Cowboys & Aliens

As a Firefly freak, I absolutely don’t have a problem with intelligent remixing of the western and science fiction idiom.  The first thirty minutes of this one show no sighs of anything idiotic…then the aliens arrive, and the western takes a dive through the event horizon of a space-spitoon that even the deepest bench of veteran actors can’t escape.

“Fighting Terrorists Since 1492″, is a lovely throwaway bumpersticker rimshot I noticed in an early episode of Breaking Bad, a while back.  It’s the property of an Indian (Navaho?) deputy sheriff, and it belongs in an honored place as the mission statement of Cowboys & Aliens, which it, of couse, isn’t.

Never mind the tactical imbecilities that dot the storyline.  This movie eventually facilitates the unceremonial burial of old tomahawks as Chiricahuas, outlaws, townsfolk and the romantic leads join together into an improbable fighting force to defend Earth against an exploitative scouting party for extraterrestrial conquistadores.  Jack Kirby told this story brilliantly, very long ago, without the, you know, western stereotypes.  Loogey-honking.  P’ding!

It’s entertaining, once, but Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Clancy Brown, Adam Beach, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Walton Goggins can’t stand up against the tower of pointless hooey, which is, in the final analysis, Cowboys & Aliens:  A movie that needn’t have been quite this vapid, raggedly paced, pseudosuspenseful and politically insignificant as this one was.  It coulda and shoulda shone a little insightful light on American history.  And didn’t bother.

Any extenuating cirumstances that might mitigate the harshness of my evaluation of this attempt-at-a-film were unavailable (as were the commentary and all of the other Special Features) on the “rental disk” I got from NetFlix, because that’s how the studio executives in charge of schlock want to play.  As if I’d pay-to-own a copy of a movie I didn’t particularly enjoy watching – because the commentary and behind-the-scenes content are its saving grace.

In all fairness, I was irate at the conclusion The Final Cut until I simmered down enough to catch its director’s commentary in the course of a reluctant second pass through the film, but I wouldn’t have bought the DVD based on the unexplained execution of the intent that only becomes explicit with commentary.  The Final Cut has become one of my favorite films, because of the intent that drove its execution.  My copy of The Final Cut DVD came very close to being destroyed.  I’m saying that filmmaker intent can be the saving grace, unless the special features are made, as a matter of moronic studio policy, strictly unavailable.  With regard to Cowboys & Aliens, who the fuck gives a shit?

Tunes of Glory

The Caine Mutiny is a splendid film unless it’s compared to Tunes of Glory.  All of the ethical and interpersonal goods are delivered in the latter without the tedious building of a case against Captain Queeg, and the spectacularly complex, subtle performances of Guinnes and Mills are complemented by the skills and grace of a subtle director whose interest in the infinite shades of character-gray between black and white is admirably adult and invisibly breathtaking.  In the course of Ronald Neame’s 2003 interview, his distaste for the current fashion of frenetic manipulation in camera operation is made explict and sharply-but-gently contrasted with the frame of mind in which he arose:

• The camera should be written, managed and handled as though it didn’t exist.
• Fastidiously smooth pans that stop before the editor cuts.
• Long, unbroken takes of events that unfold in a given scene from the least-possible number of points of view.
• Dialogue delivered clearly over spare music that never intrudes upon, muddles or confuses the audience’ apprehension of every single word spoken by performers whose obligation and gift and duty is to enthrall the attention of the viewer in stories that are too deeply layered and too complex for words alone.

Neame expressed his belief that the current trends in camera operation, editing and sound mixing will eventually be reversed in the elevation of cinematic technique to create great work in a cohesive and collaborative manner that works to the perceptual and comprehensive advantage of the audience, unlike the priorities of the current fashion.  He also said that the current trend toward freneticism in visual storytelling began with television’s insistence that the viewer IS the camera.  With that last parallel I’m forced to disagree because the camera has always represented an epistemoligical nonentity.  I think the current trend favors the absurd, confusing nonentity.  I hope he’s right, that fashions change, and that the light at the end of this long tunnel isn’t a camera aimed in the wrong direction, vainly attempting to find the action behind the scense, offstage; reality tv as the ultimate blunder in the struggle between art and commerce.  Ignore the skilled, professional actors — watch the producers/distributors pick the pockets of the numbskulls in the theater/studio audience.  Neame also produced Lean’s Oliver Twist.  A tiny joke.

Cheyenne Autumn

In 1964, Warner Brothers released John Ford’s last epic western, which cost four million dollars to make.  It was a crappy movie that didn’t break even.  It ran two and a half hours in the final theatrical cut, and improved when a comedic island of nonsense was removed from the middle.  ARCH is a little too understated a description of performances that drive socially-relevant points home with heavy expository hammers as ethnic caricatures trudge stoically through Ford’s emblematic mid-space of human history and his stars articulate plotpoints in the foreground, and geologic time looks on these mortal eccentricities from far beyond our focus and nearly every frame.

A movie about the 1500 mile return journey in 1878 of fewer than 300 Northern Cheyenne Indians to their ancestral homeland in Montana from their year-long internment in Oklahoma starred Sal Mineo, Dolores Del Rio, Victory Jory, Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland, as the primary Indian representatives.  Monument Valley, on the border of Utah and Arizona, stands in for Oklahoma.  Richard Widmark and Caroll Baker head a cast of compassionate, ineffectual white people whose indecisive ambivalences result in the gradual near-extermination (by cavalry, inclement weather and illness) of a whole lot of pseudoCheyenne in the forms of Navahos, Mexicans, Italians and Whatnots.  No Cheyenne, and none of the Navaho extras speak.  They’re scenery, but what kinds of subversive, postmodern things might Ford-subsidized Navaho have to say if they were allowed to speak?

When Dull Knife and Little Wolf speak to one another in their native tongue, Montalban’s and Roland’s words aren’t subtitled in English, because the filmmaker didn’t give a screaming shit what those characters actually thought.  And sometimes the speak English to one another, for reasons that don’t make much sense unless those central characters are simply shallow plot devices that nudge the story along, kinda like scenery.

Cheyenne Autumn is a very odd kind of apology for Ford to have made approaching the end of a long career laden with extremely-familiar, creaking stereotypes forged in 4.5 dozen successful, self-serving American films about cavalry, cowboys and Indians.  It’s a movie about the destruction of people beneath the wheel of an oblivious political machine controlled by people so remote that the stifled anguish in our foreground is inaudible to anyone who isn’t present, yet the pseudoCheyenne representatives remaing largely impenetrable masks of stoic resignation, even to the attentive audience that paid to see this story unfold.  It might as well be a tale of Irish Nazis following crazy-lethal orders as a revisionist western set in OklaUtah.

John Ford made history.  John Ford also made history stupid.

Our modern tendency to repeat mistakes previously made whenever The People square off against The Wealth would be more predictable and less disaster-prone without the screen of self-congratulating obfuscation John Ford dropped between us and the American Indian.

The inevitability of Manifest Destiny and the inevitable offshoring of American jobs are not separate processes.  People unite to protect Life and Liberty, but the protection of Property requires a draft that’s organized by people with jeopardized property.

Spiral

An odd little wrinkle:

In the twentieth episode of the fifth season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (May 2001), the Sunnydale crew holds hostage a general of holy knights who spills a bunch of backstory about Glory, the season’s BigBad.  It seems Glory is The Beast, a powerful god who was overthrown in an unspeakable hell dimension ruled by a triumverate of jealous and capricious gods before she was imprisoned in the body of a newborn male whose identity was (and remains) unknown to the knights who mean to topple Glory once and for all.

If that wasn’t sufficiently complicated, two years later (in February, 2003), Angel faces The Beast, who covertly serves the scheming Cordelia Chase, who will bear and give birth to Jasmine, the incredibly powerful god-in-transit from at least one unspeakable hell dimension.  Oz?  My head’s starting to hurt.  But hey!  The Beast awakened from rocky inprisonment  deep in the bowels of the Earth to emerge from the ground in Los Angeles in the very same alley where Darla gave birth to Connor.  What?!

And let’s not forget Illyria, whose (A Hole in the World) backstory sounds remarkably similar to that of the other two gods whose ultimate objectives involved the apocalyptic dissolution of natural barriers between familiar definitions of chaos, paradise, heaven/hell and unspeakable hell dimensions in which people are no longer discrete packets of private, unique identity…kinda like The Master’s plan to be the mass-production Henry Ford of Sunnydale/BtVS in the first season, with an irresistible vision of billions of beastly HappyMeals in denim served piping-hot to all the vampire beasts and hellishly-beastly demons drawn toward the Hellmouth.  Wasn’t there a Beast among the X-Men?  Maybe The Beast took some kind of part in building the hole in the world:  Idle speculation.  Slime and antlers.

I think looking for stinking plot holes in Mutant Enemy products is an absolute waste of time.  It’s far more interesting and exciting to attempt to connect deliciously-harmonious points of reference across arbitrary divisions (like those erected by competing broadcast networks; nonsequential presentation, content [standalones vs seriality] meddling, budget curtailment and eventual cancellation).

This post is only a remark, a gracenote for somebody’s preliminary investigation of probable interseries resonance between a couple of complex, compact and fascinating supernarratives and Yeats’ gyre, and realwold information/privacy controversy, and the seeming-inevitability that The Beast would eventually have made itself evident in Firefly.  Reavers?

Grushow/Groosalugg?  Of just how much invaluable realworld/fictional woven resonance is one small underfunded production company capable?  Whither Mutant Enemy? Check that question out!  They’ve infiltrated most everything interesting in recent American television.  And why aren’t those amazing motherfuckers federally subsidized?  That‘s a band I’d love to see reunited.

Also, whither Beauty?

Margin Call

This is the film that pardons real vampires.  Skip it.

Or Will You Ever Be?

Hymie Simon died five days ago.  Jacob Kurtzberg kicked in ’94.  Better known as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, they together, late in 1940, created a hugely-successful, iconic goyische asskicking character named Captain America in an inital comic printing run that went to 800,000 copies.

In a better United States, Captain America, appearing before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, could freely state that his real name was Shlomo (not Steve) Rogers, or Chaim, or Aaron, without creating a ruinous sensation in the press.

Imagine, if you will, Hayward, Wisconsin in 1915; and a lone, exhausted, Ojibwe woman giving difficult birth to her terribly premature son, in the snowy field behind the outbuilding of a redneck bar.  Perhaps it’s a daughter.  Chinatown.  The alley behind a mosque.  The back porch of a juke joint, cantina, Armenian restaurant…pretty much anywhere that pits the principles articulated by the Declaration of Independence to the ultimate test of commercial success in the actual Land of the Free.

I’m prejudiced.  Kind of partial to the tale that thoroughly expresses the indomitable spirit in a scrawny, little, victimized Indian kid who becomes the personified emblem of a global struggle to resist total war (an American invention first practiced on Confederate sympathizers and Plains Indians) and all “permissible” variations on the theme of human extermination.  How would Hiawatha do it?  Taking coups from Hitler.

I’d like to live in that other America.  Maybe it’s the native america.  The question that persists is how to go about making that relatively ideal America synonymous with this crappier one.

Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?

The second episode of the second season of Angel may not be entirely perfect, but it’s reallyreally beautiful; visually, musically, thematically.  As if there weren’t enough backstory dragging behind a 240 year-old vampire, this episode loops a single thread of his shameful past from the present through a lyrically assembled series of events that localize crucial choices, filmic allusions and shame-based behaviours to a personal emotional disaster frozen fifty years in his past.  It does this without the jarring, unpredictable, blinding flashes and ear-splitting noises that make most of the episodes in this series remarkably difficult to watch — even though I know that these interstitial transition story-devices mark the inevitable approach of Jasmine, two seasons down the vampire’s steeply-uphill path to redemption.

I suspect the 8 minutes trimmed for time, and moments removed to appease Standards & Practices might make this episode still more sublimely satisfying than the produced version already is, but putting them back wouldn’t alter the look that comes over Angel’s face at the very end of the episode as he gazes kinda-lovingly around the lobby of the haunted, insecurity-riddled hell of an old hotel he’s just liberated from the fascinating/abhorrent paranoia demon.  It’s a legible look of homecoming that foreshadows Malcolm Reynolds’ first, enraptured visual study of Serenity, at the end of Out Of Gas, my favorite episode of Firefly (also written by the same remarkable guy).

Tim Minear’s fine-toothed commentary doesn’t go much out of its way to itemize each of the chewy allusions he wrote into this episode, beyond the mention of Chinatown.  I noticed/imagined quotes from a host of hotel-based horror/noirs; The Shining, Barton Fink, Psycho with fond nods to Rebel Without A Cause, The Defiant Ones, Ox-Bow Incident, Pinky, Advise and Consent, and possibly The Manchurian Candidate, with strong tonal resonance with Bad Day at Black Rock and Shock Corridor – but then, the content and the context of this episode is steeped in still-topical issues that bleed from most episodes of The Twilight Zone; prejudice, self-interest served at cost to others, alienation, mob violence, lethal secrets, insupportable shame and manipulated insecurity – it’s as though Tim Minear were Serling’s unsung son.  Temporal variations in our collective sociocultural attitudes toward racism, homosexuality, miscegenation, communism, lynching, scapegoating, crowdsourcing, and bullet-headed stupidity play tacitly, deep in the viewer’s imagination without crowning The Present Day with bullshit awards for enlightened, progressive platitudes (except for one unfortunate line that Minear explicitly regrets).  It’s an amazingly tidy, nonlinear, meandering, complex and contradictory, yet beautifully-managed, profoundly-disturbing episode.  HUACpaTooie!

In the interest of candor, I might as well report that I find Angel (one of my favorite television series) a real chore to watch because of the

1. aforementioned, blinding and deafening interstitial transition thing,
2. mumbled/whispered dialogue alongside BIG musical score and (industry-standard bogus) violent sound effects,
3. the increasing prominence of the Cordelia Chase character,
4. 80% of the Pylea excursion,
5. most things involving Connor,
6. and the mercifully-rare instances of crossover in which the hit&miss chemistry of Geller/Boreanaz usually leads me to gag on the smarm.

But it’s worth it because these shows are almost always about something real and pending that deserves to be re-evaluated regularly.  And Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?  is certainly one of the best of them, right up there with The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  And there’s Billy, Skip and the indescribably delicious Alexa Davalos.

24DEC2011:

Jasmine’s the personification of the internet, the singular server of an ever-widening social network, the adversary of oldschool privacy, free will, and both the highest ideal and the ugliest dreads of humanity.  The interstital transitions persist more intermittently after Jasmine’s vanquished (in the Whedonverse, where death isn’t necessarily terminal).  Jasmine’s termination may have been instrumental in the liberation of Illyria, lest two monumentally-powerful higher largely-female powers converge on Earth kinda simultaneously to vastly overshadow the vampire from whose name the show derived its title.

Given the vicissitudes of unexpected preganacy (in season four), network anti-seriality notes and series cancellation, Mutant Enemy ground the standalone form of season five to an incredibly satisfying halt.  Perhaps its a little more accurate to say they modified the course of a streaking killer-asteroid into a stable orbit.

The Black Death vs The Season of the Witch

The striking similarities between these two movies begin with their settings in or nearly in 1348CE, and introduce stalwart holy knights who are charged by The Curch to root out The Evil cause of The Black Plague that is presently reducing the populations of Europe by something like 50%.  The Season of the Witch is a vastly superior movie starring Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman.  (A movie is a film that I’ll probably never revisit.)  It goes in search of conventional heroes who encounter problems and furnish solutions; and once I’ve seen the patented Hollywood packaging of the usual Hollywood product, there’s very little reason to go there ever again.  The Season of the Witch is just like that; boxed entertainment.  The End.

The Black Death is difficult to watch because of all the fashionable camera movement (even in extended dialogue scenes).  Action scenes apparently give filmmakers unlimited license to disorient and nauseate a manipulated audience, but this film takes those liberties whenever talking heads are babbling or silent or severed.  I also hated the fashionable editing practices that go hand-in-hand with wobbly camerawork.

The Black Death, however, has a significant advantage over The Season of the Witch; it’s about something I find far more interesting than neutralizing the diabolical machinations of the malicious imps of Satan.  The Black Death is about the rightness of righteous intolerance.  It comes right out and describes The Church as Power unjustly dedicated, for thirteen unbroken centuries, to pervasive sociopolitical dominance, the subjugation of women, and of the faithful, and the merciless extermination of disbelievers/heretics and unChristian infidels.  That’s a littly ballsy for exploitainment.  It also installs Sean Bean as the leader of a tiny band of sociopathic felons tasked by The Church to determine exactly what ungodly, necromantic force prevents an isolated village from falling prey to the catastrophic plague that’s ravaging everybody else.  It’s a film about the plural shadow of devout belief (rather than doubt) hidden in a bloody, exploitation movie that really coulda/shoulda been better made.

Inevitably, our “heroes” find the plague-free village peopled by ________________ (that would be prejudicial spoilery).  It’s probably sufficient to say there are zero signs of Satan-worship, aliens, nor people from the future.  The unChristian inhabitants make cogent and interesting talking points regarding faith in the invisible, implaccable, vengeful Lord of Christian creation and orthodoxy — which sets the heavily-armed, sociopathic killer-Christians, in their midst, on edge.  It’s probably enough to say that an isolated village of pissed-off infidels in the plague-ravaged bowels of Papist England in 1348 aren’t a single hair more pleasant company than psychotic fighting men hellbent on roasting bleeding heretics at the bidding of The Cardinal.

Don’t read this:  (The [global] village is inhabited by lying, two-faced, manipulative, sophisiticated, self-serving, murderous agnostics:  very much like Us!)

Were it not for the intrusive and excessive camera-movement/editing quirks of this film, The Black Death would deserve the kind of careful attention it clearly attempted to provoke.  Unfortunately, the film also wobbles to its bloody and irresolute conclusion with a ludicrous voice-over epilogue designed to inflect the thrusts of serious conversations of patrons leaving the theater away from universal parallel witch-hunts, toward the isolated personal issues of a vengeful monk…Hollywood schlock.  Expecting to be nauseted, I might revisit this one.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Yeah.  That worked about as well as anything I was expecting possibly could.  He’s never been Jewish.  That’s just me thinking wishfully.

First pass; intense satisfaction, patience fabricated from pure Wakandan vibranium, and ridiculously keen anticipation.

Tutonic legend freak, The Red Skull, gets Cosmic Cubed (perhaps) to Asgard, meets Loki, Tutonic legend, and a pair of fascinatingly-complex villains devise new junk that merits endless speculation.  Good Golly this stuff is fun, but it needs lots more Agent Coulson.

Third pass 30OCT2011:  The Red Skull is an antiquarian.  He’s Indiana Jones, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell — dusting off the cobwebs to reveal long-forgotten practical power.  During their climactic fight, he accuses Captain America of pigheaded, myopic, nationalistic imaging of their common Destiny; a future in which there are no flags.  He may well be a ruthless egomaniac, but the Skull is, nonetheless, interesting, visionary.

Steve Rogers (the sickly, undersized, constant victim of other people’s abuse of superior power) suddenly beomes The First Avenger because all the other Avengers were born later (with the probable exception of THOR), but the suddenly-mighty Captain America isn’t remotely interested in wreaking vengeance on the many individuals who victimized weak Steve Rogers (most of whom probably died during his 70year nap).  Captain America’s mission is (chivalrously) saving the planet from the abuses of superior power, he’s the prototype, the foundation upon which S.H.I.E.L.D. was built from the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the primary narrative representative of which is Peggy Carter:

Courtesy of Wikipedia, actress, Hayley Atwell;

An officer with the Strategic Scientific Reserve and the love interest of Captain America.  Regarding her preparation for the role, she said,

“I’m training at the moment six days a week to make her a bit more military and make it convincing that I could kick butt.”^[8]

About the character Atwell stated,

“I likened her character to that famous Ginger Rogers quote. She can do everything Captain America can do, but backwards and in high heels. She’s an English soldier through and through, although she always looks fabulous. She might stand there with a machine-gun shooting Nazis, but she’s obviously gone to the loo beforehand and applied a bit of lipstick. She doesn’t need to be rescued.  That’s exciting to me – her strength”.^[9] “I think she’s quite stubborn, a slightly frustrated woman who struggles with being a woman in that time. But more importantly she’s a modern woman and she sees something in Captain America that she relates to, and becomes kindred spirits. He treats her very differently to how she’s been treated by lots of men, in this kind of dominated world she lives in. So she’s very much a fighter.”^[10]

The transition from one secret government institiution, S.S.R., into another, S.H.I.E.L.D., is an intriguing thread of continuity (across fascinating decades of recent [male-dominated?] adversarial history) made manifest in the point of view of Peggy Carter, who appears in 2011 at the end of this film looking almost exactly as she did in 1942.  I wonder why.  If Peggy Carter lost Stever Rogers to his noble decision to sacrifice himself (or New York), that choice had deeply-tragic consequences, for her.  If, in 2011, Steve Rogers awakens in a simulated 1942 hospital bed, greeted by the (identical) granddaughter of Peggy Carter, true love gets fucked.  If it’s The Original Peggy, fresh out of preserves in 2011, there‘s a shitload of valuable personal (gender-polarized) history sacrificed in the name of the Carter/Rogers romance.  Ginger wasn’t Fred’s automatic, natural doppelgänger, maybe that was Hermes.  They worked (choreographed, tried, failed, revised, rehearsed beyond exhaustion) until they worked like nobody else.

There’s an enormous body of unproduced (perhaps unwritten) masterwork detailing The Potts Perspective on Stark, Carter on Rogers, Watson on Parker…It’s written from the shadowed, ordinary side of unqualified, superheroic celebrity, and it hands the bullhorn to people who REALLY know how to communicate something all of us will eventually come to regard as invaluable.  How to thrive while being eclipsed.

(Never mind that suspended animation wasn’t widely known to be an available option in 1942.  Steve hops into a few utterly-unfamiliar, foreign cockpits and flies expertly, too.  This film is richly-inlaid with the usual bullshit, but the stink is offset by the charm of noticing at The Red Skull’s Flying Wing [the MacGuffin that opens the film] is buried in snow an ice, very like the saucer in The Thing, and that David Niven’s introduction into Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death resonates beautifully with Steve’s and Peggy’s radio conversation as both guys plummet to their respective deaths in their respective films.  And heroes of the myopic view of culture pigheadedly wave copyright pennants as an impediment to Progre$$, while the biggest A-List creators in Hollywood are also the biggest fans/tributers/borrowers ["pirates"] who ever studied pedicure at the feet of recognized masters.)

The point I’d like to make here is that Captain America:  The First Avenger isn’t just mindless, escapist entertainment.  Its excellences, failings, quirks and logical inconsistencies point directly at stuff that’s worth thinking about and fixing in real life while waiting for the next Marvel spectacular to hunker down on our faces and bathe us in its investors’ ecstatic delight (on its way to the bank).  It’s also a crucial installment in an ongoing cultural event that may provide significant and valuable information to Scmidts and Jonses and Tolkiens and Rogers (both Steves and Gingers) in centuries to come.

Something about this particular time in American history smells like it was accurately predicted from between the dusty covers of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.  To misquote Livia Soprano, “Poe us”.

Red State

Here’s a rich, angular, suspenseful film that’s packed with actors I admire turning in spectacular performances; Michael Parks, John Goodman, Stephen Root and Melissa Leo, with engaging cameos by Kevin Pollak, Anna Gunn and Matt L. Jones (Brandon “Badger” Mayhew from Breaking Bad).  The film is significantly more visual and prettier than anything I’ve come to expect from the nimble, verbal pen and direction of Kevin Smith.  It’s also a good deal darker, dead-serious and unrelenting than whatever I was expecting, but it’s also remarkably rich in language woven to drape Michael Parks in luscious opportunities to inhabit the part of an iconic, plausible, realistic, believable, spellbinding, damn-near-persuasive, righteous maniac.  Move over, Robert Duvall.

It’s a film about ass-coverage, fanaticism and ubiquitous, fanatical ass-coverage – inronically, buttfucking is the central bone of contention in a tale that reaches around several unexpected corners to expose whole herds of sacred cows unflatteringly on the horns of legitimate, current dilemmas; realworld problems, skanky heroes, and precious little conventional, Hollywood bullshit.

While there were moments of prolonged yammering that rang ever-so-slightly false, they were generally screamed over the sound of semi-automatic riflefire, which makes up for an awful lot.  I didn’t know bigtime lethal pandemonium came so easily to Kevin Smith.  Now I do.  Red State is a chewy, thoughtful kickass film that wipes feces and sputum off it’s testicles with wit, elan and an inimitable appetite for violent, colloqual charm.

99%11 — Demonstrative Attacks on Wall Street

I’ve always found it interesting that the 11SEP2001 attack on Manhattan wasn’t aimed at Liberty.

It targeted Wall Street, like a wake-up call for 99% of Americans who came to lust for revenge against the alarm clock,

while the captains of our financial institutions effected our economic collapse.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/13nuc)

Who Are the ’99 Percent’?

Anti-Wall Street protesters have differing motivations

By Queena Kim on                 September 29, 2011 – 6:42 p.m. PDT

Hundreds of people descended on downtown San Francisco Thursday to support the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations that are going on in New York. The tagline for the protest is “We Are the 99 Percent,” and here’s how they describe themselves:

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

We wondered who were the “99 percent” protesting on the streets on Thursday and why they were demonstrating. Here’s a random sampling.

Charlene Woodcock, 71, retired book editor

QK: Why are you out here?

CW: I’ve seen the wealth of this country – and especially California – go from the middle class to the very rich. It’s destroying California, it’s destroying our schools. The Republicans are doing their best to privatize everything they can and it’s destroying the country.

QK: What do you want these protests to accomplish?

CW: A state bank. North Dakota has a state bank that isn’t doing it for profit.

QK: What do you have against Wall Street?

CW: They broke laws, they made a mockery of process of granting loans to enrich themselves in the short term and they didn’t give a damn about the long term.

Mary Ann Meany, 60, lawyer

QK: Why are you out here?

MAM: I’m out here because the program I work for has been cut, my court has been cut, every social service in California is being cut and I think it’s time that we all recognize that there’s a social contract that we have to support. I work in juevenile court – employees, commissioners, court reporters have been cut.

QK: Do you blame Wall Street for those cuts?

MAM: We use Wall Street as a symbol and a signal of whether the economy is good or not. I don’t think it’s the right indicator. We think the economy is doing well because Wall Street is doing well but we still have high unemployment and people aren’t willing to pay taxes and things seem to be breaking down.

Larry Yee, over 50, service technician

QK: Why are you out here?

LY: I’m a member of CWA 9410. I’m here in support of our brothers and sisters asking for fair jobs and making sure the banks don’t just walk away after the disaster they caused in the financial market. We all need to speak up and make sure our voices are heard.

Evelyn Sanchez, 35, community organizer

QK: Why are you marching out here?

ES: I’m very much in touch with families that have been affected by this crises. Both immigrants who have been cut off from services as well as families who are facing budget cuts in their school system.

QK: What does Wall Steet have to do with those cuts?

ES: A lot of our laws and policies are designed to favor them – their health and their well-being and not enough is being done for us, the people, who are on the street. I’m happy to see there are so many people here who are sick and tired of the agenda of our politicians and that’s doing what’s best for corporations and the financial sector. It’s about time they pay attention to the needs of the people.

Karen Henry, 50, runs clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies

QK: Why are you out demonstrating?

KH: I came out here because I am fed up with supporting corporate America. There’s a much bigger gap between the rich and the poor. And we gave all our money to the banks and we don’t have anything left. This morning I was going to work and I heard Bank of America is going to charge $5 for debit transactions – that’s friggin’ ridiculous! It goes into some stockholders pocket while it gets eaten out of ours. I heard about the demonstration today and decided to come. I left work early and decided to come.

Chris Tully, 36, unemployed

QK: Why are you out here?

CT: To support the 99%. To support Occupy Wall Street. They’re out there for us. I’m against corprorate greed and I want to see a higher employment rate and banks should pay.

QK: Why should the banks pay?

CT: They’re the ones that benefited the most from all of us in the bailouts and their still making massive profits. They continue to do so.

QK: What do you hope will come out of these protests?

CT: I’m hoping to see a stronger sense of community and be more organized. Everyone tends to walk around thinking they can’t make a difference and we’re out here to show them we can.

Ulises Olvera, 19, student at San Francisco State University

QK: Why are you out here?

UO: To stand in solidarity with all the workers and see if we can make some change.

QK: What kind of change do you want these protests to make?

UO: Drastic change

QK: Like what?

UO: Like the way the tax dollars are collected. Who gets taxed and the amount of taxes we impose on people who have money and people who don’t have money. I come from a working class family and in the last five years, they have been struggling just to make rent and it’s been really tough. I’m from San Deigo and a lot of my friends, their parents are agricultural workers, and it’s been hard on them too. They’ve lost jobs in the last couple of years.

QK: How is Wall Street responsible for that?

UO: They hold all the wealth and they get preference on how money is dispursed and they’re pretty much in control of everybody else. So whoever has the money has the power and that’s how they control.

Darnell Boyd, 50, tenant organizer for SRO Hotels
Boyd lives at the Mission Hotel and he helps organize tenants.

QK: Why are you out here?

DO: We need the rich to pay more taxes. And we need them to not cut aid and medicare.

QK: What does Wall Street have to do with that?

DO: I think they’re [rich] Wall Street. They need to pay their fair share.

Source: The Bay Citizen (http://s.tt/13nuc)

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena

The second season of this series is a prequel for the first season.  It’s another masterpiece of complex character embroidery that serves to provide contextual backstory.  Every central character relates to every other along multistranded threads of interaction that are riddled with bizarre combinations of loyalty, devotion, conspiracy and betrayal.  I’d like very much to cruise this series again; marathoning the second season again before plunging directly into the first.  This show is brilliant!  but I have a couple of problems with it:

Just as the relationships between principle (and secondary and tertiary…) characters are multilayered and complex, so too the relationship between spoken language and visual information is fascinating:

1. Every physical conflict is photographed from multiple-angles, and edited into a bewildering hodgepodge of milisecond glimpses that are (apparently) intended to goose-up the viewer’s excited appreciation of innovative, amplified and hyper-real ACTION, which, after all, is the primary draw/appeal of this show — just as Fred&Ginger dance routines were signature tentposts that masterfully integrated and magnetized audience attention to the narratives in their films.  I find the postproduction manipulation of action scenes in this Spartacus deal profoundly intrusive and a counterproductive, destructive distraction from the seamless integration of months of conditioning, hours of rehearsal, and admirable dedication of skilled performers to realize each choreographed illusion of hyper-violence.  From the beginning, Fred said, If the camera moves, I won’t!  I like his decision that effectively countered the then-revolutionary Busby Berkeley approach to camera operation by insisting on long takes shot from a stationary position, no dramatic/spectacular overheads, and realistic transitions in profoundly-integrated narrative context that drives theatrical audience attention purely in the service of story.  Leni, Busby, Dektor and MTV have kinda-sorta taken a crap on all that.
2. The exception to Point 1 appears in the final episode of Season 2, when in Bitter Ends, the characteristic editing style leans toward significantly longer snippets of action that permit the viewer a much better idea of what the fuck’s going on, who’s doing what to whom for what foreshadowed reason, and reaction-shots from outside the ring of violence are regarded (at long last) as far less important to storytelling cohesion than the coherent images of photographed violence.  Why?
3. Subtitles distract, but I find them a necessary evil.  Actors with a wide variety of British accents swiftly delivering elevated dialogue (that often lacks personal pronouns, drops objects and subjects from sentences and dwells in a realm of peculiar syntax) make the use of subtitles indispensibly mandatory, for me.  I think big American money must insists that aristocratic Nazis and Romans be played with classy British accents, social dregs are Cockney, heroes kinda Nebraska-ish…always.  Check it out.  Diona sounds like Oakland, Lecretia’s meso-sophisticated Sydney, Gaia’s upperclass Swinging London from the 60s — to my ear.  I think it’s a subtle Hollywood manipulation that’s been operating so effective for decades that we barely notice it.
4. The larger vision of the Roman Republic revealed in this series presents the viewer with an elaborated awareness of the lower strata of a vast social pyramid (slaves, gladiators, lanistas, minor officials, and gangsters) and glimpses of absolute assholes who dwell in slightly higher castes in the social order, without ever showing us the major assholes (for contrast) in the seats of power in the city of Rome, itself.  We constantly sense their pervasive influence, but are not permitted a bird’s-eye view of the structure of the Republic, except through the myopic, rhetorical fantasies, convoluted conspiracies, and vague aspirations of their (contemptible) tools, the very characters we come to know and/or hate as the episodes unfold.  And the percieved differences between heroic and villainous characters (and their actions) are so microscopically minute that they’re practically immeasurable.  Forget your moral compass?  No sweat, you probably won’t need it.
5. Perhaps the most uncomplicated relationship in all of this wonderful mess is that between Lucretia and her husband; an almost-unflagging devotion that makes them totally cool with rape, murder, dismemberment and all manner of mayhem visited on anybody other than the two of them.  But how/why that singular bond became remarkably exceptional isn’t remotely clear.

