear how passionate media scholars are about their objects of study (see especially the one that got it started about a gender divide in fandom studies and a subsequent one about the validity of fanfic that gets pretty bitchy at the end of the comments).

2. Chuck has been tracking a discussion about whether film blogs are a threat to critics/professional writers or even whether they are just changing things for the worse (1, 2). Similar discussions have been going on for several years in various quarters. Foodbloggers have changed the way the public gets info about restaurants, especially in big cities. Litbloggers are killing book review sections. Lawprof bloggers jump on Supreme Court opinions the moment they are issued, bettering the analysis offered by journalists and rendering law reviews, which have slower publication schedules, irrelevant. If this is a fight, my money is on the bloggers. They write for free and with great passion, are networked to each other, engage directly with their readers, and have few of the limits on their creative output that constrain mainstream media. Indeed, the mainstream media may succeed by co-opting many of the bloggers' forms and functions.

5/10/2007

Friday Night Lights has been picked up for another season.

5/11: The Watcher has a few useful tidbits to add here. 1. She responds, "Yesssssss!" 2. She reminds us that repeats will begin airing May 27 and that the whole first season can still be viewed online. 3. She encourages loyal viewers to proselytize on behalf of the show. So here goes: This show is awesome and I guarantee that you will love it if you just give it a chance!

5/08/2007

Television Endings and the Infinity Model

Update 5/10: The Hollywood Reporter sez Veronica Mars is likely to get a 4th season flashing forward four years, as previously rumored. This resonates with my point at the end of this post: shows about teenagers have a tough time transitioning to post-adolescence. This kind of series reset would be a novel solution to that problem.

Update a while after that: obvs, this didn't come to pass. Too bad...or maybe not.


Some TV news in the past week--Gilmore Girls is finished, Lost has an endgame--has seemed to confirm again that the aesthetic and economic goals of television production can be at odds. Both will end at least in part because they have come, or will have come, to a point at which the story profits more from concluding than continuing. But from the perspective of the networks, there is never any reason for a good show to end. Jason has called this the "infinity model" of television programming, and I like that term a lot. It's what I meant when I wrote a few weeks ago, in relation to Veronica Mars, that fans want their favorite shows to be love affairs that last forever and a day. Here fans and networks sometimes have a common interest in never having to say goodbye.

But of course there are other interests, namely those of the people who make television shows. In the case of both GGs and Lost, the network might not have wanted to see an end point, but the producers hold the power here. Network TV earns its income from selling ads, so it always needs content to attract viewers. But the creative labor, the cast and crew of a show, earns its income from a contract with a production company, and contractors have to decide what work to take on the basis not only of what will pay, but also of what will benefit a career and provide satisfaction. Satisfaction comes not only from earning income but also doing good work. The decision to end these shows is a product more than anything of this creative decision-making. But this also follows business logic. For TV producers, success is measured in profit from syndication, and both GGs and Lost will go off the air with a handsome syndication package. For whatever reason, the industry still believes that 100 episodes is the magic number for syndication. Lost will pass that benchmark in its final season. Gilmore Girls will conclude with a syndication package of more than 170 episodes. In both cases, the creative personnel who decided that ending the show would be preferable to continuing it made a business decision, not just a creative one. They have decided: this has earned us, or will have earned us, enough. Time for something else. (And yes, the new media landscape includes other revenue from online distribution and DVD sales, and in the case of Lost, all kinds of ancillaries. But we don't really know yet the extent to which these sources are significant economically relative to syndication.)

Jason makes the good point that having a finite narrative structure can be aesthetically advantageous in the kind of contemporary complex serialized narratives he has written about, of which Lost is a key instance. But the same might be said of shows like Gilmore Girls, which is not a mystery-fantasy-sci-fi program, and which doesn't really need to end to be dramatically satisfying. Shows like GGs that center around kids might benefit from having a finite narrative structure because their basic thematic material has to shift considerably when the characters grow up. Gilmore Girls was a show about a precocious 15 year-old and her hip single mom who are more like BFFs than mother and daughter. On a fundamental level, the show lost this cute, appealing premise when Rory grew up, moved away, and started getting drunk and stealing yachts and having sex. It was possible to extend the narrative into her young adulthood and it would be possible to keep it going until she gets old and dies. The visual style, the acting, the dialogue, the supporting characters are all still there, more or less. But it may not be aesthetically desirable to keep it going when the main characters are no longer the same. Likewise, Veronica Mars was much better when it was about class division in a high school setting. The show has lost its dramatic center in this third season as the characters have shifted to college and the conflict has lost its core meanings. This problem will always affect shows about teenagers. They have to renegotiate the contract with the audience in later seasons as the characters become adults. We still watch and they can still be watchable, but something is lost in the process. As I have said before, this is one reason My So-Called Life and Freaks & Geeks live on so purely in our memories. They never had to face this inexorable progress of time, and remain fixed in their original states.

