It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

I've purposely shied away from reviewing classic films. What else could really be said about a film that has been around for generations and has become not just a favorite, but has earned a piece of the history of American film making in such a way that it's become a tradition, in and of itself. I find myself inadequate when charged with such a task.

But I've decided to write a review for It's a Wonderful Life, maybe against my better judgement. I've got a few reasons for doing so. The first is simple, it's one of my favorite films. Looking at the list of reviews I've written, the films that list covers and specifically those which I've written favorably about, it might seem somewhat surprising for me to proclaim this sentimental, optimistic, "Capra-corn" kind of film as one of my two or three favorite films. Most people don't associate this film with the kind of dark, cynical, subversively penetrating themes and concepts I tend to favor and gravitate toward. Considering how syrupy and schmaltzy it's considered now, it's interesting to note that at the time of it's release it was widely considered too dark for the holiday season. It wasn't a flop at the box office, but it certainly didn't perform in such a way as to suggest the place it would come to occupy in our holiday culture. 


Another reason for me to write something about this film is that it's one of those rare films which presents the opportunity to write about a thing related to art as a whole that I think important. It's a film I have a kind of relationship with that has evolved through the years. This isn't a high minded concept. Each of us has at least one thing, probably a few films, albums, songs or books, which have been around through different phases of our lives, from childhood to adulthood and onward, and about which our understanding on the emotional, intellectual and yes, probably even the spiritual levels has evolved into something different, not necessarily better or worse, but deeper, more whole and concrete. In this case it's a film I loved as a little boy, and which I love no less as an adult, but that I love very differently, because I not only see it through adult eyes, but because it speaks to me on a completely different level than it did the little boy who saw it so many years around Christmas time. 


And It's a Wonderful Life is a quintessentially American film. I enjoy foreign films, and a stroll through the archives of this blog will be enough proof for anyone seeking it that I have no prejudice toward them. At the same time, being an American, I have a special place in my heart for films which present the dominating characteristics of American life with any attempt at a real degree of narrative honesty. I think It's a Wonderful Life does that, not only presenting those qualities we most enjoying seeing represented in film, but some of those we least enjoy seeing. In that way, it's actually an extremely well balanced and fair minded variety of fictional narrative. 


I'm not going to go into a long plot synopsis. I'm going to assume the overwhelming majority of people with enough interest to be reading a review, in a blog, by someone without "professional credentials" has enough of an interest in film to have seen It's a Wonderful Life. If not, go watch it, as soon as is humanly possible. Reading further will probably only color you're own experience with the film to a degree which is unnecessary. Go. Now. 


In those early years, the first few viewings of It's a Wonderful Life, I think the little boy I was reacted to the aspect of the story that is very much a fantasy adventure. I've always had an appreciation for fantasy and science fiction, and being a kid who had no religious training and parents who were of the most lapsed variety of Catholic, films with different religious themes or narrative aspects really didn't seem any different than those with dragons, witches, knights or aliens. There is an adventurous aspect to the film. As much as George Bailey may resent life in the little town of Bedford Falls, it seemed pretty exciting to me. There was definitely more going on in George's life than there seemed to be in my own or the lives of the people I knew. He was falling saving his brother from drowning in icy water, and saving Mr. Gower the neighborhood pharmacist from drunkenly poisoning a sick boy, having girls chasing after him, fighting the powerfully despicable Mr. Potter, constantly saving that old Savings and Loan, marrying the beautiful woman who loved him, meeting angels, getting to see what life would be like without his birth, and finally getting to reap the rewards of all that frustration and desperation being set aside in favor of something bigger than himself. In many ways, it's a relatively typical heroes narrative. But George Bailey was the quintessential everyday person. He's not some brawny tough guy easily tossing a beating to the evil doers. In fact, through ninety percent of the film, the closest thing it has to a real villain, Mr. Potter, is handing him the proverbial beating. George is very slowly losing the fight, which is only important because that actually means the town of Bedford Falls is losing, because that's actually what George has been fighting for through the entire film. He sets aside all of his own aspirations and his own goals for the town, his family, and the Savings and Loan that serves them. In a rare moment of real truth in a Hollywood film, Mr. Potter never recieves the justice we so richly think he deserves. Even after his final dastardly act, the only one which is lawfully criminal, he's never found out. George never actually achieves the victory the first three acts of the film portray him as fighting for. One of the things which made the film so appealing to me as a child was that George Bailey was living an adventure in a place that wasn't very far away or exotic. It was just another small town, like every small town boy dreams of escaping. And any small town boy, like I was, with a knack for needling figures in positions of authority, gets used to losing the battles he's been waging. 


I also think It's a Wonderful Life is a film so well made and put together, that it's actually hard not to like it. It's narrative is so compelling, it's hard not to be drawn in. The characters are so well drawn and the performances are so good that you want to root for these people, not just George Bailey, but his wife, family and the people of Bedford Falls. Mr. Potter is such a cantankerous old bastard that you can't help but dislike him and hope that George does eventually stick it to him. Children are probably most susceptible to good film making because they're coming to the experience with very few preconceived notions. They have no poltical point of view, no cultural references to offend, and for the most part, It's a Wonderful Life upholds all of the kinds of ideas we're taught are good when we're children, so it supports the things we're already being taught and are hearing regularly from adults, at least on the surface. 


As an adult, it's come to mean much more to me. As someone who has at times felt he's gotten a second chance at life or at the least a chance to re-evaluate the ideas and perceptions previously driving his life, it speaks to me on a very different level. George Bailey isn't a perfect man, at all. At times he's impetuous, rash, resentful, and indecisive. The trajectory of the narrative, George's life as the film represents it, is overwhelmed by the circumstances in George's life which are in many ways beyond his control. His father's death leaves the future of the Savings and Loan his father and uncle built in question. George's decision to forego his trip to Europe and then his college education in order to stay in Bedford Fall's and see to it the Savings and Loan survives and continues is more a decision in reaction to his own disgust at Mr. Potter's words during the board meeting than it is a decision to stay and keep the business going because he beleives it will be good for the town. More than anyone else (with the possible exception of his wife Mary) Potter keeps George in Bedford Falls. Most adults would agree it's not the best basis on which to make a decision, especially one with the ramifications related to foregoing a college education, but at the same time, most people understand exactly what it is to make that decision, and how it happens. I see this scene, and the others like it in the film, and I know what it's like to make those decisions, and to live with the consequences they bring, the frustration and resentment, and to eventually be able to look at them as part of a much larger whole that isn't at all frustrating and instead as something to be more grateful for, to be happy with and proud of. 


Anyone who's ever been involved in a long term relationship with someone they love, also understands the compromises involved, and that at times, those compromises sting more than others, even when every bit of faith in the future you can muster says it's worth it. The clash of one's more specific ambition with the more general and vague love for another person and the life the two of you have is something we rarely see portrayed with any real honesty. Here it's presented with more honesty than most films of it's time or ours. It's a singular part of a much larger struggle for George. He loves his wife and his children, obviously. But he can't help but still feel some disappointment and some regret for not having gone and chased the dreams he'd grown up with. Being stuck in the same small town he'd grown up in, fighting the same battles his father had fought, very literally, without the chance to find out what heights his talents may have taken him to eats at him through the first three acts of the film. But at the same time, it's just as clear that he is very happy with his wife, and their life, and he loves her and his family deeply. This kind of internal conflict, which is so very common to life in middle America isn't often played very fairly. Most film makers weight the argument in one direction or the other from the beginning and use the rest of the film to make the case for the side of the argument they've chosen. Capra doesn't. Throughout the film, we feel empathy for George not being able to go out and chase those dreams, but at the same time, we're happy to see Mary with him, the support she provides him and the way they interact (for the most part). It's an ambivalence which is hard to strike in any narrative, and Capra presents it beautifully. The film may be in black and white, but most of it's narrative isn't presenting us with a black and white reading of events. There's a whole lot of grey. 