In spite of these objections to presentation and big-picture context, I continue to find this show entertaining and instructive as all-get-out.

THOR

Well, that was just ENORMOUSLY enjoyable!

OneHour Photo

Mark Romanek holds Harry Truman accountable for photofinishing Japan, as though World War Two were a race/war.  It’s an uncommonly visual film that opens as disconcertingly as did All The President’s Men.

The heavenly order of SlaveMart is maintaned by specialized angels in cerulean vests, whose mission is to serve our better natures, while scrutinized from above by Bill, the multiple-monitored, big-pictured SlaveMart manager, whose inescapeable omniscience is almost entirely powerless before the unexpectable threat posed by Sigh, Perish to Bill’s only begotten daughter, on whom Sigh zooms in.  Psych!  Feint!  Gambit!

By invoking Evangelion (the 60foot-tall, darkly-winged Angel/agent of Retribution against bad guys); and by transforming Robin Williams’ look to resemble Truman, at whiles; and by framing the Yorkin family as a pillar of apparent nuclear-familial piety riddled with broken promises on the eve of their semi-private, emotional implosion; and by depositing bad Will (Hunting) Yorkin in the hotel room of Maya Burson; and by carefully or serendipitously orchestrating dozens of similar, powerfully-disturbing snapshots, Romanek makes OneHour Photo a deeply compassionate exercise in modernAmerican (and global and universal) regret.  He even provides Truman, by means of Sigh’s expository allusion to a deeply-nightmarish backstory, an excuse for the unforgivable decision to execute an unthinkable plan to destroy the nuclear family as only he can (and Truman did).

Most of the action in this exceptionally-interesting film takes place after the final act, as people who’ve been exposed to it think and talk (some may even radiate) about it; Shanley-style Doubt.

The Dawn Patrol (1938)

This is a propaganda film that manages in 103 minutes to convey tremendous amounts of fast-paced, coherent, stirring information about comradeship, the joys of insubordination, the lethally-lonely duplicity of command, vengence, despair and sacrifice.  Those are themes one would cynically expect of a 1938 American film designed to support Allied spiritual preparation for the Second World War by celebrating the exploits of gallant, flying heroes of The War To End All Wars…but somehow this film also manages to weave a powerful, cogent, fundamental, explicit and universally-appropriate antiwar statement from all of the cliches its primary themes employ.  Go figure.  No, really.  Don’t miss this one.

Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, David Niven, Donald Crisp, Melville Cooper and Barry Fitzgerald lead an ensemble cast of players in this remake (of a 1930 adaptation of a Saunders short story, The Flight Commander) that successfully spins its themes with remarkable efficiency in the first several acts, and culminates in utterly wordless action in an illustrative masterpiece of unequivocal, purely-visual “narrative” exposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_Patrol_(1938_film)

The Random Adjustment Harvest Bureau

Beyond the title of this post, I really haven’t much to say.  Plot devices in Random Harvest are much klunkier and very different from those used in The Adjustment Bureau (also klunky), but the numerous points of emotional engagement are almost identical.  I don’t mean to say that the more recent film intentionally mirrors the earlier, it’s simply that they share a lyric momentum and pace that drives toward a final, monumental chord that rings brilliantly with optimism in the Garson/Colman romance, and kicks the ass of order-following middle management in the Blunt/Damon assay (significantly easier).

I agree with Lisa Hayes (creator of UltraFem) that Philip K. Dick wrote tiny, jewel-like ideas into stories that Hollywood inflates, bathes with steroids and hammers almost beyond all recognition/affection into major motion pictures (that don’t work particularly well).

The NetFlix rental of The Adjustment Bureau marks my first experience of a clearly-marked “rental” DVD that shows me all of the special features, but won’t give me access to them.  George Nolfi’s intentions in writing and directing this film will remain unknown to me until I cough up the purchase price — or NetFlix registers and acts on the outrage of customers like me (who declare the disc defective and ask for a replacement — there has to be a less ridiculous strategy).  Media Rights Capital may well be responsible for this new wrinkle in the value-subtracted method of data distribution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Rights_Capital

I believe I’ve just discovered a brand of content to avoid like the plague (that transforms loyal customers into zombie-like consumers).  I don’t actually fault NetFlix.

I’m midway through an early-Garson marathon.  The films are superb, but they just seem to improve as that radiant personality receives more ’40s screentime:

Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Pride and Prejudice; Random Harvest; Mrs. Miniver; Madame Curie.

Update 29Aug2011 — My second NetFlix rental MRC DVD (Devil) confirms the earlier expectation that the Media Rights Capital logo signifies no special/bonus features will be available to customers playing rental disks.  It’s a reasonably effective means for studios (Universal, this time) and entertainment distributors to discredit and devalue NetFlix in the minds of NetFlix’ clientele.  I sense the birth and spread of stupid industry-wide practices intended to subtract worth from viewer experience in favor of the illusion of capital gain (upholding shareholder value by crapping on product/audience).

So long as NetFlix fails to identify castrated titles in its catalogue, customers won’t bother to avoid them, won’t boycott MRC-style manipulative practices, and the bean-counting mercenaries win yet another minor, short-term victory enroute to the absolute-complete disenchantment of audiences for studio product — not (only) because these two particular intellectual properties are fairly-blatant Christian propaganda shit, but because the fundamental intentions of its owners really stink of spite and avarice.

An American in Paris

If this film weren’t tweaked ever so slightly, I think Warner Brothers could have found it eminently actionable.  That’s how much it reminds me of Casablanca.

There is, of course, the romantic commonality of Paris.  The brash, iconoclastic hero’s permanent sidekick is a first-rate piano player, and a bit of a slacker.  The love-target was a continental waif who owed so much to her admirable protector that their marriage (of gratitude and cradle-robbing convenience) seemed inevitable.  And the hero is so entirely at-home in his expatriated ex-patriot adventure that he radiates a uniquely winning American (and disaffected [almost unAmerican]) confidence that natives and tourists recognize and bow before.  This citizen of the world reflects the maturation of the formerly-insular American character — as the stormclouds of global war gathered, AND in the chillier, atomic aftermath of that more violent conflict.

Rick, the drunkard, and Jerry, the painter, are practically the same guy.  Ilse and Lise, Sam and Adam, Victor and Henri…in fact the closer I look at both films, the more alike in wit, structure, engine, tone and personalities the seem.  It’s really only the similarly-polished crisp finishes of their respective skins that makes them seem markedly different (dancing&singing versus labyrinthine plot twists) — and the fact that the couple walking toward Destiny at the end of the movie is two dark guys in the earlier film.  Go figure.  Between Wilson, Raines and Levant, I wonder which one is and was the most invisible man.  Even if these comparisons aren’t breathtakingly original, I think they serve to highlight variations in zeitgeist and backlight the silhouette of the mysterious specter of national will, especially in context of international crises.  Call it Mentertainment, because Gentertainment was the exclusive province of Fred Astaire (or maybe Hugh Heffner).

Neither cinematic masterpiece gets any older with frequent re-exposure, unlike most things.  All hail The Freed Unit!

• The Wizard of Oz (1939) (associate producer)      Babes in Arms (1939)     Strike Up the Band (1940)     Little Nellie Kelly (1940)    Lady Be Good (1941)
• Babes on Broadway (1941)         Panama Hattie (1942)          For Me and My Gal (1942)          Cabin in the Sky (1943)          Best Foot Forward (1943)
• Du Barry Was a Lady (1943)       Girl Crazy (1943)     Meet the People (1944) (executive producer)  Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)      The Clock (1945)
• Yolanda and the Thief (1945)    The Harvey Girls (1946)   Ziegfeld Follies (1946)    Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)    Good News (1947)   Summer Holiday (1948)
• The Pirate (1948)      Easter Parade (1948)      Words and Music (1948)      Take    Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)        The Barkleys of  Broadway (1949)
• Any Number Can Play (1949)      On the Town (1949)     Annie Get Your Gun (1950)     Crisis (1950)     Pagan Love Song (1950)      Royal Wedding (1951)
• Show Boat (1951)   An American in Paris (1951)     The Belle of New York (1952)     Singin’ in the Rain (1952)    The Band Wagon (1953)    Brigadoon (1954)
• It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)   Kismet (1955)   Invitation to the Dance (1956)   Silk Stockings (1957)  Gigi (1958)  Bells Are Ringing (1960)  The Subterraneans (1960)

Dark Victory

This film is a premake of The Magnificent Ambersons, without that pesky loss of wealth.  Bette Davis plays a fabulously wealthy, arrogant spoiled brat who is fawned over and adored by just about everybody, including Humphrey Bogart, as her lowly, insubordinate, Irish, horse trainer and George Brent, the manly, heroic, saintly, lying, crusading brain surgeon who diagnoses her inoperable brain tumor.  The brat’s comeuppance impends from the very opening moments, and drags its heels maddeningly-slowly through this 104 minute star-vehicle.

Miss Judith’s sad predicament would probably have been far more interesting (to me) if Bogart’s moment of egalitarian honesty with her, late in the plod of the plot, had led to the human revelation of reciprocated carnal tension  –  and Brent were a bit of a charlatan, whose matrimonial intentions really revolved around Judy’s enormous financial inheritance &/or her surprising ample rack — and Ronald Reagan’s affable, uppercrust sot had been mercilessly brutalized by everyone capable of inflicting pain on his ass with spurs, blunt force and cramming innumerable riding crops up his dark victory.

I guess I despise this tale’s conspicuously mythic principles:

1. The lives of ordinary people are terribly insignificant; in keeping with the indefatigable conceit that inherited wealth makes anybody beautiful, adorable and important.
2. Never tell the whole truth to a person with a limited lifespan.  (Pssst…that’s everyone, so always bullshit your ass off).
3. Happiness and virtue reside in prolonged denial.
4. Irish actors (Brent and Fitzgerald) feign haughty Anglo-American accents, while Bogart needs a plebian brogue for no discernible reason.
5. Always photograph 31-year-old Davis (playing 23) through focus-softening gauze unless you can pull the camera back to Cleveland.  (Tootsie humor)
6. The best people die alone, finely and with dignity.

Irrational segue into a brighter vane:  After Top Hat and (even more-particularly) Swingtime, Carefree is an enormously disappointing experimental let-down.

Segue 2:  I read somewhere recently that David Suskind cited The Golden Age of Television as having begun in late 1938.  Most everybody else thinks it started ten to fifteen years later.  I think he meant that Orson, Winston and Adolph demonstrated the unlimited and barely-imagined power of broadcast media to rock the planet with panic, confidence and aspiration.  If I’ve caught his drift correctly, it’s an extremely insightful statement about the crass, commercialization of quality entertainment bent to the proprietary ends of the special interests that own it — who aren’t necessarilly vapid assholes, that’s just the role they’ve actually played in the corruption of TV from the transcendentally teletheatricality of Marty, 12 Angry Men and Patterns to Fox News (which might well be Murrow’s worst nightmare).

Dinner?

Scott –

I’ve set aside time for four supporters like you to join me for dinner.

Most campaigns fill their dinner guest lists primarily with Washington lobbyists and special interests.

We didn’t get here doing that, and we’re not going to start now. We’re running a different kind of campaign. We don’t take money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs — we never have, and we never will.

We rely on everyday Americans giving whatever they can afford — and I want to spend time with a few of you.

So if you make a donation today, you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to be one of the four supporters to sit down with me for dinner. Please donate $75 or more today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

We’ll pay for your flight and the dinner — all you need to bring is your story and your ideas about how we can continue to make this a better country for all Americans.

This won’t be a formal affair. It’s the kind of casual meal among friends that I don’t get to have as often as I’d like anymore, so I hope you’ll consider joining me.

But I’m not asking you to donate today just so you’ll be entered for a chance to meet me. I’m asking you to say you believe in the kind of politics that gives people like you a seat at the table — whether it’s the dinner table with me or the table where decisions are made about what kind of country we want to be.

It starts with a gift of whatever you can afford.  Please make a donation of $75 today, and we’ll throw your name in the hat for the upcoming dinner:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

I’ve said before that I want people like you to shape this campaign from the very beginning — and this is a chance for four people to share their ideas directly with me.

Hope to see you soon,

Barack

No purchase, payment, or contribution necessary to enter or win. Contributing will not improve chances of winning. Void where prohibited. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. on 6/30/11. You may enter by contributing to Sponsor through https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-With-Barack. Alternatively, visit http://my.barackobama.com/Dinner-With-Barack-Alt to enter without contributing. Four winners will each receive the following prize package: one round-trip
ticket within the continental U.S. to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion; hotel accommodations for one; and dinner with President Obama on a date to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion (approximate combined retail value of all prizes $1,075). Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Promotion open only to U.S. citizens, or lawful permanent U.S. residents who are legal residents of 50 United States and District of Columbia and 18 or older (or of majority under applicable law). Promotion subject to Official Rules and additional restrictions on eligibility. Visit http://my.barackobama.com/Dinner-Rules for full details, restrictions, and Official Rules. Sponsor: Obama for America, 130 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601.

ONE DAY LATER 16JUN2011:

Scott –

I’ve worked for President Obama for almost five years — but I’ve never actually sat down for dinner with him.

That’s why I’m excited about (and maybe a little jealous of) the opportunity you have to join the President for dinner.  He’s going to sit down and swap stories over a meal with four supporters, and you could be one of them.

You should really give this a shot. Donate $75 or more today to be automatically entered for the chance to sit down for dinner with the President:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

This isn’t going to be a formal affair or a banquet for hundreds of guests.

It’s just you, three other supporters, and President Obama, sitting down together for an evening among friends.

It’s not often you get to talk to the President one on one about your hopes for the country and your ideas for this campaign. So I hope you’ll put your name in the running.

Donate $75 today, and you’ll be automatically entered for the chance to claim your seat the table:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

Good luck,

Julianna

Julianna Smoot
Deputy Campaign Manager Obama for America

18JUN2011

Scott –

Since we launched our “Dinner with Barack” contest on Wednesday, we’ve been getting asked a lot: “Is this for real?”

Yes, it is.

President Obama is really going to sit down with four supporters for dinner. And if you donate to support this campaign before 11:59 p.m. on June 30th, you’ll be automatically entered for the chance to be one of those guests.

Make a $75 donation today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

We’re able to put on a contest like this because this campaign isn’t like other campaigns.

The organization we’re building across the country is for supporters like you to help shape. And unlike ones that count on special-interest PACs and Washington lobbyists to foot their bills, we rely on support from grassroots donors like you. So I’m asking you to own a piece of the campaign — and when you do, you’ll get a shot at a once-in-lifetime opportunity to have dinner with the President:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

Thanks,

Rufus

Rufus Gifford
National Finance Director
Obama for America

21JUN2011 6:52 AM

Scott –

The President and I have a routine — we get lunch together almost every Friday.  But all I get is lunch. You could be one of four supporters to have dinner with him soon.

Donate $75 or more today to have your name automatically thrown in the hat here:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner-with-Barack

I’m reminded every week that sitting down for a meal with the President of the United States — without TV cameras or a big crowd — is something only a few people will ever get to do.

You’re not going to want to miss this chance.

I wish you luck,

Joe (Biden)

No purchase, payment, or contribution necessary to enter or win. Contributing will not improve chances of winning. Void where prohibited. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. on 6/30/11. You may enter by contributing to Sponsor here. Alternatively, click here to enter without contributing. Four winners will each receive the following prize package: one round-trip ticket within the continental U.S. to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion; hotel accommodations for one; and dinner with President Obama on a date to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion (approximate combined retail value of all prizes $1,075). Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Promotion open only to U.S. citizens, or lawful permanent U.S. residents who are legal residents of 50 United States and District of Columbia and 18 or older (or of majority under applicable law). Promotion subject to Official Rules and additional restrictions on eligibility. Click here for full details, restrictions, and Official Rules. Sponsor: Obama for America, 130 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601.

Given the eccentricity of my crackpot ideas, they’d probably send me to dinner at Gitmo.

—

30JUN2011

Scott –

If you’re planning on donating to this campaign at any point in the next 16 months, you should do it now.

Tonight at midnight is not just your last chance to enter the “Dinner with Barack and Joe” contest, it’s also a hugely important fundraising deadline for this campaign — the first time we’ll report on our progress to the public and the press.

The next few hours are critical for us. Please donate $75 or more today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner

Come next fall, people might not remember this date — or make the connection between the strength of our campaign then and the steps we took in these early months.
But anyone worth their salt in politics knows tonight is one of the most important tests we’ll face as a campaign this year. Let’s hit it out of the park.

Thanks,

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager Obama for America

No purchase, payment, or contribution necessary to enter or win. Contributing will not improve chances of winning. Void where prohibited. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. on 6/30/11. You may enter by contributing to Sponsor here. Alternatively, click here to enter without contributing. Four winners will each receive the following prize package: one round-trip ticket within the continental U.S. to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion; hotel accommodations for one; and dinner with President Obama on a date to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion (approximate combined retail value of all prizes $1,075). Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Promotion open only to U.S. citizens, or lawful permanent U.S. residents who are legal residents of 50 United States and District of Columbia and 18 or older (or of majority under applicable law). Promotion subject to Official Rules and additional restrictions on eligibility. Click here for full details, restrictions, and Official Rules. Sponsor: Obama for America, 130 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601

and at 15:30

Scott –

I wanted to say thank you before the midnight deadline passes. And I’m looking forward to thanking four of you in person over dinner sometime soon. If you haven’t thrown your name in the hat yet, make a donation of $75 or more before midnight tonight — you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to be one of our guests.
https://donate.barackobama.com/Dinner
More soon,
Barack
No purchase, payment, or contribution necessary to enter or win. Contributing will not improve chances of winning. Void where prohibited. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. on 6/30/11. You may enter by contributing to Sponsor here. Alternatively, click here to enter without contributing. Four winners will each receive the following prize package: one round-trip ticket within the continental U.S. to a destination to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion; hotel accommodations for one; and dinner with President Obama on a date to be determined by the Sponsor in its sole discretion (approximate combined retail value of all prizes $1,075). Odds of winning depend on number of eligible entries received. Promotion open only to U.S. citizens, or lawful permanent U.S. residents who are legal residents of 50 United States and District of Columbia and 18 or older (or of majority under applicable law). Promotion subject to Official Rules and additional estrictions on eligibility. Click here for full details, restrictions, and Official Rules. Sponsor: Obama for America, 130 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601.

 

 

02JUL2011

Scott –

I know we’ve been asking a lot of you.  In the first major test of this campaign, you delivered.

More than 475,000 people decided to own a piece of this campaign in just our first quarter — a promising sign of what’s to come if we all stay focused and work together.

We’ll be in touch with more information as we continue to crunch the numbers. But for now, I wanted to pass along a quick video I think you’ll like.

If you missed it, the President held a press conference earlier this week. The last few minutes were really something special. It’s a good reminder of why we’re fighting so hard to get him re-elected:

http://my.barackobama.com/Thank-You

Thanks again. Hope you have a great holiday weekend.

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

26SEP2011

 

Scott –

Here’s something you don’t have in common with 140 other supporters of this movement who tell us they live in Foster City, CA.

That many of your neighbors have decided to own a piece of this campaign by making a donation of whatever they could afford. For some, that meant just $5. For others, it meant $100 or more. But each had their own personal reason for giving.

Our records show that you aren’t one of the 140 people where you’re from who have stepped up for 2012. Now’s your chance to change that.

Make a donation of $25 or more today to support the campaign before the critical September 30th deadline.

Here’s why you should join your neighbors in supporting this campaign: We’ve been running the numbers, and with hundreds of thousands of individual donors across the country — we are now well on our way to a million people.

In the 2008 campaign, it took us more than a year to reach that milestone. This time around, we could cross it as soon as October — just six months after the launch of the campaign.

Between now and then, we have an important fundraising deadline.

Our opponents have significant operations on the ground in key battleground states, full-time candidates without day jobs, and a lot of media attention to fuel their campaigns.

President Obama has you. And when you’re building a grassroots organization from the bottom up, the first person gets the next one involved. And the first 140 provide the foundation and inspiration for the next 140.

Support the campaign before the deadline, and bring us closer to one million donors — give $25 today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/One-in-a-Million

Thank you,

Messina

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Reginald Rose Likes To Stir Fans

The Velvet Alley DVD includes commercials and an end bit promoting viewership of next week’s episode of Playhouse 90,  A Quiet Game of Cards.   In this trailer, the contemplative faces of William Bendix, E.G. Marshall, Gary Merrill, Barry Sullivan and Franchot Tone are seen filling the screen, one-by-one, individually as no one speaks, but each man’s thoughts are spoken as they sit quietly around the card table, utterly immersed in thought.  Untalking heads?  Visual media isn’t supposed to be any damned good at that, I was, nonetheless, absolutely riveted.  Curious about an engaging show I may never get to see, I found these two unrelated articles in a pdf of a newspaper page this morning:

By Steven H. Scheuer for the Herald Statesman (Yonkers, N.Y.) 12May1959

http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman%201959%20Grayscale/Yonkers%20NY%20Herald%20Statesman%201959%20Grayscale%20-%203340.pdf

While writer Reginald Rose’ A Marriage of Strangers, starring Red Buttons and Diana Lynn on Playhouse 90, Thursday may not stir up fans as much as his previous effort on 90, A Quiet Game of Cards, Rose thinks it will shake them up a bit.  As mentioned before in this column, A Marriage of Strangers is an expanded version of Studio One’s Three Empty Rooms done several years ago.  Rose then wrote a full-length screenplay of it for RKO, only to have the studio go out of business.  So the screenplay, with new acts, becomes TV fare again.  A Marriage of Strangers concerns two lonely people in New York who meet through a friendship club and marry, and together try to overcome their loneliness.  In the original Three Empty Rooms, the story took place as the couple, just married move into an empty apartment.  In this script the couple meet, get to know a little about each other, marry, and then face the problems in joint housekeeping.  Actors Enthusiastic  Actors in Rose plays are enthusiastic over their parts – they have meat to work with for a change – and Red Buttons is following the pattern.  “Red and I flew out together,” said Reginald, speaking softly in a dark, dark Hollywood restaurant which had a fake gas log flickering away in the fireplace.  “I showed him the cuts and revisions on the script and, by the time we landed, Red said he had the first act in hand.  He’s quite enthusiastic about the part.”

Same holds true for Barry Sullivan and Franchot Tone, who are still talking about their roles in A Quiet Game of Cards two months ago.  “Sullivan even wants to do it on Broadway,” added Rose.  Rose received bundles of mail on A quiet Game of Cards, a tale of a group of successful businessmen who decide to murder for the thrill and benefit of the community, and pick out a good man as their target. “We got a reaction all right,” said Rose.  “Some people thought it was one of the best TV plays they’d seen, others vehemently complained that it was immoral.”  Rose plays like Thunder at Sycamore Corner and 12 Angry Men bring fans out of their lethargy and to their writing desks.  “I think fans like to be aroused,” said Rose mildly.  He likes to jab at them, but writes to please  himself first of all.

He then told about a controversial series he and writer Rod Serling, together with producer Worthington Miner, participated in.  “We came out to the Bel Air Hotel and sat in our rooms for four days  dreaming up outlines for the proposed series.  We ended up with 39 subjects and many script outlines where we presented two sides of an issue.  We had one on loyalty oaths in which a school bus driver refused to sign, figuring that if he were honest, he should be proved dishonest.  He is fired, and then the kids strike on his side.

“We had one on divorce and another on free speech.  I’d come across a fact about Benjamin Franklin, of all people, banning the press while representatives of the 13 colonies in 1789 were drafing the Constitution, thus avoiding the power and forces of each colony’s special interest.”  Needless to say the series never saw the light again. Brave sponsors are not to be found.  Meanwhile Rose spends six mornings a week at his desk writing.  His 12 Angry Men will appear on Broadway in  the fall and he also has another play in the works.

Hoover Asks Publicity About Young Hoodlums

WASHINGTON D.C. — FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover says it’s time to start getting tougher with young hoodlums.  “We can no longer afford to let ‘tender age’ make, plunder into a trifling prank, reduce mayhem to a mischievous
act and pass off murder as a boyish misdemeanor.”  Hoover told Congress.  Hoover, who was named chief of the G-men just 35 years ago Sunday, recently gave his views on juvenile delinquency and other matters to the House Appropriations Committee. The testimony was made public Sunday.

In other subjects, Hoover said:  1. There have been 108 bombings or attempted bombings having a racial or religious aspect since the start of 1957. Twelve have involved schools, 16 had churches as targets and the other 80 involved private homes, amusement places, business establishments and other places.  2. The railroad industry in recent months has been singled out as one of the primary targets for Communist penetration. Other recent Communist party activities, he added, include efforts to infiltrate Negro and labor groups to create agitation, and confusion.  In his testimony on juveniles,  Hoover said figures for 1957 show that only 3.3 per cent of youths under eighteen were arrested.  This indicates, he said, “that about 97 per cent are growing up to be decent Americans and who resent, I think, very strongly, the unfavorable publicity that comes to them as juveniles due to the conduct of a small segment of their age group.”  Hoover told the House group “in recent years, reports on youth crimes have, indicated a mounting savagery,’ a senseless brutality which leaves little doubt that in the interest of self- preservation, now time for sterner measures to be taken by the congress and the courts.  “I see no reason for secrecy. I feel when a felony is committed in a community, there Is no reason for withholding the name of the youthful offender and he ought to be treated in the same manner of an adult.”

“Youth should not be treated cruelly, but when they do not measure up to their responsibility of obeying the law, they must be made to accept the responsibility for their acts.”  He recommended more publicity for the many youth organizations which are doing a valuable job for the nation’s young people.

Kindly restore your flying car back-rests to their fully-upright position as you return with us now to Officer Krupke’s utopian future to enjoy this newfound and interesting Serling reference:  http://www.rodserling.com/Commentary1957Patterns.htm

Amazing Stories

Well, the first season almost-completely SUCKED!

Amazon will notify me if/when the second season (of this mid80s television show created by Steven Spielberg) becomes available on DVD.  Twenty-two of the twenty-four amazing tales of fantasy and imagination play like premise pitches or flat jokes told by Spielberg to a writers’ room that faithfully recreated twenty piles of shapeless goo lacking satisfying endings; exactly like the worst SNL sketches that simply peter-out and conclude.  Rumor has it that the second season was more Amazing than the first, but plenty of season-one critiques at Amazon and elsewhere praise its vapid stereotypes and meaninglessnesses to the skies, presumably because Steve was the executive producer.

None of this bodes well for the entertainment value of the second season (if/when), and the only saving graces involved the season one contributions of illustrious/celebrity directors (Spielberg, Balaban, Eastwood, Scorsese, Glatter) and the fact that episodes 22 and 24 were based on stories and written by Richard Matheson.  The Doll and One for the Books didn’t totally suck, and The Amazing Falsworth and Guilt Trip came within spitting distance of story ideas that might have been interesting (in other hands).  In (wait for the chortle) The Black Shield of Falsworth, Gregory Hines and Richard Masur turned in very effective performances because they were excellent actors, and probably overjoyed to be working their magic for Spielberg — but in the closing moments of the episode, Hines locks himself in a closet.  There’s even an insert of the in-knob thumbturn in the vertical position (like you’d find on the inside of a bathroom door).  Who would install a bathroom doorknob backward on a bedroom closet door?  Probably a versatile handyman like Steven fucking Spielberg.  That’s a minor example of the salient details that clearly got neglected along with minor issues like;  if Harvey Keitel can paint his way into a joyous future with his dead wife, can he sell any of his paintings of her? or does he have to choose between creating wealth and painting marital bliss with the dead chick?  THAT kind of question, had it been posed, might have been worthy of obedient compliance with the ridiculous dictates of appointment television.

Since I don’t have to wait a week between episodes, I’m probably a good deal less forgiving than I would have been 26 years ago during my/our patient-obedient phase, when sitcoms and pseudo-dramatic nonsense (Dallas?) ruled the trackless waves between treasured, tiny islands of provocative science fiction, or near-miss slop like this that passed for same.  Back in ’85-87, I regretted my failure to chain myself in front of a screen to watch this stuff I actually longed to see.  Silly me.  Silly us.  Silly television.  What do you want to do tonight, Marty?  It seems as though somewhere between The Richard Boone Show and NYPD Blue we settled for less and less pith and wound up watching reruns of the infantilzingly sappy Isles of Gilligan.  Adventures in Paradise seemed pretty adult, hard-hitting and gritty when I was 12.  I’d like another look now that I’m 60.  But…NO!  Why is that?  Route 66 seems markedly overwrought now, but it still puts me to sleep.

Conversely, The Velvet Alley absolutely kicked my ass by presenting the predicament of an serious New York screenwriter confronted with the intoxicating, corrupting power of his first Hollywood success.  The printed remnant of the film looks and sounds like an unreconstitued kinescope, but the speeches, relationships, pace, varying tones and powerful performances make up for every shortcomming.  This was amazing television, courtesy of Rod Serling, whose osterized feelings about fame, wealth, reputation and success are beautifully portrayed in less than 90 minutes — and remain at least as vitally relevent to a hungry audience as they were in early 1959, probably more.

Now I’m anxious to get a load of whatever remains of Reginald Rose’ work, excluding 132 hour-long episodes of The Defenders.  He must have stuck something explosive up the butt of a really important and immortal asshole.

(Thanks to NetFlix, the six disks of the Studio One Anthology will rotate past me next week.  I kinda figured $40 for The Criterion Collection:  The Golden Age of Television and The Velvet Alley would crash and burn my monthly budget — [but I still say what the fuck!])  This medium can teach.

Stir of Echoes

This is a remarkably good film!  It’s very-faithfully adapted (if Richard Matheson is credible) from a Richard Matheson novel by David Koepp, who also directed it.  The special effects are almost-entirely not digital, but practical, and the commentary is phenomenally transparent.  Keopp explains, lucidly, insightfully, humorously and with considerable eloquence, almost everything I wanted to know about everything I wanted to know about lenses, shutterspeeds, sounds, intents, contexts and sensibilities — often going out of his way to be uncommonly clear about tricks, failures, prostheses and gimmicks.  Like Tony Gilroy, he seems to think the old line separating filmmakers from audiences is imaginary, stale, and counterproductive of better audiences and filmmakers.

The most interesting aspect of the film, for me, is the way it opens.  A 5year-old boy named Jake is taking a bath while his father sits fixedly noodling on a guitar several feet away.  The kid is talking directly to the camera as titles roll and the father ignores the child’s blather, BUT I CAN’T because the kid seems to be talking directly at the completely bewildered ME who isn’t particularly comfortable with this strangely-intimate, 3dimensional approach to the start of a horror movie.  The father’s more mundane reality intrudes for several seconds as he asserts the bath is done, so father and son negotiate which pajamas are to be worn, but the moment the father (Kevin Bacon) leaves the room, the kid’s talking to me again, asking me if it hurts to be dead.

