Today I saw Whip It, the rollerderby movie directed by Drew Barrymore. It felt pretty ordinary to me, and would have been disappointing without the excellent Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Hardin. The critics generally liked (but didn’t love) it.
Confronted with a very rainy afternoon, I lingered for a couple of minutes in the lobby of the cinema. I looked over the eight movie posters in the lobby, and was surprised to see that five of the films they promoted had been directed by women. I snapped some bad photos on my iPhone, and made this unpretty collage:
Of those five films, three are mid-level Hollywood flicks, one is a Canadian indie and one is a feature-length documentary. How surprising is that result? In 2007, of the 13,000 members of the Directors Guild of America, only 7% are women. I don’t claim that my little lobby survey has any sort of authority, but it’s at least a little encouraging. The role of director has always struck as one of the last bastions of near-total male domination.
I’ll admit a little of my own sexism here: I was surprised to learn that best movie I saw all year, The Hurt Locker, was directed by a woman. Kathryn Bigelow has made a minor masterpiece in that movie. I wonder how many other war movies women have directed over the past fifty years?
Last night, courtesy of the Vancouver Comedy Festival, we watched George Strombopolous interview Steve Martin at the Orpheum Theatre. There was no particular framing around the evening–Martin wasn’t promoting a book or movie–just a reasonably informal chat in front of an adoring, apparently sold-out crowd.
I’m not a big fan of Strombopolous’s public persona, but he’s a reasonably capable interviewer. The conversation meandered through Martin’s youth, his stand-up career, his movies and other sundry pursuit–he’s a bit of a Renaissance Man.
Though I don’t consider myself a huge Steve Martin fan, I’ve actually consumed a ton of his work. I’ve seen most of his movies (excepting those made ‘for the whole family’) and at least one of his plays, and I’ve read both his novels and his autobiography. He writes charming, readable books, and his autobiography was a fascinating study of one artist’s mind.
Having read Martin’s autobiography, a number of his entertaining anecdotes were familiar to me. Still, it was a funny evening. After 35 or 40 years on-stage, he’s just an innately amusing performer. Looking dapper in a linen jacket and striped socks, he was kind of everyone’s funny uncle. Though I’ve never made this connection before, his physicality reminded me quite a bit of Alan Alda–skinny, white hair, all elbows and knees.
An Adoring Audience
And everyone else seemed to agree. I was surprised by the youthfulness of my fellow audience members. I wasn’t particularly scientific, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the audience was born after 1976, when Martin stopped regularly doing stand-up comedy. I saw a couple of my friends from the theatre community there, which seems natural, but I was, frankly, shocked at how many people paid $60 to $185 to watch Martin chat with Strombopolous and play a couple of bluegrass tunes on the banjo. And they were so smitten. They gave Martin a standing ovation when he walked out on stage.
Maybe it’s a supply and demand question: the opportunities to see him locally, in any guise, are pretty rare.
A significant chunk of the evening was given over to questions from the audience. As they always do, these ranged from the inane to the insightful, and people frequently started by gushing about how much they loved the comedian. I could have done without this. I’d rather watch a succinct, well-run 80 minute interview–I came to hear from Martin, not his fans.
My only technical complaint is that the sound seemed pretty poor. I was toward the back of the main floor of the house, but I often had to strain to hear what Martin and Strombopolous were saying. Strombopolous, in particular, is a bit of a mumbler. If that was the best the venue could do for amplification, they might have been better off not using microphones at all.
A few random quotes from the evening:
Martin described the movie poster for The Lonely Guy as “the worst movie poster ever made”. He’s right.
“3:00pm is the worst time for comedy.”
When asked, he admitted to occasionally reading the message boards on his website. He said, “if there was a discussion forum about you, wouldn’t you read it?”
Rebecca scored an interview with Canada’s boyfriend yesterday, in case you’re looking for more Strombopolousity.
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
Earlier this year, Alliance Films released “Polytechnique “, a French-Canadian movie based on the 1989 Montreal Massacre at the École Polytechnique. Here’s the trailer:
It’s been a busy year, and I’ve been living in indie-film-starved Victoria, but I totally missed this movie. Based on a few reviews and the trailer, I’m sorry to have not seen it in the cinema. Wikipedia indicates that, outside of Quebec, it was released in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Did anybody see it?
Also, is this the first movie about the Montreal Massacre? It’s interesting that it took 20 years to produce–the incident seems like natural fodder for the docudrama treatment. Consider, by contrast, that we’ve already seen a few (several, even?) 9/11 movies.
One other note: Wikipedia says that “there were two versions of the film produced, one in English and one in French.” I wonder what that means. Did they shoot every scene twice?
Looking at the film’s financials, we see the classic problem of telling Canadian stories to Canadians. “Polytechnique” had a $6 million budget, and box office revenue of only $1.6 million. There’s more money to be made in DVD sales and broadcast rights (or whatever they’re called), but the producers are never going to recoup their costs.
Yesterday I saw Inglourious Basterds [sic], Quentin Tarantino’s latest project. It’s an epic tale of World War II intrigue, assassination attempts and gory Jewish revenge fantasy. In style, it was typical Tarantino. The film began with a long, talky scene fraught with tension, and moved through the series of long set pieces we’ve come to expect from the director of Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction.