One of the other major things I appreciate as an adult is that the first three quarters of the film are much darker than most people tend to credit it. Because it ends on a much brighter, lighter note, and actually earns that ending, most people tend to forget exactly how much has transpired before. George Bailey has almost constantly had his options cut away from him through circumstances that are beyond his control or through the selfishness of the people around him. His younger brother leaves him in the lurch on more than one occasion, his less than adept Uncle sets in motion the films final act by losing eight thousand dollars out of little more than the petty desire to brag and a flaky mind, and so on and so forth. He's constantly beset with either moral dilemmas or financial troubles which he's only been lead to because he is George Bailey, the good man we want him to be. As with Mr. Gower in the early part of the film, George seems to be life's punching bag, specifically because he is trying to do the right thing. George's life may be wonderful, but even it's being wonderful almost in spite of his being a good man, it's still a hard life, full of hard questions, hard decisions and two very long, hard fights. His fight with Potter, and the harder fight to win, the fight with himself, his frustration and his disappointment.

George's on going attempt to keep Mr. Potter from gaining complete control of the town is the kind of thing we've seen thousands of times in movies before. The difference between this film and so many others, is that the fight isn't that grand and dramatic. Sure, some of the scenes and the dialog are relatively dramatic, but in towns across the country, this same fight was being waged. It's something so much a part of the American character that we're still waging those exact same battles today. Distrust of a concentration of power and wealth are at the heart of the nation's founding and have worked themselves into the way we see ourselves and our world so deeply that the battle George wages with Mr. Potter throughout the film is familiar, understandable and sympathetic no matter what time period it is when one first sees the film. The questions related to the profit motive versus the greater good have probably been around since nomadic groups of hunter/gatherers traded amongst each other, though they are especially acute in a society based on a capitalist economy. We still have these same arguments today, the most currently public being centered on the internet itself. Are we going to allow a small group of major corporations have control of content or is it going to continue to be a much more open, user based medium? We still haven't decided, but in it's essence, it's the exact same fight George Bailey was putting up against Mr. Potter. It's the kind of argument we Americans have been having amongst ourselves since the country was founded.

Possibly the thing I most enjoy about It's a Wonderful Life now is that each of these episodes plays itself out, with George being consumed by them in a singular way. As an audience, we're seeing them and understanding them as part of a larger narrative, but George isn't. For him, each one is immediate and urgent, and only vaguely related to the rest, until the last act of the film of course, when George gets the opportunity to find out exactly what would have become of Bedford Falls and the people he cares about if he hadn't been there to fight through each specific incident to create the larger whole. George never became a rich man through the creation of Bailey Park, but he provided an opportunity for dreams more humble than his own to be achieved. As he stumbles through the town which became Pottersville in his absence, it is a little comical to see the nightclubs and bars as representations of everything antithetical to the kind of small town community George was able to help continue. It's certainly a little puritanical, and it reminds me that the distrust with which rural and suburban communities view cities has a long history for us as well. But it's the cut throat nature of the entire sequence which is most striking. The convivial tone George brought to the majority of his interactions with the rest of the people in the town is gone. These people are largely strangers to one another, and he who falls among them gets kicked, not helped to his feet. It presents a strong argument that more than George's ability to help these people own homes, stay free of Potters tyranically selfish nature, it was his friendly and giving spirit which was most important for the town, and so long as there was one man continuously willing to sacrifice for the better of the whole, it effected the nature of the entire town. It suggests that so long as George was there to be willing to give, each of the others to whom he gave, had a little more to give to the next person. Not necessarily materially, but in terms of human kindness and compassion. 


The interesting thing about that suggestion is that it's just as much a part of the American tradition and character to be venal and petty, selfish and apathetic. It only took George's absence for all of these things to change and for Bedford Falls to become the den of sin and cruelty that is Pottersville. George gave up his ambitions up in favor of those whose ambitions were more humble than his own, but even George's ambitions were humble in comparison to those of Potter, and without George around to be a counter weight, the same kind of selfishness and cruelty colored the entire town, just as his own good nature had effected the town in his reality. 


All in all, this is a great film. It came to it's classic status many years after it was finally released because the copyright lapsed, making it a cheap and easy film for television stations to run, and run it they did. Once it started being regularly shown on television in the seventies, it started to be recognized as the brillaint film making it is. Another interesting thing to note is that Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption is an avid admirer of It's a Wonderful Life's director, Frank Capra, and Shawshank went through a similar cycle of not really being all that popular at the box office, being nominated for a number of Academy Awards and not finding it's real audience, one that is nearly rabid in their love for the film, until it started being repeatedly shown on cable television. Now, the two films are considered among classics of American cinema. 


On a trivia note: in the early part of the film, when George is approaching Ernie's cab, where Burt stands reading a paper, the headline which is only visible very quickly reads, "Mr. Smith Wins Washington." The film that Capra and Jimmy Stewart had last worked on together before Wonderful Life was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009)

Nicolas Winding Refn is a film maker to watch. Of his films that I've seen, The Pusher Trilogy, Bronson (link to my review), and now Valhalla Rising (links to the search results for Google's shopping option), he has proven to have the rare ability to craft films that have the qualities of being both meditative and unpretentiously entertaining. His films have been, in many ways, the other side of the Christopher Nolan coin. Where Christopher Nolan's films have been primarily entertainment, with the kind of serious, meditative undertone, Refn's films have been primarily meditative and serious, without snobbishly turning up his nose at the kind of entertainment "serious" film critics and aficionado's tend to lambaste. 


With Valhalla Rising (links to Netflix Watch Instantly), he's taken that ability to the next level. Where Bronson and The Pusher Trilogy presented those qualities in stark relief, contrasting each other in different moments of each film, Valhalla Rising mixes them together much more organically, and in eliminating the contrast creates an unusually powerful narrative for a film whose content deals so directly with brutal violence, and the nature of people who perpetrate it. The result is a film which takes the best of Terrence Malick's lyricism and the most brutally compelling scenes in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. In it's own strange way, it's in the same spiritual family as Apocalypse Now.


The film begins with a man in chains, surrounded by dour looking Norse warriors. It quickly becomes obvious that these Norse are either using prisoners for entertainment by watching them kill each other or it's their form of a system of justice. This particular man is also extremely adept at killing other slaves and prisoners.

This cold blooded killer quickly escapes and kills his captors, and with a boy named Ayre who had been a slave, finds a group of Vikings, who are headed for Jerusalem to reclaim the Holy Land. They don't end up in the Holy Land though, they end up more or less lost, landing in some unkown place. All is not what it seems, and the rest of the film follows our slave warrior, at this point dubbed "One Eye," through a compelling and engaging journey. The film is broken into three acts, differentiated specifically by title cards, whose titles are interesting if only for the kind of allegory they suggest.

Refn has used Mads Mikkelson in two of the Pusher films, and again here as the protagonist One Eye. American audiences would probably most quickly recognize him as Le Chiffre, the villain from Casino Royale and unfortunately that horrendous, skull crushingly bad remake of Clash of the Titans (link to my review of that steaming turd). It's unfortunate that he's only been given the kind of extremely stereotypical roles common to American blockbusters, because he's a talented actor, with real range and depth, and he's got one of the most interesting faces in contemporary film. Did I mention that One Eye, his character is mute? Through the entire film, the character never says one word. Even with just one eye, his eyes stil say thousands of words. 