At the top of my wishlist for Fall '07 is another full season of Friday Night Lights. But I fear for FNL if it gets too successful. The actors already look old to be playing teenagers. (This is a basic convention of American television, but still.) The show is about high school football and won't shift very naturally to college. Much as I love it, I don't know that it could still be good after several more years. Still, I'd like to see for myself.

Characterization in American Independent Cinema

A couple of years ago I wrote a PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison called Characterization in American Independent Cinema. In it, I argued that characterization in cinema is a process of social cognition, much like our ordinary process of making sense of others in our everyday lives, and further applied this approach to thinking about characterization to an analysis of how indie films make character a central appeal of their storytelling. I'm now in the middle of turning this into a book. In the process, I am losing much of the theoretical discussions of characterization and adding some new parts about independent cinema's forms, institutions, and culture. I hope to make the cognitivist characterization portions into another book someday that is broader than just indie cinema (and broader than just cinema, for that matter), after I get the chance to do more systematic research into issues in social psychology that I still need to know more about. I decided to focus more on the indie stuff now mainly because it seemed that way more people are interested in it, and it excites me more to write a book that people want to read.

Occasionally people ask me to send them chapters of the diss, and I thought it might be a good idea to publish it on the internet, especially since the more theoretical portions aren't going to see the light of day in any other form in the near future. So I have uploaded the chapters to Scribd. Here are links, with brief additional info:

Title page

Chapter 1: Introduction (Headings: pg. 1 Independent Cinema and Character; pg. 4 Character, Person, and Self; pg. 17 A Cognitive Theory of Characterization: Intuitive and Counterintuitive; pg. 21 Character and Characterization; pg. 27 What About Subjective Narration?; pg. 34 Making Sense of American Independent Cinema [I would start reading here if you're into indie cinema but not so much into cognitive film theory]; pg 36 Auteurs, Spririts, etc.; pg. 39 Hollywood/ Off-Hollywood, Art Cinema/Independent Cinema; pg. 43 Viewing Strategies; pg. 66 Conclusion.)

Chapter 2: Typing (This chapter is about how we categorize characters into myriad types; Headings: pg. 77 Traits and Types; pg. 85 Stereotypes; pg. 93 Social and Genre Types; pg. 99 Typing in Process: Passion Fish; pg. 112 Conclusion. Some of the ideas in this chapter turn up again in an article I wrote for a special issue of Film Criticism on complex narratives, "Character and Complexity in American Independent cinema: Passion Fish and 21 Grams" [pdf].)

Chapter 3: Mindreading (This chapter is about how we predict and explain the behavior of characters by inferring mental states such as beliefs and desires--some experts call this mindreading. Headings: pg. 116 Mindreading: Character Psychology Inferences and Judgments; pg. 121 Folk Psychology; pg. 135 Causal Attribution; pg. 151 Heuristics of Social Judgment; pg. 157 Conclusion: Mindreading in American Independent Cinema.)

Chapter 4: Emotion Expressions (This one begins with a quotation from Fritz Lang that I really like, which reads in part, "Film has revealed to us the human face with unexampled clarity in its tragic as well as grotesque, threatening as well as blessed expression." Headings: pg. 163 Character Emotions; pg. 164 The Face; pg. 169 The Voice; pg. 172 Emotion Expressions: A Closer Look; pg. 176 Problems in Expression Recognition; pg. 182 Emotion Expressions in Film; pg. 186 Facial Expressions in the Construction of Character: Welcome to the Dollhouse and Hard Eight; pg. 196 Conclusion: Combining Appeals. Some of the ideas in this chapter, along with some of the preceding one, found their way into an article in Film Studies: An International Review, "Characterization as Social Cognition in Welcome to the Dollhouse" [pdf].)

Chapter 5: Characterization in Style (I argue in this chapter, among other things, that all audiovisual technique in a narrative film can be understood to have a characterizing function. I doubt that my advisor really buys this idea but he never put up a fuss about it. Headings: pg. 203 The Challenge of Style; pg. 204 Style and Character in History; pg. 212 Characterizing in Style: Story and Self; pg. 226 Levels of Characterization in Style; pg. 242 Style and Character in Todd Haynes' Safe; pg. 260 Conclusion.)

