While reading about the new History Channel series Life Without People (brief review: fun, highly derivative of the excellent World Without Us, but the movie-guy narration is ridiculously overblown), I happened upon a reference to the seventies BBC TV post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. It turns out that they’re in the midst of remaking the series–they’re currently shooting season (which, in BBC terms, probably means six episodes) two.
I really dig post-apocalyptic works of art, so I immediately went looking to watch the remade series. I read on this (Official? Unofficial? Hard to tell) blog that season one was available on iTunes. Great, I thought, I’ve got some travel later in the week, I’ll plunk down my 20 bucks or whatever and download them.
Alas, “Survivors” is not available on iTunes Canada. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it available on the American or Canadian Amazon sites. I’d gladly pay for the show, even with iTunes’s imperfect system, but I can’t. What’s left? Illegally downloading the show using BitTorrent.
The Excellent Yet Distant Online Content Distribution Model
This is, of course, a very common complaint. Over the last decade, as Cory Doctorow likes to say, content producers must be ““dragged kicking and screaming to the money tree”. Farhad Manjoo reflects this ethos, and describes some of the reasons behind it, in his latest Slate article:
In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.)
Things, of course, are even worse up here in the Canadian digital ghetto.
Those chants at the start of the trailer are the crowd saying “Ali bomaye”, which means “Ali, kill him”, in reference to his historic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight with George Foreman.
I’ve been a bit remiss in writing blurb reviews of movies that I’ve seen over the last couple of months. It hasn’t exactly been chock full of winners. I’ve added these to the big list of every movie I see in 2009.
Watchmen - 6/10 - I reviewed it elsewhere, but it’s essentially two hours of back story and one hour of a pretty ordinary plot. It’s a movie made (and a story told) 25 years too late.
One Week - 6.5/10 - A love letter to our nation (at least the half between Toronto and Vancouver). It’s as much a travelogue as a film, following a stricken Joshua Jackson as he spontaneously rides his motorcycle out west. The script is wonderful in places, and quite clunky in others. I liked the lead performances (I could watch Liane Balaban read census results all day), and the film has a kick-ass soundtrack. If you’re looking for a little feel-good Canadiana, you could do worse.
I Love You, Man - 6.5/10 - Who doesn’t love a bromantic comedy? An ordinary movie with pretty ordinary themes. The cast is watchable (Jason Segel and J.K. Simmons in particular), and there are plenty of amusing moments. Still, it’s nothing to write home about.
Twilight - 5/10 - The broodiest movie in Sombre Town. Man, those teenage vampires are moody bastards. After Kirsten Stewart, the cast is unilaterally wooden. I’d imagine that, much like the Harry Potter series, subsequent films will get better as the cast matures and the burden of exposition lightens. I watched this on the plane, so that may have negatively impacted my impressions (though I doubt it). I’m not a fan of Catherine Hardwicke’s work generally, so that doesn’t help.
Duplicity - 7.5/10 - I really liked Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in Closer, but I found their scenes together in this film rather lifeless. They lacked the sizzle of, say, Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight or Pitt and Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Perhaps it’s because they felt repetitive, and rarely advanced the plot. I did really dig the directorial work of Tony Gilroy, it felt stylized without being intrusive. In particular, the film’s opening scene (after the one the studio obviously required he add) is beautifully shot. The film’s plot is ridiculously byzantine, so don’t even try to follow it–just sit back and enjoy the good-if-not-spectacular ride.
Back in 2002, I saw the excellent spelling bee documentary Spellbound. It featured a structure that is now familiar to me: in the film’s first half, we meet the competitors. In the second half, we watch them compete. It’s effective narrative arc: make us about the characters, then we can watch them succeed and fail. For the dorky elite of the spelling bee world, it made for a pretty riveting film.
Yesterday I watched Word Play, a 2006 film that applies pretty much exactly the same model to the world of competitive crossword puzzles. Though it lacks the emotional thumb screws that competing kids offer (replacing them with crossword-loving celebrities like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls), the film is another great example of what I’ve come to call “the competition documentary”.
While in Winnipeg last week, I caught part of Ballet Girls on Bravo, yet another film that seems to fit this sub-genre:
Ballet Girls is a behind-the-scenes documentary series that follows nine girls on a quest to land the coveted role of Clara in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Nutcracker. The girls come from across Canada - gap-toothed 10-year-olds and willowy teens with ballerina dreams dancing in their heads. In this “Canadian Idol” of the ballet world, ambitious young dancers compete to share the stage with professionals, taking the first pointed step in their own careers as dancers.