The film is beautifully shot, and this adds to the overall lyricism, in combination with the structure of the narrative. There isn't an indoor shot in the entire film, and the wide expanses that surround the actors also add to the feeling of seclusion and in doing so, heighten the feeling that the characters are under threat. The vistas captured by the lense are beautiful and breathtaking. Refn has quite an eye for talent. Having given Tom Hardy the lead role in Bronson, he introduced the world to the kind of searing talent we can expect to be around for a very long time. Cinematographer Morten Soborg has worked on a number of Danish films, including two of Refn's Pusher films, and we should expect to start seeing him getting work here in the States very soon. 


This is a bloody good film. I should have known better than to expect a more straight forward actioner from Refn, and I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it reaches for something much deeper than that, and on the whole, succeeds. 

The Party's Over

Out in sunny California, the movie industry just held one of it's yearly conventions. Not a fan-boy, geektasitc convention with people in costumes (unless that is you count studio executives trying to pass for human beings), but an actual industry convention. Blu-Con is the industries largest Blu-Ray convention, and in the past few years has been the place where some interesting details about the strategies the studios have been trying to implement have first been announced. This year has been a rough one for the film industry. Ticket sales are down, way down. What's essentially been happening is that they've been having to rely on tentpole properties for the entire studio to produce a profit. In other words, the big movies are making more money (some in part because of 3D, some in part because they actually are popular) and selling more tickets, but everything else that's not a big huge success, is selling fewer tickets. If the trend continues, we're headed to having only movies that end up making billions of dollars, and huge flops, that don't even make the original investment back, much less the advertising budgets that are tacked on after production is finished.

On top of that, Blu-Ray and the digital download market aren't expanding as quickly as they'd hoped. Most consumer surveys are showing that price is the real sticking point. What's coming out of these surveys is that movie goers obviously prefer Blu-Ray, but the cost is prohibitive. In a slumping economy with millions of people unemployed, and millions more worried that they might not be employed next week or next month, this isn't really a shocking revelation. Blu-Ray accounts for about ten percent of the home video (cinema? what do we even call it now) market right now. Digital download (of the legal variety) accounts for about five. Obviously, there's no good way to track the percentage of people downloading illegally. That leaves eighty-five percent still dominated by DVD. The price of Blu-Ray players is starting to drop significantly, but in some circles, there's a discussion suggesting that the industries previous hype for Hi-Def, combined with it's current hype for 3D are essentially shooting it in the foot. How many people are going to make the jump to a Blu-Ray player if they're not sure that it's going to play 3D as well? Most of the 3D players will play straight Blu-Ray, but the marketing for the 3D players hasn't been focusing too much on that so far. On top of that, there are still many people who haven't made the jump to Hi-Def televisions yet. All of that adds up to this: why make the jump to Hi-Def televisions and Blu-Ray players if they're just going to have to buy a whole new system in five years anyway? They're shooting themselves in the foot on this one.

Yet another problem they're facing is the popularity of Netflix. Netflix streaming currently accounts for twenty percent of all the evening internet usage in the country. I don't know if I have to tell you this, but that is unheard of. The internet has only been a part of American life for a short period of time, but not since AOL has any company accounted for that large an amount of usage over any period of time. And AOL was an access provider, Netflix is strictly content.  Right now, there's a 28 day delay between the time a film is released on DVD and the time it's avaialable on Netflix, be it watch instantly or DVD by mail.

The L.A. Times has a good story covering some of this and detailing what a panel of heavy hitter studio heads had to say about the situation. The basic thrust of the story is that Netflix is pissing the studio's off by being more popular than any of the ideas they've come up with, and with revenue's down, they're trying to figure out how and when to either chare Netflix more for the content licensed to them or the studio's are going to try and come up with their own variety of digital streaming that will create direct revenue for them.

Studios have historically made money through what are called release windows. They release a film to theaters, and there's a window of time during which people are actually going to go and see a film. That window of time has been shrinking. The studio's believe this is due to the shorter periods of time they've had to turn to on the DVD release window. They shortened the period of time between theater and DVD releiase specifically because of the digital piracy problem. If they held a title from DVD release too long, more people were downloading it illegally. The DVD release window became a strong revenue stream very quickly after DVD was released commercially. DVD quickly outstripped VHS in both adoption and in revenues. People made the switch to DVD from VHS relatively quickly, and they were buying more DVD's than the had VHS. And, what are referred to as "catalog titles," older films which are still available for purchase, have been a good source of revenue as well. A DVD costs roughly three dollars for a studio to produce and ship (most of which is actually shipping). If they don't have to run a promotional campaign for it, every dollar above that is profit, either for them or the retailer. If you're paying nine dollars for a discounted "catalog title," the studio and the retailer are making money - the retailer makes an average of a dollar to a dollar and fifty cents. The difference is all mark up from the studios. The next window studios were able to establish revenue through was the television release window. They get paid every time one of their films is shown on television.

Netflix, eats into all of that. If I only have to wait a month to see a film I missed in the theaters, I'm much less likely to go pick it up on DVD or find a rental organization that has it on the day of it's release. I'm certainly not going to buy a catalog title before checking to see if it's available from Netflix. And, I've only watched two things on television for the past three months, the news and The Walking Dead on AMC. Netflix is the reason for that.

The studios have been laying the groundwork for a premium VOD (Video On Demand) service which will make movies available to consumers a month or two after their theater release, but before release to DVD. It would basicaly establish a new release window, and therefore a new revenue stream. They've been talking about a price point of twenty to thirty dollars. That seems a little extreme for what basically amounts to a rental, no matter how much earlier it is than DVD. But, there are ways that a service like this, at this price point could make sense. The best example I've so far heard is with something like the Harry Potter franchise. If the studios were to make those films available to a limited audience during or before their theatrical release, they'd be able to add some revenue as Harry Potter fanclubs across the country would be getting together to watch the films. Peter Jackson's upcoming The Hobbit would be a good candidate for something like this as well, and it would help get the early word out on the film. If the studio and the film maker feel they actually have a good film on their hands, it could help start to build word of mouth that's worth more than any amount of promotion. 