Chapter 6: Infinite Variety: Variables of Characterization (In this chapter I offer a typology of characterization variables along three axes, depth, complexity,and change. I argue, counterintuitively, that independent cinema characters or characterizations are often shallow rather than deep, straightforward rather than complex, and static rather than changing. One way of creating interesting characters is by keeping the audience at a distance from them, forbidding us access to their psychology, and refusing to have them follow the typical Hollywood hero's trajectory toward self-knowledge and revelation. Headings: pg. 268 Round and Flat; pg. 274 Narration and Characterization; pg. 277 Variable 1: Depth; pg. 294 Variable 2: Complexity; pg. 310 Variable 3: Change; pg. 324 Conclusion.)

Conclusion

5/07/2007

Lauren Graham talks to TV Guide's Michael Ausiello about deciding to end Gilmore Girls. If you love the show, prepare to shed tears. She talks about her mixed feelings about this season, about the loss of Amy Sherman-Palladino from the creative team, about romantic-triangle storytelling, and about her feelings about cast members. She's very candid, very Lauren Graham.

Meanwhile, we will soon know more about next fall's schedule. If you just can't wait for it, see Deadline Hollywood's scoop-y, dish-y prime-time pilot handicapping. (No mention there of The Return of Jezebel James--is it for midseason?)

5/06/2007

Irony, Sincerity, and Fountains of Wayne



In the video for "Someone to Love," the first single from Fountains of Wayne's new album Traffic and Weather, the tropes of early MTV are reheated with that mix of affectionate nostalgia and gentle mockery that has come to define so much of contemporary culture as it re-circulates the images, sounds, and narratives of the past. The video for "Someone to Love" tells a story about a boy and a girl--exactly the story told by the lyrics. When Fountains sing of a woman spending an hour in the shower or a man working as a lawyer, that's exactly what we get. For the choruses the band lipsyncs on a television in a character's apartment against stylized colored lights, and that's about as cheesy a device as you'll find in music video. Like the band's only real hit, "Stacy's Mom," the video for this new song tries to play to two audiences: young people with no memory of the first crop of MTV videos, for whom the text plays straight, and aging hipsters of the band's vintage who get that they're a stylish, knowing knockoff of the early 80s new wave pop sound and recognize the slight goofiness of these video homages--especially the excessive Lolita-meets-Fast Times iconography of "Stacy's Mom." In an interview about "Stacy's Mom," Schlesinger talks about the very specific early 80s sounds they're after, including Rick Springfield and The Cars. He even calls it ripping off, though he obviously means that in the nicest possible way.



Fountains of Wayne's music is a perfect blend of sincerity and sendup, with moments of honest pathos passing imperceptibly into revival style that goes a bit too far. On the new album, the rhythm guitar over the percussive piano line of "Yolanda Hayes" is straight out of a Joe Jackson intro ca. Stepping Out, while the panting vocals over a sexy bouncing synth line in "Someone to Love" might segue any second into "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" (...baby right round round round). Adam Schlesinger is an ace at dreaming up songs that make you smile even as you cringe a little, as he has done in composing for films like That Thing You Do! and Music and Lyrics. The whine of Chris Collingwood's voice works well with Schlesinger's sad sack suburban themes in songs for Fountains of Wayne. The lead characters in "Someone to Love" are lonely twentysomething New Yorkers who need each other but fail to connect. The narrator of the wistful "Hackensack," off the band's previous effort, Welcome Interstate Managers, pines for a high school classmate who became successful in showbiz while he remained stuck in his hometown working for his dad. I'm sure Schlesinger doesn't mean to be putting anybody down, but his portraits of post-adolescent white middle-class angst are basically about what his life might have been like had he not found himself some success as an indie rocker. In other words, they can come off as gloating.