Jake’s actually not talking to me but to an inaudible Samantha, an adolescent who disappeard six months earlier — and Koepp maintains a respectable pace of continual contextual bewilderment throughout the course of the film that moves briskly between significant moments that very clearly explain all of the disquieting stuff that made bizarro-negative sense from the moment the film began.  Koepp’s commentary, however, doesn’t even allude to the tremendously-impressive violation of the fourth wall with which the story starts.  He mentions that (the almost-uncredited) Brian De Palma was a wonderful consultant, offering a torrent of excellent ideas.  So it looks like I’d do well to leap headfirst into a pile of De Palma, while poring over the hugely-successful writing and directorial work of David Koepp.  It’s an interesting way (not unlike The Social Network) to jack up the viewer’s head and overcrank it into your movie:  “What the fuck just happened?!”

I don’t know that the subjective-camera effect could have been advantageously employed beyond that first scene, but I think it worked brilliantly to announce the presence of an unusually-organized movie that just might be a great film.  As I cruise through the commentary, I’ll be looking for opportunities to envision the camera’s point of view as belonging to Samantha — with no real expectation that Koepp intended the disembodied observer to be instrumental to the tale beyond the initial moments of the film — still, that’s the approach I really wanted to discover in Rope, in which the (generally-invisible) dead person’s perspective adds several invaluable layers of meaningful interaction to the presentation of events that unfold before the viewer (who is [just like a dead person] intimately disconnected to those events).  Samantha’s POV is used as a plot device to move the story forward, but an ice-blue gel (for example) might have been used to differentiate it from every other camera angle in the film, providing an immensly powerful accelerant/detonator/visual-shorcut.  The counter-revolution (of “the lost art of the master-shot”) against the disorienting jiggle-cam and MTV-style rapid cutting might have begun in 1999, when this film was released.  What the Neil character (the black cop in the cemetary) adds to the story is a verbal explanation of Samantha’s agenda and an impression of its urgency (which would have been [according to Koepp] communicated far more memorably and efficienty visually).  Neil’s second appearance contributes an impression that the psychic community in Chicago like a kind of gay underworld in which everybody’s closeted, paranoid, cranky and warped.

Koepp surprised me with Ghost Town by bringing an unexpected depth of humanity to the incisively-comic, witty tale of a shockingly-sympathetic lifelong misanthrope.  He brought Kevin Bacon’s character into the real world the moment the father confesses that he never expected his life to be so…ordinary.  That line is delivered in the second scene.  And it only gets better.

Yesterday was my inadvertant Richard Matheson Day.  I cruised through the Twilight Zone movie, hit What Dreams May Come and went to sleep during the Stir of Echoes commentary. Some days you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting something written, ghosted or influenced by that guy; most days, actually.

Panic in The Golden Age of Television

It was largely over by the time I was old enough to watch any of it, but Delmer Daves’ commentary for Marty  (The Golden Age of Television: The Criterion Collection [1958] — Amazon-sale-priced presently at just $25) reminded me that the ragged edge of panic characterized live broadcast performance in realtime continuity — making movie versions necessarily quite/profoundly different from the TV versions.  Gotta love NetFlix.

Patterns is the most intriguing offering I’ve seen thusfar.  In that I own a copy of the Heflin-based film, I look forward to viewing both simultaneously for variances — and bearing in mind that Serling’s pre-Cook original construct had Staples crush Everett Sloane’s incandescent performance, by flatly leaving New York (and the exquisite challenge of life at the tippy-top of his chosen career) in a righteously-indignant huff.  Fuckit!  I just placed my order, adding $10 for The Velvet Alley.  It’s Ramsie’s industrialist’s rant that I wanted from PureFold, to bring the voice of the Chief (Brand-)Culture Officer out of the inferrential opacity of the conference room and into the unblinding transparency of sunlight for natural disinfection.  I think that’s a major chunk of what Rod wanted too.

Now let’s see where I can download ancient screenplays.  Long time, no feeding frenzy.  This intoxicated rush is sorely missed.

Also on the devout media-freak front, there’s this:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/05/why_its_great_to_be_a_media_bu.html

Oh yeah:

http://www.simplyscripts.com/cgi-bin/search.pl?search=Serling&method=exact

Oh well.

 

Green Zone

This film is a very entertaining thriller.  It simplifies the reasons for the second American invasion of Iraq so that even I can understand them.  It fastens a jittery window of heroic clarity on Matt Damon as the leader of a squad of soldiers explicitly charged with the search for weapons of mass destruction.

They don’t find them.

What I found in looking through this window was a ridiculously-complicated vision of two corrupt regimes in conflict.  That conflict would have been neatly resolved if (as a last resort) caches of WMD had been planted and detonated by the Bush administration appointees, who evidently were not True (enough) Believers fanatically-dedicated to preserving the illusion that the administration wasn’t pathetically incompetent.  If the immediate objective was to justify war and to inspire allied confidence in W, then releasing weaponized ”Iraqi” biotoxins was THE means.  How’d they miss that?  The perspective from this window doesn’t shed new light on the intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on 911, but it contextualizes them a little more distressingly.  (I’d also have liked seeing Osama bin Laden captured alive and remanded to Saudi custody for criminal prosecution under international law, along with the entire B’ushist network.  I’ll strike that notion off my wishlist and toss it into my Hurt Locker.  “War is a drug.”  Fuck you!)

Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke details the Bush administration’s failure to manage the New Orleans emergency catalyzed by Hurricane Katrina.  The documentary goes instructively out of its way to indicate that several corrupt political administrations (since 1965 &/or 1927) have been responsible for catastrophic conservation/meteorology-based disasters visited on that city/region/nation.  It also casts multiple shadows of primal doubt on the practical efficacy of the experiment of American democracy, and shamefully-hypocritical national will.  It’s a film that tastes like scathing honesty.

Green Zone plops a popular actor into the role of crusading protagonist at the head of a body of Americans cast specifically for the legitimate, authoritative authenticity of their real-life combat experience.  In the commentary, Damon frequently remarks on the intimidating challenge of fitting himself into the part as leader a group of guys who actually are the real deal.  Other people compliment Damon for rising to that challenge.  I can’t help noticing that the Hollywood treatment of the Sgt. Roy Miller profile is reminiscent of the cockeyed theatrical conceits that made W president.  Mission Accomplished! — not exactly.  And not unlike the movie, the target of the mission kept moving through subtle redefinitions:  Osama/vengeance-for-theoretical-complicity/WMD/victory!/democracy/stability/exit.  The movie simplifies all of that stuff to WMD/book/al Rawi/Truth/wtf!/curtain.  The more often I sit through this film, the more it seems movie-like, which means it doesn’t stand up to repeated visits, unlike Casablanca, which never gets old or less complicated, no matter how often I watch it (and which, I think, was a story retold [with a happier ending] as Sabrina, and could easily have been a remake of The Philadelphia Story, had Grant [swapping Hepburns] not been replaced by Bogart shortly, before commencement of principle photography).

I think this movie really should have been shot from the point of view of Freddy the translator, who, throughout the film, is one step behind Damon, intimately involved in every conversation, and pivotal in the ultimate resolution of a thrilling, suspenseful potboiler conventionally shot in Greengrass-style, which looks an awful lot like the so-called “innovative” (find-the-action) dynamic manner attributed to Friday Night Lights, NYPD Blue and good old Leslie Dektor.  The actor who portrays the crucial role of high-ranking Ba’athist General Muhamed al Rawi is said to have made the interesting point that Power can’t be convincingly acted, it has to be implied by the deference shown it by the actors surrounding Power.  Camera technology has come a very long way since 1947 and the failed experiment of The Lady in the Lake.  Some films seem to me to demand that the camera be cast as an emotionally-reactive, rational, realtime, participating member of the performing company, an actor; not exclusively as a jittering, magical, semi-omniscient, invisible non-presence.  Let the camera act!  Enough already with this jiggle, jitter, zoom-in, zoom-out, wobble, short cameraman, tall cameraman, editeditedit moron-convention bullshit!  These conceits perpetuate storytelling cheats.  Show me…the story.

The identity of the camera-as-Freddy would have been infinitely more informative (for the audience) if cast-subordinate, unAmerican Freddy were ideologically-incapable of gazing boldly into the commanding eye of al Rawi’s obvious Power, when, eventually, they meet, both times. The POV thing I harp upon would have made loads of “necessary” scenes simply impossible, like the first 24 minutes of the film, Kinnear and Gleason’s policy spat, al Rawi’s early (expository, badly-subtitled) meetings with his staff, where Freddy (Farid Youssef Abdul Rahman) wasn’t present, and Miller’s acceptance of the redefined mission proposed in a confidential meeting with CIA… but the situational complexity of Freddy’s point of view, I think, would have been significantly beneficial to the viewer’s understanding of events as they unfolded before a one-legged, bilingual, Iraqi national “on the ground”, surrounded by dangerous American innocents and criminal incompetents versus his Iraqi “peers” and the real, traditional, culturally-contextual personal Power of al Rawi.  Maybe that’ll happen in the sequel or the remake.  And maybe war movies are the sincerest form of sarcasm.

“Calm down.”  “Get your fuckin’ game face on.”  “Don’t be naive.”  Hamza’s dying word was, “Jordan.”  Michael?  Thrillers play fast&loose with key bits of information.  Movies and (corrupt) governments do the same thing with truth.

–A note from 11JUN2011– In a special feature of The Studio One Anthology, E.G. Marshall makes an interesting comparison, that Worthington Miner, producer of Studio One on CBS and Fred Coe (Playhouse 90) on NBC had differing perceptions of the proper role of the television camera.  Coe’s preference was for a static POV in which scenes were blocked to move action and speech toward an objective, immobile spectator.  Miner’s cameramen, conversely, were instructed to “find the action” by moving their cameras like subjective enquirers noticing things on the set (like a mysterious letter placed beside an entry door in The Storm) as the actors discover them, for example.  Miner (more than Coe) wanted the camera operator to be an independant, silent participant in the telling of the story.  Marshall used the same literal expression, “find the action”, about teleplay presentations broadcast in 1949 that was re-coined and re-invented by the producers of Friday Night Lights sixty years later.  I think the best place to stand when re-inventing the wheel is on the shoulders of giants, and that the lessons taught in The Golden Age of Televison desperately need revisiting by audiences criminally deprived of access to valuable pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of media literacy:  Crimes against culture in the interests of commerce, ignorance and bliss aren’t victimless.

Ask the Amazon search engine about “Rod Serling”.  You’ll get more than 30 pages of Twilight Zone references and almost nothing about the three Emmy-winning teleplays he wrote (Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Comedian) before resorting, exhausted, to science-fiction/fantasy in 1959 to successfully slip 95 of 156 of his own incisve, socially-relevant, morally-challenging efforts at storytelling past the censors, sponsors, advertising agency representatives, networks and rednecks.  Nobody in 1965 anticipated the kind of popularity, syndication and marathons The Twilight Zone has enjoyed for a half-century, least of all, Rod Serling, or he’d have died one hell of a lot wealthier.   And the teleplays written or refined by Reginald Rose include 132 unavailable episodes of The Defenders from the early/middle 60s, along with long-forgotten Studio One presentations of The Remarkable Incident at Carson Corners, The Death and Life of Larry Benson, An Almanac of Liberty and Dino.  This stuff ain’t just television.  It ain’t just HBO.  It’s primitive, powerful, moving, inspiring, sorely-missed and probably necessary.  Next stop, The Paley Center, one station after Willoughby.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stop_at_Willoughby

Friday Night Lights — End

It isn’t every television series that’s afforded the opportunity to ripen, mature and end gracefully in an honorable act of thematic and theatrical sepuku.  Most aren’t produced, and many are abortively cancelled.  Friday Night Lights managed its termination nicely.  It’s interesting that both commentaries on the final DVD disk for the fifth and final season are delivered by producers who happen to be relentless stammerers; “uh.  uh.  y’know…the uh, uh reason for this — y’know thing is almost self-evident.  It’s that y’know uh uh uh…” and listening to them yammer is unbelievably annoying.  On the other hand, several interesting points about the show were made, generally anecdotally.

Lead actor Kyle Chandler’s part (as Coach Taylor) in a given scene (according to the commentator) was beautifully written to provide the actor with wonderfully poetic and philosophical talking points that were intended to be delivered verbatim at an extended crucial moment.  And the actor spoke privately with the writer/producer asking for permission to slough the words in order to ddliver the information nonverbally.  They tried the actor’s approach, and printed it because the nonverbal approach was significantly better than the scripted, wordy alternative version.

The point I’d like to make here is that the television medium is loaded with powerful, influential verbal-communicators.  It’s the platform that celebrates writers (whose scripts are customarily regarded as inviolable) because showrunners, producers and writers are the creative power in television — unlike cinema, in which money and directors generally rule supreme, and writers are valued like toilet paper.

I have a number of qualms and misgivings about the 3cameras-constantly-shooting scheme of Friday Night Lights.  This “performance-based” storytelling design requires camera operators to work handheld, and insists that operators “find the action” in the scene.  Despite my skepticism, every season of this show has delivered moments of intense emotional tension and release that make it difficult to argue against an innovative design that has worked admirably.  Nonetheless, I’ve never enjoyed looking at the unfocused backs of actors’ heads, the jiggle, the interminable seconds that pass as the camera moves past posts, lampshades and irrelevant objects before “finding” the face of the person who’s been speaking all along.  After four years, I ought to have known that this show was never really about football, and the ways they photograph/edit games illustrates constantly how little the sport matters in this context. 

Perhaps someday somebody else will noticed that every important problem in every season invariably revolved around the choices and eccentricities of female characters in a layered, overlapping subtly-misogynist show ostensibly devoted to the primarily-male enterprise of Texas high school football.

I think television writers have a tendency to hammer home their points in words, rather than trusting actors and directors to stress necessary connections for their not-particularly-perceptive audience.  It’s a point that’s made in the commentaries for season one of Treme, that standard network approach to televised storytelling is significantly more didactic and on-the-nose than the ways Simon says it, and the cast of Treme appreciates the respect both they and the audience are accorded.

One last point gleaned while watching Robin Hood; the prince of thieves last night.  It’s that the physical action and stunts are recognizably, ridiculously improbable/impossible…and despite the obvious intention to make Kevin Costner appear to be wonderfully deft, they can’t give him a fraction of the charismatic virulence of Errol Flynn, who generally lacked the gravitas of Russel Crowe.  The most  (perhaps only) delicious line in the Costner version was that nobility isn’t a birthright, it’s what you do with what you’re given. And television’s artistic nobility depends on a small minority of gifted writers who trust their audiences and the actors who play to them more than they trust blather, network executive notes and the forces that counsel scaled-back ambition. 

Actors are louder than verbs.  Arrested Development‘s narrator is measurably louder than its dialogue.  Maybe that’s a meaningful observation, Maeby not – but the place where experienced and admirable practitioners of the various and sundry skills necessary to successful crossmedia production of radio, cinema, gaming, comics, literature and televison entertainment talk to one another is damned hard to find.  If it ever does appear, I’ll happily shut up and listen as they debate the theoretical and practical parameters of telling/showing stories across platforms.  I suspect those platforms aren’t as fluidly interoperable as transmedia evangelists theorize.  And that the obvious proprietary barriers that prevent Wonder Woman from joining the Avengers (transnarrative collaboration) also throw phantom blocks at transmedia narrative — as though corporations that own IP simply can’t own cultural archetypes, and that actors who move from role to role are the realest adversaries of transnational media conglomerates.

I think Star Wars is an excellent model of oldschool transmedia (merchandising) narrative, perhaps Arab Spring is a better model of the new one in which an unexpected audience rises to participate in the production as though the membranes separating news from fiction from means from will from commodities from people were old habits in need of change.  What if unsubstantiated rumors of revolution fomented hopes that resulted in a North African snowball?  What if the most powerful human force on Earth were inadvertantly unleashed by evolving technology’s crossing an unanticipated threshold of instantaneous global communication?  What if that force were the normally-adversarial/contradictory will of The People for whom cohesive, coherent action becomes possible through interactive communication?  What if FDR and Churchill broadcast better shows than Hitler — remember to consult Nielsen — no don’t.

A few nuggets of coincidence from Vince Gilligan; dated one day later than the junk I wrote above:

 http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/05/vince_gilligan_showrunner_tran.html

Were there particular things that Carter taught you?
Well, I became a better writer, and things that he taught all of us that I still carry with me are: Show your story, don’t tell it. Try not to depend too much on dialogue. Try to remember that it’s very much a visual medium and that sometimes more can be said with a look between characters than a whole spate of words. I also learned how to tell a story economically. If they’d shot the first draft of my first script for The X-Files, it would have cost 20 or 30 million dollars! So, all the tools that I have in my toolbox now, I got them on The X-Files.

What show do you wish you had created?
The Twilight Zone, and I wish Rod Serling hadn’t died so young. That’s a man I truly would love to have met. He was the first showrunner whose name the country at large actually knew.

How much do you care about what fans think?
I care greatly. We wouldn’t have a show if not for the viewers. But having said that, I don’t think that equates with a need on my part to constantly check in with what the fans are saying. I hear about it anecdotally at best. Because on the Internet, you get what are often, I think, unrealistic responses — you get the highs and the lows; the people who love something enough to type something into their computer about it, and you get the people that hate it, but you don’t get the great vast middle. So, it’s an interesting gauge, but not necessarily an accurate one.

Can fans ruin shows?
I don’t think fans are capable of ruining anything. I think only the showrunner and their writers and actors are capable of that. If a showrunner logs on to the Internet and a fan’s telling them to add a lovable robot to his or her ensemble, they’ve only got themselves to blame if they take that kind of advice.

…and in the same series of New York Magazine interviews with showrunners:

ONE THING I’D CHANGE ABOUT NETWORK TV

 Mike Schur:
Episodes would vary in length from week to week.
I’m not sad that there are commercials, but every episode of our show has to be exactly 21 minutes and 17 seconds long. It’s unlikely that the optimal length of every episode of our show is exactly 21 minutes and 17 seconds.

 Carter Bays:
No more notes from the networks.
Oh God, please don’t let me be the only one who says “No more notes.” If that’s the case … ha ha, just kidding, guys. I’m not Spartacus. I’m just some gladiator. Hail, Caesar!

 Vince Gilligan:
Take more risks and assume the audience will go along.

 Dan Harmon:
In a world where everyone can watch anything all the time, and where we spend all this money making lots of shitty pilots, why don’t we have special website events where all the pilots are aired and people vote for their favorites? Make this populist medium genuinely populist.

Shonda Rhimes:
The wonderful Mad Men, in its first four seasons, has made as many episodes as we made in seasons one and two of Grey’s Anatomy. After twelve episodes, I’m tired, the crew is tired, everyone is tired. The break of a few months that cable shows get would be amazing.

Jason Katims:
Thirteen-episode cycles twice a year would also allow the writers to write all their scripts before shooting starts. It would raise the level of storytelling, you’d have more time to prep, and that would make the show less expensive to produce. And you should be allowed to say “Jesus” and “goddamn.” How offensive is it? I guess it is. I guess I don’t understand it all.

Graham Yost:
More patience.
Don’t be so quick to cancel shows.

Kurt Sutter:
Stop making decisions based on research data, and hire development executives with degrees in art, literature, and theater instead of marketing, business, and law. If people followed those two rules, TV would be a fuckload better.

Here’s a little Roseanne Barr-based razor-edged (holy crap, this is almost exactly what I was asking for!) bonus:

http://nymag.com/arts/tv/upfronts/2011/roseanne-barr-2011-5/

20 April 2011

The President of the United States is here in the San Francisco Bay Area today to raise millions of dollars for the thriving industry of broadcast network television (at the kickoff for his West Coast campaign-solicitation [champagne] campaign) by holding a closed, T-ball (peptalk), townhall meeting at Facebook, streamed by Facebook at 13:45 PDT.  I might not have noticed this historic ironic event were it not for the ABC “headline” news coverage of Mrs. Obama’s near-trivial brush with inconvenience involving a shift-changing airtraffic controller’s failure to keep a 5mile buffer between her 737 and the military aircraft in front of it, upon her departure from Andrews AFB.  The suddenly-imperative NTSB investigation may (and probably won’t) eventually finger Ronald Reagan’s pulsing legacy of uncommon disdain for the rank&file, at least 30 years late.  grassroots. greenmail.  ”ordinary Americans”.  26year-old billionaire interviews President O’Dollar, who forgot to force the bailed-out financial industry to share the wealth, so the million micropumps (small business) of a sluggish national economy don’t pump, and the Supremely-disloyal opposition wins seats in Congress, stymies progress, Blue Fairys corporations, and fabricates budget crises that crush all hope of positive change by threatening every minutely-incremental advance made in American commonwealth (CPH, PBS, NPR, NEA, PP, Ed, Med…) since Machiavellian LBJ.  WTF!

NCMR podcasts became available for download yesterday.  The supremely-informative Saving the Bay documentary will begin rebroadcast, nationally, this evening with the first of four hour-long chapters at 22:00 PDT.  It’s the brand of semi-scrupulous propaganda I dearly favor.  And The Royal Wedding furor is ramping up on every channel I can choose to ignore.  Can’t hardly see the lethal paradoxes for all of the intervening oxymorons.

It’s a glorious time to be able to choose where one directs one’s attention…so it can’t last much longer.

“There is no progress so long as private funds drive public elections.” — Lessig

http://rootstrikers.org/

Olympia

Leni Riefenstahl’s towering reputation as a visual storyteller is significantly tarnished for me as sit, presently, watching her crowning achievement.  Reports of revolutionary breakthroughs in camera location, meticulous planning and tireless editing leave me wondering about the crappiness of all that came before her.  Perhaps I’m disappointed in Riefenstahl’s direction and editing because I’ve been spoiled by several decades of sports broadcasting performed by people who studied her work (and improved upon it tremendously).

I think Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 pushed almost all manner of cinematic talent absolutely out of Germany, which left a limited number of people (who were mostly famous for being famous) like Riefenstahl to photograph the 1934 Nazi Pary Congress in Nuremburg, embellish the static documentary style, then prevalent, with fascinating bits of moviemaking magic and spend two years editing her so-called propaganda masterpiece, Triumph of the Will.  So they called on her again in 1936 for the XI Olympiad in Berlin.  But (for example) Olympia stations the primary camera for four heats and the final of the 100m dash high above the track in the stadium stands at midfield.  Which puts that stationary camera in one of an infinite number of wrong places to clearly and dramatically document the crossing of the finish line every time that race is run.  There was no recognizable learning process evident as each race ends with the camera locked on the backs of the runners rather than looking straight down at the tape.  All of the track and field events are made less coherent, substantive and meaningful by theoretically-appropriate camera angles, editorial interruptions for snippets of crowd reaction, Hitler footage, flag waving, awards ceremonies, and irrelevant bits of bullshit.  Jesse Owens starts his approach for his very last attempt at the long jump victory (he will win).  We cut away to anxious faces in the crowd whle he’s tearing along the runway.  We jumpcut back from the crowd as Owens leaves the ground at the foul line, hangs in the air (in realtime) and lands, characteristically springing out of the pit because his forward momentum always carries him forward.  The narrator explains that Owens has won the event.  We cut back to the jubilation erupting from the stadium’s American contingent.  It might as well have been radio, for all the value added by cinematic file footage edited by Leni Riefenstahl to dramatize an event that required no music, no punching-up and no crowd footage, and (properly shot) zero narration.

She did the best she could do with unlimited funds, license to dig pits in the field, float baloons, and submerge cameramen in the diving pool for optimal camera placements, 40 camera operators, two years to edit 400 miles of film, and Hitler’s unconditional blessing.

It’s like George W. Bush, in late 1999, appointing Angelina Jolie to create a stirring cinematic propaganda record of his first presidential inauguration, then appointing her again to cover Superbowl XXXVII without permitting her to consult exhiled or assassinated acknowleged football experts, hire experienced staff, nor listen to anything better-informed than her famous celebrity gut.

I think Leni Riefenstahl performed two monumentally difficult tasks (that were jammed down her throat) quite admirably.  Neither of those productions deserves the mountains of praise that have been heaped upon them nor the ruinous condemnation, nor did she.  Her careers as dancer-then-actress (as presented in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl) don’t look particularly interesting, but Hitler’s ascendancy pulled her unfairly way out of her league/depth, just as his fall buried her unjustly for several decades.  No doubt, I’ll eventually stumble over Billy Wilder’s and Fritz Lang’s… remarks about her, but now that I’ve seen the two masterpieces that created the fuss that made her a figure of controversy, the unkind remarks of the genuine talent (whose conspicuous absence from Germany) made her a star will wait while I stumble along elsewhere.

Treme

My first pass through this series this weekend moves the first season of Treme toward the top of my list of favorite entertainments, for all of the reasons enumerated elsewhere: 

• Powerful, ringing, ferocious performances by a brilliant ensemble cast;
• Vibrant, engaging music created and performed with an authenticity that comes directly from and goes directly to the heart;
• An intimate immersion in the soul of a profoundly alien culture;
• Interlocking stories about interlocking, deeply-engaging people, woven from miniature realities that encapsularize and vivify enormous, abidingly-human, irresolute real problems…

My first pass through the first season of Treme has generated an insatiable, immediate hankering for one hell of a whole lot more!  I recognize in myself a degree of need I haven’t felt since discovering-and-losing Firefly — which, upon reflection, I realize was ABOUT things, like;

• the intimate presentation of the personal lives of people caught in the negligent and incompetent machineries of a corrupt and interfering complex of bureaucracies;
• the literal preservation/restoration/creation of Traditional American Values in absolute spite of the obscene abuses that subverted phrase has been used to justify;
• and We, The fuckin’ People, Jack.

I’ve always suspected that the continuing mission of the tramp freighter, Serenity, a vessel desperately dedicated to enterprise, was to boldly go (with fathomless stores of humor and character) to explore the future of inequality in sex, finance, influence and race; projecting present-day pathologies forward through centuries of morally-degenerate tomorrows.  And I truly believe that in Treme, I’ve found the logical/emotional/spiritual successor to Firefly.  It’s primary interest is in (its and us) people; leaving ratings, political correctness, sociopolitical issues and universal popularity to sort themselves out in the fullness of time.  Or not.  I love these show.  They nourish conscience (by example).

And When the Sky Was Opened

Three years before President Kennedy officially declared America’s participation in The Moon Race, with the safe return to Earth as/at the finish line, and a moon landing ( before the Soviets) as the prize, Rod Serling wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone in which three early astronauts (who were, in the course of their voyage, offline for 24 hours) return to Earth, are hospitalized for observation, and one-by-one wink out of existence along with any single shred of evidence that any of them ever existed.

It’s a very strange little tale I’ve revisted several times this morning because each of the special features replays the story with voiceover by Serling — then leading actor, Rod Taylor – then director, Douglas Heyes — then Leonard Rosenman’s score.  It’s a strange little tale that stands up to revisting, with wonderful bits of individual personality packed into every scene, deft directorial flourishes, intelligent camera magic, and counterintuitive headfakes that provoke the viewer to think about what the episode “really means”.  Four days of principle photography, no time for rehearsal and preparation; just remarkably engaging performances in a classic production that plays quite brilliantly (for me) 52 years later, despite the disruptive oversight of Rod Taylor’s elbow in the mirror in Jim Hutton’s hospital bedroom, an incredibly insignificant execution error.

To be, or not to be; is that a rhetorical question?  What might it be like to be one of three intrepid Musketeers, three pals who have returned from a fateful, harrowing journey (like Apollo 13) to find that one of your number has been completely erased from demonstrable existence? (and you’re the only person on Earth who remembers [including his parents] that he ever existed ) and know with a sudden (terrifying and strangely euphoric) certainty that you’re next?  Shades of It’s a Wonderful Life, with innovative deepfocus effects, reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and a tale told from the middle to the beginning that culminates in no explanation, whatsoever.

Along the way, from beginning to end, there are tasty little references to the ambivalence of taxpayers to The Space Race, the emblematic inutility of pioneering (celebrity) astronauts, and the myopic/pragmatic view of progressive space exploration as a monumental media ripoff…all of which contrast sharply with the retrospective significance of innumerable threads of incalculable importance that made the 20th Century bizarre and indispensible. I’d like to take a look at Richard Matheson’s short story on which Serling’s screenplay was based, and the script from which the director deviated, and the actors must have contributed mightily.

I really really like this one.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”

John F. Kennedy,
Speech at Rice University, Houston, 12 September 1962

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race

The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US) for supremacy in outer space exploration. Between 1957 and 1975, Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on attaining firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national security and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority. The Space Race involved pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, sub-orbital and orbital human spaceflight around the Earth, and piloted voyages to the Moon. It effectively began with the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and concluded with the co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project came to symbolize détente, a partial easing of strained relations between the USSR and the US.

 

Sing a song of sixpence…and when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing…”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence

What the fuck?!

The Social Network

It begins in midsentence purposefully to place the audience at a distinct and instantly-recognizable disadvantage.  Two young people are conversing in a bar, talking to cross-purposes, rapidly, and almost inaudibly because the background music and ambient noise drowns out the viewer’s perception of the content of their conversation.  Lipreading in this context is a far superior skill to subtitlereading, because much of this conversation is nonverbal/unpredictable, and the viewer’s eyes need to be locked on the faces of Mark Zuckerberg and Erika Albright as their relationship disintegrates in the perilous course of this white-water conversation. 

The midsentence, crash of a midrelationship constitutes a wonderful device created/employed by Aaron Sorkin to force the audience to pay attention.  The smothering of voices in background sound extends the device to the point of exasperation with (and at) the very start of the film – but not to the extent that I wanted to stop the DVD and turn to something/anything else.  In fact, I played the first three minutes four times; straight, with subtitles, fiddling with a couple of sound control panels…and eventually I quit trying to defeat the sound design.  I simply paid more attention, and found the investment sufficiently rewarding to keep on keeping on.

Ultimately, I found it to be a wonderfully engaging film packed to bursting with very smart, attractive people saying and doing smart, interesting things from the moment it starts to the moment it ends.  And fuck them, each and every one, including the chicken.

Next morning:  This film is subtly and strikingly reminiscient of Flowers for Algernon and Amadeus in revealing the sharply contrasting (de)valuation of people; turds/nuggets, celebrity/negligence — strongly implying a desperate cultural need for universal forgiveness and boundless, groundless loyalty within and beyond the permeable boundaries of species; refresh…refresh…refresh.

Three days later:  Fincher’s commentary approaches conclusion with the story of a French journalist who passionately objected to the failure of the principle participants in the film to actively collaborate with Zuckerberg, the living human on whose life the story is based. 

Fincher responded by asking the critic WHAT that kind of consultation would have bought the project, in that the humaneness clearly lacking/muted in Mark at the start of the film is also clearly evidenced as present, robust and growing at the conclusion of the film.  It’s an interesting response that strikes me as evasive.  I also think that Zuckerberg has been treated by The Social Network enterprise very much as Eduardo Saverin was treated by the Facebook enterprise, according to the film; the value of his stake was enormously diluted in the course of an incidental/accidental betrayal and exclusion.

Ironically, a brilliant but asocial computer artist invents an amazingly powerful social network tool and grows a recognizable conscience in the course of its prosecution.  I think collaboration with Mark Zuckerberg might have made The Social Network a far more important film tha it is, but the one we got is brilliant.

Irking Siobhan O’Flynn

	Siobhan O’Flynn
To:	Scott Ellington

---

oh buddy – can’t see the forest for the tree huh? how silly – is this performance art??? must be

On Feb 20, 2011, at 10:27 AM, Scott Ellington  wrote:

Siobhan,

  

No.  It’s a photograph of my eye.  I’m telling you there are absolutely NO other body parts nor other people involved in the icon that creeps you out, and any associations you make with defective schools of art are purely your projection.  On the other hand, it’s a polarizing image to which some people react as you do (probably without informing me of their ennui/disgust/whatever) and other people say they like:

---

Caption:  If the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had a kid, it would probably come into the world with an attitude like this.
Scatalogical allusions are unavoidable, hence the content warning.