The other way a service of this kind could work would be in tandem with the new theatrical release strategies the studios have been using. All of the big films, things they've put a lot of production and advertising money into have been getting nationwide releases. But, most of the smaller films that haven't had huge production budgets or that they've picked up for distribution at film festivals etc. that they haven't put production money into, but aren't willing to spend the money for a nationwide promotional campaign on, have been getting targeted, limited release first. They'll go to major cities, with a modest, but not stingy promotional budget. If the film does well enough during that limited release, they expand it. It may just begin with less limited release or go directly to a nationwide release, depending on how it performs. The kind of premium VOD service the studios are suggesting would be excellent for films like these. A good example would be Buried, which was released a few months ago. It garnered a strong word of mouth, was adored by the internet film press, and was put into limited release, and because it didn't perform as well as it's marketing budget required in limited release, it never made it nationwide. I'm two hours away from the nearest theater that will play most of these films. We've got an arthouse theater here in Richmond, but honestly, it's a little too "uppity" for me. Right now, they're showing The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and I'll probably go see that, but for the most part, they're showing "respectable" movies. The other film they're playing is 127 Hours, which is supposed to be excellent, but is also playing at the local multiplex. They sure as hell weren't playing Adam Greene's Frozen when that as in limited release. I don't expect to see the new Christmas horror movie about an evil Santa called Rare Imports: A Christmas Tale there either. I think I know enough people who would be interested in seeing these films before they get to DVD to make a VOD service for those worth our money. If four or five of us were to throw together five or six dollars each, we could watch them in one of our living rooms, and since we're not getting the full theater experience, we still don't have to pay the full ten dollar ticket price. Something like this could work. It could even be a way for studios to draw some revenue from films they just don't know what else to do with. Trick'R Treat sat on a shelf for two years, while word of mouth dwindled from a roar in the horror community to a "what ever happened to that?" When it finally got a DVD release, the studio didn't even have to do much in the way of promotion, because it was done for them by internet sites excitedly touting their "cred" by reposting reviews and articles they'd written on the film two years before. I'd have paid to see it through an On Demand kind of service, and then I'd probably have bought the DVD as well. On the other hand, The Poughkeepsie Tapes has been sitting on a shelf for about four years now, with no release date in sight, a rash of new "found footage" films that it's definitely better than making boatloads of money, and having had the same positive reaction from the internet film community. People probably won't pay twenty or thirty dollars to see it, but making an exclusive offering to a relatively small number of people who've already demonstrated an interest in it or films like it, could generate enough interest to give it a respectable run in limited release. 


Probably the most interesting bit in the L.A Times article is Universal studio cheiftain Craig Kornblau proclaiming, "We want to advantage methods that are more profitable." That's a no brainer, so here's where it actually gets tricky and Kornblau demonstrates an attitude I wrote about earlier in a piece called "Blockbusted," Kornblau went on to say, "We don't have an obligation to give consumers what they want when they want it." The thing is, he's wrong. If you're actually interested in capitalism, that's exactly what you have to do, otherwise, the consumer is going to find another way to get what they want. It might be illegal digital downloads, which studios can spend huge sums of money to fight, but are never going to really eradicate, especially with the number of free information activists out there who are going to be constantly coming up with new ways to undermine whatever efforts the studios use to cut down on it. Even if it's not that, there are new methods of financing film making cropping up all of the time. The film makers are able to go directly to the source more and more often. The fans are playing a part in financing films in a more direct way than they ever have before. The studios didn't have to give consumers what they wanted, when they wanted it in the past. Now they do. The entire reason the film industry is in the shape it's in is because they are still holding on to an ideal, a way of doing things and a perspective on profit that is no longer a reality. 


The age of the studio executive is over. If the film studio's are going to continue to exist in any form that resembles what they are now, they are going to have to deal with the reality of a changing industry and market place that is opening up in a way few people could possibly have foreseen. With all of the new distribution methods available, there are going to be so many different hands involved with it that the studios are never going to be able to cover all of that ground with the model and methods they have today. It's going to mean that studios are not going to be able to make big tent pole franchise films, and make L.A. Confidential at the same time. The only thing wrong with that is that there are going to be films like L.A. Confidential might not find the kind of audience it has. It's going to be completely different than it is now. There are going to be new, smaller companies that are going to be in the business of producing films specifically for these new kinds of distribution. They are going to be the companies producing Up in the Air, and Juno. Those films are not going to star George Clooney and Ellen Page, but they're going to get made, and they're going to get distributed, and some of them are going to be damned good. A lot of them are going to be navel gazing crap with bad scripts, bad acting and even worse direction, but they're going to get made, the same way studios are making more crap movies than good ones every year. The difference is, those movies are going to cost thirty thousand dollars to produce and distribute, instead of thirty million dollars (which is about the average cost of a Hollywood film these days). And studios are going to have to come to the realization that they are going to have to do what they do well, and leave the rest of it alone. 


They're only going to be able to pay actors and directors millions of dollars if they have a track record of being able to put asses in seats, and they're going to have to start cutting the number of multimillion dollar executives they have on staff if they're going to be able to five or six successful Hollywood productions put out each year. Things are already starting to go that way, which is why they are employing a new strategy of only releasing the really big, expensive pictures nationwide. But soon, there are going to be companies who have reached some level of success with the other forms of distribution they've been using, and they're going to be able to finance the kinds of limited releases that the studios are scaling back to. At that point, the studios are going to have to start asking themselves whether or not it's worth it to continue to release a seven million dollar film in a limited number of theaters when they are competing with a film that was made for five hundred thousand, and needs to make that much less in order to be profitable. And that's just for the kinds of movies that the audience feels are worth going to see in a theater. At some point, the only things people are going to go see in a theater and pay a full ticket price for are going to be the big Hollywood spectacle films, comedies and the occasional horror film. They go to the theaters to see the huge, expensive spectacles, because it's best to see those on the big screen, with the sound systems more expensive than most people can possibly afford to have at home, and they go to see comedies and horror films in theaters because a big part of what makes those work is the theater experience of being able to see those films with a crowd of people. 


The future of American cinema is going to look vastly different than it's past. We all know this. What exactly it's going to look like, none of us can completely be sure. But there is one thing we can be sure of, if Americas film industry doesn't start changing more rapidly than it's been willing to so far, and start actually trying to develop some real innovation in the distribution of film, it's not going to be around for the 50th anniversary of Avatar. There's a great article taking a really humorous look at this over at Cracked.com. 

The Beauty Of Martyrs

I just sat through Martyrs, a French language horror film in the new tradition which is being established right before our eyes.

I'm going to bet the majority of people who might read this are people who haven't seen this little French serving of complete insanity. With that in mind, I'm not going to say much about the film, except that I loved it. It's been a really good while since I've seen something which was able to hit me in the soft spots with as much ferocity, accuracy and consistency.

So, in order to give those of you who might see the film a chance to go in blind and untainted, I'm going to talk a little bit about how I see the film, and why it's gotten the reaction it has from both mainstream critics and the horror community. For once, they're equally torn. They love it, hate it or are completely flummoxed by it. This is probably the thing which made me most interested in seeing it. Beyond the fact that I'm a horror obsessed geek, I tend to find the films I enjoy the most are the ones which create the most bitter divide in the audience. It means you've felt something strongly or you just don't exactly know what to feel or how to think about it. When a film can draw such strong opinions of pro and con, and still at the same time have people more or less saying, "yes, it's something different and new, but I don't know that I like the different and new that it is", this is a good sign.

Let's start with the blatantly obvious. This is not a film for everyone. In fact, this is probably a film for a relatively small audience. It's showing at last years Cannes Film Festival served it well because it did create this buzz and this controversy among the critical community, but it also is probably drawing some unfair and unnecessary criticism because there are people seeing this film who were never meant to see it in the first place. It's not meant for the faux art house crowd. Of course, they're calling it misogynistic. If a woman isn't worshiped or presented in what they interpret as the most positive light, they tend to whip out the misogyny card. This is not to say there aren't some extremely misogynistic films out there, because there are. At the same time if you can't give women the respect to present them as you would any other human beings, with examples which are really cool, awesome characters and also really horrible, disgusting characters, you're selling them short by presenting them as being something more or less than human. I know some really incredible women who are inspirational to me. I know some really disgusting women who are inspirations in much the opposite way. There is nothing of them I want to see in myself. I say faux art house because in the last fifteen or twenty years what we've begun to be spoon fed as "art films" aren't really art films or even independent films. Most of them are just films major studios have used some small arm too spend less money to produce, but still provide enough money to make sure the costumes are pretty and the equipment is top notch. There was once a tradition of art house films which were dangerous, hard, and challenging. If you appreciated those kinds of films, you will probably appreciate Martyrs at least for it's aspirations and it's pure technical prowess in storytelling and narrative, if not as a whole.