A tension between irony and sincerity is a tone that we find now too frequently in rock music, television, film, and other pop culture. All forms are indebted to the past, but in a genre like indie music where authenticity counts for a ton, reviving an old form with low authenticity, like early 80s AM radio pop, requires a smirking suggestion of being in on a joke. (This is different from, say, Billy Joel adopting 50s doo-wop style in "Uptown Girl"--these two things were on the same level, more or less, authenticity-wise.) And yet Fountains of Wayne clearly adore the music of their youth. They don't love it in spite of its cheesiness--either they don't find it cheesy, or more likely cheese is part of what they love. The influential Tarantino school of cultural appropriation exploits a similar contradiction between affectionate and parodic relations toward one's nostalgic fixations. To some leftist critics of corporate culture (e.g., Naomi Klein), the ironic consumption of corporate kitsch is an exercise in bad faith. But the acceptance of debased commercial entertainment as aesthetically legitimate can be quite liberating. It allows for the honest appreciation of the things mass audiences really love even when they are "guilty pleasures" and it celebrates the people's taste. Further, it decouples critical appreciation of culture from a kind of economic formalism that dictates that the creative output of corporate culture industries are less authentic or legitimate than other kinds of culture simply by virtue of their origins in exploitative business practices.

"So bad it's good" is a put-down. It's an arrogant, cynical stance. The key to appreciating a culturally delegitimated form is to own it, to insist on appreciation that avoids mockery or derision, to stand up for your taste. In a better world there would be no guilty pleasures-- just pleasures. I think the Fountains guys get that. I don't know if their fans do, too, though. Popular sentiment seems to be that the band could be doing so much more with their talent (e.g., a 3.0 rating Pitchfork review--which might actually be evidence of artistic triumph). I hope this isn't code for "stop reviving early 80s crap."

5/04/2007

At the end of this Techcrunch article about Flickr replacing Yahoo! Photo, it mentions that Flickr users will soon be able to upload videos. Not sure what to make of this at the rumor stage, but it could mean some pretty significant changes for both Flickr and web video. Imagine how different YouTube would be with Flickr's interface, its greater/better social affordances, and its generally more civilized community standards. Stay tuned.

5/03/2007



Gilmore Girls is cancelled. The statement issued by The CW and Warner Bros. television reads, "This series helped define a network and created a fantastic, storybook world featuring some of television's most memorable, lovable characters." That's true. Seven years is enough and the show has gone off the rails from time to time this season, but it will be hard to say goodbye to our friends from Stars Hollow. The last ep airs May 15.

5/02/2007

My So-Called Life to return to DVD, but what about the extras? (via)

The CW: has the sum been less than the parts?

Does 24 need reinvention?

Do sweeps periods still matter?

Google: ready for a fight?

Perez: past the tipping point?

American Gladiators nostalgia, anyone?

Finally, this map of online communities is my favorite thing of the day.

5/01/2007

Pulp Muppets! Ok, so John Travolta is the logical Kermit and Uma Thurman can only be Miss Piggy. But I wasn't expecting Bruce Willis to be Beaker. (via MeFi) Bonus: Beaker sings "Memories."

4/30/2007

MiT5 wrapped up yesterday and it was an exhausting but really exciting weekend of scholarly exchange. I kept some tabs on events as they transpired on Twitter, which was fun (though some attendees seem to have resented the divided attention of laptop-enhanced participants). I have been enjoying reading blogs about attendees' conference experiences, including those by Derek, Jill, Chuck, Axel, and Jason.

Perhaps I'll write some more about the conference in the coming days. In the meantime, there are a few photos at my Flickr.

Update 5/1: Jean Burgess (who I heard give an excellent paper at MiT5 about Flickr and vernacular creativity) blogs about issues around Twittering the conference and the "continuous partial attention" that this requires:
As far as I could see over people’s shoulders, and certainly in my own case, most of the time the twitterers were using their laptops and the internet to annotate, share, get background on, critique, and fact-check the papers they were listening to - and yes, they were also sometimes ‘playing around’ and socialising.
The question to me is not only whether this parallel communication is a distraction from the conference presentation--it is and it isn't--but whether it's disrespectful to the person giving the paper. I don't think it is. My mind wanders all the time during conference panels. I find it hard to attend to every word of three or four papers consecutively, so I zone out for moments, scan the conference program, doodle, think about other things. Having a computer in front of me filled these times in addition to allowing me to annotate, share, etc. I don't see the harm in that. All the computer does is makes people's already partial and intermittent attention visible.

And: My paper is now available in PDF form at the conference website. Or you can download it right here: "The Community as Artist: The Show with Ze Frank."

4/27/2007

MiT5 kicked off this afternoon and I made it to parts of two plenaries and the entirety of two breakout sessions. Among several good papers I heard was Derek Johnson's on historicizing transmedia storytelling and media franchises. Derek was challenging Henry Jenkins's use of the term "transmedia" while Henry Jenkins was in the audience. That was my favorite part of the day.