Comments:

~Fastmax Jun 1, 2010

OH MAN IS THIS COOL LOOKING!!!!!!
LOL!!! LOL!!
INSTANT FAVE HERE!
Maybe to make this a screen saver on my computer. Strangely enough,… scatology is not the first thing I allude to or is on my mind with this image.
More like… “Even with sex were “fucked over” by being watched/ controlled by THEM…-from our own insides.”
Ponder that, My Peoples.

          *ScottEllington Jun 1, 2010

        Thank you! I think all spin put on the (eye)ball is invaluable.

 

~coopers204 Jun 11, 2010

looks like a mutated pussy COOL PIC!

  

*Kitsch1984 Jun 24, 2010 I confess that for a moment I understood what it was … wOw!

          ScottEllington Jun 24, 2010

        Me too.

  

~Awooo Jul 16, 2010

«Scatalogical allusions»… what do feces have to do with this?

          *ScottEllington Jul 16, 2010

        An interesting question, and very like my response to the representative of one of the founders of United Hollywood who asked me to replace it as my avatar there.
        Apart from the assertion that this image was objectionable because of its urogenital associations, no elaboration was provided, and I complied with their request, motivated by my respect for very smart and very creative people.

        If you don’t see a scatalogic allusion, perhaps it isn’t there.

  ~ilovemykids Sep 15, 2010

clever hahaha

          *ScottEllington Sep 15, 2010

        High praise for low humor Thank you!

  ~bellefree-bentan Sep 20, 2010

It’s a disturbing image .
The Brazilian singer Tom Ze has an album cover where he uses a marble in a scatalogical manner to evoke an eye…

          *ScottEllington Sep 20, 2010

        Thank you! Message re-sent and Ze research in-progress.

---

It’s just the eye of the beholder on which and with which the viewer projects associations.  Those associations are as valid as the artist’s original intent — which was to see what a photograph of my eye would look like mirrored.  It actually was slightly more interesting than the original photograph (and that’s not saying much), but the response to the image is fairly fascinating.  The instant it’s shared, the image also becomes yours to like/dislike for reasons beyond my control — but it’s still just an origami eye/lid/socket, folded in half and mirrored in Photoshop — and mirroring the culture that interprets it’s significance as they see it collectively and individually.  I don’t own the associations people make any more than I have control of the way people see me.  To be known as the PudendaEye guy is not a shameful thing, regardless of the derivation of the word, “pudenda”.  Trite, shocking, old-hat..?  Wow!   It’s a cheap, digital photograph of my eye that I manipulated in the simplest possible way.  The persistence and vehemence of your (and other people’s) response to it is disproportionately interesting to the effort invested in creating it, so my response to those responses probably seems quite ornery.  Sobeit.  The truth is — it’s a slightly manipulated photograph of my eye.  Handle it.  Or don’t, but asking me to stop using it as my avatar is a vastly inferior alternative to our having a conversation about it’s putative significance as an indicator of the health of our common culture.  (Which isn’t post-racist, post-pornographic, making-much-progress…)  So, thanks for this opportunity. 
 Scott      

Hey Scott,

that’s a packed email below with many tangents that I can’t rely speak to on the writers’ strike, so I reply to the point I can, re your avatar. 

Here’s the basis of my response, the degree of which you find fascinating:

To be concise as your description is disingenuous, it’s your eye in a vagina – so is that supposed to be subversive? avant garde? rejecting the constraints of normative society? if so, it’s been done but maybe an audience without a sense of art history won’t know that.

And, as I mentioned before the clearest antecedent, the Surrealists, were almost all misogynist in their fragmentation of the female body – See Hans Bellmer’s disturbing dolls. So whatever rejection of the morals of the day, consistently, the shock value of their images was generated by images that continued the tradition of misogyny and objectification that underlie the western tradition of the nude. The only surrealist who really broke with the past in creating a radically new iconography was Magritte. And I should add, Lee Miller, Man Ray’s sometime model, and a photographer in her own right who did a radically subversive photo series of a real breast on a plate, having stolen the post-masectomy breast from a hospital. That is one radical critique of the tradition of the nude, the objectification of women and the medical profession all in one.

so I don’t really see the traction in your avatar as a subversive political statement, as it’s one in a long history of images that support a status quo that I don’t support. And artistically? aesthetically? as such it’s kinda boring because it’s been so done. And do you really want to be ‘the vagina eye guy’? You’re a film guy, you must know all the crit around the dynamics of the gaze etc etc

saying it as I see it

Siobhan

On Feb 19, 2011, at 09:58 PM, Scott Ellington wrote:

Bill Moyers spoke at length last month to broadcasters in NYC.  One of the jewels among his remarks was this one:

---

 The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy.

---

From: Siobhan O’Flynn
To: Scott Ellington
Sent: Sun, February 20, 2011 6:13:57 AM
Subject: Re: Avatar

He called them “The Bastard Muses“:

Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth;

Sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and

Pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality.

The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said

“Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic pr

oliferation of mass media,

is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember.”

Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.

http://www.alternet.org/world/149925/bill_moyers%3A_america_can%27t_deal_with_reality_–_we_must_be_exposed_to_the_truth%2C_even_if_it_hurts/?page=entire

---

 

Avatar, schmavatar, really.  It’s a photograph of half of my eye — very simply, but suggestively mirrored symmetrically – and in-and-of-itself, absolutely no big deal, from my pov.

It’s importance to you is, on the other hand, absolutely fascinating.

Before the writers’ strike ended, I was honored to receive an email from Jeffrey Berman, one of the founders of United Hollywood asking in behalf of an even more heroic bigshot

(quite possibly Laeta Kalogridis) that I pick another avatar, because the same one that bothers you also disturbed her, ostensibly for the same reasons which were not itemized then either.

I complied.  The strike ended, and the sentiment proclaimed on November 6, 2007:

“They get paid, we get paid” and “We’re all in this together.”

fell by the wayside in the stampede to get back to business as usual

and beneath the weight of a 150 page Minimum Basic Agreement formulated by the army of lawyers called the AMPTP.

So I’m anything but anxious to exercise unquestioning compliance with the semi-rational, inexplicit qualms of people I respect

who have a problem with my means of expressing myself.

It should be noted here that most of the things I said at United Hollywood involved the inflamaory suggestion that the WGA should initate

a 3-year education program to educate global audiences to the realities of rank&file screenwriters’ situation…preparatory to calling for

a global boycott of studio product.

Throughout the duration of the strike, I stopped buying DVDs, suspended my iTunes and Netflix accounts, and wrote directly to Patric Verone

asking how a private citizen might support the strike (given that [my] presidential campaign donations would be funneled directly into the very deep pockets of

integrated transnational minstream media conglomerates for incredibly wasteful and counterproductive adbuys) anyway.

He actually wrote back! telling me to send money in support of the striking writers to the Motion Picture and Television Fund, which I did, supporting an organization

that has fallen deeply into disrepute since then.

So much for blind obedience.

When I invent or discover a “better” avatar, I’ll probably start using it ubiquitously, religiously, and far more diplomatically,

but not meaninglessly, nor blindly-obediently.

My avatar, in my opinion, propaganda, sentimental nor pornographic.  It’s fairly angry, skeptical and vigilant.

Sidebar.  The same guy who turned me on to his copy of the Serenity DVD four years ago, that put me on the path to Joss Whedon, Ken Burns, David Milch, David Thorburn, Henry Jenkins and to you

suggested yesterday that Kyle XY was really cool.  So I’ve been streaming it for the past 10 hours, and Kyle XY absolutely sucks.  Bob’s taste is clearly deplorable and his tip to SereniFly was a total fluke.

I guess I don’t understand, with civil wars erupting, foreign and domestic, why anybody’s talking about anything else.

Scott

Captain Blood

is a tale told to an audience of idiots; full of sound, culminating in fury, and scrupulously careful to avoid the confoundingly intricate, fascinating historical context (the English Civil War to the English Bill of Rights) that would vastly complicate the tale of the ultimate prevalence of Progressive Democratic Justice over Papist Absolutism.

It’s also a remarkably clever propaganda piece espousing the virtue of disobediance, impertinance and insubordination — told by a wonderful army of unknown up-Star(t)s, contract players, character actors, Curtiz, Korngold and the Warner’s studio system at a time (late 1935) when unqualified financial success and gripping hymns to civil disobediance were desperately needed.  And it’s a pulse-poundingly moving encyclopedia of inspiring Hollywood cheats that blessed careers and greatly influenced all that came afterward.

The Duchess of Duke Street

Good stories, well told; but the ninth episode in the series of fifteen is absolutely golden in that familiar and novel characters weave through fifty-two minutes of unpredictable attitudes, choices, actions and consequences while fabricating and embroidering upon an embedded treatise on the stratified quality of lives in early 20th Century London.  In one way or another, this episode’s central conflict revolves around concise definitions of the contrasts between the amateur and the professional — which generalizes quite meaningfully to explicit differences in class, talent, gender and avocation, and narrows brilliantly to focus precisely on profoundly moving matters of life and death, generativity and exploitation.

Whether one lives in order to work or works in order to live is beautifully illustrated in a deceptively simple tale of an inappropriate lodger in a posh hotel whose reason for being in the wrong place at this particular time opens the heart and enriches the mind like a forgotten key in the locked and callous disused imagination.

The Outsiders blew me away by restating (in an Edwardian context) a few of the most important problems confronting artists, audiences and presenters in the Age of Information.  Candor, magnanimity and an awareness of vital urgency are the signal virtues I plan to extract from this episode, and exercise in the remainder of my tomorrows.  (NetFlix, streamed.)

When I’d already invested ten or so years attempting (largely unsuccessfully) to teach myself to draw, I happened into a neighborhood bookstore, buying reference materials and how-to anatomy guides.  I fell into happy and casual conversation with a young female store employee who concisely explained that if I hadn’t sold any of my work I simply wasn’t an artist.  I spent yet another five years of my life rising at 04:30, crashing after midnight, and squeezing the pursuit of my chosen art into moments not spent earning a living.

The difference between the professional and the amateur is a nose for arrogant mediocrity.  It’s an acquired distaste.

25DEC2010 — The second season of The Duchess of Duke Street is more engaging than the first, despite the fact that the first two episodes emphatically define the titular character’s tendency toward the imperious arrogance of a martinet.  It’s Louisa Trotter’s innovative responses to the peronal and historical topography of early-middle Twentieth Century that elevate the tale far above the standard bio-pic devoted to cultish personality, raising it to the level of a classic media document concerned with the lives and aspirations of humble people mortally imperiled by timeless global and universally-human torments.

On the other hand, the second season highlights a problem for sound designers miking accomplished stage actors whose dynamic range is absolutely confounding.  You’ll want to keep a finger on the volume button of your remote — which reminds me to whine about the design of remote controls (which really should be as well-balanced and ergonomically sensible as a .45 automatic, or a handcrafted Navy Colt).

Robin Hood; the director’s cut

kicks ass eight ways from Sunday, including that of the theatrical version I saw last May, and every prior version.

The West Wing

is a radio show that ran for seven seasons on television.  I know that because I’m listening to it again while playing computer solitaire, and noticing that I’m being bombarded by torrents of information that are delivered by a battery of distinctive voices that flow from a wide variety of rapidly-talking heads.

The first season of this masterpiece of exposition (because that’s all I’ve “seen” again thusfar at this writing) requires that I look at the screen approximately 5% of the time for mandatory visual cues that complement, extend and accentuate the raging rivers of information pouring in through my ears.

The signature walk&talks, the long takes, and sundry stylistic visual eccentricities associated with this series are comparatively insignificant aspects of the driving sound-based narrative that continues to be excellent without (and entirely in spite of) them.  This realization leads me to the provisional conclusion that the promise of cinema as a purely visual medium is not only emphatically not-realized in The West Wing, it’s actually utterly contravened by an extremely successful show that went exactly the opposite way, telling (rather than showing) the story in a manner that strongly resembles the struggle between Democrats and Republicans to wield the pen of history.  For now, that’s a minor irony (that probably figures prominently in the gradual, subliminal transition from a currency-based to the coming attention economy).

Try it.  Watch it.  Enjoy the show, but when (for example) Jed and Leo engage in a moving, confidential conversation in the Oval Office, ask yourself who you are to have this absurd window of opportunity to view that private, pivotal conversation.  And how else might these seven seasons of captivating, enthralling, inspiring entertainment be created if the point of view of the audience were not impossible, disembodied, discontinuous and absurd; the point of view of an angel.  Then make it.  I’ll watch.

Rubicon

I’m confident this series isn’t worth the investment of time and attention it demands.

Having adjusted my audio volume level for

(the tons of rapid, mumbled fragments of frontloaded) exposition, I was totally unprepared for the unexpected

moment that comes 25½ minutes into the pilot episode:

Ed Bancroft calls “dead” David Haddas’ office phone to continue their longstanding chess competition and

Will Travers,

who is standing in David’s office

(in order to be) startled by a LOUD incoming call to a dead man.  Will is understandably slow to answer David’s phone,

(which) lets its deafening ring assault my ears three times before he picks up the Mitel/Inter-Tel Endpoint Executive deskphone handset.  That’s when I realized this showrunner has absolutely no problem annoyng the hell out of his audience — who will probably be kept confused and disoriented for as long as we persist in watching a successful series that absolutely depends upon misdirected self-contempt for the audience. 

Apparently, I don’t spell success like a television executive…so I’m prone to disappointment.

Other notable objections:

• Rubicon’s pilot episode begins on Will’s birthday. April 8, and David Haddas dies the next morning, but it’s snowing lightly at David’s funeral in New York in the middle of April — which seems unlikely.
• A phenomenal number of first names are flung at the viewer who is obligated to remember who’s who in order to make adequate sense of a story in which individuated, personal threads of narrative won’t come together (maybe ever) in the pattern of the first thirteen episodes unless the viewer studies the story repeatedly.  And repeated viewings greatly assist the viewer in grasping the foreshadowing and ironic implications latent in the significance of who’s talking about what, where to look in the frame for previously overlooked information that may help the viewer to piece together a puzzle-solution that can’t possibly justify the effort expended from my moment of choosing to watch the pilot through several seasons WAY down the road to a mythic, pie-in-the-sky narrative-payday for my attention’s ROI; and leading to the viewer conclusion that If I don’t get it, it’s my fault.  While I can’t pick up the obnoxiously loudly ringing telephone,  I can choose to hang up on this television show while turning to the Bourne (Maslowian) pyramid or Three Days of the Condor for a far greater sense guarantee of satisfactory closure.
• The David Haddas character’s violent death is telegraphed to the viewer without actually showing the face of the actor who takes his seat in the best possible location for the camera to connect mayhem with an overcoat that only belongs to David Haddas in the mind of the viewer due to the dis/misinformative intent of the folks in charge of this show.

I don’t think I’ll play along with this sucker’s game, either.   This show pushes the river.

Fear Itself

Although a number of entertainments produced in the past few years have adopted that title, this post is about none of them.  It’s intended as an observation in the run-up to next month’s midterm election.  My team, the progressive/liberal/transparent faction is sending me daily emails that read a lot like this:

The extreme candidates on the other side aren’t just intent on bringing our progress to a halt, they want to take us backward, well beyond the failed policies of the last administration.

They envision an America where Social Security is privatized and left to the whims of the market. They picture an America where education programs get cut to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations. And they look forward to an America where the insurance companies once again have the right to deny coverage to anyone they want.

This election is about choosing the direction this country takes.

On one side is the millions from undisclosed donors attacking our candidates. On the other is us. And each and every one of us who is committed to this struggle for change has a role to play.

That’s why we all need to be knocking on doors, making phone calls, and spreading the word from here through Election Day. The President is doing all he can, and he’s counting on all of us to take that next step today.

We’re flying three winners to Las Vegas to meet the President backstage just before he speaks at one of the most important rallies before Election Day.

And your donation will help us fund the most ambitious grassroots program ever run in an election like this — from putting targeted ads on the air to paying the operations expenses in our field offices to providing food for volunteers.

My donation (the least-participatory aspect of my support of this anti-authoritarian movement) will help them put targeted ads on the air — which is another way of saying some of my gift will be given to mainstream media conglomerates represented by the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers.  Oops.  I figured out three years ago that those guys are the enemy of innovation in broadcast media, egalitarian cooperation and information freedom.  My paying them to air attack-ads seems like a bad idea.

There’s something in this invocation of the liberal/progressive faithful that reminds me that the enemies of my freedom are faceless, radical extremists…who I should fear…because they have weapons of mass electoral persuasion, and corporate money running out their ears.

It seems to me that my team (exactly like the other guys) is resorting to the irrational, magical and superstitious marketing of fear itself.

The discouragingly-ineffective forces opposed to the resugent conservative insurgency deserve my support in the form of my vote.  Period.

Public Enemies

Michael Mann’s commentary for this film is the definitive example of authorial intent exceeding the elastic limitations of the cinematic medium.  Public Enemies is an excellent film, but the commentary tenders layers of context that did not (probably could not) be brought to the viewer’s attention within the 2hour limitation and the cost constraints of the film.  Delivered by an expert filmmaker whose phenomenal familiarity with the material presented is nearly unsurpassed makes for magical depths of association and knocked me on my ass.  It didn’t hurt to find that Mann’s encyclopedic creative sensibilities pulled meaningful parallel speculations out of plausible places.

A drunk midwestern, middleclass kid robs a grocery store for $50 in 1923.  He’s sent to prison for 10 years, leaving it with a graduate degree in bank robbery courtesy of a mentor named Walter Pierpont who imbues the kid with a kind of sophisticated, methodical, rigorously military discipline that will elevate the student to the exalted national status of Public Enemy Number One for the 13 months of freedom on which the movie concentrates.  And yet the day of the independent career bank robber (just like Butch and Sundance) is absolutely done, not only because J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation says so, but because the end of prohibition means that the smartest elements of organized crime have moved beyond their ususal suspect activities (like harboring the high-profile gangs of independent bank robbers) to various forms of low-profile legitimate corporate criminality.  So the extra-ordinary audacity and public relations acumen embodied in the Dillinger organization is threated in its prime from both sides, leading directly to an historic outcome that’s related in a film about it 70 years after the fact and lovingly mirrored in the gangster movies Dillinger loves to watch…one of which makes it into Mann’s movie.

It crossed my mind as Mann described Hoover’s appointed Dillinger-ender, Melvin Purvis, that that very Southern gentleman’s Gman career and cultural tradition were profoundly mismatched, especially in context of Hoover’s mandate to get Dillinger by any means necessary.  While the film and commentary go so far as to strongly suggest that Purvis’ misgivings about the job and its executive director (later in the film) prevent him from doing the job to the fullest extent of his native ability, I’d like to go a step farther.

The threat Dillinger posed to national security justified Hoover’s strategies; arrest the target’s relatives for indeterminate periods of unlawful detention while subjecting those persons of interest to cruel and unusual forms of interrogation and exercise whatever forms of information gathering and monitoring of American citizens may be deemed necessary to achieve the agency’s goals.  So the movie was an interesting biopic about the end of Public Enemy Dillinger, but the realer public enemies were Hoover and Purvis.  And, thinking back, it seems that a remarkable variety of threats to national security are cited fairly continuously as ample justifications for extra-legal activity by heroic SuperPatriots who turn out increasingly swiftly to be incredibly slimy scoundrels.

I’d like to see Purvis and Dillinger team up to rid the world of Hoover, McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush, the FOX News Team and Bush…Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and whoa.

Maybe that’ll be Luck.

And nobody contextualizes network neutrality (and cocksuckers) as clearly as Tim Wu, in my experience:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/tim-wu-net-neutrality/

Crudely paraphrased:  Google’s approach to wireless internet is like America’s approach to the imposition of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq; noble-sounding motives devolve into unlawful detention and torture.

I, Spartacus LOST

Having now completed my second pass through the inital season of Spartacus:  Blood and Sand, I know that there are two commentary tracks (kinda hidden on disks 2 & 4) for episodes 5, Shadow Games, and 13, Kill Them All .  These tracks contain quantities of information that provide fragments of exactly what I was looking for, helpful indications of the intents of the storytellers.

I’d like to thank Sam W for posing questions of my last post that led me to look for more interesting answers to the uncertainties we share regarding this television show.  Some of those answers emerge from the commentaries, and lead to more interesting questions.

I think Sam’s primary objection to this television history was the frequency of incidental carnage visited on people whose casual placement in the narrative is uniformly insignificant.  Perhaps I overstate Sam’s case by saying the show’s wanton and computer-enhanced exhibition of contempt for human life is a very reasonable objection that earmarks an entertainment aimed at vicious morons.  Maybe that’s an understatement.

I had faith in Steve DeKnight that greater value was embedded in this tale than that.  I still think so.

In Gossford Park, the hierarchical order of relationships between masters and servants is central to the revealed development of characters.  In this television show, the hierarchical inequality of all mankind is gradually revealed to be in bitter conflict with values expressed in the narrative, composition, lighting, score and with the ever-expanding, labyrinthine personal agendas of each of the major and minor characters.  And the deeper I venture into the complexities of this version of Spartacus, the greater and more interesting are, to me, the embedded references within the tale to trials of conscience, the development of consequences, interpersonal agendas in conflict; and exterior references/riffs/homages to putatively-objective versions of history, previous versions of this story, I, Claudius, Paradise Lost, The Sopranos and Angel:  Not LOST, which I find more than merely interesting.

Let’s Get To Work and Kill Them All before the next round of informal negotiations with the AMPTP.  Perhaps I’m overreaching, slightly.

Spartacuss

“On steroids!”  “Industrial Strength!”  That’s two ways of indicating that Spartacus:  Blood and Sand contains more graphic violence, sexuality and profanity than your average television show.Ever!  Three really.  The title of this post plays on the profanity scripted into the language of the show to highlight the sanitized lamenesses that shocks and awes the modern television audience into watching televison.

Just behind the spectacular visual delights (for every taste in every segment of the cult and casual audience) tendered in the frequent display of boobs, copulation, violence and male nudity and slowmotion bloodsplatter-by-the-pint, there are abundant verbal pleasures to be derived from the high level (but accessibly sub-Elizabethan) of elevated speech, by Juptier’s cock, and nuggets of arcane and timeless profanity welled up from far too many decades of  Standards&Practices beating the freaking heck out of broadcast versions of adult reality.

And under the XXXpletive level of engagement are fascinating instances of artistic license that intentionally join the graphic novel to moving visual storytelling with classy restraint and hightech abandon — to sublime effect, from time to time.

And under those strata of evolving visual and narrative sophistication is a layer of reasonably-subtle moral ambiguity in which Power flip-flops constantly while rolling downhill in consequences that reverberate in all directions, something like this:

Crixus’ secret love for Naevia (while he’s recovering from his encounter with his legendary destructive, very-nearly-lethal nemesis, unretired Theokales) has significantly damped the pleasure Lucretia’s always taken in Crixus’ fucking enthusiasm — so Lucretia’s is less-resistant-than-ever-before to Batiatus’ reluctant contemplation of dumping an over-the-hill Crixus (former champion of Capua) on the even-more-minor-league market, somewhere else in the Roman world.  Naevia, overhearing management’s disturbing ruminations, and putting two and two together, and dreading separation from Crixus, persuades her secret lover to redouble his customary efforts in the satisfaction-guaranteed bouts of fucking of Lucretia, despite Naevia’s profound distaste for Crixus’ sexual and romantic duplicity.  Chicks!?! The thing here is that each and every character  has a reliable moral compass that points constantly in whatever direction happens at the moment to seem reasonably warranted. 

 There are no moral absolutes nor completely-inflexible codes in a brutal universe of Power, domination, appeasement and betrayal – which makes for fascinating character development, situations and complex, multifaceted, provisional resolutions, alliances and fusible bonds that burn at a variety of rates.  This is the soap opera layer of Spartacus:  Blood and Sand; a layercake composed of beefcake, cheesecake, graycake (homoerotic), angel&devil’sfood, poundcake(as in thump), techcake, cusscake, naughtycake and miscellaneous forms of fetishcake…it’s adrenaline&thought-provoking pornographic entertainment for the entire family, designed to stimulate every taste and every demographic.  Pornography (to my mind) is utilitarian entertainment.  It’s primary objective is to addict those who partake in it, so a pornographic motivation exists everywhere in entertainment, education, religious worship, political engagement…and political expediency leads to confrontation with moral order which is only beginning to emerge at the end of season one as a counter to the numerous and contradictory exigencies that have dominated the beginning of the story of a legend in the making.  Until I learn otherwise, I’m predisposed to call that legend Steve DeKnight.

If Mad Men mirrors contemporary American culture from the distant, politically incorrect remove of 50 years, Spartacus:  Blood and Sand does something very similar, but it mirrors “our” modern liberation from the oppressive, arbitrary lowest-common-moral-denominator confinements of broadcast television.  Whether the soul and conscience of the era depicted (about 100BCE) will be Julius Fucking Caesar of Jesus Fucking Christ, has yet to be specified, but this show is clearly designed to give every possible segment of the viewing audience massive chunks of delight, family-style.  Jumbo!  Full-on!  Balls-out…!  To the max?  Not yet, but I’ll bet DeKnight is working on it.  Hence, my  emphasis on “our” liberation; content creators and audience, paying intense attention together on the same very same page, because we’re all in this together.

The 4-DVD set became available from NetFlix last Tuesday.  Having streamed the season weekly last spring, I wanted to experience the series again more continuously and immersively.  And I’d hoped to explore the horse’s mouth for clues to the show’s intentionality — Special Features reserved to Disc 4 — no commentaries, but several interesting features.  Clearly, the first job of a showrunner is to keep flying.  You can’t teach much with a show that can’t stay on the air.  I think that misson was accomplished, but now I need to look into old rumors of the unavailability of Andy Whitfield for health reasons.

Datelessly, per IMDb: 

• “Production has been halted on the Sam Raimi-produced show while heading into its second season, due to star Andy Whitfield being diagnosed with cancer. Whitfield has been diagnosed with early-stage Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and will begin undergoing treatment immediately. With the first season of Spartacus completed, production will be delayed on the second season.”

Rope

Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as an independent producer in 1948 was based on a play that was based on a book that was based on the infamous crime of Leopold and Loeb.  It’s a remarkable film for several reasons, and frequently cited for the unusual experiment it undertook; to photograph the action without the use of conventional edits. 

There’s also no insinuating musical score and (except for the early and later intervals, surrounding titles and credits) all of the music that appears in the film is explicitly made by an actor at the piano or the turn of a nob on a radio. 

Less explict is the very-similar tonal pitch of all the actors’ voices.  Even the three women in the film are resonably-deep contraltos, and their voices interact and blend with those of the men (including the upper register of the booming Cedric Hardwick) in an almost-continuous patchwork (foreground/background/multichannel) of dialogue that very rarely ceases (except conspicuously) and culminates at the end of the film in some  electrifying crescendos; vocal, philosophical, kinetic and emotional.

Rope, Smith and Mad Men are three very different entertainments that happen to have in common absolutely zero characters that appeal to me, no characters with whom I sympathize/identify and automatically like.  And yet, despite that formulaic “oversight”, in sticking with those stories I was led to appreciate the use of other elements/devices that justified the investment of my attention.

Rope‘s nine characters range (in my opinion) from the purely-loathesome to the merely-avoidable kinds of people I might meet at a party; elitist, classist, privileged, and fundamentally contemptible…but by the middle of the second act, the vapid conversations and self-important posturing began to peel away — revealing fascinating, human complications that are tucked inside of all of us.

The most-notable thing about Rope is the considerable number of conventional cinematic devices and cheats (filmmaker priviliges) it doesn’t utilize in telling a story about bullshitting.  (Hitchcock also cheats.)  On the other hand, the 1948 Technicolor camera was an enormous machine that could not move without drawing attention to itself in wobbles and bobbles and various conceits that the viewer isn’t meant to notice.  And the camera’s point of view in Rope (as usual) belongs to nobody.  I  tried pretending (on my third pass through the film) that it belonged to David, the guy Brandon and Phillip killed, but that very clearly wasn’t the (pure cinema) story Alfred meant to tell.

Rope is a fascinating film on many levels, and riveting for many reasons that culminate in a ripping of scabs off the fundamental socio-philosophical question that emerges quite pointedly through the telling — How should superior wealth and privilege get along with the rest of us?  I think Hitchcock’s hero in this tale is Mrs. Wilson, and his answer is that the elite had best behave with redoubled efforts at compassion and civility. 

I think think superior wealth and privilege purchased mainstream media along about 1945 and have beaten us senseless with it, ever since, complicitly. 

The film ends with an interesting, implict comparison between Old Testament capital punishment and Nazi euthanasia, mediated by civilized government’s  willingness, readiness and aptitude to kill.  That’s a bone of contention that doesn’t quite fit in the film.

Hollywood’s late-40s experiments in visual storytelling (Rope, The Lady in the Lake, Dark Passage…) might have been provoked by studio-anxiety over the embryonic giant of television.  I think that notion gives undue credit to the presience of studio executives — whose eventual solution would be to buy (or be bought by) broadcast networks; they joined what they couldn’t beat.  I think it’s high time I studied Hitchcock as a means to understanding the history (and future) of mainstream media as Alfred Hitchcock Presents…it.

The primary byproduct of all systems is irony.

(SIDEBAR:  Generation Kill is a fascinating miniseries without insinuated score.  All the music is made by characters onscreen, with layers of vocal communication set behind the brilliant foreground conversations, rants and diatribes in an alpha-male environment dedicated to constant contention which is reminiscent of some notable functions of communication exhibited in Deadwood and Stage Door, the 1937 chickflick with the deepest all-star bench and the wittiest conversations since Eve slew Lilith with (and Edna Ferber spurned) false immodesty.  I love Generation Kill, partly because it elaborates on American lore/myth broached in The Killer Angels about heroism, patriotism, sacrifice, blood and privilege.  And I’m steeply and steadily warming to Nathan Fick’s One Bullet Away, for very similar reasons.)

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Thou Shalt Not Steal.

David Milch sometimes refers to the source of creative inspiration as God.

I think that kind of talk is presently just a little bit inflamatory, so I just call it Culture. 

But I call it by that euphemism simply to shift the focus of authorship away from authors, authorities and the armies of people who are motivated by money and who aren’t creatively inspired while they’re busy dickering, suing, enjoining, litigating, negotiating and accounting for every last brass farthing they feel is due somebody and them. 

Lawyers, agents and accountants aren’t creating content while they’re busy dickering, but then neither are authors.  And that’s the point at which my perception of authorship diverges from the normal.  Maybe love is all you need and amateurs (amatory participants in the process of making art) drive the evolution/efflorescence of art while professionals impede those good things by professing a stake in the ownership of art’s artifacts.

The care and feeding of Culture, I think, requires the sacrifice of professional authorship to facilitate innovative collaboration (authorized and otherwise) as people who create art and people who appreciate it reach for more humane and productive means (than copyright protections) to compensate one another for engaging with and making culture Culture.

Mimi and Eunice cartoon courtesy of Nina Paley:

http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/archives/thou-shalt-not-steal/433#comment-182

and:

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/08/16/mimi-eunice-now-12-5-smaller/

Deadwood PD Blue, South

The titles sequence for Deadwood runs over the desultory perambulations of a magnificent, wild, sorrel horse, intersperced with fragmentary moments refined from crude life in a working gold mining camp.  The thematic score and visuals combine to set the tone for deep immersion in a very specific universe of rough pleasures, raw toil, rampant corruption and the fervent search for gold.  The horse will eventually become the agent of destruction of the innocent son of  Seth Bullock, the primary representative of law or order throughout the series.

The pilot episode of Brooklyn South erupts in cataclysmic urban violence with breathtaking suddenness as a sorrel-colored ungentleman (named Hopkins [as in Lightning]) begins his unbridled paroxysm of gunthug murder with a devastating punch to the face of guy who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Late in the third season of NYPD Blue, Andrew Sipowicz, Jr. is murdered while responsibly intervening in the violent celebration of two guys (wildcat capitalists) who are busily rejoicing in making good their escape from the scene of another recent crime scene.  This story of Andy J’s murder is told entirely confessionally, in retrospect by victims and cowardly observers, all of whom chose not to take a stand against the sudden intrusion of dedicated, random violence erupting in their presence.  It’s like, you know, stylistic variations of the same violent incident; transnarrative storytelling with virtuoso flourishes that fanthropologists and graduate students will probably be thinking about until hell freezes over (if anybody gets around to it).