While I enjoyed Tarantino’s latest project, it left me feeling a little hollow inside. It really feels like the writer/director has utterly failed to develop as an artist. He’s technically astute, and has an incredible repertoire of film history in his head on which to draw. This seems to make him an incredible writer and director of individual scenes and set pieces. Inglourious Basterds, for example, begins with a fay Nazi officer interrogating a French farmer about some Jews he may or may not be concealing. Depending on how you feel, it’s an homage to or highly derivative of the work of Sergio Leone.
It’s a riveting scene, but, much like Kill Bill, it’s preceded by a title card that explains that this is ‘Chapter One’. Other title cards follow. See, Tarantino can’t seem to resist reminding us that we’re watching a film. And not just any film–one of his films. Hence the title cards, the self-aware performances his actors give, the conspicuous song choices, the film-within-a-film in this movie and so forth. They’re all post-modern tricks that felt very hip in 1994.
Today, his films feel like sweet confections with hollow centers. There’s nothing wrong with plain old entertainment, but I really wish Tarantino would explore some themes beyond ‘how cool is retro?’, ‘the world is full of sudden violence’ and ‘I am a master film aesthete’. Here’s a quote from Cannes that kind of sums up my frustration with Tarantino-as-egotist-auteur. It’s in response to a question about the title’s mispelling:
Here’s the thing: I’m never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to describe it, to explain it, would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place. Basquiat takes a letter ‘L’ from a hotel room door and sticks it on his painting. If he describes why he did it, he might as well not have done it at all. That’s my answer!”
Guess what, dude: you’re not Basquiat. I don’t actually mind his misspelling the title. It’s just that his films seem to reflect a kind of aesthetic snobbishness which I find frustrating.
On the weekend I watched District 9. In terms of pre-release buzz, creative marketing and a smallish budget ($30 million), it’s this summer’s “Blair Witch Project”. I’m still trying to reconcile how I feel about the movie, and how much I actually enjoyed it.
It’s a surprisingly difficult movie to categorize. It’s certainly a science-fiction movie. But it’s also, at various times, an obvious allegory for South African apartheid, a thriller, an action movie and, oddly, kind of a buddy flick. Director Neill Blomkamp (born in Johannesburg, but attended the Vancouver Film School and is still based here) draws on a lot of techniques from television news and documentaries. The first third of the film is constructed out of interviews and seen through the eyes of a camera crew following around the protagonist.
This technique, combined with effective CG work and naturalistic setting–the film was shot in Johannesburg’s sprawling slums, make for a really immersive experience. There’s a little of TV’s Battlestar Galactica in District 9, as well as some Starship Troopers and a dash of Hotel Rwanda.
The movie is Blomkamp’s and lead actor Sharlto Copley’s first feature-length film, and you feel that occasionally. The performances and writing are a bit broad in places, a bit simple. For example, I liked the way the humans referred to the immigrant aliens as ‘prawns’, with the same nonchalance that previous generations of white South Africans called blacks ‘kaffirs’. Yet the metaphor becomes overused and trite by the film’s climax. The whole film is a bit uneven–nuanced and clever one minute, clunky and obvious the next.
Still, it’s the most surprising and original film I’ve seen in months, and it has smart things to teach us about apartheid and the developing world. I’d definitely recommend it.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
The Hurt Locker - 9/10 - A terrific war movie, brilliantly directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The cast is also excellent. They’re mostly unknowns, with a couple big names in small roles. American critics are falling all over themselves to praise this film, and that’s mostly deserved. I think critics have been a little desperate for a really good movie about the Iraq War. This film has a lot in common with the excellent mini-series Generation Kill.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - 4.5/10 - Not as dreadful as the Transformers movies, but pretty poor. It’s overly long, and suffers from the comic booky hollowness common to a lot of superhero movies. The accents, also, were often astonishingly bad. Despite watching the TV show and owning a few toys when I was a kid, I felt zero nostalgia while watching this movie.
A Perfect Getaway - 4/10 - A predictable, run-of-the-mill thriller in Magnum P.I.’s old stomping grounds. Even Milla Jovovich’s presence couldn’t elevate to average.
I was talking last night about how much of our home media consumption is time-shifted. We pretty much only watch shows that I’ve downloaded or recorded on the PVR. I only listen to radio via a few podcasts. I discover music on my own schedule, as opposed to MTV or the radio.
I started thinking, then, about how we could time-shift media we enjoy outside the home. I wondered if the digital distribution of movies to movie theatres meant that they could display the movies when I wanted, instead of according to their schedule?
Couldn’t they open up their schedule to voting? For example, what if I had twenty people from my office who wanted to attend a summer blockbuster at 4:00pm, but the movie is scheduled to run at 3:00pm and 5:30pm. Couldn’t we, hypothetically, visit the cinema’s website and vote to change the movie schedule for that day?
Once digital distribution is commonplace, a cinema should run entirely like any other shop at the mall. It has no requirement for a skilled and scheduled projectionist, so the movie schedule could change daily based on the whims of its patrons.
And seeing as we’re changing movie start times, why can’t we vote on which movies the cinema runs? The real answer is that the producers, distributors and cinemas have this farcically baroque system for scheduling movies and dividing up box office revenue. That could change, though. Just as MP3s, Napster and iTunes has tranformed the music distribution channel, technology shifts could change the way movie sales work.
A vote-for-upcoming-movies model would reduce the amount of guesswork that cinemas have to undertake when scheduling movies. Combined with the crowd’s ability to adjust the schedule, these changes might, in theory, increase the average attendance per showing.
Surely some independent cinemas have tried this model. Have you heard of any?
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