My paper on web video and community-based authorship is tomorrow. As for today, here are some more impressions, bullet-point bloggy-style.

-Studying media in transition is shooting a moving target. So many of the speakers here seem to be trying to grapple with ongoing events, with shifting terrain and inchoate discourses, and some even concern themselves with forecasting future trends, which seems to me to go beyond the scholarly mandate of media studies. Studying an ongoing process is not easy, and it makes me wonder whether it might make better sense to wait awhile before writing about what's happening now. This actually makes me feel good about my major non-new-media project on independent cinema, which I think of as a book about something that has already happened rather than something that is developing as I write. (Of course independent cinema continues to develop, but it's also something that has taken shape over the years and assumed a fairly stable identity.)

-There are more open laptops here than I have ever seen at a conference, and from what I can tell from snooping over people's shoulders, most are being used in multitasking fashion, to read e-mail or have encounters in Second Life or scan RSS feeds while at the same time paying attention to a speaker. Just like my undergrads Facebooking in class.

-M.I.T.'s buildings are numbered as well as named, and so looking for your next panel means searching for E-15 or 4-253. This is confusing.

-At dinner I had clam chowder. I'm the kind of person who orders clam chowder in Boston, cuz that's what you do.

For more on MiT5, see Jill's blog. She's keeping track of various Twitter and blog responses to the conference. More to come.

[update 4/28: Jason has a more thorough discussion of the two panels we both attended yesterday.]

4/23/2007



"The World Series of Uno" is the only web video I've seen lately that really excited me. Either there's a lull or I'm losing interest. Either way, blogging will continue to be light here for the near future.

I'm going to be at the MiT5 Conference this coming weekend in Cambridge, MA, so hope to see you there if you're planning on attending. (My paper is called "The Community as Artist: The Show with Ze Frank" and it will be posted to the conference website.) In the meantime, you can find me at Fraktastic, Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us. And please check out some of the excellent sites in my blogroll. ttyl.

4/17/2007

CNN has the Widest Screens

CNN

If this were my face, I'd be pissed. Why is this image (of a Virginia Tech student) being presented in this format? The 16x9 aspect ratio on CNN's online video player is presumably to accommodate widescreen footage in its original ratio. But when showing 4x3 footage, CNN uploads distorted 16x9 stretched to fit? It looks awful. Does the whole world really not notice? Is the impressiveness of filling the frame really so much more important than preserving the dignity of the subject? Here's another:

CNN

For comparison's sake, I looked at NBC news online at MSNBC. The player might be 16x9 but it preserves the 4x3 ratio when appropriate. Perhaps it's significant that this is a shot of a highly-paid anchor--they have a disincentive to make his appearance unappealing by stretching it horizontally.

NBC

And here's another comparison, to the online version of the NBC drama Heroes. Here the player is 4x3 and the original image is widescreen. The familiar letterboxing preserves the integrity of the subject.

NBC

4/16/2007

Happy Days Season 2 on DVD, which is available in the U.S. + Canada tomorrow, is being released with much of its original music replaced by generic muzak. Of about 50 original songs used in that season, just five have been retained. "Rock Around the Clock" has been replaced as the theme song with "Happy Days," which they started to use beginning season 3. "Blueberry Hill" appears once but it is omitted several other times.

It was only when reading through the list of omissions when I really realized how vital pop songs were to establishing Happy Days's setting. Some of the missing cuts on the DVD are "I'm Walking" by Fats Domino, "Wake Up Little Susie" by the Everly Brothers, "Sh-Boom" by the Crew Cuts, "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin, and "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley. Just hearing these titles I start to see those 1970s blue checkerboard wipes from the Cunninghams' living room to the booth at Arnold's. I have probably watched more episodes of Happy Days than any other show in the history of television--I probably watched two episodes a day for about ten years--and the very idea of it missing these songs fills me with longing and regret. Releasing it without these bits of music would be like reproducing The Last Supper with a couple of Apostles missing.

As with the release of WKRP in Cincinnati on DVD, original music could have been licensed, but the distributor would have had to pay a steep price. The problem of licensing music for DVD highlights one of the excesses of copyright law. A more rational system might set a statutory rate for reuse of music in a television program released on DVD, just as radio stations pay statutory royalties to play songs. But obvs, our system wasn't designed to be maximally fair and the rights holder basically holds its content ransom. On the other hand, the distributor could charge more for the DVD and spend the extra cash on rights. But the market wouldn't support a very expensive Happy Days release. As Something Old, Nothing New notes, the first season DVD of HD did have all the orig music licensed, and it sold badly and lost money. The major media industries aren't in the business of preserving cultural heritage, alas.