I understand perfectly why there's a wide section of the horror community which is not at all thrilled by Martyrs. The simple answer is that it's not a simple film. It is violent and gory, which your average gore hound usually eats up. But, it's a little too complicated to be a splatter flick. It's a little too cerebral to be your usual kind of hack and splash horror film. It's at least aspiring to be something a little more intelligent. Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely enjoy a big dumb gore fest as much as any pure gore hound. Sometimes, it's great to be able to just turn my brain off and enjoy some big, loud, bloody excuse for incredibly silly and completely unbelievable puppet shows. In many ways, that's how you have to look at some horror flicks. There really is nothing else going on. It's all right there on the screen, there's nothing more to think about or consider. They are very purposefully saying nothing. They're no underlying theme or idea. They are just there to gross you out, make you jump a few times and take you on a roller coaster ride from the safety of your non-moving seat. If you're looking further than that, you just are incapable of getting it. This is not the movie for the pure of heart gore hound.

Also there's a whole spate of reaction to the film which cover the current "jingo" for simpletons. Misogyny is one. Torture porn is another. Lesbian chic, yet another. Pretentious and religiose round out the use of contemporary go to descriptions for people too lazy to actually come up with something more meaningful and more nuanced. Sorry guys, but you're as intellectually lazy as the mainstream movie folks you all seem to really like to skewer. At least the majority of those people will admit to not even wanting to have to think about their movies. I understand this reaction though, and it's something that happens when many films are capable of skirting that line of presenting the superficial, popcorn, pure entertainment variety of film with some really strong ideas, themes and questions. To some degree this has to do with the fact that Martyrs is a horror film. The critical community pretty much sees the horror film as the unwanted orphan dropped off on the film communities door step. It's there, and yes, sometimes something good comes out of it, but the thing is, we really don't like to admit we raised it and it's part of the family. To another degree, I think as an audience we've dropped our expectations so low that when something does come along that does have something more going on, we don't necessarily catch it if it's not slapping us in the head with a frying pan. If they're preaching to us, we can't stand it, but we've been inundated by big dumb movies for so long, we forget to look for something smart going on under the immediately accessible surface. I don't think the critics are immune to this, especially considering that as a community they seem to really enjoy finding something to look down their nose at. I can't really hold it against them either. In movieland, there's a whole hell of a lot to look down your nose at. At the same time they can laud heaps of praise on films which are too dumb to understand the meaning of nuance and subtlety (you remember Crash, don't you?).

Beyond the fact that Martyrs is a horror film film though, it deals with some really uncomfortable ideas, themes and questions. Suffering is actually a central theme and there are some really interesting questions the films suggests about it. The misogyny call is particularly dubious in the instance of this film because it suggests woman are more capable of surviving and transcending suffering than anyone else, "especially young women" is actually a line from the movie. I can't go into it more without spoiling it. It also suggests something about extremism in it's own way. The fact that this film has gotten stamped with the "torture porn" label by some critics is something I almost think is good. If it were to be watched in comparison to some of the other films which have been slapped with this unfortunate label, most especially Hostel (the film which inspired the term), I think a pretty interesting set of ideas would start to emerge about what these films are actually saying. Both of them, in their own way deal with a kind of extreme dedication to an idea or ideology. The kind of dedication which suggests that for these people, they either don't care about right and wrong or possibly even more frightening, believe that the dedication to this ideology or idea puts them above considerations of right and wrong. I think that much like the films of the late sixties and early seventies, some of today's films have some weird, inexplicable process of cultural osmosis going on and the questions and the horrors we're dealing with in the real world are coming out in some of our horror films.

The thing is, Martys is not for everyone. Not at all. Had it not gained some level of notoriety in the way of controversy and becoming somewhat notorious, it would have been passed around the horror community and argued over by those of us who are passionate about horror films. The rest of the world would have been more or less unaware of it's existence, kind of like Cannibal Holocaust. I am specifically at odds with the fact that there is a remake of Cannibal Holocaust in the works because the rest of the world doesn't need to know about it. It's in no one's best interest, except possibly the studio hoping to incite controversy with it. Martyrs is a film which would have and probably still will find a very loyal cult following. People who are capable of loving and admiring both it's ferocity, it's grace and it's thematic aspirations would have told friends about it, who'd have told friends about it and so on. Occasionally, some poor schlep whom it was never intended for would have been forced to sit through it by some well meaning friend who thought they would enjoy it, and there would be people out there who'd seen it and just reviled it, and that would help it's strange cult status. It's the kind of film meant for people who can appreciate the full range of what film can be and who love film for that reason. The pure gore hounds can't handle it because it's probably just a little too high brow, even for it's guts and gore. The people who like to fancy themselves "aficionados" or guardians of films cultural importance aren't going to like it because it's rough, dirty, disturbing, gory and most especially, deeply subversive. This is one of those rare little films for people who can appreciate all of those things equally without being chained to any single one of them as more important than the other to either the medium itself or the culture. It's kind of movie for people who love movies in equal part because of their splendor and their sickness.

Blockbusted

[Note: This was originally posted on another of my blogs on 9/1/10. In the interest of organization and consolidation, I've moved it here.)

In my regular travels across the vast internet wilderness, I came across a story on /Film that's worth noting. It's not that there's anything particularly enlightening about it or that it's even very surprising somehow. Blockbuster video is closing up shop and filing for bankruptcy in September.

This might seem like a story which would be more at home in my movie blog, but there's a little more to it than just "giant movie rental chain goes belly up". It would probably seem to make more sense for someone like me, a rabid movie fan, to be saddened by the death knell of an outlet through which people might be able to see more movies. David Chen, one of the regular contributors to /Film, certainly seems to be. I'm not. At all.

When I was growing up, and the obsession with film was just starting to take root, we had two video stores in town. One was in the local supermarket shopping center, and it was the first video store my family had a membership with. I was a bike riding fool as a kid, so I was constantly peddling from one end of town to the other. Whether it was to go fishing, swimming, play ball somewhere, trying to find the place which would allow my bike and I the most air and the greatest speed, I wasn't confined to a very small area. On the other side of town from where my mother and stepfather bought our first house, there was another video store, and having the first twinges of obsession with film, I would occasionally stop in there, curious to see if a video store was a video store was a video store. In more ways than not, I was a typical middle class kid at that age, and in that time.

It was called Ultimate video, and it sat on the corner of Main St. and Railroad Avenue, a stone's throw from the local little league field. Ultimate Video was proof that not all video stores were created equal. It was a relatively tiny little place, but compared to the store at the other end of town, it was a veritable treasure trove. The shelves were packed full of video's whose covers ranged from bizarre to exotic to almost mind numbingly boring. It didn't take but a few visits for me to realize Ultimate Video was indeed ultimate, and far superior to the video store my parents had decided to sign up with. It became a source of constant irritation. When we had the good fortune to be able to go and rent some videos, I knew I was missing something. The Other Video store (which is invariably how adults referred to it) was further away (by a whole mile and a half), and to them, one video store was the same as the next.