I’m sounding more disparaging than I mean to be–I think it’s an effective and entertaining approach. I wonder the origins of this genre are. Surely they predate Spellbound. Maybe they’re risen in popularity as a kind of legitimate alternative to the hapless dude + ridiculous challenge model of reality television. Any suggestions for other films in this sub-genre?
The legendary Leonard Cohen is, as you probably know, on tour. He comes to Vancouver on April 19. Today the National Film Board blog features a 45-minute documentary on Cohen from 1965. I haven’t watched much of it yet, but it begins with a charming, funny monologue and, a little later on, has some great insights into the secret joys of hotel rooms:
Watchmen is not as much a movie as it is a nearly-three hour treatise on post-modernism in the superhero genre. It’s two hours of back story followed by 45 minutes of story.
I use the word ’story’ there because the movie unfolds with barely a causal event. A writing prof taught me that story was “the king died and then the queen died”, while a plot was “the king dies, and then the queen died of grief”. Because of the movie’s dense exposition and constant flashbacks, we see Watchmen’s story unfold around the characters, instead of them making the plot happen.
This makes for a remarkably dull movie. The film’s themes–is vigilantism an effective replacement for organized justice?, is the survival of the many worth the sacrifice of the few?, how does the threat of nuclear annihilation change our behaviour?– were pretty revolutionary in 1986, when the comic book was released, but they’re utterly familiar to comic readers and movie watchers today. That’s to writer Alan Moore’s credit–the comics are kind of a Citizen Kane for the industry. Watchmen have been so influential and imitated that the originals have lost some of its effectiveness.
There’s a lot to like in the movie. It looks great, and the cast is refreshingly free of household names (save for the excellent Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, who spends most of his scenes nude and glowing blue). It’s also intensely violent–we’re talking Sin City in full colour. Some of the dialogue is clunky, but I imagine we can blame that on adherence to the original comics.
The movie also takes itself way too seriously. I’ve said it before, but (with rare exceptions) great movies always find ways to make us laugh. This ought to be doubly true when the film’s about a bunch of vigilantes running around in latex.
Metacritic gives the film a 56, which feels about right to me. There was plenty of eye candy (beginning with Malin Akerman, if she could lose the indie bangs), and some entertaining tropes, but too often I felt bored and fidgety. What did you think?
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
Taken - 5.5/10 - Liam Neeson stars as a vengeful father whose daughter is abducted in this low-rent Euro-thriller. It’s an entirely forgettable film, with the exception of one terrific, gripping moment during the abduction scene. Neeson is apparently impervious to harm, so there’s rarely any question about the outcome.
He’s Just Not That Into You - 5/10 - A movie packed with star power, but ultimately episodic and soulless. It’s a kinder, gentler Closer or Friends With Money. Jennifer Connelly stands out with the best performance, but the many plot lines make the film feel hurried and hollow (I’d have cut Drew Barrymore and her storyline). Also, the film seems to entirely disprove the premise of the book. I want to write a blog post about movies based on non-fiction essay-style books, such as this one and Fast Food Nation. I think I’ll wait until I see a third one, though.
Frost/Nixon - 8/10 - He’s not subtle, but Ron Howard is a gifted storyteller. Thanks to Howard’s skill and the leads’ outstanding work, I was never bored. It’s also an incredibly watchable historical drama, and a great introduction to the details of the Watergate scandal. Like many filmed plays, it’s a lovely small success.
Thanks to Mongrel Media, I have, oh, about 40 movie passes to a screening of One Week (caution: auto-playing video ahead), a most Canadian movie starring Joshua Jackson. Here’s the trailer:
Gordon Downie, Tofino and the Stanley Cup? Most Canadian movie ever. Incidentally, is that an actual NHL player at about 1:50? I don’t recognize him.
The film also features the lovely and talented Liane Balaban. I first saw her in New Waterford Girl, a really charming Nova Scotian film. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look.
Mr. Jackson, I should add, has done an admirable job of sustaining and bolstering a career that could have died with final episode of “Dawson’s Creek”.
The screening is at the Scotiabank Theatre on Thursday, March 5th at 7:00pm. If you want a couple of free passes, come find me at Northern Voice.
I was recently reading New Yorker magazine, and encountered a reference to a sub-genre of movies called “mumblecore”. From Wikipedia:
Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s.It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers in this genre include Lynn Shelton, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, Todd Rohal and Ry Russo-Young.
Based on box office revenue and some crowd-sourced review sites I checked, mumblecore has yet to find its 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the list in Wikipedia, I’d only heard of one of the films, Baghead, and I hadn’t even seen that one.
Truth be told, these films sound like dreadful, film school wankery. But, then, I’d better watch one or two before I actually pass judgment. Have you seen Baghead? Or maybe Dance Party USA?