No one gets rights from this video...yet, anyhow. It's "Yakety Yak" by The Coasters, performed at the Beacon Theater in New York in 1980 (followed by some super-cheesy stage shtick and then their even bigger hit, "Charlie Brown").

4/13/2007

Variety reports on the digital camera's effects on acting. The ability to shoot continuously without worrying about wasting film, without having to call "roll sound" and "action" and "cut," is initiating a shift in the creative process of making films. The author of the piece, David S. Cohen, interviews Mel Gibson and Tony Bill, who have both recently shot films on digital cameras (Apocalypto and Flyboys, respectively).

Bill:
For 100 years of acting on film, actors have had to cope with several technical limitations...they had to rehearse the scene before they shoot it. Then, once shooting begins, they have to act between reloads.

[...]

they have to act when the camera is running, not when it's not running. They're always aware there's film running through the camera, which is a tremendous burden for an actor, whether they know it or not.

[...]

This is going to change the way films are made, the way directors relate to actors, and the way actors relate to the camera. I think this will change acting as much as the Method changed acting.
And Gibson:
It just gives you a little more room to experiment, to explore, to talk, and you're not burning this precious stock that's very expensive and runs out. It would have been a tragedy to burn all that film talking to them.
The article goes on to describe the experience of Marley Shelton, who acted in both halves of Grindhouse. Rodriguez's portion was shot on video, and Tarantino's was shot on film. Shelton describes the difference in these processes. Rodriguez would gather actors around the playback monitor and everyone would watch the takes together. Tarnatino's style is more traditional.

Cohen begins by announcing a revolution in acting style, but it seems from the description of the changes that what's really at stake is a directing style as much as an acting style, a new way for filmmakers to collaborate with their actors. I would still love to know more about how the finished product might be different. A matter for future research, for sure.

And another question: isn't the same thing happening in some television productions? Peter Berg and Jason Katims have discussed similar creative situations on the set of Friday Night Lights, and a big part of the spontaneous, natural, partly improvised aesthetic of that show comes from shooting in this more casual setup, with multiple cameras running continuously. (For instance, see the description of the filming of FNL at Wikipedia.) And yet, as far as I know, FNL is shot on film. Maybe there's more to this new style of shooting than just a technological innovation?

(via CinemaTech)

4/12/2007


Things I love about "Ode to Zach Braff": the domestic mise en scene, the lip-synching, the piano playing, the cable-knit sweater, the line about the ATM PIN, the line about MySpace, the surgical scrubs, the "ZB for eva" tattoo, when the guy calls Zach "dog," and the whole casual faux gay panic thing. Pretty much everything. (The same creative folks made the much less tasteful Man's Best Friend With Benefits.)
NYT: "Not all is well with the Weinstein Company."

Slate is a-Twitter.

Jimmy Kimmel 1, Gawker 0.

Recently on Fresh Air: Jake Kasdan, Mike White, Peter Berg.

Ken Levine reports from the studio audience of Tuesday nite's Idol. Snarky but appreciative. Lisa de Moraes's WaPo blog is lively reading, too, if you're into this stuff.

And if it's in your power, please make these things go away asap: Imus, O'Reilly, the blogger code of conduct, Daniellyn, and Justin.tv.

4/10/2007

Grindhouse flops! People who care about such things as who wins the weekly popularity contest called Box Office (I do care, just a little) are formulating their explanations for why the audience stayed away from a movie that seemed like such a sure thing. Harvey Weinstein himself offers some answers. The movie was too long. The audience, especially in flyover country, didn't get the concept. Both are probably factually true, but as explanations I'm not so sure. Did the grindhouse films of the 1970s earn boffo b.o.? Maybe the Grindhouse audience-that-wasn't did get the concept and expected crapola because the film was promoted as schlocky. Call this the so-bad-it's-bad explanation. Maybe. I haven't seen the film, so I really shouldn't opine. I will anyway.

Explaining why people go to see a movie is hard enough. Explaining why they do not see a movie is a mug's game. It has always vexed me that we generally assume a movie is popular because people like it, and unpopular because they don't. But you can't know that you'll like a movie until you have seen it, at which point you have already paid your money. Movies that are unpopular could potentially please lots of people, but they can't know that until they pay their $8. This is different from many other cultural experiences. We rarely buy music recordings without having heard some of them first. We rarely watch TV shows regularly that we have not already tuned into and liked.