For those first few years, I made due. I found what I could in that initial place, and at least got a movie fix once in a while. But, when my parents moved us to the other side of town (the side Ultimate Video  was on), it finally happened. We got a membership at Ultimate Video and the pain of having to browse the less worthy shelves of that crappy store was finally ended. That first store, the name of which I can't even remember anymore, went belly up not long after. People were figuring out that Ultimate Video had the real goods. From that point forward, I spent many hours perusing the shelves of that tiny little video haven. Going to rent a movie became an event that took me a few hours. When I say tiny, I mean it too. It was probably twenty-five by thirty-five, but there were so many shelves packed in there, it was like a little maze. I'd walk through those aisles, whose top shelf I had a hard time reaching at first, and scrutinize the cover of every single video. Does anyone else remember being completely awestruck by the glowing eyes on the cover of Dead Pit? It was a terrible movie, but that cover was a genius marketing move. If something seemed like it might be a candidate for the day or evenings viewing experience, I'd pick it up, read the plot summary on the back, study the frames from the film, and set it back, making a mental note. I spent so much time in that place as a kid, I'd occasionally just grab a stack of video's waiting to go back on the shelves and put them out. I knew where they all went, and I was in there so often, the proprietor trusted me enough to know I wasn't heading for the door with a stack full of her videos.

She got to know my mom pretty well too, because I'd come in pick a video and if it was R rated, she'd have to make the call. At first, I'd be standing there phone number in hand, but it wasn't long at all before it was just written down on our membership card, and not long after that, the owner memorized it. She'd call, tell my mom what it was I was trying to rent, give her a basic idea of what it was about and why it was rated R (this was about the time PG-13 was making it's debut, so for a while, I had to go through the same process with those), and my mom would give her the yay or nay vote. Luckily for me, before video was at my disposal, I'd developed a pretty voracious reading habit. Being an only child, and a latch key kid, meant lots of time to yourself, and even my dog would get tired at some point, so I needed something to keep me busy. I had made the jump from strictly kids fare to Stephen King, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain and so on pretty young, so my parents weren't too restrictive in what movies they'd let me see. Occasionally, something was just a little too much, but I knew the line, and I wasn't interested in putting anyone through the hassle of having to call my mom about a video I knew I wasn't going to be allowed to see (I Spit On Your Grave and Faces Of Death taunted me from those shelves). That reading habit had already started me on an interest in all things horror. I waited impatiently for the newest Stephen King novel to make it to paperback in those days. Paperbacks were cheaper, and they either fit in my pocket or in my waist band in the small of my back. It didn't take me long to figure out that I had to read the first few chapters before I could start carrying that way. Little boy sweat tended to smear the print pretty horrifically at some point, and the covers and first few pages would end up disintegrating. Poe and Lovecraft would satiate my hunger for horror while waiting for Stephen King's next page turner. If those paperbacks were my introduction, my elementary and high school of horror, science fiction and all other forms of narrative geekery, Ultimate Video was my undergrad. It was the kind of business that recognized itself as part of a middle class community, and the owners did their best to live up to that responsibility.

They certainly did a service for me. I was just a regular middle class kid, and without the likes of places like Ultimate Video (and The Record Stop, the areas independent record store), there are so many things I either never would have been exposed to at all or it would have been so much later, that they may not have made as much of an impact on me. Prior to these kinds of businesses existing, you couldn't see a lot of these films in the suburbs, you had to live in a major metropolitan area, and catch them in the theaters. The same was true for music. If you didn't live in a major city, there were many things you just didn't get exposed to and which remained too obscure for far too long. These kinds of businesses opened up a whole new worlds for middle class kids, adolescents and adults who were looking for something a little different from what the local multiplex was playing of the local radio station was promoting.

I wasn't necessarily interested in what the newest videos were. There were plenty of weeks during which whatever was newly released just wasn't interesting to me. Sure, I could sit through and relatively enjoy some big, loud, dumb action movie, just like any other boy, but I had already figured out it's better to see something a little older and well done than something new that just wasn't any good. In my mid-teens, the point finally came at which I'd seen basically every catalog title they had in stock that I had even a remote interest in, but by that point, the video boom was in full swing and there were video places everywhere, and of the record stores which carried lesser known music started selling video titles that were a little outside the mainstream. At that point, Ultimate Video would order stuff for me if I asked for it, and on one or two occasions, they didn't even make me buy it, they just put it in with their rental catalog.

Unfortunately, the video boom also brought the huge rental chains, Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video and the like. The first time I walked into a Blockbuster, I was initially wowed. It was so big and the aisles were wide enough to walk past someone else without having to press yourself against the shelves, and it seemed like there was just an endless supply of movies. And in the first year or so they were coming to prominence, they had a decent selection. It still wasn't quite as good as Ultimate Video, especially if you were a horror fan, but it wasn't too bad, and if I couldn't find a horror flick I wanted to see, I could find something in another section. But then, over time, the selection started to get worse and worse. There was less and less room in the store devoted to catalog titles, and more and more devoted to new titles. There would be ninety copies of the Meg Ryan romantic comedy they'd given a new name and cover, but when a fellow horror aficionado was finally convinced he could not go another day without seeing Cannibal Holocaust, it was nowhere to be found. It wasn't that it was already rented and just not in stock. They didn't even carry it. When I asked about it, I was told there were some titles they didn't carry because of their content. And that kind of thing started to happen more and more often. It wasn't necessarily always content that kept things off of Blockbusters shelves either. It was the kind of corporate decision making that decided a title wasn't going to have enough demand to be worth carrying. I get that, every business has that right, but I can't for the life of me figure out how those decisions were actually made. There were plenty of things on that "New Release" wall that even I had never heard of, and I spent more time than anyone I knew reading magazines (because there was no internet at the time), newspapers and the occasional film zine from some small press in New York City), just to know what was going to be coming out. It wasn't lost on me that most of those movies had titles like "Silk Desires", and were purported to be "thrillers" about two people caught in a web of intrigue, often involving an affair, a missing person, an insurance scam or some such nonsense. They were the softest core porn really. They were porn without the porn. Lots of fuzzy angles, the occasional moan, and silhouetted nakedness. It was like porn for the kind of hardcore "Moral Majority" type who decided tonight was going to be sin central, but you know, without the actual sinning.

There lots of those, and things like "Hood Riders", because Menace II Society and Boys In The Hood had just gained popularity and acclaim, and retailers of all varieties were starting to try and seem like they were "urban friendly", but getting a copy of School Daze, before Do The Right Thing hit, was impossible. All of that stuff was in abundance, but when I read about a film called Salo by Palo Pasolini, a disturbingly violent and sexually graphic, but intellectually unparalleled cinematic meditation on the realities of fascism and totalitarianism, it was nowhere to be found, and by that point, the Blockbuster's of the world had put the Ultimate Video's of the world out of business. The American middle class had turned Blockbuster into the nine hundred pound gorilla of the video rental industry. When I asked the guy behind the counter, whom I knew to be the manager, if he could possibly order a copy for me, it seemed as if I had asked him to build me a space shuttle behind the store and use some kind of alchemy to turn popcorn butter into rocket fuel. When I finally decided there might be more to The Seventh Seal than a bunch of pretentious film student posturing, I couldn't find a copy of that either, and it's widely considered one of the two or three greatest films of all time. It's not that obscure a title, at all. It's something you can see referenced in the pages of any newspapers film reviews, as long as it's a paper written on more than a seventh grade reading level (unlike the Richmond Times Dispatch). And three quarters of the people working in the stores had never even heard of these things. 

And that trend continued. Fewer catalog titles, more new releases, and straight to video "niche market" titles became the regular business model for rental chains.

Blockbuster was not a business which saw itself as part of a middle class community. Without a middle class, they would never have reached the level of success they did, but being a part of and enriching that community was not something Blockbuster was interested in. They were interested, first, foremost and only in squeezing every dollar they could out of that middle class. It's something we've seen plenty of in our lifetimes. Companies are built on a customer base that is middle class, but it's only interest is in taking what it can get, and they claim their only responsibility is to their profit margin and their shareholders. To the community that makes them successful, they are only responsible for providing a product that consumer community will buy or can be convinced to buy. It doesn't have to be a quality product, it just has to be something they can sell and we will buy.