Having a fairly literal mind, I’ve always read the horse metaphor as a beautifully fleshy manifestation of Unbridled Capitalism running amok in its pristine, natural, native environment, into which relatively-civilized Easterners intrude, bringing with them inappropriate attitudes and customs which the horse will summarily reorganize, and, in telling instances, crush, destroy, maim and render barely-recognizable (like William Bullock, as it eventually turned out).  But David Milch, in his commentary, thwarted my literalist read by indicating his consternation at the inclusion of a wild horse cavorting in the countryside…which kept me thinking despite my tendency to figure I’d read the symbolic significance of the horse well enough.  As it turns out, the horse probably didn’t die, but it’s worthwhile beating it, anyway, retrospectively and repeatedly, possibly forever.  And there is no such thing as well enough because 9/11/2001 marks a date of violent action like a pebble striking the surface of a pond, making ripples that flow from the moment of impact AND ripples that lead up to it.

In his commentary for the pilot episode of Brooklyn South, David Milch remarks on Bill Clark’s frequent remarks about the manner in which violent behavior erupts, in Clark’s experience; suddenly, unexpectedly and often with breathtakingly disastrous results and unforeseeable consequences…kinda like 9/11.

So, I’m blithely cruising one of my favorite television shows with a couple of guys named Sipowicz and listening quite casually as one of them pointedly tells the other that policing starts and ends with paying attention to, and getting intimately familiar with

• People,
• Places,
• The Things they do, and
• The Times they do them

…and I’m reminded of the horse, the Hopkins massacre, and the murder of Andy Sipowicz, Jr…as a violent realization overcomes me…that David Milch and Bill Clark have been explaining sudden, cataclysmic outbreaks of fictitious violence based on real events for a couple of decades…and I’ve only paid attention to the action, when the requirement is to read the ongoing interactions of people, places, things and times. 

I see the internet as one small step toward telepathy and one giant leap toward global Culture.  While certain sources of information feed my need for infomation, and other sources don’t, the internet is very like a gold mining camp in the wilderness, or a policeman’s beat in a community, or a medium in which violent action (that draws attention) erupts from persistent inattention to stuff that’s happening all the time.  Likewise, Milch sloughs praise and awards for being The Creator of television shows that grab attention away from real life in which Culture grows a-David Milch-a-minute.  I think he’s telling us to police our own areas with greater care, to invest redoubled attention in our lives, and to act with heroic-yet-conscientious decency.  The alternative is to remain fixated on politicians celebrities and media heroes — whose successes (which ironically bring celebrity and hero-worship) derive solely from their immersion in policing their respective areas.  I think he’s advising us to invest in our lives and not in our stars.  Dave’s Epistle to the Skells.

Sorry about the anticlimax.

I almost forgot to mention that Yvonne leaves a gaping, ulcerated wound in Brooklyn South.  Her mercenary duplicity and bottomless bitchiness match the trials of Andrew Sipowics, Senior, and she presents an excellent (though rarer) example of Milch-made antiheroine monsters written to spar at par with the demon-ridden guys (who absolutely do get more facetime, Wally).

Max Headroom — Caveat Emptor!

My amazon pre-order of the 1987 14-episode series arrived yesterday afternoon.  I’m four episodes in, and loving it all over again, partly because of its distinctive voice and partly because of its incisive humor, but mostly because of the world in which its set – a world in which omnipotent corporations and massively corrupt media networks rule a hellish planet peopled by somnambulists, while pointless puppet governments posture constantly and all cops are incompetent goons.

Max Headroom represents a kind of cyberpunk vacation from or antidote for the Milch-mania (which I actually prefer) that leads me to sound, even to myself, like some kind of sycophantic, pro-cop, law and order freak.

It’s nice to shift temporarily away from my steady diet of crusading detectives and visionary police officers (besieged by slime-covered news reporters and hamstrung by counterintuitive bureacracies) to one heroic, hardhitting newsman (mired in zombie-cops and soulless corporate nazis).

The series is just as low-budget, sometimes-tedious, and primitive as I remember, but it’s especially gratifying (after 23 years of waiting) to actually follow a reasonably-continuous storyline (no commercials, no week-long waits, no censored profanities…) and character arcs I hankered-after so long ago.  (And the techno-mumbo-jumbo is probably lots easier now to translate into obsolete computer-speak.)

 I’m finding, as well, that this show made remarkably cogent and prescient observations about Twenty Minutes Into The Future of television, media and society from 23 years in the past.  And It’s FUN!

http://www.maxheadroom.com/mh_c_dvds.html

Important Update:  Conversely, by episode 8, the drawbacks of crappy acting, deplorable dialogue, an unrelentingly cynical and whining view of the future, and the gimmick-ridden speech impediment of Max,  himself, make this show increasingy difficult to watch and enjoy.  It’s as though inert material is accumulating in my imagination, and the longer I pay attention to Max Headroom, the more difficult it is to pay attention to Max Headroom, a titular character whose charm and utility as comic relief cease to entertain as his appearances come to annoy, and I’ve begun to dread them. 

What began as an almost-glowing pseudo-critique has become a serious CUSTOMER WARNING.

Toy Story 3D

Good story.  The 3D effect contributed a measure of  irrelevant novelty that didn’t ruinously intrude on the narrative experience.  I look forward to buying the DVD to complete the set of three engrossing, animated films, and to prospect for nuggets of curiosity and personal interest — BUT I won’t be looking for an archival copy on iTunes and I won’t seek the deluxe BlueRay edition, nor the 3DTV version, because I think that’s the SUV of storytelling.

One pass through the film in a theater last Sunday doesn’t give me the right to wax all philosophic upside it’s head, but I noticed that the 3D stuff that came before the 3D film began (trailers and logos and promotional crap) moved me.  The involuntary acts of flinching were due to owls and bowling pins flying out of the screen and right through the fourth wall of the theater experience, into my sacred domain.  Well…I thought it was mine and sacred, because for sixty years the movie industry has largely avoided acknowledging the fourth wall and my place on this side of the screen.  Robert Mongomery’s 1947  The Lady in the Lake, near as I can figure, returned the investment of capital so poorly that the sustained use of subjective-camera in movies is like the third rail in subway hitchhiking; movies (and studios) that want to live long and prosper have avoided that technique asiduously.  

I say that realizing that exceptions count for something, and from time to time, Hope and Crosby, Bugs, Lou Costello, for example, address the audience directly, and 3D experiments since ’47 (generally centered on horror-movie special effects) dot the recent history of cinema.  The kicker here is that 3D and subjective-camera technique are extremely compatible with one another…you can watch the pitcher brush back a slugger from your seat off the 3rd base line or you can see that event from the point of view of the batter…3D and subjective camera optimize visceral and involuntary responses in an audience (until the audience habituates to the phenomenon).  They’re also entirely compatible with the fashionable idea that audiences communicate virally, automatically massing in staggering numbers to have their strings pulled by special effects that can take the place of a stimulating and provocative story.  No, they can’t.

There’s a 3D fork in the road of cinema up yonder.  It marks the point in the marriage of commerce and art where a lousy relationship gets worse.  Compelling content and the profit motive separate when money invests in sure things (like the autonomic nervous system that always makes you flinch when a beanball’s coming — even if it’s virtual).  Artists may be able to incorporate fresh technology (like a wireless HD clip-on camera [or an absolutely insubstantial PIXAR camera]) into storytelling, but cretive artists are definitely not the kind of sure thing money prefers to depend upon.  Some studio coercion is probably inevitable.

It remains to be seen whether people want 3DTVs enough to invest in the hardware necessary to play the software that’s coming in the wake of the stream of first-run 3D features.  It also remains to be seen whether people will want 3D software archives that may help them replicate the autonomic, visceral responses that Hollywood and pornographers will insert in place of compelling stories from now on.

There are probably a number of intriguing parallels in Toy Story 3 that mirror the careers of outgrown toys bound for the attic, day care center or land fill; but I’ll probably have to get a DVD copy to fully appreciate them.  I think the natural compatibilty of hot 3D and long-disfavored subjective-camera technique forces film schools to teach subjective camera use from the library of existing experiments like The Lady in the Lake, Dark Passage and With the Angels.  And eventually the studios will realize that content is king, while gimmick is only temporarily novel; so, in time, audiences and greenlights will demand meaningful, provocative stories (again).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/business/media/03-3d.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The aim ‘is to be the only horror movie coming out that is not in 3-D.’
JOSS WHEDON
The producer of the coming film The Cabin in the Woods.

•

‘When you put the glasses on, everything gets dim.’
J. J. ABRAMS
The director of Star Trek, which was a 2-D hit last year.

The Santa Monica (Lewinsky) Address

Four score and seven versions ago, our content creators brought forth upon this continuum an old notion, conceived in equity and dedicated to the proposition that all media is Cultural currency.

Now we are engaged in a great war of civil definition, testing whether that original notion or any ulterior promotion of private, corporate or global ownership can long endure.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of our fortunes, our individual and collective attention, to the restoration of an old frontier.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  But in a larger sense, we cannon dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground without inspiring others to engage, add or detract from our poor power to be dedicated here to the unfinishable work which they who endlessly fight here have, thusfar, so nobly advanced.

It is, rather, for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from postings, comments and critique we take increased devotion to that cause for which the minimum basic agreement acts as an open door (to the street); that we here highly resolve that this site shall not exist in vain; that this notion, to resist complicity with Power, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that entertainment of the people, by the people, for and about the people shall not perish beneath an avalanche of counterproductive corporate notes, but strive to find intrinsic values in the plural form of “is”.

Brooklyn South

In the pilot episode’s commentary, David Milch mocks himself for the hubris that led to creating a better version of Hill Street Blues (my emphasis) in the midst of perpetuating NYPD Blue.  It’s a powerful, deadly-serious, self-inflicted attack on his character.  The remark stems very specifically from his contempt for the roll-call parody set piece, that characterized the earlier show (created by other people before he came aboard in season 3), but it ends with an underexpressed apology to the actors whose careers were not favorably impacted by a cancelled show that the actors loved.  He indicts himself for failing the creative enterprise of Brooklyn South by underestimating the demands of his very own process; Licalsi confessed to a crime ascribed to Giardella.  The series is eminently worthy of study for that reason alone — to provide insight into David Milch-overextended, heroically trying to provide just-in-time, custom-tailored inventory to two, unimanginably-demanding creative enterprises, simultaneously:  Inserting newly-minted, custom content too late for the meddling of bosses.

Why is it still a lamentable truth that only the first four seasons of NYPD Blue are available on DVD?  I don’t know, but I entitle myself to the speculation that that series spiraled toward the toilet the moment the attention of David Milch became permanently divided between a wildly successful commercial property and a speculative spin-off (that was also a remake [from scratch]).  I’m just guessing that ABC’s vested interest in NYPD Blue frowned on the devotion of previously-contracted resources to CBS for the upstart Brooklyn South.  But then, I’m inclined to see monied people meddling in the affairs of artists, Culture and practically everything.  So let’s move on to the heart of the aborted series after noting that Brooklyn South had more than a little in common with a fabulously-rich mining camp (named Milchwood) that Power coveted.

 

Yesterday, I bought a new copy of Brooklyn South from a guy in Georgia, via Amazon.  I was surprised to find it advertised as unexpurgated.  How exactly that term can be applied to a (Standards&Practices-inhibited) broadcast television show remains to be seen, but (speculating again) I figure the archane language of smart, undereducated neighborhood tough guys (who grew up to become cops, skels and assholes) foreshadows the metatextual use of language in Deadwood, which will probably lead me to Mencken’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Language and Twain and Melville and London and McChesney and Mcluhan and God-knows-where-else, like a moth to a flame.  And maybe the seller in Georgia is simply bullshitting, precisely as Spielberg suckered me out of the box office price of CE3K, The Director’s Cut.  We’ll see. 

 

Brooklyn South is loaded with characters, storylines, conflicts, solutions and an extra-heaping helping of Bill Clark’s worldview and expertise in world viewing.  I’ve noticed (or imagined) that the emphasis on confessional exposition (that made NYPD Blue very different from the standard-cop-procedurals before and since) is amplified in BS to the extent that the action-motivating stuff people are thinking eventuates in ”secret” conversations (later or immediately), and the subtextual mysteries in the pilot (for example) become spoken bonds of confidence between characters in episodes 2-12.  So I have to go back to see how Kersey might have had the opportunity to accidentally kick the life out of that maniac gun-thug in the pilot. The show encourages the audience to gain access to the VHS/DVD archive of the show to review the choreography of events that take place in a rigid chronology, yet are influenced in viewer perception by subsequent and/or future events that don’t unfold in time so much as they open our understanding of how stuff happens/happened; literally permitting present revelations to profoundly modify our perceptions of “factual” events that we thought we understood (well enough) when they happened in the past.

This manner of structuring stories illustrates some of the most-repeated Milchisms, but it also sets up a kind of call&response between events and subsequent revelations, like pastor and congregation, like theme and variation, like virtuoso musicians jamming, like artists and audience in ecstatic collaboration.  Like David Milch teaching.  Like Bill Clark teaching him.  Like life.  Lifelike.

 

I’ve got to go back now to explain that Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake is a 1947 screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novella.  Montgomery chose to provide the world with an almost-unique movie; shot from Philip Marlowe’s point of view.  That’s a very big deal because of its rarity, audacity and the enormity of its failure, unlike the first 25 minutes of Dark Passage, which did a little business despite its use of the same and similar photographic techniques). 

I know that Montgomery’s mistakes are interesting.  It’s a minority opinion.  Playing Marlowe, he’s the camera, so every move, every conversation, every reflective surface involves a technical problem in preserving the illusion that the lead actor, who we almost never see (who’s also the director of the film) is moving, conversing and being reflected as though a noisy, 1947 phonebooth/movie-camera were Philip Marlow/Robert Montgomery.  That’s a minefield of potential illusion-destroying errors that the film manages to escape.  BUT the aspect of the novella that made the story fascinating to readers was Marlowe’s inner voice revealed from line to line as Chandler describes factual reality filtered through the narrator’s perceptual faculties and his vastly cynical, sardonic experience that makes metaphors leap from the page in a way that Montgomery’s film absolutely didn’t.  So the movie is a remarkable experimental failure (that makes an adequate film noir) and never even approaches the super-enriched quality of telepathic audience-experience Chandler built into every breathing line in the book.

David Milch in Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and especially in Brooklyn South —  found ways to make the viewer a reader by fashioning access to the thought processes of his characters connecting directly to the life experiences of his plural audiences (broadcast, archive, academic, disciples, detractors…)

The camera in Brooklyn South doesn’t call conspicuous attention to itself in the way that it did vehemently (ad [literal] nauseum) early and often in NYPD Blue (with Dektors and wobbles and jittering movement) nor by pulling a Montgomery.  How the camera facilitates storytelling is another reason I want to own a copy of the series.  I think the emphatic-yet-understated quality of mercy falls easily from the actors (not by means of camera trickery, but) because David Milch imparted to his cast/staff/crew the fundamental, overwhelming decency he found in the company of Bill Clark, and the ability Clark invested in Milch to see the world anew.  (In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Who ARE those guys” (who are chasing us as though the cosmos depended upon their inevitable success in our complete and utter destruction) is one hell of a wonderful question tht Milch has been answering for a couple-three decades.  So his commentary barely mentions the myopia of fear-based network and studio executives who wanted to build on the unaccountable mystery of past success by casting young, attractive actors in place of the actors for which the show was written.  And I entitle myself to speculate on who those uglier, older actors might have been, which permits me to guage performances (in the future, when I own a study-copy) of child actors struggling with parts designed to impart a more complex reality to the global audience.

In True Blue, Milch is far from blind to the idiosyncracies and congential defects visible to him in Saint Bill ClarkKellySipowiczDoyleMcElwaineDonnovanMooneySwearengenBullock (and his legendarily-dysfunctional kind), but just as in Boomtown (Yost, 5 years later), the flaws in people lend majesty to the people-destroying enterprise of the invigoration of an infrastructural system that absolutely, desperately needs them to be effective (and needs them, in order to be effective and relevant to the dynamic needs of people) warts&all.  Saint Monster.

Now, I don’t claim to follow the Milchian explanation of the cyclic battle of corruption&reform outlined in the enforcement of law as practiced in New York City from 1965-1997, but Serpico, Report to the Commissioner, both French Connection films and countless other narratives help to fill in the subtextual context that Brooklyn South builds upon to illustrate the regional recovery of either law or order from Lindsay to Giuliani.

I wrote the foregoing in a letter to a friend, a couple of days ago, after viewing only the first four episodes.  Now that I’ve seen all six discs of the lone 22-episode season, and cruised Stephen Bochco’s follow-up interview, I’d like to relate another layer of opinion.

 

NYPD Blue is very different from Brooklyn South.  It’s different for the reasons I mentioned previously, and, as Bochco says, Blue is more cerebral and generally set after the criminal act as detectives reconstruct and intuit the forces that culminated in violence.  Additionally, however, Brooklyn South was set in the midst of the ongoing lives of the police subculture in the vibrant, unique community of Brooklyn; nested within an environment veined with interlocking vascular systems of pulsing dedication to honor, duty, loyalty, tradition and other words that aren’t just rhetorical expressions.  Brooklyn South is a good deal more visceral, funny, tragic and alive than NYPD Blue.  And it makes a significantly more human case for the career of a community policing than any experience, real or virtual, that I’ve enjoyed since riding around Northern and Park Districts in San Francisco one night shift in 1973 with Officer Ray Portue (a superb example of humankind), who, believe it or not, aplogized to me because that ride-along was uneventful.

For all you know, Ray Portue is a name I made up in order to tell a story.  The man was real, but I don’t know enough about him, nor storytelling, to do that convention justice.  The aim of this paragraph, however,  is to substantiate or re-explain my premise that for most narrative/entertainment purposes, people and stories are synonymous.

By using the same actors in the stories he tells, David Milch makes it easy for someone like me to track similarities and differences in the Silas Adams identity that threads its way through the Deadwood saga which relates to Brooklyn South and Jack Lowry at least to the extent that Titus Welliver played both guys — and I infer that Jimmy Flynn in Big Apple somehow finds a complementary function to perform, a commonality.  It so happens that I cling to the sly suspicion that Milch continually casts Welliver as Saul on the road to Damascus, who emerges from a more-or-less catastrophic epiphany as Paul, the great evangelist for the vision of Cultural renaissance.  Also, Gary Basaraba, Garret Dillahunt, Gordon Clapp, Dayton Callie, Paul Ben-Victor, Bill Clark, Michael Harney, Jim Beaver, Stephen Tobolowsky, Paula Malcolmson and Kim Dickens . 

I just noticed that the practical impact of all men are created equal is ironic, and pathetic until it’s expressed in the voluntary diversity of women.

I guess I just can’t stop myself from seeing David Milch as the jackpot-motherlode of modern transnarrative media.  No wonder Power never lets him complete any of these tales.  After all, he’s only a private citizen, and the sacred voice of public indignation.  Maybe I’ll defend that last statement some other time.

The extremely thin, blue line between more-or-less organized crime and Internal Affairs probably enlivens the punchline of a million jokes about a cop, a wiseguy and a rat who walk into a bar.  I don’t know any.

For Whom the Skell Rolls is the second episode of the second season of NYPD Blue.  It’s fascinating for lots of reasons, but (for the moment) the most fascinating of these for me is the vision of trial lawyers as duelling champion storytellers.  When Licalsi’s champion, Sinclair, sits down after delivering his mesmerizing summation, he does so with the exquisitely understated flare of Wild Bill Hickock’s well-earned reputation for chivalry and restraint.

Paraphrasing Sinclair, “As you know, Detective Kelly, the witness stand and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth have about as much in common as a frankfurter and a warm puppy.”

Champions perform a function.  They execute the intents and agendas of a higher power.  Champions can be played as true believers in an heroic agenda (see Bryan Cranston in Brooklyn South) or as cynical virtuosos (see Daniel Benzali as James Sinclair, Esq. in For Whom the Skell Rolls) or as self-serving vermine (see Paul Ben-Victor as Stephen Ronald Richards), but I see David Milch as both a hero and a champion.  I also believe that the majority of screenwriters see him as I do, thus emulating the person and aspiring to incorporate the genius woven into the work. 

On the other hand, For Whom the Skell Rolls pointedly excludes the adult moment in which Andy Sipowicz thanks Mike Roberts for providing a scandalous videotape at a most propitious and flobotinous moment.  What’s more adult than the feeling of humble gratitude for the thoughtful act performed for you and yours by a toxic opportunist  who already knows how much you  loathe him?

The Value of Gold

Having just revisited the three seasons of Deadwood, it crossed my mind again that it’s difficult to determine which of many, many arbitrary certainties is A Lie Agreed Upon.  I’ve concluded that the first of these is the value of gold because rumors of the discovery of that rare and precious metal motivate dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people to leave wherever in the world they were, reorganing their life-priorities, to convene in an inhospitable place on the planet where all of the civil safeties and conveniences available to people in 1876 are profoundly undeveloped or simply don’t exist.

Gold is a heavy metal.  It’s chemically inert.  It’s yellow and maleable.  It’s so rare (according to Wikipedia) that all of the gold that’s ever been taken from the Earth would make a cube 60.4m tall.  Picture the length of a football field, squared.  Then cover that field with a pyramid of pure gold that sinks directly into the earth because of its tremendous weight, like a volcano in reverse.  Now picture the ring of a few billion people surrounding the square crater (where all the gold in the world went) — each one gnashing, rending, ranting and lamenting the individual loss.  Then what happens?  Lemminging?

The intrinsic properties of gold don’t just naturally make my mouth water, but I certainly see that it’s possible to find significant utility in a material that can be worked into an infinity of shapes, is very chemically stable (even when mixed with other materials) tends to remain shiny, yellow and heavy despite environmental variability over time:  Coin, currency, physical symbol of wealth, guarantee; a fundamental lie agreed upon.  Hey, it could have been Bay leaves.

Gold, more than most other physical materials, remains constant. 

It’s psychological counterpart?…seems like that would have to be…fixation…gold fever…a hunger for the color YELLOW.  Odd that that word applies, especially in the old west, to precious metal and worthless men.

“String her up!  She’s the coward Custer trusted.”  and other sentences that don’t reverberate through the well-worn pages of history, except with their absurdity.

Although I think there’s value in this line of reasoning, I’ve got several hundred pounds of obsolete telephone equipment to sell today.  More-or-less unfortunately, that too is a constant.

KaSSandrA Vizerskaya

I stumbled, last week at DeviantART, across several striking visual images (from a closed account) authored by a woman from Kiev:

http://www.photosight.ru/users/16172/

and found her posted videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Vizerskaya#p/u

While I still have web access, I think the right thing to do is share these discoveries, rather than regret (for an indeterminate period) not having done so.

In the past 5 weeks…

…I’ve lost the use of three hard disks, one internal, two external.  These losses in storage capability probably aren’t to dust, shock, abuse or my carelessness.  They’re probably the logical consequence of authorized, official updates to my operating system; MS Vista 64bit.

I have to say “probably” because dialogues and alerts provided by my operating system are remarkably misleading, and every potential remedy I’ve tried, instruction I’ve dutifully followed (where intelligibility and reason permit) since these problems began to arise has resulted only in a noteworty waste of time.

So, I’m soldiering on with work-around solutions, deprived of about half of my library, and contemplating ways to migrate my stuff to a new (and unaffordable) platform that might perform its fundamental functions up to and beyond the expiration of its goddamned warranty.

In brief, the cinematic highlight of the past five weeks has been Budd Boetticher, a name I learned a couple of years ago from Martin Scorsese’s The Century of Cinema.  Back then, I found The Tall T on VHS at Amazon, enjoyed it and planned to investigate the remainder of the Ranown cycle.  But life got in the way.  A random Henry Jenkins tweet reminded me last month of my Boetticher resolve, so I caught the remaining films via NetFlix, which also gave me access to a peek at Burt Kennedy’s films and some standard Randolph Scott, Peckinpah, Leone…for contrast. 

I like Boetticher’s themes, his attitude toward Hollywood (Fuck ‘em) and I really like watching his influence spread far beyond the Western, the 60s, and Hollywood to exemplify clean, incredibly-efficient filmmaking rooted in character development in conjunction with a straight-forward plot.  I think most of the value I found in the Boetticher approach is reflected in Jeremiah Johnson, and the primary modern practioner of his filmmaking style appears in products made by Malpaso. 

Brief.

Justified  didn’t intrigue me much, despite the praise Sam Ford (a reliable source of excellent information) sprinkled on it librally regarding its Eastern Kentucky setting.  (Sam’s a Western Kentuckian.)   The pilot episode turned me entirely around with sharp, intelligent dialogue, blistering pace, and a full-on creative environment that made Timothy Olyphant (who [I think] did not understand what Milch was getting at — at all) almost totally palatable.  It didn’t hurt to discover that Graham Yost (Speed [catch the commentary], Band of Brothers, Boomtown, From the Earth to the Moon, Raines) is the showrunner, with Keith Henderson (the son of a good friend who turned me on to Boomtown) working as editor on four (?) non-consecutive episodes, and Nick Searcy (From the Earth to the Moon, among other excellent things), Matt Craven (everything!), Earl Brown (great underplayed comedic/dramatic work on Deadwood).  But the major revelation for me in the first season of Justified is the complex and fascinating contribution of Walton Goggins.

John Christian Plummer (a name with which to reckon in future, mark my words) turned me on to the fact that David Milch’s pre-Deadwood series, Big Apple can be streamed (and downloaded) from YouTube.  And it’s far more than eminently worthy of that insignificant effort.

Like I said, brief.

None of the computer problems I’ve been having these past few weeks have prevented me from blithering in this blog, but “New&Improved technology” (that doesn’t fucking work anything like properly) provides powerful disincentives to use it as a means to a thought archive.

SeeSpeak

Let’s start with this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-06-02&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

I noticed that among the dissenting opinions in Comments, some people’s objections to the g-speak interface centered on the strenuousness and stamina needed for keeping one’s arms aloft, which led me to the notion of SeeSpeak — that the gestural language of John Underkoffler might be adapted and significantly refined by building a variation of it on the gestural (and facial) communications of a symphony orchestra conductor.  Which led me to think of the rapid evolution of motion-capture technology that made significant strides at Weta during the translation of Gollum’s character from page to screen.

And if a hundred-or-so musicians can read complex, nuanced direction in the contextually-meaningful gestures of their designated conductor, why couldn’t an operating system manage something similar; contributing visual information to facilitate apprehension by the collective audience?  That visual(/olfactory/kinesthetic/climatic…) information could be provided specifically by artists adept in those alternative media, working in collaboration with any/all agents of the production to create/recreate an augmented human experience as varied and wonderful as the human imagination is capable of concieving.

Well, there are copyright concerns that prevent the visual artists from freely incorporating cinematic elements of John Ford films into a production of Aaron Copland masterpieces, for example.  And who, exactly, would pay for all of this innovative and inconcievably expensive creative collaboration?  I have not a clue.  Maybe he does:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2010-06-02&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

but I’m inclined to doubt it.  So I started thinking about stuff I read here:

http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/2010/05/rise-of-creative-thing.html

And I continue to ruminate on the idea that any generic renaissance faire is the nucleus of an EraFair in which various temporal points in our collective cultural history draw musicians, painters, poets and dancers together to recreate that particular creative period — at various, proximal locations in a city park — where passersby can become interested, initially, in the reach of the music, then the atmosphere of creation and the invitation to engage and, ultimately, study/play with practitioners of arts formerly-defined by whichever eras interest them.  A physical manifestation of creative peaks in human cultural history, open to every art-creator, student and fantasy-seeker (past/present/fictional…) just makes my mouth water.

Mostly, I’m thinking that g-speak, a newly-invented gestural language that controls a user-interface (and replaces a mouse, trackball or a pen-tablet) probably doesn’t have to be all that brand-spanking new; that conducting a band or orchestra is itself such an ecstatic pleasure that people do it anyway with mock-control over recorded music — so SeeSpeak is my way of theorizing about the interface of new technology with traditional, old, human quirkiness as a step in a more interesting direction than teaching people g-speak (which won’t necessarily make us better acoustic bandleaders when the power cuts out, computers crash and all we’re left with is one another).  I kinda like stuff that’s of, by, for and about people — so long as they’re hypothetical.

Revisiting Hancock (with spoilers)

I revisited the film this evening.  It’s still disturbingly tame.  The review I wrote last July reaches most of the objections I’m going to raise presently:

A guy spends about 80 years on Earth without knowing why

• he can fly,
• isn’t vulnerable to bullets, knives, speeding trains…
• doesn’t age,
• moves with incredible speed,
• and is about as strong as Godzilla.

But he’s also an antisocial asshole that nobody wants to know.  So he drinks a lot and leads a remarkably reckless and haphazzard, superpowerful existence.  He’s opposed to crime and evil, for no discernible reason…and to the best of his knowledge, he’s the only person on Earth who’s cursed or blessed with these attributes that make him a definitive outsider — with the unenviable tendency to punch gaping holes through his sexpartners courtesy of his superpowered orgasms:  Control issues.  Zeus, Christ, Lucifer…superhuman stereotypes to avoid.

With a wealth of comic opportunities to exploit, the film didn’t linger on the miscegenation topic of white Charlize Theron and black Will Smith as lovers who were made for each another (One man, One woman).  Nor did it struggle to evaluate the implicit value of lives saved against replacement costs of private and public property damaged by the recklessness of an inexpressibly lonely, brokenhearted, derelict superhero.  An asshole is anywhere your stuff becomes shit.  The step-mother loophole still bothers me, as does the choice to end the film by dropping an enormous corporate logo on the moon saying, I HEART YOU.  It feels like an unbelievably tedious patchwork of appeasements to keep mercantile feathers unruffled.  I loathe the taste of horsefeathers! 

Pitching Hancock to Jackman would obviate that ticklish race-thing, but Jackman’s Woverine already has that amnesia thing going, and…fuckit, Smith! and write around the implications.   Theron chooses Bateman over Smith for his more-sustainable values, and to willfully override the obsolete dictates of providence (by sticking with the dictates of prejudice).

Perhaps the most unexplored of several underplayed themes involves the central premise that Mary Embrey (Charlize Theron) chose to abandon her destined, natural (black) partner after thousands of years of ambivalence about his proximity and the normal lives they’d lead in a humanly-brief and permanent mortal bond.  How would that play in Tupelo, Provo, Cairo, or in theaters frequented by humans?  The backstory of their relationship is wholly delivered by Mary in fits and starts and half-truths that make exposition entertaining, but leave an intrigued audience a great deal less than satisfied.

If proximity is the Achiles Heel that dooms these two to intimate mortality (and happiness) — is normal, human life so repellant?  And how is Mary’s choice to deny her predestined (and frequently conincidental) entanglement with John a good choice?  If John is forever condemned to life without his definitive true love, where’s the happy ending for, you know, the title character?  Handjobs?

The other thing about Hancock that really, deeply bothers me, (apart from the far more meaningful stuff this entertainment carefully avoided confronting) is that fact that Vince Gilligan (the showrunner of Breaking Bad) is credited for co-writing it, along with Vincent Ngo — 12 years in development hell.

This new discovery of Gilligan’s involvement bodes ill for the satisfactory resolution of Walter White’s tale.  Will monumentally interesting, contemporary real-life issues of good/evil, strength/vulnerability, power/compassion, partnership/estrangement/betrayal/family/ruin/legal system/property/addiction/life be treated with comic and xfx reckless abandon as in Hancock?  or will Walter’s many problems resolve more interestingly than John’s did?  Tune in until the end of time…or series cancellation…suckers.

Mona Lisa

A white rabbit is flung into this film (for no obvious reason) early.  It led me down a rabbit hole (on the second pass), and continued to show me an alarming frequency of looking glasses, rearview mirrors and reflective, funhouse angles on events and people whose surfaces/reputations/manners are markedly different from one interaction to the next.  The rabbit put me on track for an Alice lurking somewhere inside an enigmatic smile, which made itself known on all of the faces of each of the several daughters who show up eventually to torment, elude and beguile the central character (played by a constantly-peripatetic [white rabbit-like] Bob Hoskins) ever-deeper into a native London he’s never known.