With the impossibility of really knowing the motivations of millions of non-viewers in mind, here are some more reasons why a film like Grindhouse might fail:
-No big name stars. Regardless of how hot they are on the cover of Rolling Stone, Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson don't open movies big.
-No clearly identifiable, bankable genre. Sorry, postmodern pastiche don't count. Neither does horror anthology.
-No pre-sold property (adaptation from a book or game, say).
-A confusing poster that makes the film seem like a revival (this is the point, but not everyone will get it).
-A title that doesn't refer to the content of the movie and that has to be explained to audiences at every opportunity. If you need to have it explained, that means you don't get it.
-The reviews. The fake trailers and the QT feature were generally well received, but few critics gave the Rodriguez feature a very positive notice, and...
-You have to sit through Planet Terror to get to Death Proof. This is a violation of a basic rule of double-feature programming: you snag the audience with the better film first, and keep them around to watch a weaker film with second billing.
-Most of the key moviegoing demographic, people my age and younger, is too young to have seen movies in grindhouses. The film tries to tap into nostalgia for something we don't remember. 70s retro is so, so dunzo.

Now for the explanations that smell to me like baloney:
-Too long. Long movies do well all the time.
-Easter weekend. Easter weekend is for family films. Yeah, and the studios used to avoid bringing out big new movies in the summer. I don't believe that people are so constrained by Easter weekend obligations as to avoid a movie they really want to see.
-There's something wrong with the audience--they're playing it safe, they're timid, they can't spot quality, etc. Joe Carnahan, who you might know as the director of the QT-manqué Smokin' Aces, writes in his blog:
What is wrong with American moviegoers? Is there nothing NEW that they're willing to embrace? Jesus, it's the worst kind of erosion. We're making dumber and dumber films and they're becoming cash cows. God Bless '300', at least it's got balls and the director WENT for it. THAT movie is good for the business, it's good for everybody. But some of these other flicks don't even TRY because they know in the end, EXACTLY the age range and demographic driving ticket prices these days. Those monstrosities (the names of which I won't mention) are pure pieces of commerce, marketed to perfection.
Kids these days, whatevs. I've seen Blades of Glory, which won the weekend, and it's a competent, funny movie with a strong cast and a decent script. It's no Miracle of Morgan's Creek, but then Smokin' Aces ain't exactly The Godfather, is it?

Keep reading, movie fans: Mojo, Film Threat, Variety, Vidiocy, Poland, MovieJuice, MovingPictureBlog.

4/08/2007

An Inconvenient Truth, which we watched last night on DVD, is supposed to be a movie about global warming. But its true subject is Al Gore, and everything in it engineers our deep regret that Gore did not become the American president in 2001. He would have been so good at the job, the film implies. He's so smart, so thoughtful, so empathic and hardworking. And how much we pity him now, shlepping his own suitcase through airport concourses as he tours the world offering up his modest slideshow. In essence, An Inconvenient Truth is an extended opportunity for counterfactual musing: if Gore had been present, would there have been a War on Terror, or even a 9/11? Would there have been a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, or even a Hurricane Katrina? The genius of the film is to connect our sense of urgency about global warming to the tragic loss of Gore--to make the 2000 election a narrative not only of Gore's personal loss, and not only America's, but all of humanity's.

There are passages in the film that actually have nothing to do with climate. Gore's childhood split between Washington and Tennessee. His son's injury at age six. His sister's death from lung cancer. They serve to humanize the speaker, to add to his credibility. He tries to connect them to his own journey toward greater knowledge about global warming and his efforts to do something about it, but ultimately they are there to characterize Gore and make us feel for him. They serve the argument by serving the person delivering it. I wasn't expecting the film to be so much about Gore, but this puts in perspective all the joking at the Oscars about his possible candidacy for president in 2008. It seems unlikely today, but if he decides to enter the race, An Inconvenient Truth will retroactively become a kind of campaign ad. And it has some of the flavor of a campaign ad in the way it positions the politician as a sympathetic regular guy, a good listener as well as a good speaker, and a family man.