Then, the digital revolution truly began.

I was actually working in a record store when Napster made the front page of almost every newspaper in the country (except, of course, The Richmond Times Dispatch). Music was being shared across the internet, for free, by hundreds of thousands of college students everywhere. This wasn't news to me, I'd already had more than one person scoff at the twenty dollar per CD price tag and mumble about downloading it from Napster. Personally, I wasn't doing the whole download thing. I not like the way the music industry conducted a lot of it's business, but at least the people creating the content should be getting paid enough to keep creating content. Napster and it's users were basically screwing the people whose music they were fans of, which didn't make much sense to me. The music industry was very quickly in complete chaos. Those of us working in the stores were hoping they'd at least be smart enough to get on top of things and start offering music for sale, online. Then came the Metallica suit, in which the band sued the users sharing their music. We all saw the writing on the wall. Suing the fans is the most idiotic possible way to stop digital piracy. You're punishing your fans, for what amounts to cents on the dollar for you. The fans knew enough to know the overwhelming majority of profit for music sales went to the record companies and the artists make the money on merchandise and tours. Well, there were some attempts, most of which were pretty laughable because either the digital security measures were so draconian users couldn't actually play the music on all of their different machines or the pricing was ridiculous. I was somehow not shocked that people weren't going to pay fifteen or twenty bucks for music that didn't come with a package of any kind. There was no hard disc copy, no liner notes, no cover art, none of it. It was just the music, which is worth having and why you buy music in the first place, but without the rest of it, and with the modern consumer being savvy enough to know how much of the cost is in the production of a physical product etc., people knew they were getting screwed. The music industry had spent too much time fighting the future, and trying to keep it from coming, and in many ways had gotten left behind, and still hasn't caught up. Now, Apple almost entirely controls the market, because the record companies spent their resources trying to keep the digital revolution from happening, instead of trying to figure out how to capitalize on it.

The exact same thing has happened to the movie industry, and especially the rental industry. Because they've gotten locked into a business model which has been extremely profitable, but which hasn't served the consumer very well, and they have been more willing to try and fight the inevitable than expend the energy to develop some new ideas, they've gotten caught with their pants down. The major film studios are in the process of bringing exactly the same kind of suit, against end users (fans) that Metallica did. They've run into a bit of a rough patch with that suit though, because none of the internet service providers have enough people on staff who can bring them the names which match the IP addresses they've nailed down. Three to five people on staff, finding IP addresses for a company like Verizon, who typically have to track down twenty to one hundred a month for criminal investigations, are suddenly saddled with a list of thousands, and they just aren't able to do it. It's not looking good for the studios on that front either.

And for the likes of Blockbuster, this has been a long time coming. They too fought the digital revolution for longer than was wise, and by the time they started doing their own rental through the mail and download content, it was way too late, Redbox had already eclipsed the new release market for the casual movie fan, and for the serious film obsessive like me, Netflix streaming capabilities and the mail to home rentals is like having forty Ultimate Video's in my living room.

I have a deep sympathy for the employees of Blockbuster who are going to lose their jobs. But the thing is, this is something that's happening in many different American industries. The inability to even consider attempting to change the model of a business because they are so anchored to the idea that this is the only way they can profit, is not good for anyone, at all. This is really no different than what happened with the American auto industry, except Blockbuster isn't a big enough part of the economic picture and American identity to get rescued. Things are changing, quickly now, and for those businesses who are incapable of trying to develop REAL INNOVATION it's going to be the end of the road. Right now, there's a significant push back against the green movement and the idea of climate change, but that's not going to hold up forever. At some point, hopefully sooner than later, people are going to realize it is an actual reality, and the only fantasy and conspiracy perpetrated upon them has been by those who keep denying it. There are businesses out there who are capitalizing on the future that's coming and putting themselves in the kind of position to be the industry leaders of the future. The question is whether or not there will be qualified Americans for them to hire.

The same thing is happening to the middle class in many ways. It's been the middle class who have made so many of these companies and industries incredibly profitable. People are clamoring to bring the jobs back that have been sent overseas. Well, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you folks, but it's not going to happen. Those jobs are never coming back, and we're going to have to figure out a new way of structuring our economy, which means developing a new way of creating and sustaining middle class existences. As globalization was becoming a reality, the question of how the American labor force was going to compete against labor forces which can successfully live on two to five dollars a day was put to many of the people who were singing the praises of globalization. The answer was always education. The American Educational system is a complete mess, and the answer they have for you? It's not stop stripping funding from public schools that gave us a middle class which made us the most powerful economic, military and political force in the world. It's start privatizing it. That's been the same answer we've heard to just about every problem we've faced, even when those problems have their basis in the private market failing to provide what people need. And what happens when those private educational industry face the same kind of unstoppable future that the auto industry, music industry and film industry have faced and they refuse to change because their past models have been so profitable? What do Americans do then?

In 2006, America was graduating fifty-thousand engineers each year. Fifteen years prior, we'd been graduating sixty thousand engineers every year. In 2006, China was graduating over three hundred thousand engineers. Fifteen years prior, fifteen thousand. And what are we talking about right now? A community center in Manhattan. This is no different than Blockbuster trying to close it's eyes and act like Netflix and Redbox don't exist. We are not making the changes to the way we do things that are going to prepare us for the future that is coming. We are not realizing and taking into account that what it took to be, become and stay middle class is changing at an exponential rate. Middle class wages have been frozen, to the point of falling behind inflation, for thirty years. We can't afford to ignore these problems if we're going to continue to be and have a middle class. If we do, we're going to have ended up exactly like Blockbuster video, for exactly the same reason.

Blockbuster video was once the largest most powerful rental chain in the country and the world. The American auto industry was once the largest and most powerful auto industry in the world. The Unidted States once had the largest and wealthiest middle class in the world. One was recently rescued from utter destruction by the federal government (a government take over that saved their asses from being owned by China). Blockbuster won't exist in another few months. And the middle class is facing a dilemma. The model which created the middle class is no longer working. We are watching the world change around us, and we can become the leading edge of that change or we can get left behind. Are we going to keep on the path we've been on these last few decades or are we going to be the one's leading the world into the scientific and technological age? Are we going to be providing the kinds of services which make those advances as efficient as possible or are we going to be watching India, China, Korea, Japan and others beat us to it? Blockbuster and the auto industry refused to accept the realities of the changing world. America was once an economic and political powerhouse the likes of which the world has probably never seen, specifically because it had a thriving working and middle class. If those middle and working class people don't start waking up to the realities that just wanting things to go back to the way they were and not trying to start developing some new approaches to the changes of a changing world, we may very well end up in much the same place as the auto industry and Blockbuster video.

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)

The White Ribbon is a rumination on ritualized punishment by master film maker Michael Haneke. The film revolves around the residents of a small Austrian village just prior to World War I. Following a series of events both routine and unusually horrific, the peaceful life they've become used to is turned upside down. 

To say that The White Ribbon is an understated film is understated. It's obviously the work of a master film maker specifically for that reason. It takes someone confident enough in an ability they understand to be superior to craft a film as patient, studious and methodical as this film is. In every way, this should probably be a very boring film. This is not a flashy film, with exciting action and events happening every second.