It’s a filmic attempt to explore the sexual adventures of exploited young women not through the eyes of a male, chauvenist, racist, Cockney pig (who’s spent the past seven years deprived of the company of women) but through his lively, pink face as his innocence, self-image and crusty exterior evaporate in the ominous presence of his awakening to a reluctant self-awareness that marks both his outward, physical appearance and extends deep into this particular man’s ability to percieve the people around him…as the increasingly-complicated, interesting and potentially-anihilating projections/familiars of the person he formerly thought himself to be.

Along with the debatable references to Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, there are interesting parallels to Carroll’s realworld sexual eccentricities, involving puns, figures of speech, and presumed sexual adventures with very-young females…presented in a cinematically surreal manner that makes adolescent prostitution appear to be an institutional artifact of contemporary society; a hellish jungle of our own creation through which the camera moves, following people it brings us  close enough to care about as they move through the seamy, unattractive underside of our abandoned, urban dreams. 

The familiar, Official London peeks at us remotely, through negligent cracks in the drab and tawdry midground scenery, as our intimate associates in the foreground fling mercurial facets of their personalies directly at us;  Bob Hoskins and Robbie Coltrane alternate as TweedleDum&Dee, while Clarke Peters grins perversely slashing boldly with a straight-razor, and Michael Caine conspires, fumes and commands with lethal intensity in every scene in which his subtle, almost-reptilian simplicities convene.

There’s also lots of tea, a little proctology (seen darkly through a looking glass), and a final resolution in which liars, storytellers and masterpieces of fantasy leave Promethean doubt with regard to what the hell one’s actually supposed to do with all this complex, layered and fascinating information about sexually-oriented projection, self-perception, class distinction, stereotypical profiling and personal survival in this world of ours as Neil Jordan kindly permits us to see it…by looking at the mug of a mug who gazes into the looking glass at the infinite promise of Life and finds a more-or-less limited human being (who dreamt he was a …).  Or did he?  Which goes to the heart of Shanley’s remark about Doubt, that the final and most challenging act of the play should be performed after the final curtain as members of the audience passionately discuss over unbirthday pie alamode and tea the details that led to the wide variations of their respective interpetations of the event they just witnessed together.

Great movie!

The Legacy of Kung Fu Jimmy Chow

Miss these twelve utterly killing episodes at your juicy peril:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-adwWy52SqY&feature=related

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcPmuq8000Q&feature=related

There are also crib notes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_Jimmy_Chow

Person of Interest

 

<a href=’http://kck.st/aymyW7′><img border=’0′ src=’http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gregorybayne/person-of-interest-off-the-grid-film-tour-independ/widget/card.jpg’ /></a>

Everybody Loves Rebecca

Just a couple of additional notes following a commentary pass through the film with Richard Schickel.  I’ll certainly never read DuMaurier’s book, so Schickel’s comparisons are helpful in consideration of the first hour of the film in which slavish devotion to text builds atmosphere and governs the devolpment of elements.  It’s the second beach house scene that initiates reasonably radical departures from the book, largely to appease the Hayes Office by blunting objectionable implications about Rebecca’s and Danvers’ lesbian overtones and Maxim’s intemperate murder of his wildly misperceived wife, Rebecca.

That second beach house setting is a kind of mysery spot in which relationships established in the first hour of the film suddenly go to pot in the midst of bizarre reversals and revelations while Maxim and what’s-her-name invest several minutes in overdue exposition — which Hitchcock (according to Schickel) would have communicated more skillfully were it not for Selznick’s fascination for characters who endlessly talk.

The propulsive power of verbal revelation justifies itself by unravelling several mysteries that would not reveal themselves efficiently.  The beach house scene opens the floodgates for spoken explanations that end the largely-gloomy film on a happy, hopeful note that culminates in the rapid, bouncing pace (and dramatic conflagrations) I have to attribute to George Sanders energetic presence and Favell’s electrifying character.  His consummate thorough-scoundrel perfectly counterpoints Danvers’ mesmerizing Svengali character, both of whom enliven the illusion of the never-seen titular character with their own very singular devotions to Rebecca.  It’s a very good film that deserves the kind of talented thought that might remake it better.

Rebecca and Mrs. Paradine were presented as exceptionally beautiful women everyone loved, and both of them lost control of that incredibly intimidating power.  It’s a theme Whedon’s dealt with comically in a couple of separate Buffy episodes, but it’s also a vital component in the still-unmade superhero chickflick that might just shatter box office records and revolutionize the art…simultaneously.

The Paradine Case

Several years after the release of this 1947 film Alfred Hitchcock was interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich.  Their discussion touches on several valuable points of reference I’ve been curious about for a long while.   Hitchcock speaks of Robert Montgomery’s (sad) attempt to shoot The Lady in the Lake consistently from a singular point of view (with ridiculously taciturn Philip Marlowe, compared to his nonstop internal voice in the novella).  Hitchcock had clearly concluded that only incompetent (new) directors try this confounding technique, which inevitably results in dreadfully-muddled storytelling that continually violates the rules of “pure cinema”…which he seemed to believe necessarily involves manipulating the audience’ attention with ideas and emotions elicited by carefully-edited, deliberately-orchestrated confusion of the viewer’s point of view.  Which sounds to me exactly like modern-media politics, absolutely.

This interview is one of the special features included on the DVD presentation of The Paradine Case.  It opens with mention of his dislike for the numerous compromises that film represents because The Paradine Case was specifically and entirely a David O. Selznick project (an 18″-high stack of alternate treatments and scripts) wrecked by the casting of a regular guy, Gregory Peck, and clean-cut pretty-boy, Louis Jourdan in roles that really should have gone to a classy/articulate Ronald Coleman or haughty Laurence Olivier (iconic representatives of the nuanced Existing Order) in contrast to Jourdan Robert Newton (a lowlife, manure-smelling stable hand who somehow became the valet to an honorable gentleman [and remained a permanent servant of Chaos and Disorder]). 

So Hitchcock was saddled with a counterintuitive, miscast mess to unscramble, and handed Selznick an objectionable “jigsaw puzzle” to cut that wasn’t what Selznick expected…and it shows in the final cut.

Having not yet turned to the expert commentary for supporting evidence, I see in The Paradine Case a scathing denunciation of 20th Century British hypocrisy, in that a simple case of murder results in 114 minutes of yammering heads constantly dancing around simple truths; a very beautiful, young European woman with “an unattractive past” marries a very-rich, older, blind gentleman, whose long-time valet lusts after her, and the feeling’s mutual.  When the old man dies, Mrs. Paradine is arrested and defended by a wily-but-otherwise-irreproachable barrister with an unblemished record of legal victories and an entirely class-appropriate wife…and he lusts after his client, also, because she’s really hot. 

Hitchcock seems to denounce the lofty (and superficial) appearance of ideal living that floats (like delusional bullshit) on a sea of repressed biological imperatives, unmentionable passions, and real, vital impulses denied in favor of the conformist’s facade of civilized and rational decisions/actions/lies; arguably-necessary, institutionalized hypocrisy.  But that’s not how this story unfolds.

The dance of partial truths, slowly revealed in and out of courtroom scenes, consumes 105 minutes of the film’s running time, as respectable outward appearances of each of the principle characters gradually dissove into degraded blinds of intentional misrepresentations of who these people really are.

Mrs. Paradine, almost to the end of the film, continues to stonewall the prosecutor (and everybody else) by maintaining that the valet’s untoward and unthinkable attentions to her always turned her stomach, obviously, because he was a servant, reciprocity was absolutely unthinkable (an absolutely hypocritical circular argument).  A few minutes later, due to unforeseen offscreen events, she’s hopelessly confessing to stuff that would have shortened the film by about 104 tedious minutes.

This film is beautifully lighted, and packed with interesting actors who play interesting parts (none of which, unfortunately, is a dilligent, intuitve cop or infallible amateur detective), but every moderately-interesting aspect of the film resolves in Mrs. Paradine’s ultimate confession which I find remarkably suspect.  She’s told partial truths throughout this tale of divided loyalties and tight-lipped betrayals that lead to a final, convenient confession that everyone somehow believes.  This sudden, miraculous confession frees the shaken, lovesick, fallen barrister to implore his stalwart wife’s forgiveness, which she gives by asking that he soldier on without giving another moment’s thought to the dark temptation of discrete retirement from a public life (that floats serenely on a massive shelf of really stinky classist bullshit).  The (plucky and vaguely uplifting) End.  A few early minutes alone with Kelly, Sipowicz or Simone could have worked visual wonders with Mrs. Paradine’s faulty confessional narrative.

I think Hitchcock’s belief in “pure cinema” is valid, although I’m not entirely sure what he’s really talking about.  He also condemns the use of the handheld camera (increasingly frequently employed [along with camer operators who have neurological disorders] since the date of his death) as another crutch of the novice director, proclaiming that the magic of storytelling takes place primarily in the process of editing to illustrate the cause of the viewer’s idea or emotion (photographed subjectively), then the effect of the actor’s physical, vocal and facial response (photographed from the outside of the actor), what follows is the selective intercutting of causes and effects from numerous points of view that lead the scene onward through to a capsular, empirical summary of the physical, mental and emotional content of the photographed and verbal event.

Maybe I’m overreacting to 90+ years of cinematic storytelling from multiple points of view (with literal intertitles) and 80+ years of characters telling the audience what they’re experiencing.  It seems to me that “pure cinema” is more difficult to execute than the stuff we’ve been watching.  That it’s vastly more difficult to show a story than to tell it, and harder still to show events from a singular, consistent point of view.  Maybe I’m agruing ruinously to reduce filmmaking to a kind of theatrical presentation of mime in which events unfold in realtime before a sedentary audience.  Maybe I simply don’t recognize the cinematic validity of yammering actors, cameras that flit about like omniscient fairies and the failsafe standby of omnipotent, manipulative editing.  So maybe I’ll have to stop my own yammering and get on with the process of doing the things I’ve been yammering about; make an illustrative example.

The camera’s point of view doesn’t have to be that of the protagonist.  It might belong to a fly on the wall, the protagonist’s dog, a surveilance bug in a cufflink, a rosebud…or a magical fairy that flits about through space and time that nobody whose photographed notices, except Bing and Bob who sometimes played comic asides directly at it. 

It’s nice to find The Lady in the Lake (a massive disappointment) discussed by an incontestible authority, although I think Hitchcock trashed the film for wrong and illogical reasons.  No mention of Dark Passage yet, and With the Angels was shot long after his death.  I wonder what he’d make of them.  A year after starting this blog, examples of subjective POV continue to be few-and-far-between, but I’m still looking and still thinking.

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER — Bill Krohn and Stephen Rebello provided an unusually rich and informative commentary that underscores the working incompatibility of Selznick’s and Hitchcock’s last collaborative effort together, citing Selznick’s overzealous elimination of 16 minutes of the film that might (paradoxically) have made it a significantly less tedious and talkative cinematic experience.  They also point out the long takes with which Hitchcock had begun to experiment, immediately preparatory to making Rope, and the ubiquity of lighting fixtures and practical lighting signatures that point to Welles’ influence in the use of unusual camera angles to incorporate ceilings and the elaborate set decorations Selznick loved to ”enamel” into ornate set pieces for The Selznick Studio Signature.  Cost overruns and contextual considerations place this film (in my mind, at least) in contention with The Magnificent Ambersons as the most butchered offspring of a catastrophic divorce; Dave’s and Al’s, certainly, but also Mr. and Mrs. Selznick’s.  (Cross reference Jennifer Jones with David Ø’s infidelity.)

What might have been Hitchcock’s intelligent indictment of the closed and patriarchal English justice system has survived Selznick’s ultimate final cut as something resembling a public apology to his estranged wife for betraying her.  Krohn and Rebello also give credence to the suspicion that Welles and Citizen Kane influenced Hitchcock in the near-final scene in which Laughton and Barrymore dine alone at opposite ends of a very long table illustrative of late-stage marital pathology between coupled and uncommunicating partners in a formerly-plucky relationship devastated by the husband’s class, occupation, sexual eccenricities and wanton abuse of power; business-as-usual.  Conversely, picture AH and OW sitting together for a late-in-career conversation; two boy-geniuses went to Hollywood, one of them didn’t survive the opportunity, but they eventually arrived at identical, rotund profiles, as though from mutual respect.  That’s a half-way decent premise for a thesis or a play. 

One of the long-lost scenes Selznick scrapped got Ethel nominated for a supporting oscar.  On to Rebeccett.

Yup!  Rebecca is one insanely excellent chunk of immortal entertainment!  Now picture it from Jasper’s point of view, and Ben’s and that DeWinter ancestor’s portrait’s…and Danvers’.  Happily, I was never in danger of marrying Rebecca, we were only the best of friends.  I guess that makes me George Sanders.

Iron Man 2

Legacy.  There’s significantly richer/deeper/farther-back backstory in this second film in which the ever-enriching John Slattery plays Howard Stark, long-dead father of the morally-defective Tony (Iron Man) Stark.  The Iron Man universe expands in several interesting waves, as the 1939 World’s Fair hyperlinks the 1974 fission of the temporary StarkVanko collaboration that eventually pits Downey against Rourke in a StarkVanko reunion that neatly illustrates the downside of unparalleled, generative genius; unparalelled, self-destructive, avenging narcisism.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize four of the most interesting material-interpreters (actors) presently working in mainstream media; Downey, Rourke, Cheadle and Rockwell — whose performances in this film do not disappoint.  While both Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johanssen are featured more prominently than all of womankind was in the first film, their talents are still profoundly limited to sauntering about in extremely tall shoes and wearing stylish clothes while looking great and bantering in layered, simultaneous, comic conversations with RtD2 (Robert Downey, Jr.).  Of course, somebody’s got to flesh-out the background scenery while Gary Shandling, Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg mix metaphors with  other cast members in the foreground. 

I’m saying this Iron Man movie has an extremely deep bench of fascinating franchise-carriers, which short-changed women players a bit less than the first film did, but that’s still several dozen testicles short a full-on SuperChickFlick…which is something to scrutinize exactingly, as The Marvel Universe expands, evolves, grows facial hair and its voice deepens; shallow, short-changed, minor roles for serious, powerful, accomplished women actors.  The primary conflicts and resolutions in Iron Man 2  are rooted in decidedly male themes: father/son legacies, filial betrayal, pissing contests and blowed-up shit.  Mrs. Stark and Mrs. Vanko probably had first names, but I don’t remember hearing them…which is just a simpleminded way of saying that Iron Man 2 isn’t Gone With the Wind, and it hasn’t much to say about successful romantic relationships, personal sacrifice, joyous resignation, intimacy, isolation, despair…and Daredevil did and The Brave One did…not do very well at the box office.  So it’s something to watch.  And something to build another universe upon.

I loved Iron Man 2 !  It didn’t have to be perfect.  It only had to be as electrifying as its predecessor.  That definitely happened, and then some.

This afternoon I also saw How to Train Your Dragon and Robin Hood.

But first, a few words about title design:  http://www.bigspaceship.com/blog/labs/by-hand-tacticility-in-title-design/

We’re closing on 100 years of cinema, which is stories told to us with moving pictures.  And yet title design has fallen so far behind the evolution of storytelling with pictures (and sound) that movies are still introduced with written WORDS.  And the discussion of major innovation on this front is limited to comparison of machine-made or handlettered fonts?

Stanley Kubrick favored a very l.o.n.g. musical overture in the 1960 introduction of Spartacus.  The theatrical advantage of a long musical overture (over the various other things most movies do) is that the theatrical audience is collectively conducted onto a single, coherent, cohesive page in the minutes before the movie begins.  And whether they struggled to get to the theater on time, fought with traffic for a parking place, bickered all the way to the show on the subway, or just awoke from having slept through the preceding feature (because people in adjacent seats left and the music just got a whole lot louder)…the billion variations on walks-of-life that bring a billion people to sit before a screen for a couple-three hours are all of them converged into a singular state of anticipation in the minutes before the movie begins.

Now, a long musical overture is one of many fashionable ways to introduce a film like Spartacus or Cleopatra or West Side Story, but title design hasn’t changed much at all since 1910…for reasons that elude me.  I mention this because I read titles fairly carefully in order to remember the names of the above-the-line contributors who made films I enjoyed.  I brand myself by bonding with cinematographers like Roger Deakins, editors like Lisa Lassek, writers/directors/producers like Ben Hecht, Joss Whedon, David Milch, Neil Jordan…and I seek/buy other work they’ve done based on the covenant they create with me forged in the course of the film of which I’m presently reading the titles.

I’d like to see my brand names introduce the film.  I’d like to see my brands speak their own names aloud and introduce one another, maybe even contextually.  In a storytelling medium that’s composed of sound and moving pictures, it strikes me as profoundly odd that titles and credits are and always have been limited to written words that bear only the most abstract association with the people who made the product I’m watching — while the elaborate logos of distributors, studios and financial backers lead the procession of onscreen written words — as though those were the brands that mattered.  And DVDs involve opening an anti-theft, anti-piracy-device-laden package of wrappings and tapes and magnetic strips that generally take as long to break through as the titles take to run, once the DVD is at long last inserted in the appropriate hardware and the leagalistic, multi-lingual terrorizing warning mumbojumo gives way to preview trailers and the inevitable disclaimer that commentaries (by anyone responsible for the actual creation of the content) are unrelated to the sentiments of the (not legally liable) people who irresponsibly own the content.  THEN titles.  Then content.  Then credits that flash by like fine print in a deal with the devil you can’t refuse.  Then the dicks who put the film on DVD (usually badly) get to wave their logos at us too.  Something (almost everything) about the state of cinema business-as-usual stinks of bogus priorites, confidential agreements, and ulterior agendas that come very close to queering the fundamental storytelling covenant between the content creators and their audience.

I liked them.  How to Train Your Dragon and Robin Hood entertained me.  Also father/son legacy-stuff.  I like the peculiar ways Chris Sanders tells stories, although there are recognizable eccentricities in continuity that want more careful editing.  Hickup’s drawing of Toothless’ tail is and isn’t and is asymmetrical.  Similar flaws in Bolt are clearly attributable to the violent intervention of other people hired to replace the director, but Toothless’ tail is a stupid oversight in an otherwise strangely-paced but riveting tale.  I asked him to speak in his journal at DeviantArt about (what I figured would be) the release from creative captivity at Disney in the regime change that introduced Pixar to the top of the food chain.  He never answered, and I soon realized the question was a major faux pas — so I feel like I owe him.

Robin Hood, Ridley Scott, Russel Crowe and Cate Blanchett is a combination I wouldn’t care to miss.  Max and Bill get to flex a bit, as well, but the reel revelation is the longed-for continuity that links Henry II to Magna Carta via Becket, The Lion in Winter and this Robin Hood that lends backstory to all the previous cinematic Robin Hood iterations I’ve seen.  It also goes a long way toward a gripping, heuristic demonstration of the evolution of gritty philosophizing about domion’s transition from the divine right of kings to representative democracy:  A first class lesson in How to make political philosophy not-tedious, not-boring.

Interestingly, Chris Sanders has much more to say about the institution of xenophobia than Ridley’s treatment of Robin’s legend, which is odd to the extent that Ridley Scott always subverts the us/them paradigm.  In this film, unlike Costner’s shot, Angles and Saxons are okay with Normans, but the goddamned French really NEEDED a 13th Century foretaste of Agincourt with John the First-runt-king of England bringing shavetail comic relief to a fascinating inversion of the landing at Omaha Beach presented in Saving Private Ryan. 

I really get off on transnarrative media, especially stories that run meaningful threads of context across proprietary boundaries, so Firefly intimated that the institution of slavery and indentured servitude lay under the surface of a universe set 500 years in our interstellar future, which led me to Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels because that book (about the Battle of Gettysburg) self-reportedly inspired both Burns and Whedon, and I learned also from Jezebel that the South’s definition of liberty was far less complicated and contradictory that the North’s (but equally goofy).  Likewise our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led me to Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen because I didn’t and still don’t understand how the Japanese forgave America’s final solution and bent to MacArthur’s post-war will.  Also I don’t have to wait for storyarchitects to get their semantic shit together (with lawyers) prior to money changing hands that may eventually lead to the fashioning of transmedia narratives, when transnarrative media has been helping me stuggle toward the answers I seek reasonably, tolerably well.  And nobody’s making any effort to dissolve the proprietary boundaries that provide nothing useful to storytelling other than short-portions of money.  (That was just a dream some of us had.)

I greatly enjoyed the three feature films I saw today in a multiplex, although none of these three theatrical presentations layed a glove on the greater control I experience in viewing content in the DVD format.  Pause and replay beat the pants off theatrical virtues like:

• the inability to smoke
• jughead administrators who don’t pay attention to auditorium thermostats (I got real cold during Dragon) and
• volume control;

although lots of movies seem to favor actors who frequently mumble and whisper while music and sound effects drone on too loud for dialogue intelligibility, which also leads me to appreciate the favor done me by DVDs in english that provide the option of subtitles.  Old people like to understand words in new movies and in old ones.  I’m old.

Now I’ll close with the mention of Longitude, a superb film about talent, persistence, and curiosity versus the invalid prestige of reputed scientists – and a second, long round of sincere applause for the emotional and performative excellence/maturity of The Brave One, both of which lean deeply into unique revelations of profoundly faulty institutions that destroy people to preserve utterly irrelevant reputations.

Tonight, it’s Rebecca, The Paradine Case and Bela Fleck:  Live at the Quick, via NetFlix.

Iron Man

It’s the story of a guy who thinks shit up.  That alone is a fabulous talent. 

Even more remarkable is his gift for finding ways to execute/realize the shit he thinks up.  The ability to think it     then translate it      into a thing that actually works –  that combination qualifies as a genuine superpower.  We venerate Edison, Tesla, Marconi and dozens of technological giants for their personification of those admirable abilities.  Then we make glorious biopics that retrospeculate about their private tribulations and holy victories that benefitted Mankind!

But wait, there’s more.  The first film is also the story of a guy who actually builds his ideas, mass-produces, and sells them, profitting fabulously from imaginary sweat transformed into socially-useful instruments, which happen to be mostly morally-bankrupt weapons of mass destruction.  And he’s the second generation manifestation of that superpower.  Now that’s downright Olympian-mythic!

Hold on, that ain’t all.

There’s nothing Tony Stark builds in the original movie that isn’t (eventually or immediately) used against him.  His WMDs get him kidnapped, severely wounded and enslaved to the agendas of total assholes.  I put it that way because I think it’s true of

• the weapons he manufactures,
• the commerical organization his genius preserves,
• a handy-dandy paralyzer on which the story turns,
• the profoundly-important complex, heartlike device that safeguards his life and liberates him from his oppressors, and
• his playboy persona as a pampered moral defective who poisons all of his relationships by simply being his ill-reputed self.

In my initial review (in a blog I kept at the now-abandoned United Hollywood v2.0) I called the film Irony Man, because anything Tony Stark builds

can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion. 

It’s an odd kind of Miranda Warning that’s actually articulated in the film by his nemesis and partner, Obadiah Stane,

“Do you really think that just because you have an idea…it belongs to you”.  (No paraphrase.)

That single line impressed me with its applicability to the ongoing struggle between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Writers’ Guild of America because writers think shit up for their employers who execute and market it (arguably) to the eventual detriment of writers.  But now I’m just overloading my version of the story with debatable social significance.  I’ll get back to that a little later.

The single most remarkable aspect of the first Iron Man movie (and in my mind there are plenty) was the director’s explicit intention to reverse an industry practice that confined and limited the license of actors to enrich their superheroic characters with explicit personality (because computer graphics imaging is incredibly/prohibitively expensive).  So Favreau blew off the established wisdom and licensed Downey to embellish/invest his Tony Stark/Iron Man character with all of the considerable, eccentric, improvizational wit and whimsy the actor had at his command, while charging the army of CGI technicians to follow the lead of the actor.  That’s the opposite priority of every film that preceded it (and some released subsequently) Story>Actor>Special Effects & CGI Technicians.  I think The Favreau Priority worked like gangbusters to tell an excellent personal story that incorporated the current state-of-the-art of constantly-evolving motion-capture technology and push technicians (actors, crew and staff) to the fullest extent of their creative limits — like it’s s’pozed to.  Check the second commentary track for The Incredibles to hear the deeply inspiring and contagiously creative storytelling vitality that radiates explosively from technical coordinators. 

Writers, actors, staff, crew and technicians aren’t interchangable parts of the Hollywood fantasy machine.  They’re uniquely gifted people, who collaborate more effectively in some schemes than in others, and the material-interpretive faculties of a gifted actor can and should be of paramount importance even/especially in spectacular blockbuster, mechanized, technical extravaganzas that are always exactly stories of/by/for…people.  The actor is primarily an audience for the scripted material, and his/her performance in the film is user-generated content.  Culture animates people animate systems, not the other way around.

Now I’m reading criticism, in the first few days of its domestic release, that the second film isn’t as remarkable as the first one was.  Which sounds as though anything Jon Favreau built

can and will be used against him in the court of public opinion. 

And that’s just downright ironic.

One last thing, but it’s a big one. 

David Milch spoke to (screen)writers in more than one series of lectures I liked a lot.  Much of the stuff he said sounds profoundly mysterious and cryptic, but I got from him a sense that writers are simply instruments through which Culture speaks — and ultimately writes our history.  So I tend to look right past writers (as the ultimate arbiters of authorial intent) to Culture as the force that invents shit     for which writers get paid    and    about which the get very very crabby, when asked to specify what exactly they meant by this or that.

Joss Whedon named a planet Miranda in Serenity and spoke of it (subsequently in interviews) as a Shakespearean reference to The Tempest.  I prefer to interpret it as warning about the point at which good intentions lead to a forced choice between suicidal apathy and ultra-violence. 

You have the right to remain silent, and  I have the right to be wrong.

Whedon also said (for Creative Screenwriting DVD043) that the writer’s job involves a lot of isolation, imaginary sweat and technical skill, which ultimately leads

(with a lot of luck and undeterred determination)

to a script that says something useful ABOUT something important.  (So maybe Dollhouse referenced All About Eve [Addison/Adelle DeWitt] to gradually introduce and articulate the aims of Equality Now [against slavery, human trafficking, abduction, sexual infantilization] — thematic strains that lay barely-subliminally beneath the fascinating surfaces of the Firefly universe.)

http://www.equalitynow.org/english/index.html

The resistance I encountered in the virtual presence of amateur and professional photographers to (my off-the-wall) articulation of meaningful statements I’d discovered in the photographs they’d created surprised me for the six years I spent writing critiques of their work.  I concluded that the endeavor to tell them what I found in their work wasn’t worth the effort I invested, so I stopped doing it.   Those experiences shaped a defensive attitude I adopt when addressing “creatives” who aren’t creating while I’m talking at them (they’re usually responding like proprietors).

David Milch spoke words of encouragement to writers in his talks, but far more importantly, he spoke to the interpretive faculties of global audiences (people) to extract meaning from works of art quite in spite of the people (and the propietory interests) who made them or own them or market them. 

Once you’ve shown your creation to other people it’s a little or a lot less yours than it was before.  Though copyright may protect the creators’ expression of an idea, it doesn’t bear at all on alternative interpretations of the work.  And everyone who receives a story rewrites it to make it more personally useful.   That’s what stories are, and that’s what people do with them. 

SmartMoney builds theaters, museums, stadiums and galleries to capitalize on the interface (the work) where creative and interpretive intent meet.  That way, the housing of the work always makes money (and the house always wins) until artists and audiences exchange information more directly (outside the house) and the house abreacts against evaporating revenues and the greedy dreams of avarice.  And that’s why social media is antithetical to money-as-a-medium-of-exchange when the gold standard suddenly becomes attention.  Cheap low-resolution copies communicate creative and interpretive intent, so the house insists on 3D, HD, IMAX, 7.1 SurroundSound in THX to sway the court of public opinion toward the great value of copies controled by the house, and away from the underplayed value of meaningful stories.  So I’m glad I waited for Avatar to become available on VHS.  (A small joke.)  I’d probably have missed the story I thoroughly enjoyed if I’d seen it first in IMAX.

Now I’ll exercise my right to suicidal apathy and contemplate my right to be wrong. 

Then I’ll cruise the first film again before I go to see Iron Man II.

Transnarrative Media

I’ve just spent an hour or two with Herbie Hancock:  Possibilities.  I selected the film from a load of badly-suggested movies that NetFlix figured I’d love (based on my enjoyment of Ken Burns’ Jazz, Ninja Scroll and No Direction Home — a really odd extrapolation).  I did love it, in spite of my expectations.   (Have I even seen Ninja Scroll?  I sure don’t remember liking it.)

I loved the beginning because a famous jazz musician confessed to himself that he was tired of making recordings for the familiar expectations of people who buy them; that making the same creative decisions he’d made countless times before was getting profoundly dull.  I think it wasn’t Yoko who killed The Beatles (’twas expectations of their fans).

So Herbie Hancock set out to bridge a lot of gaps in the usual scheme of expectable collaborations by playing individually with Christina Aguilera, Sting, Paul Simon, Annie Lenox, Brian Eno, John Mayer, Wayne Shorter, Joss Stone…because nothing much (apart from inertia) prevented him from doing so.

I loved the middle because stuff I never knew about Herbie Hancock’s interaction with Miles Davis got talked about; that Miles paid his collaborators to practice on stage, exploring unknown aspects of their personal and collective musicianship to see what together might be made of moments when remarkably competent players exceed their competencies in an environment of suspended judgmental resourcefulness, focused on the primacy of radical innovation.

And I loved the end that brought me back to something I read through earlier today:

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/

which leads me to see a single narrative throughline crisscrossing the qualitative/categorical gaps that separate technology startups from feature films from musical collaborations from blogs, fiction and autobiographies: 

Media are environmental gaps between A and B.  Whether hostile to or facilitative of communication (between A and B) is only a matter of degree, but the ability/inability to connect competent practitioners of one discipline with another can be determined only by building bridges, recognizing story-commonalities on both sides of the gap and overcoming inertia.

I really like the comments that reply to the AndreessenHorowitz post because they emphasise the difference between hired-gun-CEOs and people whose self-assigned mission is to realize possibilities.  And I find it amazing how similar are the post’s itemized characteristics of exemplary founders and admirable artists:

• Comprehensive knowledge
• Moral authority
• Total commitment to the long-term

I also got off on the music.  Check it out.  Stories are people too.

Eleven months later:

I just realized that I forgot to specify any meaning to the term Transnarrative Media.  It’s threads of meaningful and valuable sense that run through stories owned by competing entities, and reveal themselves clearly to those of us who regard storytellers as brands, even if some of us are clearly delusional.

Define A Point Day

Mr. Flynn had just asked his class of nine and ten year old Low Sixth-graders to define a point.  He was, in fact, reviewing class material recently imparted to us in his personal pilot project of a local 1961 experiment in epistemological optimism.  You see, Leonard Flynn sincerely believed that even little kids could benefit enormously from the careful introduction of advanced course material normally reserved for the vastly more mature intelligence of little kids in high school.  His superiors would require persuasion.

I really wanted to help my teacher prove to his educational hierarchy that our minds were NOT too immature to engage in the wonders he himself had lately found in the expansive mysteries of Euclidean geometry.

Yet, like every other kid in the room, I didn’t raise my hand, knowing with some certainty that he wouldn’t like the  answer I’d spent the past few days carefully considering.  So affably, encouragingly, smilingly, like a young Spencer Tracy with wavy red hair and wrinkly forehead, he simply asked us once again to define a point.  No answer.

The third attempt contained a subtle note of exasperated resignation, as though Leonard Flynn’s confidence in his rosy, private vision of education had been fundamentally shaken, drawing him slightly nearer to the darker view of brick-like students widely held by more senior officials in the educational establishment.

I raised my hand.  He nodded sharply at me with the very-faint implication of exasperated relief.