The film ends with little messages in text interspersed among the credits encouraging spectators to reduce their carbon emissions, take public transit, drive hybrid cars, get an energy audit, etc. These are the only words in the film that do not come from Gore's voice, and they function to turn the film's ideas away from Gore's collective rhetoric--"we did this, now we can change"--toward an individualistic rhetoric--"you can do this and that." These messages undermine the film's agenda on two levels. First, the solution to global warming, like any massive social change, must come not only from individuals but from institutions, and emphasizing individual responsibility makes the need for political and corporate solutions seems relatively less urgent. More importantly, it takes the last word away from the film's true subject and makes him seem like just a spokesman. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is not just a spokesman--he's a character, a protagonist. The film tells the story of our role in changing the planet, but also Gore's role in coming to the point that he made a movie about climate rather than assuming the public office that might have given him the power to achieve something more direct. Whether he would really, practically, have been so empowered had history turned a different page in December, 2000, is another matter, and one the film doesn't consider.

4/07/2007

Ira Glass on Charlie Rose (begins around 32:00). I'm still not used to seeing Glass's face when I hear him speak.

4/05/2007

Virginia summarizes the Sopranos summary on YouTube (prev.), paying tribute to the art of the found footage video. It's great that the Grey Lady now publishes regular, respectful reviews of amateur videos posted online. Good for them. But the cycle of cool video surfaces → MSM story gives the background is getting a little predictable, and it makes recognition from the established press a kind of endorsement of value. Of course, it's the reverse of how the industrially-produced media generally work, which is for the audience to get the context (reviews, interviews, publicity, ads), then the text. It helps to have context to understand the text. But so much of what makes these online videos exciting is their very lack of context, their lack of standard valuation.

Now perhaps some able reporter can work on this story for next week: who is behind this inspired recreation of Do The Right Thing with Fisher-Price Sesame Street Toys?
A few music links:

Ze Frank's songs have been made available from iTunes as an album. (via)

Via Stereogum: new Amy Winehouse-Pharaohe Monche remix of her excellent single "Rehab"; new Rufus Wainright track at Hard to Find a Friend.

If you have used Last.fm, you can find out here How Mainstream Are You? I'm 38% mainstream.

4/03/2007

Allessandra Stanley in the NYT offers a baggy Zeitgeist reading of American Idol's psychological appeal by relating it to our presidential electoral misadventures of the past few years. I don't have the energy to pick the whole thing over, and you can do it yourself if you're so inclined, but here is one bit that jumps out at me:
It cannot be a coincidence that television voting rights arose so soon after the 2000 election left slightly more than half the voting population feeling cheated. Those who didn’t go to the polls and fear that their abstention inadvertently made possible the invasion of Iraq may feel even worse. “Idol” could be a displacement ritual: a psychological release that allows people to vote — and even vote often — in a contest that has no dangerous or even lasting consequences.
Yeah, it can be a coincidence. As a rule, when a writer begins a point by denying a coincidence, you can be pretty sure that they're about to make an injudicious leap. And aside from the vacuousness of relating things so little connected, this argument makes no allowance for the large number of Idol voters who don't feel guilty about 2000 because they were too young to vote or because they never vote and don't care. And clearly to the fan, Idol has serious and lasting consequences. That's why people care about a vote-for-the-worst candidate prevailing.

Ah well. That's enough for now. Tonight's show was good. Tony Bennett was the guest coach so the songs were all standards, and the show is at an advantage when the kids have to sing good songs.

Update 4/5: Chris Cagle has some thoughts about how to do a symptomatic reading of reality TV and legitimation.
Random:

Hipster indie music snobs skewered
(via gf, who links to this video with nothing but the description "word document")

Last nite I saw The Host (scary monster!) and before it the trailer for Year of the Dog, which looks great. Has anyone compared The Host and Pan's Labyrinth? I'm too lazy to Google it, but there's certainly something there with young girls, disgusting creatures, and politically-themed global genre cinema. (See also, NYT profile of Molly Shannon.)

IHT on Helvetica, an appreciation of "a democratic luxury."

Wikipedia: Five-Second Rule.

NYMag on the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit is the best analysis I have read. Google, according to this account, has a kind of corporate Asperger's syndrome that makes it oblivious of other corporations and their psychology. (See also The Economist on Google and the future of books.)

The Chron picks its favorite campus prank web videos. (via a+l)

A sneak-peek at TV Guide's forthcoming web video portal/search. I always want to buy TV Guide at the supermarket, their covers are so appealing. But it always seems like a waste of money.

Sanjaya drops by Weekend Update
. I am so glad that the web has made it unnecessary for me to watch the 1:27 of SNL each week that isn't worth my time. I hope Sanjaya sticks around a few more weeks b/c he's more interesting TV than some of these other bland nobodies. I think he will. (See also Jenkins on idolhacking.)