The narrative is built like a mystery, a nearly perfect mystery, and the subtlety of it's construction is only possibly overshadowed by the performances, the dialog, the  script and the cinematography. It's shot in black and white, and so beautiful that there could be a few paragraphs worth of hyperbolic language to describe. I could seriously go on for a very long time about the photography in this film. This alone would be reason to see this film. 

Haneke has managed to create a film which is tightly wound and has a more consistent rhythm than a metronome by keeping things as subtle as he does and by using a decidedly uncinematic cast. That's not to say the performances aren't good, because they are, every single one of them is superb, but none of these actors look like they just stepped off a back lot somewhere in Hollywood or spend long hours devoted to the iconography of the physical image that we cultivate in most of our cinema and television. They aren't your classic Hollywood "pretty people," and whether we want to believe that or not, it makes a difference in how far we're willing to go in suspending our disbelief. When people are so attractive, so perfectly coiffed that it's abnormal, and looks like an effect they're attempting to achieve, we know it, and we don't believe it as willingly as we do people who look like they belong in an early twentieth century Austrian farming community. All of those elements come together to give the film a steady, quiet rhythm that keep it from becoming a boring, slow, preachy snoozefest, and make it engaging, suspenseful, interesting, and ultimately, an example of the power of quality, no frills film making. 

There's a cliche it's really easy to get tired of hearing or reading when you're a film enthusiast. Film makers, actors, producers, everyone invovled in film making and just about every single variety of storytelling in general use it. They say, "I was willing to do it to serve the story,""we really didn't want to do anything but serve the story." It's always about "serving the story." It's something said on a near constant basis, even when it couldn't be further from the truth. With The White Ribbon though, it's absolutely the truth. There is nothing in this movie that doesn't somehow serve the story. There's no extraneous bits and pieces or unecessary scenes, characters, dialog, nothing. It's all actuall there to serve the story, and that is what makes this such an incredible film. The story here has some interesting things to say about the nature of punishment and oppressive social, religious and economic conditions, and suggests some even more interesting things about the role those may have ultimately played in the beginnings and future acceptance of fascism. The source of that punishment and oppression is different in this film, but because of it's lack of sensationalistic tone, it's easy to see the through line from a life like the one depicted in the film, and accepting the kind of oppression fascism would eventually bring. 


The White Ribbon is an artistic accomplishment by a master film maker, which should be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in film on more than a pure entertainment level. I caught it on Netflix Watch Instantly and it's available on DVD. 

Bits and Pieces 11/22/10

Netflix is starting to offer a subscription option for streaming only. DVD isn't dead and gone yet, but this could be yet another example of the move in that direction. The New York Times had a piece on it.

With Black Friday coming, Amazon has a load of deals for film geeks of every stripe. /Film has a good list and a whole set of links. 

Harry over at Ain't It Cool News has compiled his usual list of noteworthy weekly releases. A Criterion Edition of Night of the Hunter is probably my favorite pick of the week. For anyone out there who hasn't seen it, Robert Mitchum's performance was the precursor to and foundation for basically every famous, fan favorite movie villain that's followed, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter. Mitchum's performance is both so charismatic and so creepy that whether you really like his character or you really hate him, you feel badly about it. It's impressive, a great movie worth checking out and paying Criterion price for the quality image and extras.

Neil Blomkamp, writer/director of the awesomely impressive District 9 seems to have a new project going on. There's a viral video showing up in this months iPad edition of Wired Magazine. Bloody Disgusting has gotten their paws on a copy, which is worth checking out. I don't know what it is, but it looks interesting, and considering how superb his first outing was, chances are I'll give this a shot.

/Film has a few other stories worth noting. Disney has apparently signed a deal with Gore Verbinski (director of the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the American version of The Ring) to finance a Verbinski directed version The Lone Ranger, with Johnny Depp attached to star. Good old Johnny boy seems to make quite an impression on his directors. Is this the beginning of another collaborative relationship along the lines of Burton/Depp? I guess we'll see. Johnny Depp is definitely a talented actor, but The Lone Ranger? I also have to ask, do we really need another Lone Ranger? We can hope it will be good. This may be of limited interest to most people, but Gael Garcie Bernal (who perfectly played a pre-revolutionary Che Guevera in The Motorcycle Diaries) is attached to play boxer Roberto Duran. If you're a casual boxing fan, like I am, Duran's story is an interesting one. Even if you know or care nothing about boxing, it could make for very good cinema. Also, Warner Brothers is doing something extremely unseemly. They are in the process of developing a reboot of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, without the creator of all of the original characters, and who was the creative engine behind the popular television series that fans are still dying to see a film based on. Joss Whedon certainly isn't hurting for work, as he's been tapped to write and direct The Avengers (possibly the biggest cinematic undertaking in the medium's history), but he did respond to Warner Brother's running off with his baby. Does anyone remember the last time someone tackled this property without Whedon to keep it balanced? It was a big, steaming, stinking pile of turd. Good luck with that Warner Brothers, for all of our sakes.

And then there is this... a surprising find and important find. One of the original 35mm prints of King Kong has been found. There's some speculation that this found gem may include the lost "spider pit" scene. Ain't It Cool News has a good piece on it, and so does Dread Central. 

Zombie Strippers (2008, Jay Lee)

This thing is a piece of trash. Seriously, it's utter trash. It's quite possibly the smartest, most sly, intelligent piece of trash I've ever seen. Zombie Strippers is trash, completely, totally and absolutely purposely. The history of film is filled to the brim with examples of film makers who had aspirations for creating real art, something really different, new, intelligent and only ended up with trash. Boom!, for example. There's nothing wrong with aspiring to reach new heights, great art has been created in the attempt to do so. This thing, goes in a completely different direction. It wraps itself in the veneer of trash while hiding some pretty intelligent well crafted social commentary, having fun with all of it the whole time.

It's a parody of both high art cinema and B-movie exploitation flicks and something of a ham handed social satire at the same time. The plot is completely ridiculous. A government created virus escapes from a top secret facility in a future created by the dissolution of Congress by an all powerful George W. Bush. Morality has been the central legislation, along with many, never ending wars. Exposed flesh has been outlawed completely, so stripping is obviously illegal.

When the virus escapes, in the form of a soldier who's been bitten by a zombie, it ends up at an underground, illegal strip club. Said soldier attacks the establishments star, who becomes an uber stripper. The crowd at this illegal establishment develop an appetite for nothing but zombie strippers. Living strippers just don't cut it anymore, because zombie strippers are sexier.

Of course, it all goes south from there, with lots of nudity, lots of gore, and strangely enough, a script practically carpet bombed with references to every major philosophical movement in history. In your face doesn't quite describe it's style. Considering the fact that the modern zombie film is steeped in philosophic allegory, possibly more than any other genre of film, as a fan I found that part of it entertaining. Writer/director Jay Lee is obviously a fan of the zombie genre, and the philosophical underpinnings which have been at it's heart since it made the jump into the modern age and the cultural lexicon with Night of the Living Dead.

It would be an overstatement to suggest this is not a film for everyone. It would also be an overstatement to say it's nothing but a mindless piece of trash, because it wears it's mindless trashiness too proudly on it's sleeve, with a wink and a nod. The best probable audience for this film is probably an extremely small one, philosophy loving fans of zombie movies. Chances are this will end up being exactly what it's intent seems to suggest, a cult oddity passed along from serious genre fan to genre fan for a number of years and generations. All in all a fun film that takes nothing seriously, including itself. It's not bad if your looking to waste some time with something fun, and mindless enough to be laughable, but not insultingly stupid either. Not a classic, but not a dud either.