“A point is an indeterminate location at which no line exists.”

I was absolutely right!  He absolutely hated my answer, specifically because it helped none of the other kids in class remember the answer he’d given us a couple of days earlier. 

Except for the fact that it did.

His next request of the class, “Define a line.”, sent little hands aloft like at Berchtesgaden.  From that moment on through the end of the school year (which culminated in the combined grammar school assembly/Parent Teachers Association meeting in which we presented to excited younger kids and doting parents alike all the keen stuff we’d learned with nifty visual aids and memorized geometric axioms, that) our Sixth grade class amply justified Mr. Flynn’s faith in us kids and validated the glorious future for less-condescending education.  Except that somebody left it to Beaver.

I’ve celebrated Define A Point Day every year since 1961, quietly preferring my own joy to missionary work; a lesson from another, later, more-reluctant teacher.  It was probably  my super first day.

Life

The first season opens on the release of the central character, an LA detective whose been brutalized in a maximum-security prison for twelve years.  Define anticlimax.  The quirky Rumplestiltskin thing that Damian Lewis achieves for all eleven episodes of this initial season works to varying degrees because of the presence of Damian Lewis and a remarkably interesting cast of collaborators surrounding the character he portrays.   Robin Wiegert, Adam Arkin, Michael Cudlitz, Garrett Dillahunt, Christina Hendricks and Titus Welliver (Deadwood, Band of Brothers, Firefly, NYPD Blue, and Adam fucking Arkin!).

The episodic (standalone) felony investigations gradually include fragments of information about the ancient homicide case that kept him locked away in prison until his persistent defense attorney, a very attractive woman, eventually secured and brought forward excuplatory DNA evidence that resulted in

• his release from prison,
• his acceptance of an undisclosed and enviable cash award for wrongful imprisonment, and
• the restoration of his job as a metropolitan detective. 

It didn’t guarantee that his senior partner, Sarah Shahi (as Det. Dani Reese), would be one of the most beautiful women presently working in television.  That’s just a riveting and marketable coincidence.  It’s also a deeply contrived assortment of circumstances that kept my teeth on edge.

And there are peculiar technical stupidities that crop up from time to time, like;  at one point in an early episode the prime suspect and lone survivor of a car wreck is seated in an interrogation room wearing a butterfly bandage over his right eye, except when it’s over his left eye, as though somebody flipped the negative in coverage and nobody respected the audience enough to think it really mattered.  Ultimately, it doesn’t.

The premise and synopsis of this show depend upon the semi-plausible idea that Charlie Crews, the central character, has undergone a radical transformation within the walls of his imprisonment that lead him now to caper with the rigid corners of duly-authorized police procedure in ways that reflect dry humor and perfect knowledge of the wily criminal mentality, making him a kind of supercop with a really-interesting mind. 

The thing is that relatively few members of the audience are expected to be sufficiently steeped in genuine police procedure to spontaneously recognize Charlie’s deviations from SOP, so one or more of his onscreen compatriots is obliged to raise an eyebrow or otherwise object to the zany antics of a knife-slinging, Bentley-driving, zen-platitude spouting oddball LA homicide detective who lives in an unfurnished stately mansion on several acres of orange groves with hot’n hotter California babes constantly on tap.  Return with us now the the thrilling days yesteryear, as The Lone Ranger, and Magnum, P.I. ride again.  Because who the hell remembers?

Getting to know, really-really like, and root for Charlie Cruz and Dani Ruiz in the course of nine standalone episodes is probably supposed to prepare the viewer for the wealth of juicy revelations about the case that originally imprisoned him, arc-tic revelations that gradually begin to intrude on the graceful pace of his weekly felony solutions.  It doesn’t quite work because the unfolding of this involuted, damaged character takes too long to unfurl with drizzled-in elements of old evidence from twelve years earlier, while the hidden personality of the central character very rarely appears beneath the various layers of pseudo-comic subterfuge:  “I’m a good cop, a master-criminal, a man on a mission to solve an old crime and I’m also quite enlightened, except with regard to technical advancements like cellphones with cameras and the mysteries of Instant Messaging — stuff that happened while I was in stir..”.  Welcome to dis-appointment television, and farewell.

Note to folks who produce DVDs:  Five egos in a tiny viewing room is not a good idea.

Irking Christy Dena

Christy Dena and Jeff Gomez have long been powerful and effective advocates for innovation in the structure of entertainment.  Following her Tweets, I found reference to people like me, here: 

“For all the newcomers to the area who are excitedly exploring #transmedia – a big welcome! Go for it! I hope you create great projects!”   (about 9 hours ago via web)

-and

“It is just the people who have suddenly entered the area or have been quiet all these years and are suddenly public experts that irk me.”   (about 9 hours ago via web)

While I don’t mean to imply that Christy is chastising my latecomer’s remarks disparaging the recent success of transmedia advocates in gaining a measure of recognition from mainstream media , the shoe fits perfectly well.  I might as well wear it proudly. 

I’ve been dropping my goofy opinions around the internet for years, frequenting places like Henry Jenkins’ aca/fan blog, Lessig space, and six years of critiquing photgraphs over at photosig.com.  Most of the stuff I’ve contributed, logical and coherent or otherwise, persistently questions definitions and assumptions that signify the current tide of expert and popular opinion.

I’ve confused and irritated a lot of professional and amateur photographers by asking (for example) why so many of them repeal the law of gravity by cocking their cameras at peculiar angles in order to take “visually dynamic” pictures.  How can fetish photography be deeply personal when most of it dwells on fashion statements about mass-produced materials; latex, piercings, wigs…?  And a thousand other questions bent on connecting authorial intent to uncommunicative execution.  In six years, I spoke with lots of gearheads whose rationale for making photographs had surprisingly little to do with the people they photographed, the people who viewed their pictures, and nothing in particular to do with communication.  It was about costly hardware, advancing technology and gadgety stuff…leaving the heavy lifting of making sense of the image to the viewer because the photographer generally didn’t know or care how a given image was interpreted.  I cared.

A similar set of questions arise for me in cinema.  Early in the course of writing this blog I tried to express my confusion concerning the very long cinematic tradition of photographing and editing human interaction from multiple visual angles.  Robert Montgomery’s 1946 film, The Lady in the Lake is an fascinating, disciplined and failed attempt at bringing Raymond Chandler to the screen through the eyes of Philip Marlowe.  An enormous 1946 movie camera is only one technical part of the problem, the filmmaker chose to completely eliminate the streaming voice of Marlowe’s thought, which is Chandler’s cardinal virtue. 

If the holy grail of modern entertainment is “audience engagement”, maybe the traditional practices of multiple-camera/quick-cuts and counterintuitive point of view is an enormous impediment industry leaders need to dispense with.  The most effective means to communicate the difference (that these words don’t really convey) between a camera’s coherent point of view and what Hollywood’s been doing for 90 years is neatly expemplifed in With the Angels,  webseries I found at strike.tv:

http://www.strike.tv/search/with+the%20angels

At Lawrence Lessig’s blog, in mid-2008, I asked why the Highlander ethos (“there can be only one”) applies to the American presidency.  There and at Huffington Post (somewhere) and at Bill Moyers’ blog I asked if anyone know how large a percentage of my contribution to the Obama campaign was instantly consigned to the very deep pocket of the magnates of mainstream media — the same names that turned out empty pockets when the writers’ strike highlighted their conviction that the internet was strictly a promotional medium possessed of indeterminate commercial potential.

About 90%  of the questions I ask go unanswered.  No matter.  Irking Christy Dean is not one of my objectives.  Much higher on my to-do list is the task of simply understanding what the hell she and an easy dozen of highly-qualified experts have to say about transmedia. 

A few hours after Christy mentioned being irked, Nina Paley Tweeted a link to this:

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20100305%2F1907278449&edition=entrepreneurs&utm_medium=bt.io-twitter&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_content=backtype-tweetcount&threaded=true&sp=1#comments

Mike Masnick’s article suggests, perhaps only to me, that the marriage of art and commerce, copywrite and professional recognition…is based in our collective (suspect) faith in avarice as the driving social force that fosters culture.  Hellboy 2, I learned from the commentary last night, was budgeted at $85million.  The superhero films with which it was slated to compete for the attention of audiences averaged $175million, each.  Maybe money matters.  Maybe insanely generous compensation packages for executives in failing industries and institutions makes some kind of sense.  And maybe nobody’s questioning nutty perceptions of business-as-usual.  I care…not about health insurance, my reputation as a media analyst (I spitshine other people’s desktop telephones for a living), and not about lots of adult concerns that bother other people.  For some unaccountable reason, I care about transmedia, creative freedom and the apprehension authorial intent, among other things.  And I’ll probably go on questioning authorities (who very rarely respond/participate/interact) anyway.

Christy Dena is certainly not specifically irked at me.  This blog is slightly less influential than a germ in a flea on the tail of a dog that wags for other reasons, but to anybody who happens to be listening, I think it’s time to dissolve the bonds in our thinking that elevate professionalism in art over artists’ more-amateur pursuits; choices not guided by money.  Something’s going to wag this dog differently. 

Let’s go to irk, if necessary.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Barbaric satisfactions!

I’ve just reached the end of Episode 13, Kill Them All.  It isn’t called that coincidentally.  Episode 12 concludes with those fateful words, and the season of WAY over-the-top violence (with more than a little sex in it) and frequent paroxysms of difficult, sidelong, elevated speeches comes to an abrupt stop.  One pants in anticipation of the second season.

On the other hand, Andy Whitfield’s summation oration lights his face oddly from below.  The camera, which is also low, finds Berchtesgaden darknesses on Whitfield’s upper lip.  His rousing Bravheart oratory kinda stinks of Roman corpses that litter the central square of the villa and foul the bold and hopeful words with rivers of elite Roman blood.  St. Crispin’s Day, it ain’t.  Also, I don’t imagine Andy Whitfield was hired for his uncanny resemblance to Laurence Olivier’s acumen with the written word: 

“Dude doesn’t look totally ridiculous in a loincloth, so yeah.  Lex Barker, Jr.  Yeah, that’ll work.”

It worked fine!  Unfortunately, most of the BigBads that drove this season probably died.  Chief among these was the almost-credible John Hannah, as Batiatus (formerly Peter Ustinov as Bat Eye At Us), the ambitious, plotting, conscienceless weasle almost-absolutely-positively-certainly died.  Lucy Lawless as Lucretia definitely took Crixus’ blade in the foetus, but she was still twitching when credits rolled…so…?  And there absolutely was no shortage of deeply nasty people this season to get in the way of the run-up to the (to be continued) inevitable slave revolt, next season (and maybe a couple of seasons after that).  See, Spartacus (1960) wound up weaving his army up and down the length of the Italian peninsula as though they were lunch-hour customers at a preChristian Taco Bell.

However it gets where it’s surely going it’s going to be fascinating television. 

I came to the series solely because of Steve DeKnight, the creator, and nobody who spent years writing at Mutant Enemy takes bloodshedding lightly, so WAY over-the-top violence (the cardinal signature of this rendering of the story) won’t go gently into that good DeKnight.  Even utterly-righteous violence leads to dire consequences for heroes, or I’ve been misreading a lot of amazing writers for a long, long time.  (Entirely possible.)

And on yet another hand.  Henry Jenkins, today, called Twitter-attention to an interview here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/16/reducing-the-worlds.html

The discussion of his evolving perception of the myth of media violence is pretty cool.  I’d just like to add the notion that most media violence is packed with amplified bullshit, and that systemic violence tends to go largely unnoticed.  Systems that fail to meet the needs of the people (who subscribe to and support those systems) exhibit deeply embedded flaws in particularly interesting television shows like Breaking Bad, Deadwood (where we watch those infrastructural systems grow from nothing to institutions in the course of several months) and pretty much every show that David Simon’s ever touched.

It’s bound to be months before I tie into Treme, but the stuff I’ve read suggests that Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the problem that devastated New Orleans.  Criminal systemic failures did kill, displace, and brutalize people.  And the acts of violence visited on the inhabitants of that city will (if I’ve read the intent of the creative force behind the production correctly) show through even to the dimmest of us; acculturated to see criminal behavior as confined to certain strata of our society.  Guns and anonymous decisions made deep in the safety of corrupt institutionalized infrastructures don’t kill people, people do. Actually, bullshit kills people.

Systemic violence and technological innovations that reduce personal options are aspects of the same thing.  It’s not a popular subject, but needs considerable attention.   That’s why I wish Professor Jenkins had elaborated on his description of things that suck (the life out of people/culture) because many of them are directly attributable to systemic, bureaucratic, ideational quagmires; beta slop that needs field testing.  And there’s no better time to be a corrupt politican (or firmware developer) than the moment when the press provides less-credible criticism of our institutional systems than fictional drama.

Interesting that I’ve been watching television for 50 years and yet I’d never seen a castrated man crucified until Spartacus: Blood and Sand.  Sure, that’s an awful thing, but what’s even worse is the institutional repression that blunts the shock of violence people do to people.  In that context, media violence is far from mythic.  It amplifies the bonebreaking sound of a slayer’s punch (that never lands) and refuses to show the stump of a severed dick.  That’s downright bizarre.

“But what about the children?!” 

Just when a kid needs and deserves an honest clue in order to make informed choices about (you name it), some asshole farts that moronic question as a justification for bullshitting.  No wonder people who risk their lives to preserve our ways of life believe we can’t handle the truth.

I really liked John Hannah’s work in Rebus, and yet Ustinov played BatEyeAtUs more interestingly than Hannah’s BattyAtus.  The differences between these two recitations of the Spartacus story are numerous, but I think the essential differences are localized in Batiatus.  John plays him like a grasping, malicious, tolerated, minor Wall Street criminal.  Peter’s portrait (of Judas) bats-his-eyes-at and flatters Real Power.  Both portrayals present a man who goes-along-to-get-along.  John plays a tragic, rigid paranoid, Peter plays a flexible coward.

Given that historians and storytellers lie, each of us is obligated to play the role of Batiatus.  More decently.  What redeming quality resides in your Batiatus that punches through the web of lies and 41st Century agendas fashioned by future historians?  I wrote goofy sentences.  I’m obligated to do better.

Time, Money and Attention

Each of us gathers and spends these three things differently.  Possibly uniquely.  And the weight/importance we percieve in our jobs, our fascinations, our stuff — varies from decade to decade just as it varies from person to person, creating recognizable patterns of similarity that make some of us nostalgic about StarWars, summer camp or band practice.  The measure is personal…satisfaction.

“The hours I spend with a cue in my hand are Golden.  Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye…”  Attention, time and money…invested, squandered, earned, stolen…

The Producers Guild of America, this week, was the first professional entertainment organization yet to create an official designation recognizing the Transmedia Producer as a legitmate occupation.  You can look up the definition of the job, but by the time you get to it they’ll have changed it to more accurately reflect the objections of concerned industry workers who took exception the moment the announcement was made to fictional narrative stretched across at least three discrete media platforms, and yadada yadada, yawn.

• Transmedia Producer – A Transmedia Narrative project or franchise must consist of three (or more) narrative storylines existing within the same fictional universe on any of the following platforms:  Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, Mobile, Special Venues, DVD/Blu-ray/CD-ROM, Narrative Commercial and Marketing rollouts, and other technologies that may or may not currently exist. These narrative extensions are NOT the same as repurposing material from one platform to be cut or repurposed to different platforms.

Money, time and attention are spent and gathered by each of us uniquely.  Controversy over the definition of “transmedia” will persist until a lot of money is made by people who weren’t much involved in the semantic squabble, people who managed to make something profoundly (valued and) lucrative –  which will garner the attention of the squabblers, who will spend lots of time, money and attention attempting to replicate the success of those who demonstrated something that worked while the squabbling continued ad nauseum.

The problem I see with this historic announcement is that it has focused attention on product, return-on-investment, and technique, while distracting people from thinking about who they’d love to work with, what they’d love to do together and how to love budgeting personal time, money and attention to design coherent experience that magnetizes their collective attention (and has the identical kind of effect on a global audience).  I can’t think of anything that motivates people more than the invitation to collaborate.  I’d rather spend time collaborating in the writers’ room than sit through the eventual movie that’s created.

Transmedia entertainment is mostly about people who invest time, money and attention pursuing what they want to do…on both sides of the camera, screen or creative/receptive process.  It isn’t concerned with the prioritized agendas of media executives, nor box office receipts, nor fads.  It’s the further adventures of culture; coherent, self-aware, aspiring initiative to make stuff happen within the limitations of the money, time and attention you have to do so.  Transmedia entertainment is all about you.

Thanks for your time and attention.  We validate, but don’t forget to tip.

This post was inspired by this one:

http://creativity-online.com/news/for-the-love-of-money/143113

Lie to Me

I spent the past two evenings streaming the first season of this series via NetFlix, and valuing the experience.

The pilot episode introduces principle characters and simultaneously begs a little  for the suspension of audience skepticism as Tim Roth divines truth from the universe of facial expressions, mannerisms and body language of all things human, deducing implications and preventing ruinous consequences at superhuman speeds.

The first eleven episodes held my attention, although unexplained flaws in the superior inferential skills of the protagonist(s) tended toward redundancy in standalone episodes that linked together on the slender threads of recurrent behaviors exhibited by regular characters.  Episodes twelve and thirteen amply justified the tedium of slogging through familiar situations in episodes two through ten.  The promise of longform storytelling started paying off in Blinded and Sacrifice.  And my appetite for season two was expertly whetted by neatly set up callbacks to earlier episodes by the end of season one.

There is one bizarre inconsistency that centers on Agent Dupree. He’s a short, black FBI agent who swiftly becomes the boyfriend of Ms Tores, a regular high-secondary character.  Dupree makes recurrent appearances throughout the season, as another short, black FBI agent becomes a regular character.   I think the second guy wears mottonchops with moustache and goatee, but he’s practically indistinguishable from Dupree, who ends the season, hospitalized in a coma.

This show also tends to open segments with painfully blinding flashes of light that remind me of the interstitial transitions Angel (presumably) used to replicate  for the audience the experience of Cordelia’s agonizing visions.  It’s that class of unscrupulous manipulations that put me completely off LOST, initially: 

• Auditory and visual f-bombs,
• multiple-camera-angles that obfuscate,
• didactic scores that signal viewer=puppet…

damned familiar devices need serious rethinking, just like the empty claims of aspiring to the ”complete immersion” of the audience in the mise-en-scene.  That stuff is counterintuitive nonsense that degrades the bond of trust that must unite the storyteller with the audience in order to share the journey to the far end of the episode, season or run. 

Showrunners who depend on flash and boom to get a physiological start from an audience are like MBAs and CEOs who confuse short-term gains into honest profit.  It’s one of the surest earmarks of employees, surgery with cattleprod. 

A storyteller with a boss tends to become a meddle-manager of cattle.

Breaking Bad

A middle-aged, middle-class man is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.  The terrifyingly inconvenient prospect of his imminent death forces him to evaluate the utility of his resources in order to provide adequate wealth for the family that will survive him.  The over-qualified high school chemistry teacher knows that his health and life insurance aren’t up to the task of compensating for his inevitable loss as a bread winner, so he decides to break with his own personal tradition of law-abiding, civilized behavior by becomming a manufacturer of an illegal chemical, crystal meth.  The product he creates is uncommonly pure, distinctive and sought-after by the market, the market’s regulators, television critics and by fascinated audiences.  (I’m a member of that last group.)

The process of his evolution from loser to entrepreneur beautifully illustrates the story of capitalism, a contraband/unfashionable class of tale Grant McCracken laments here:

http://cultureby.com/2010/03/the-mystery-of-capitalism.html

The protagonist of Breaking Bad, Walter White, builds a superior mousetrap.  People want it.  The rapid introduction of Walter White into the complicated workings of fundamental capitalism make for fascinating television as he learns enough to survive the challenges of distribution, competition, personnel management, regulatory agencies…and loses his grip on his personal life while navigating through an increasingly complex tempest of lies, deceits and questionable/abominable ethical choices.  Not the least agonizing of these lessons is that Walter White’s wonderful product creates avid customers (partners, competition and colleagues) he can never ever trust.  That implication is the hallmark of insanely-intelligent storytelling; Vince Gilligan’s values demand a 300hour cruise, along with Milch, Whedon, Simon, Burns, Chase, Sorkin — oh, how I long to add Noxon to this archipelago of creative sphincters. 

Maybe it’s possible to tell a fascinating story about an abstract economic idea like capitalism.  I don’t think stories work that way.  It seems to me that stories are always about people.  Even when the tale centers on an animal (The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Black Stallion…), the lure of the yarn is the (human) intelligence that guides the actions of characters (and resonates with human audiences).  Does the world population of literate white whales explain the fact that Moby Dick still sells? 

While Breaking Bad illustrates many fundamental principles of capitalism, the story is utterly rooted in the forces that move people to action.  Stories exist at the heart of social media because people create and recite them.  People pay attention to them.  And people are the active/attractive elements in stories of/by/for and about people.

I think of stories as the nuclear bond at the crux of social media that grow by being taken and spread regardless of compensation.

I think of money as the practical (not philosophical or theoretical) opposite of stories.  Money’s power (for good or ill) increases as it is accumulated/concentrated.

I think of stories about money as fascinatingly oxymoronic, and the current expectation that money should be exchanged when stories are told is just cosmically ironic. 

The creation of stories is a necessary function of culture:   The cultural organism excretes an unlimited stream of narratives (through assholes we call writers and story-architects).  That certain segments of our population claim the right to exact payment for particular streams of cultural excrement seems, to me, shockingly presumptuous, especially when the protestors are armies of lawyers representing men at the tippy-top of a handful of pyramids  that comprise horizontally-and-vertically-integrated transnational media cartel(s); two entirely different sets of assholes, lawyers and moguls, from which socially-interesting excrement almost never spews.  I suspect that social media (story) and commerce (money) are practically antithetical, pulling in opposite directions (and sometimes spinning in parallel), and too-rarely do they collide as expected.  And Hollywood is obssessed with the art of bottled lightning.

The next day:

I’m picking up Season 3 via an iTunes “season pass”, and watched the newly-released third episode I.F.T. last night.  I’d probably have missed the significance of the title were it not for the accompanying Inside Breaking Bad download that highlights the meaningfulness of the episode’s title, which is probably an abbreviation of Skyler’s powerful, pivotal confessional statement, “I fucked Ted”.

I say probably, because  Anna Gunn’s actual pronouncement was probably censored to hush the naughty word in her sentence to a whisper.  So I’m not entirely certain whether Skyler mirrored Walter’s confession, “I make meth” with her own reference to a permanent and ongoing, parallel secret life that isn’t safely locked away in the past tense.

“I make meth” and “I fuck Ted” are significantly different statements from “I made meth” and “I fucked Ted” in context of the disastrous implosion of their marriage.  But the (probable) influence of lawyers and moguls leads me to surmise that my uncertainty over “fuck/fucked” will have to sort itself out in the course of the continuing story, so these three paragraphs amount to nothing more than a footnote of protest.

Eight days out (from I.F.T):

It mattered a lot whether Skyler confessed to a lone indiscretion or an ongoing romantic catastrophe for their marriage.  She confessed to iniquity to fix an inequity with Walter, whose resolve to go straight is perfectly illustrated (and perfectly thwarted) in the last few frames of the very next episode, Green Light.  One or the other of them might make an exception and forgive the other’s past and pardonable error in judgment, but all hope of change is negated as these married antagonists are drawn inexorablycloser together by the power of that which they each hold sacred, and against the dictates of common sense, self preservation and conscience while Jesse and Hank are doing exactly that very same thing.  (Hanks is The Bomb in Albuquerque and a tiny fish out of water in the bigger pond of El Paso.)

Whoever muted one naughty word in Skyler’s fateful confession will doubtless remain anonymous, and while that important decision does a disservice (that matters) to every member of the audience, it really doesn’t matter at all.  It just calls attention to the hypocritical stupidity that makes this show so powerful; systemic failures on showcased display, highlighting warts and all.

Without Love

For some reason, NetFlix has automatically rejected my review of this 1945 Tracy/Hepburn film, so I’m dropping my impressions here:

This film is brilliantly overloaded with proven box office talent.  Barry plays and Stewart screenplays (customized for Hepburn) bring fascinating questions about open marriage and platonic love from dusty tomes of philosophy and biting literary references to life in the presence of organic modern music and deeply gifted actors.  But it doesn’t actually work quite as well as Holiday nor The Philadelphia Story, largely because of the numerous characters and complicated subplots that pull attention in various directions that (don’t really matter much and ) magically resolve in exactly the kind of family-friendly tenderness, optimistic passion and genuine warmth that was telegraphed before the start of principle photography.

Curiously, this film is overburdened with long moments of sparkling wit, extended periods of profoundly meaningful silence, sophisticated charm, deeply adult ideas about companionship, and frequent bursts of comedic brilliance.

It ought to have been the (re)launching platform for a half-dozen amazing post-war careers; and it was, but the film also stands as a testament to all failed attempts to bottle lightning.  Sometimes the best ingredients result in flat champagne or fireflies. 

This film is a remarkably interesting and engaging disappointment that begs for your careful analysis.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

This 1956 Fox film addresses uniformity in postwar, 1950s, middle class American family life strangely.  It touches on the suit.  It presents aspects of the inner workings of a couple of nuclear families.  It centers around the headquarters of a thriving television network (in TechniColor and CinemaScope).  It does these things without actually saying much of anything about them.  Conformity?

The cardinal device employed concerns three American women, the wife of the protagonist, the wife and daughter of the protagonist’s CEO.  Each of these women is glimpsed in surprisingly ugly profiles as bitter, intractable, demanding and fundamentally infantile…yet each is duly worshipped for reasons that aren’t remotely explained in the film.

James Monaco’s commentary track led me to think about other things that only tangentially relate to this odd little big-budget pointless film.  He mentioned that ABC was a latecomer to the 50s television industry.  Competing with NBC and CBS which were prosperous radio-broadcasting networks based in New York.  West Coast-based ABC’s problems with funding resulted in alliances with Disney and Warner Brothers Studios.  The liaison between the upstart television broadcaster and movie studios resulted in a philosophical production rivalry.  Live entertainment from New York’s wealth of theatrical and radio talent was vastly more expensive than recorded television produced in keeping with the Hollywood tradition of archival presentation/representation of entertainment designed to control access by the audience.

The more cost-effective model won, and the East Coast television broadcast industry moved west, modelling itself after ABC.  The decline of live television, conventional radio shows, even Broadway theatrical presentation owe their loss of audience-attention to the success of ABC and the resurgence of Hollywood studio power as the West Coast system converted its sucess in cinema archives to archival television broadcasting.

The natural evolution of complex, serial, longform narrative was likewise retarded by the preeminent emergence of the ABC model of television production because weekly, self-contained 30 or 60minute episodes were deemed more salable (to network affiliates [in syndicated, non-consecutive representation]than treating programs as wholes).  And the revolutionary countermeasures employed by Hollywood to overcome the threat of East Coast television (CinemaScope, stereophonic sound and TechniColor) were likewise deemed by the studios to be less cost effective than constraints imposed by utilization of the existing television medium (4:3 aspect ratio, monaural sound and grayscale).  Rather than continuing competition with the innovative opportunities potentiated by the television medium for the attention of audiences, studios simply muted the importance of color television, stereo sound and widescreen presentation until that stuff enhanced the value of products owned and controlled by studios.

And that’s why The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a TechniColor CinemaScope film in stereo was created in 1956 to draw audiences into theaters yet hasn’t seen much broadcast time until the advent of DVDs when audiences can witness top-flight actors meandering through a pointless story.  It wasn’t about storytelling, but specifically designed to present viewers with an ultimatum that denigrated televison in favor of the more engaging medium of cinema.  The studios succeeded, not by revolutionizing film production, but by causing television to conform to the will of movie moguls who duly came to own the intellectual properties that fuel both cinema and television.  The engine of these changes in the 60 years of television’s ubiquitous popularity is cost-effective production coupled with addictive storytelling that collects eyeballs and glues butts to seats while starving culture of value and meaning. 

That mercenary agenda has very little interest in the cultural significance of useful, innovative, meaningful storytelling.  It’s about making money.  Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Heroes and LOST are prime examples of studio products that don’t rely on dynamic storytelling to garner audience attention to meaningful stories.  They’re the result of ABCs success in subverting two forms of media that might have taught us much more about our world than Edward R. Murrow feared would serve the interests of the captains of mainstream media.  Murrow was right.  We’ve been wronged.

Nothing I’ve said here is substantiated by research.  It’s purely speculative opinion.

The Man in The White Suit

This 1951 Ealing comedy is a perfect film that’s perfectly executed.  It invents a perfect synthetic fabric and populates the narrative with characters whose imperfections polymerize into the antithesis of the putative aspirations of industry, labor and the common man; criminally empty platitudes about development and progress.

The creation of an incredibly strong fabric that repels dirt, never wears out and practically can’t be cut sounds like the ultimate invention of the textile industry, but results in ever-widening circles of absolute and perfect panic as the people in the film who represent capital, labor and customers come to see this product as the  terminating element in their practice of business-as-usual.  Squabbling, pomposity, the vapid adherance to ridiculous rules…the flaws in people, traditional practices and mercantile relationships of producers and customers are used as gags to punctuate and illustrate the inutility of perfection in a world governed by absolute fools.

While the creation of this perfect product consumes the first half of the film, the inability of the characters to recognize value in its creator foreshadows the eventual discovery as generous people of vision and penetrating foresight grace the entire presentation with conspicuousness of their absence.  A cinematic environment filled with subtle and blatant class-intimidation, stupidity and pathological self-interest perfectly contrast and clash with the altruistic character whose sole intent is to realize the dream product.  And the intricate processes by means of which that perfectly-motivated individual achieves the ideal he’s dreamed about are expressed (primarily in pantomime) in this perfect film in perfect gags and situations that procede at a pace that’s uncommonly rapid in the entire body of conventional (slow-developing) British films.

I always object to the industry use of multiple camera-angles in storytelling, which leads me to believe that this perfect story might have been told even more remarkably by giving Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinnes) a constant (small canine) companion to represent a coherent audience-point-of-view throughout the film.  And fluctuations in volume levels (usually involving softspoken women and an incredibly loud, pedantic score) are always disturbing.  BUT these inherent flaws in the continuing evolution of 20th Century filmmaking are practically ubiquitous, and don’t significantly detract from the profound enjoyment of a perfect film.

Reproduction

Fifty years ago, when I was nine, I decided not to reproduce.  The reasons for this decision were manifold, but they centered on the merits of my parents’ relationship and shortcomings in my reasoning abilities.

This choice at an early age precluded my serious undertaking of courtship, marriage and family, and led me on a solitary path separate and distinct from the programming of mainstream society.  It was a good choice.

Looking back on fifty years of a life at variance from the usual, I see a number of flaws in my execution of my end-of-line plan.  Most of these involve my failure to take adequate responsibility for contraception in the heat of a lengthy career of profligate inseminations.  A more responsible version of me would now devote all of his resources to identifying his fuckups, and caring for any that exist.  I won’t do that.

Desk Set

Here’s a 1957 movie about the digital revolution.  It stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as a couple of accomplished bachelors whose lives have been dedicated to seemingly-dissimilar pursuits.  She’s the primary research librarian for a television network located at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York, and he’s the creator of an early mainframe computer…that’s apparently intended to take over her job.  The story revolves around the implicit fear that office automation would inevitably displace millions of people from their places of employment, replaced by terribly efficent and cost-effective machines.

It’s interesting that a half-century has passed and so very little has changed.  Business continues to run on the variability, complexity and adaptability of people while longing for the simplicity, reliability and consistency of comparatively inexpensive mechanical intelligence.  Offshoring, outsourcing and various methodologies of devaluing the contribution of loyal people to commerce seems to be intrinsic to the pursuit of doing prudent business.  Unfortunately, the sterility injected into the souls of working people by this paired search for efficiency and extirpation of humanity from business has the lingering side effect of limiting the degree and quality of engagement with our jobs. 

Ultimately, the movie resolves in the belated revelation that the computer was always intended to extend the power and scope of the research librarians, it was never meant to replace them.  It’s still the inability of computer experts to explain the intent of their dreams and the traditional inhumanity of employers that justly fuel the (irrational) fears of people who work for a living.

It deserves mention that the DVD commentary for this film could not be much more irrelevant to the plot, themes and the almost-completely invisible competence of the actors.  I’m going to watch it again with the sound turned off just to see Tracy animate his character in pantomime: 

“Never let them catch you acting.”

Although he’s a bit of an ugly fuck, he’s kind of a joy to watch.

Bombs

In the first 30 minutes of The Hurt Locker, stuff that’s never explained begins to happen.  A wheel falls off a wagon, an engaging, dynamic squad-leader dies and isn’t mourned before we meet his replacement (who reminded me of the closeted-loony played by Martin Sheen in Apocalypse, Now).  All of that’s okay for a film with a great, and justly deserved, reputation.  Oops.

Early confusion is par-for-the-course, for any earnest audience, so I prepared to knuckle-down and get into the rhythym of the action.  But Sgt. James, the new squad leader, begins his first day by blowing off the ‘bot, donning the blast-suit and strolling down to the unexamined lethal contraption by the mosque.  And apparently purposefully obscuring the view of his two heavily armed protectors by tossing a smoke grenade in his wake.  Why?

That’s the point at which my confidence in the filmmakers was severely shaken.  They never won it back with

• multiple jiggling cameras,
• familiar faces in tiny cameo roles, and, most importantly,
• the absolute failure to show me just one coherent story. 

I loved the complex confusion that’s intrinsic in Generation Kill last week, and eventually found plenty of episodic, character-driven storytelling to like in Danger UXB, but Hurt Locker‘s attempt to “challenge the medium” by creating cinematic profiles of three individuals at war simply missed the boat on which documentary filmmakers learn to be adequate storytellers.

The film is more suspenseful early rather than late, and the longer it lasts the less the squad’s relationship to one another makes cohesive sense, and the kicker at the end of the film translates into a curse that resonates with some (unfamiliar) guy’s quote that “War Is a Drug”. 

Oh.  So Sergeant William James (like President Harrison Ford in Air Force One) is the tough and enigmatic hero who survives an incredible ordeal —  to emerge from the terrible crucible, pretty much, exactly as he went in.  Enigmatic heroes are a dodge.  Don’t ask.  Whether 1800 kilogram bombs are dropped deep into London from 10,000 feet or whipped together at Iraqi roadsides, there’s something profoundly cowardly about the randomness of the victimization and a complementary intrinsic nobility in the people who disarm them.  (Don’t EVEN ask about any similar intrinsic nobility of terrorists and Nazis.  Let them make their own little movies.)  

Apparently it’s possible to elevate “the most dangerous job on Earth” into a pointless movie about nothing in particular and garner awards and nominations and be flooded with offers to create more narrative vacuums.  I tend to suspect that the unexplained, counterintuitive smokescreen isn’t what’s wrong with The Hurt Locker, it’s symptomatic of a defective industry.

Even if the apolitical, fictionalized account of one embedded writer’s experience of EOD life in Iraq in 2004 is absolutely true-to-life, random story elements that don’t resolve kill interest in revisiting highly-reputed careers, theaters and maybe even  wars, just or otherwise.

Fattality and Thinicism

Kevin Smith is a famous guy who had/has a famous problem.  Last Saturday afternoon the filmmaker, raconteur, wit and citizen-journalist stood an excellent chance of catching an earlier Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland back to Burbank.  The problem emerged when someone in authority decided to prevent his fortuitously early departure by citing his girth as a reason to reject him from his standby seat on that earlier flight.

The inside skinny has been thoroughly detailed here (at SModcasts 106 & 107):  http://smodcast.com/109-100.html

and  littered around various lax media outlets from Huffington Post to Good Morning America, but the probem Kevin Smith faced, explored and expanded into a national (maybe international) public relations fiasco for Southwest Airlines really concerns the continuing struggle between irresponsible corporations and Consumers of Shame.

A Southwest Airlines employee decided, last Saturday afternoon, to flex a little authority at an available target.  That victim has turned out to be a fat guy who has earned the attention of millions of people.  Smith’s spontaneous ire at the slings and arrows flesh is heir to was barked into an open mike, and for the past half-week, a minor media circus has resulted. 

Now an anonymous airline employee (possibly the very one who actually was responsible) will either be offering a personal apology to Kevin Smith or he/she won’t.  The only certainty I’d like to offer is that corporations came into existence precisely and specifically in order to deflect the necessities of personal liability for the decisions and actions of corporate representatives…so the illusion of personhood in the form of Southwest Airlines may simply (and irresponsibly) stop talking about Smith’s problem, expecting it to go away.

Fat, (ex-?)smoker, profane, celebrated, smart, talented, middle-aged…; the characteristics of Kevin Smith are each of them vulnerabilities that may (in any given context) outrage a particular authority sufficiently to flex cowardly power from the cover of a corporate cloak of invisibility.  But apart from his global audience, and the ability to speak with them, the characteristic that makes Kevin Smith the wrong canary to fuck with is his relative comfort with himself.  He’s famously less-ashamed of himself than lots of the rest of us are, and speaks for an ever-widening variety of people when he flat-refuses to be casually persecuted, because NOBODY IS as NORMAL/REGULAR/TYPICAL as random, thoughtless bureaurats require us to be.

The Kevin Smith vs Southwest Airlines media debacle may evaporate into memory in the next couple of minutes, but The Problem is going to persist. 

Fat is one small part of The Problem; subordination and shame don’t seem to result in obedience like they used to.

Fattality is a state of mind in which I’m reasonably okay with who  I am. 

Thinicism is the kind of ridiculously unnecessary cruelty I visit on myself and other people, when I don’t like who I am.  Thinical people are more obedient than fattalists, and that’s the heart of The Problem that was lying in wait for Kevin Smith at Oakland Airport on Saint Valentine’s Day; a dose of the FU2 virus.  Ironic.

I think the first victim of abused authority is personal dignity.  Apart from the wit, intelligence, fame and the talent to tell several stories I’ve liked, Kevin Smith’s character balked like a nightmare at an instance of cowardly, corporate thinicism; the kind of creative hero I really, really like, admire and aspire to emulate.

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/02/16/flying_while_fat

and

http://silentbobspeaks.com/?p=394

Restless

At the end of season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the BigBad has been vanquished and The Initiative is not only broken but obliterated, scattered and denied as though it had never happened beneath the plausible deniablility of “scorched earth” and governmental scoffing.  The season-long arc has climaxed in episode twenty-one, which leaves Restless as an aftermath of summing and evaluating the work the show had done — for four years.  And it’s written in ancient iambic Sumerian, Buffy Summerian, that is; swimmin’ pools, movie stars…

It’s an anthology of dreams of the four principle characters who joined together (even more completely than of-yore) to defeat the BigBad by invoking the soul of the power of the slayer, which just happens to annoy the hell out of the entire tradition of slayers, which manifests in each of their four more-or-less fragmentary dreams to threaten their waking lives for having the temerity to flout the chain-of-command (slayer tradition) by going directly to the source that’s personified in the original slayer, a solitary misanthrope, the victim of frightened old men.

And the writer’s/director’s commentary for that episode reflects his intentional, insistent break with tradition to write an hour of only-vaguely-linear, subtexual exposition about the sandbox in which four characters met to create a television show; the writer’s sandbox.

Buffy’s success as a programming victory for an insignificant market reached more people than were targeted in an age-appropriate demographic by breaking with tradition, remixing staid conventions and going directly to the source of the power that unites writers and audiences; by making something new from stuff that had already been done to death.  And Restless departs from the customary path that defines the rise and fall of television shows.  It specifically and particularly defies its own traditions by (among other things) previously portraying Spike in The Yoko Factor as the maniplative influence of network/studio executive notes and messageboard remarks from fans.  Everybody meddles, well-wishers, censors, sponsors, fans…even artists meddle with their own work.

Call it classic or cheesy television, if you must.  I’ll just describe it as art.  Like fashions, cultish devotion and popcultural references, obsession with novelties wax and wane, but Mutant Enemy produces work that continues to delight me as I age, finding rich new layers of meaningful content embedded in each successive assay; not unlike Casablanca — it never seems to get stale.  I don’t see Dollhouse in the same light, but it’s loaded with ideas that deserve (and will receive) plenty of additional scrutiny.

Restless is a remarkably transparent statement about nourishing the writer/artist/content-creator by flouting the interests of significant others by engaging with the source of pleasure in writing stuff people will eventually come to realize they need because it keeps the saga alive in the souls of the writers/artists/content-creators who refuse to work on their knees, pandering to past success; pandering to pandering.  It also does that for the audience.

I believe that the factor that killed the Beatles was their unqualified success, the overwhelming public adoration for what they’d already made together acted as a profound deterrent to whatever hadn’t happened yet.  It wasn’t/isn’t Yoko, but public inertia; popular yearning for more-of-the-same that kills artists (by rewarding copyists and meddlers).

The most singularly valuable thing I’ve leaned while following the blog of The Ad Contrarian came from a guy named Guy who said that discovery and invention are very different processes; that academics invent categories, classifications, comparisons and contrasts, while fortunate and talented scientists and artists discover things that really can’t be vivisected without significant loss.  And the death of social media happens when reputation acts as an impediment to stepping out of character and discovering something new.

Transmediopoly

Having spent the past couple of hours reading and thinking here:

http://cameronmcmaster.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/transmedia-more-like-vapidmedia/

it seemed especially appropriate to consider carefully Jeff Gomez’ opening statement,

“I’m the first to admit that there are far too many diverse definitions of transmedia and even transmedia narrative, but even the mavericks in our crowd will agree that the term is distinguished by the fact that story becomes paramount in the dispersal of content across various media platforms and formats.”

I’d like to suggest that story is probably paramount to storytellers and central to all interested content creators, but angels seem to fixate on ROI.

I like longform-story-that-incentivizes-audience-archaeology kind of a lot!  And with only the sketchiest understanding of the contingencies involved in the metrics of franchise-success, the intricacies of narrative structure, the byzantine complexities of product distribution and predictive business models…I see the transmedia movement as prone to several practical hazzards.  Firefly is my shining example of a deeply-engaging IP that was brutally murdered by its angels.

The corporate ownership of intellectual property is where mainstream media starts, right this minute, here&now.  Corporations exist to limit personal liability while maximizing profit.  The fundamental purposes corporations serve are radically different (maybe antithetical) to the purposes of art.  And without defining art, consider the state of the art of the contemporary corporation: 

Composed of competing divisions, the modern corporation is representative of a culture rife/riddled with proprietary secrets, flexible alliegences, and a remunerative structure that’s most beneficial to

1. persons at the tippy-top of its hierarchical strucure and
2. shareholders whose contribution to the creation of product could not be more intangible.

I see the transmedia movement as capable of branding the template of corporate culture deep into the living flesh of independent content creation.  That’s totally anti-progressive for the evolution of art and prevents the growth and facilitation of the collaboration of independent artists. 

Whether narrative or profit is paramount to modelmakers, animators, actionfigure assembly-line-workers… isn’t the point I’m trying to make.  It’s that the art of collaboration is more important than the quality or quantity of the end product, to me.  I suspect that the inevitable ubiquity of now-developing transmedia modalities in content creation will be very greatly influenced by corporate culture; the only pockets deep enough to fund widely-popular experiments, with an eagle-eye on ROI, and platitudes about the primacy of story.

I do not mean to impugn Jeff Gomez’ word nor his integrity, but I’m fundamentally curious about entertainment projects owned by the widening diversity of artists who made them — for the benefit of culture, rather than funding agencies and angels.  Transmedia entertainment might become the exemplary beacon of participatory democracy, but an environment ruled by

• governmental mandates,
• corporate ownership/interference, and
• audiences geared to behave like inattentive herd animals

doesn’t bode well for the vitality of liberty, the emancipation of the arts, nor artists, nor people.  That’s all.

Soulless

Rhymes with “solace” as the antimatter reboot episode of Angel 4.11 in which Angelus is tactically invoked to replace Angel for the specific purpose of putting an end to The Beast (that blotted out the sun and would probably devour Cleveland).  And that’s quite enough about that.

I’d like to take this opportunity to bitch about Connor and Cordelia.  The two of them are written in a way that makes this fourth season a very difficult passage to the series final year.  I’ve now seen Vincent Kartheiser in only two roles, but both of the characters he’s portrayed are disgustingly ambiguous.  In Mad Men, Kartheiser’s acknowledged talents elicit moments of tremendous sympathy that rise high above my accustomed contempt for his character’s slippery, self-serving values and tendency toward treasonous toadying…but Pete’s been there since the beginning of that series; integral to its success.  In Angel, Connor is a climactic insert, an add-on, an appendix that never seems to go away, adding a bottomless suck-hole of selfpity, sexual perversity and quasi-religious fixated venom that borders on insanity.

Mutant Enemy’s fondness for Charisma Carpenter has never seemed less justifed than in the course of this season of Angel, in which Cordelia’s everpresent influence thwarts everything I enjoyed in the show.  As a foil, Cordelia was invaluable, but as a scold and a pillar of reason, she’s utterly superflous…and I say these things about the characters who were written by the most admirable brand I know.  Cordelia and Connor stink, while Kartheiser’s brilliant portrayal of a crap-hole sings with an actor’s sensitive and intelligent choices, the character just sucks ass.  The thing is that I blame the writers for driving an incredibly complex, multiseason plot-arc through the incestuous liaison between Connor and Cordelia that’s foreshadowed by Angel’s implausible fixation on the wellbeing of his dearly beloved but mostly-evil son.

Sidebar:  I’ve known admirable individuals who marry admirable individuals and reproduce in order to become horrid parents who make contemptible choices, persistently, whenever they’re obliged to choose between sane behavior and actions that might possibly infringe upon the wellbeing of their little ones.  These choices extend to barring the use of profanity within fifty yards of their kids, smoking most anything, the display of affection between unmarried adults…It’s the kind of drastically-altered, hypocrital mindset that murders longstanding friendships, and results in horrid kids who sometimes become admirable individuals, especially if they estrange themselves from their parents early.

Angel leans quite deeply in that revolting direction.  He prevents Cordelia from joining in the search for The Beast stating that she’s far too precious to him to risk her life and safety needlessly, then he tells Fred to get a move on (as though Fred were labelled BEASTFODDER).  The wizards at Mutant Enemy pointedly drew the distinction between Fred and Cordelia to highlight Angel’s Cordelia-related compulsion that would require several more episodes of tedious semi-credible explanation, but the special place for Connor and Cordelia in Angel’s theoretical heart casts piles of unloving disregard on every other character for a very long time…and that’s why season 4 seems a great deal longer than all of the others.   The moment in Orpheus when Angel rescues a small dog from the path of an oncoming car in the 1920s reminds me of the Shatner-meets-Collins temporal paradox that’s pivotal in The City at the Edge of Forever.  Just sayin’.  Thirteen bucks to download nearly 29 hours of Star Trek season one from iTunes.  Such a deal!  I ought to be able to check the ostensible parallel/quote/homage and make a report in about 48 hours.

Paraphrasing Angel:  The purpose of a champion is to behave as though the world were a better place, and thereby set an example for the rest of us.  When Angel behaves like a parent/knave, his show might as well be Ozzie and Harriet.  And I’ve better things to do than that.

A little more bitching:  Interstital transitions are very unlike act breaks.  They don’t adhere to the narrative structure that makes their occurence predictable.  An abrupt change of scene or timeframe on Angel is often accompanied by instantaneous flashes of lightning and attendant bursts of thunder.  These instantaneous overstimulations of the audience sensory instrumentality contrast markedly with several mumbling actors and signature dark cinematography and really piss me off.  They’re all so unpredictable, painfully bright and disconcerting that they also serve as foreshadowing intimations of the arrivial of Jasmine, who, as Skip explains, in Inside Out, is the all-powerful unknown force that’s been nudging, manipulating and influencing important events since long before the start of season one.  I love Skip.  I loathe Jasmine’s bargain that equates world peace with theocratic world domination – and I also loathe blinding interstitial transitions, even when they’re deeply integrated, innovative and intentional enhancements of story.  They fucking HURT.

There are a couple of notable parallels that won’t bear up under serious scrutiny, but I’d be remiss in failing to mention Jasmine’s blatant and subtle resemblance(s) to Oprah, beauty queens and Michelle Obama.  I think that in the moment of her ascension to First Lady, the media reduced our collective perception of her intelligence and personal dynamism by 75%, and has been feeding the world a steady diet of her private sleeve-lengths, child-rearing advice and bits of traditional role debris.  It’s as though media artisans are tirelessly revising Michelle Obama’s breathtaking native identity into the mandatory First Lady’s graven image that generates adoringly-favorable global impressions far more like Oprah’s, Elizabeth II’s, or June Cleaver’s than Hillary’s.  If so, we’re too dumb to pity.

Gwen Raiden is introduced in Ground State (4.02).  Portrayed by the remarkably attractive and adept Alexa Davalos, Gwen appears twice in a couple of later episodes in the middle of that season and never shows up again.  Why?  Rogue didn’t have some of the finest writers in the television industry fabricating snappy banter for her to deliver, though the nature of her superpower made Gwen Raiden almost exactly as incapable of physical intimacy as the X-Men character, Rogue.  Mutant Enemy failed to service the Raiden character adequately, yet they made her emotional isolation chamber infinitely more empathically recognizable in fragments of three episodes than the X-Men franchise managed in three excessively expensive films to make Rogue matter, meaningful, memorable.  See Players for the soul of a spin-off pilot that unfortunately didn’t extend the domain of the slayers beyond Players.

Their commentaries indicate that Mutant Enemy was constantly formulating work-arounds for practical, financial and logistical difficulties, many of which were imposed by their dinky networks or the studio.  I’ve always suspected that the season arcs were exquisitely designed to tell the audience more about the obstacles besetting the production process than all the cumulative speculation in print by academics, fans and critics.  Whistler was replaced by Doyle.  Corruption was replaced by Lonely Hearts.  Angel almost never tasted of human blood, but would have done so in Corruption…it’s the notes and meddling of network and studio executives that lead me to speculate that an angel in theatrical production is a soulless wad-of-money with legs that makes a television show like Angel possible.  The trick of turning angels into  Angel involves making the best possible compromise with hosts of variable-sized demons.  Most production companies don’t entertain by itemizing the cost (in souls) of creating products that give solace.

Some day the final departure of the Groosalug from Angel will make even more poignant sense than Mark Lutz’ last line — if I can grab somebody who knows more than I do (about the Sandy Grushow relationship with Mutant Enemy) by the lapels and torture them until they confirm/contextualize my irrational suspicions regarding Firefly, Buffy and Angel.  No, probably not an opportunity I’ll ever have (to learn a thing or two).

And that passage of The Teddybear’s Picnic that introduces a caged Angelus as the teaser closes in Soulless really should have been overdubbed by a superb vocalist with perfect pitch, to contrast with Angel’s off-key, arhythmic Manilow covers; Anthony Stewart Head, maybe:  Audience notices the markedly-improved voice with surprised satisfaction, then recognizes the singer and with keen curiousity attributes a wealth of deceitful talents to Angelus that make him a more formidable antagonist than Angel.  That’s the note that prompted this post.  Show the viewer someone new, don’t just always tell us.

Ironic

I guess it’s just one of life’s little ironies that an actor bearing a phenomenal resemblance to Anthony Stewart Head makes his singular appearance in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd about 38 minutes into the film.  Moments after Todd’s tonsorial contest with Pirelli concludes, the actor I’m talking about congratulates the victor with a couple of lines that indicate the inquisitive gentleman fully intends to become one of Todd’s regular customers.

This moment is oddly ironic simply because Anthony Stewart Head’s appearance is

1. uncredited, and
2. Head (unless I’m entirely mistaken) was probably the most accomplished professional singer who ever came near the set (exluding coaches and extras).

The one-and-only special feature on the DVD, I just cruised through, makes much of the good fortune and pluck surrounding Tim Burton’s, Helena Bonham Carter’s, Johnny Depp’s and Richard D. Zanuck’s very first musical, ever.  There’s even mention of Burton’s disinterest in the theatrical form of the muscial; Carter’s longstanding passion for the play; and Depp’s having come to Hollywood originally, not as an actor, but as a musician (who never sang)…and yet…movie-magic doesn’t translate this rendition of Sweeney Todd into a hands-down masterpiece of dark cinematic genius.  It’s a fine, engaging, very-visual and well-acted movie that’s 70% singing with reasonably good vocal performances by people who are famously marketed for doing other things.   They classed it up with Alan Rickman, yet gave him very little to do.

I’m probably making strident note of a subtle aftertaste of commerical arrogance that drips like running riulvets of blood from this remarkably entertaining film that might have been something                              ? more rewarding? inspiring? influential?…supm brilliant. 

It was really very good, just more like Alien Resurrection than Amelie; they were last night.  I gotta say that an esteemed auteur’s name on the cover says very little about end-product-value, nor is an auteur’s interaction with collaborators central to promotion.  Maybe it should be.  And what might a filmmaker learn from a film of audiences watching her film?

A summary Rickmanism:

“You can act truthfully or you can lie. You can reveal things about yourself or you can hide.

Therefore, the audience recognises something about themselves or they don’t —

You hope they don’t leave the theatre thinking ‘that was nice…now where’s the cab?’”

“[Head] was originally to have a role in Sweeney Todd, as a ballad soloist and one of Todd’s murder victims, but, due to the ailing of Johnny Depp’s daughter, the schedule became tight and Head’s character, as well as the characters of 13 other actors, were dropped from the film. Instead, Head made a short cameo appearance as a character who asks whether Sweeney Todd has an establishment of his own. — Wikipedia

That’s my tale of Weenie Todd; hotdog box office appeal, but don’t question the ingredients.

GunnFire

The commentary track of Lullaby (Angel 3.09) is provided by Tim Minear, who co-wrote and directed the episode, and Mere Smith,  writer and script coordinator.  It’s the funniest and most insightful 43 minutes of focussed conversation since Lem Dobbs and Steven Soderbergh argued their way through The Limey. 

Lullaby is a pivotal episode in the development of the saga that brings a final end to Darla and introduces Connor, but Minear and Smith somehow manage to kill (one another and me) in the course of a stand-up/sit-down, microscopic leer behind the scenes of the making of M.E. product.  (I really believe that Darla became the soul of the franchise [and Connor was the stake in its heart]).  Plymouth Cock landed on Darla in a way that permitted her backstory to drop dimensional shadow on the whole whore of American history.  Mutant Enemy barely utilized that exquisitely beautiful teaching aid.

Late in the lively frivolity, derisive mention is made of That Old Gang of Mine (3.03) in which Gunn’s loyalties are divided between his old crew and his new one, while black characters perpetrate violent acts of indiscrimate racial intolerance against a local minority population (of dangerous and harmless demons).  I mentioned the rarity of media insight into black racism in an earlier post on Lakeview Terrace, which leads me to marvel at Tim Minear’s (and Mutant Enemy’s) courage in exploring that special brand of darkness that doesn’t seem to win awards or even lift many eyebrows.  (District 9 tried to go there too, but it overdosed on Stupid and Brutal before it succumbed to Moronic.)

I wonder that a white guy from Whittier (Nixon Country — 43.2% white, 1.2% black, 1.3% Indian in 2000) even took a sympathetic shot at addressing the black experience, let alone an intriguingly clear, equivocal one.  Apart from the unambiguously negative regard with which Tim remarked on That Old Gang of Mine, I’d really like to know how it was meant to fit in the M.E. product line, and how it failed to make the more satisfying statement he obviously intended.

The purpose of this post, however, is to mention a kind of alternative interpretive overlay in which I see significant similarities between Charles Gunn and Malcolm Reynolds. 

Gunn’s pickup truck is introduced in War Zone (1.20), bristling with a stake-throwing, bed-mounted machine gun, and Reaver-style Wash-stickers, strongly resembling “the boat”, late in the BigDamnMovie.  I see another similarity in the gradual raising of Gunn from the heartbroken leader of a streetgang (“muscle”) to the stature of a diplomat in the struggle against overpowering and nearly-immortal sanctioned corruption…which (to my mind [vampire/empire]) resembles the evolution of Malcolm Reynolds from the ungenteel son of an independent rancher to heroic soldier, outlaw, bearer of bad news for the established Allied government, and (ultimately) a leader and diplomat in a subsequent war for interplanetary independence.  I even wonder whether J. August Richards was eyeballed to play the role that was given to Nathan Fillion.  No telling, but there’s room for speculation.

One of many latent conflicts deeply embedded in Firefly is the distinct possibility that slavery and indentured servitude remained to be explored in later episodes/seasons, foreshadowed by Badger’s inspection of the teeth of a woman as Mal enters Badger’s office all the way back in the pilot episode, and Badger’s insistence, in that scene, on the importance of his elevated place (above Reynolds) in the wider social hierarchy in which a businessman on a border planet like Persephone ranks significantly higher than the captain of a Ford F-100.  I think the poignancy of a black Capt. Reynolds, veteran of a war of independence against a culture dependent upon the institution of slavery, would have provided the writers additional leverage in telling tales of biting contemporary relevance by means of the microscope of American history and the telescope of speculative, character-driven fiction.  Tag Glory, buzz Ali, circle The Hurricane and honor The Killer Angels by citing George Pickett’s parable of a gentlemen’s club from the point of view of someone who would not or could not belong to a society that would love to have him as a member; choice/no-choice; states’ rights versus federal obligation (to obliterate slavery).  We just can’t seem to put that pesky slavery thing to bed.

Sexual and racial imperfections in the American character were masterfully massaged in the course of the first two series, and what’s coming from the brand I most admire (Mutant Enemy) remains to be seen repeatedly and reinterpreted to death…the overdue death of obscene and obsolete institutions.

Can entertainment production companies teach, change unquestioned practices?  Can television teach?  Where’s Murrow?

Stuff I Survived

I was 8 when a physician diagnosed my condition as the result of a perforated kidney.  I was hospitalized with an IV drip for a few days, then released with the stern advice to drink plenty of water more frequently to prevent clouds of blood in my urine and a tendency to pass out.  In the narrow behavioral confines of my elementary school environment, racing all the other boys and girls in my class across the schoolyard to the water-fountain/trough struck me as profoundly undignified, and so I knocked my participation in that particular indiginity off, and generalized the reflective mindset into a little bit of kidney pathology. 

Since then, I’ve taken to drinking water frequently and in moderation, but that early lesson in 50s elementary school behavior modification showed me the value (for teachers) of depriving kids of basic needs to afford their teachers a few moment’s respite from the incessant, annoying vagaries of largely-undisciplined children.  It was a fairly shrewd and subtle farmer’s trick that blew up in Mrs. Christopherson’s face when my mother tore into her verbally for depriving her students of face time at the drinking fountain, as a tactic of kid-control.  The fact is that I was silently on Mrs. Christopherson’s side of that argument.  Us kids were awful.  1958.

I’d probably just turned 18 when I bought Lance Raynor’s 1964 Honda 305cc SuperHawk, cheap.  I somehow drove it the 10 miles home (with no previous motorcycle experience) via the freeway and parked it in my parents’ garage.  The next morning, I set myself, prudently, to start safety-training by idling the engine in the driveway, then literally popping the clutch at high idle.

I flew from sidewalk to sidewalk in the blink of an eye, hit the far curb and bounced (like the bike) high into the sky, and landed on our neighbor’s lawn not far from the stalled engine and the tire that spun like an Indian massacre in a dramatic 20-mule-team wagon-disaster.  There was no traffic anywhere in sight, and apart from any neighbors who might be peeking out their windows at the novel engine noise-then-silence, my dignity and life might both survive this brush with their profound fragility.

So I raised, righted and started the bike, pointing it in a reasonable direction.  And I was off!!! on an irresistible adventure in the explosively seductive, intoxicating universe of motorcycling!  How I survived the first 40 miles of that journey, no one knows. 

Suddenly, I was rapidly approaching the T-intersection a bit west of Mill Valley, where a lazy right turn would take me up to Mt. Tamalpais, and going straight would lead toward Muir Woods and Stinson Beach.  Ah, but the  road on the way to the intersection, and the right turn that I fully intended to make, required a significant reduction in speed.  Alarm was clearly reflected on the face of the driver who watched me apprehensively from his place alongside the stop sign.  Neither of us should have survived that turn, but evidence suggests that we did.  1968.

About 15 years later I spent the night with my girlfriend who was housesitting for an extremely rich client at their ranch.  We’d spent the evening cavorting in their opulent surroundings, and in the morning, before Karen awoke, I elected to hang out with their horses.  One thing led to another, and I tossed a blanket and saddle on a dark Palomino, exercising all the virtual horsemanship I’d learned from a youth pretty thoroughly invested in the works of Walter Farley and Anna Sewell, among others. 

The horse must have read better books.  The blanket went on easy as pie.  Adding the saddle was only slightly more difficult.  Cranking the cinch was a bitch, and in only a couple of sidelong steps, the blanket and saddle were off the horse and strewn about the corral.  Undismayed, I hefted the blanket and saddle, and ran at the gelding from behind.  Again with the sidelong eyeball, and a playful acceleration placed a more/less random hoof, quite squarely, in the heart of my big, brass seashell-shaped beltbuckle. 

It’s a very odd sensation to run forward in a brilliant burst of youthful speed and willful determination as the single hoof of a half-ton horse flings you backward with amazing ease.  I’m talking ten to fifteen feet.  Somehow that hoof found the beltbuckle.  There were significantly easier (and more vulnerable) targets.  Sweaty and shaken I called it quits.  The last laugh went to the horse, but the dumb-luck award for beltbuckle selection went directly to me.  1983.

The point of these pointless stories (to which I’ll add further incendents, in subsequent edits, as they arise in my recollection) is that it’s really hard to practice devout agnosticism in the face of subjective evidence of divine intervention.  I’m not inclined to point to a guardian angel or some higher destiny or the nebulous construct of Luck, but stuff that actually happened, stuff that really should have resulted in mutilation &/or death…hasn’t yet.  I’ve learned to approach certain phenomena with greater respect; the south end of a northbound horse, motorcycle transport, educators…but that kind of trepidation is minimal protection against the history I’ve clearly demonstrated of bringing loads of stupid into dangerous situations.  I’m not the only one.

As though to punctuate that final sentence, the room just quivered with a minor earthquake.  I’d estimate a 2.7.

Dumbocracy

If all gentlemen are created equal, who governs?

Comfortably-fixed, propertied, white males with influential connections (if the historic record is entered into evidence) have ruled an independent American nation since long before it existed. 

Gentlemen govern, but the definition of Gentlemen (which is only properly understood by Gentlemen) is an incindiary semantic discrimination that’s especially provocative when tucked into a justification for rebellion, or a constitution of rules of governanace limiting the power of government to infringe upon the rights of Gentlemen.  Far better to leave the Gentle out and concentrate on Men…better still, People…when the fundamental proposition is that The People will lend indispensible support to the Gentlemanly representatives of choice.

So how in the world can Gentlemen persuade the rest of us to vote for them?  Pretend that government of/by/for Gentlemen is of/by/for People; that voters know at least enough to vote prudently…but secret matters of national security, ruinous scandals, and the partially-revealed intrigues of special interests continually demonstrate the fact that we do not, cannot, must not know facts that are best left to be sifted by the greater intelligence, experience and know-how of the Gentlemen who lead us.

So, disinformed, misinformed and led, we vote for comfortably-fixed, propertied, white males with influential connections.

Now that Journalism, The Fourth Estate, the Megaphone of Freedom is in desperate financial difficulty, I’ve begun to wonder that it was ever allowed to become a commercial institution; IF the necessary function The Press performs is the punctual distribution of valid information about the factual state of the nation to an informed constituency…why have they always charged for printed newspapers?

“Free” news depends upon advertising, which turns the voter’s (guarded and reluctant) attention over to the special interests of the advertiser.  And the information provided by anchorpersons is usually less informative than it is diverting, persuasive or incomplete; bent on serving the interests of the commercial entities that broadcast less information than the People generally need to make informed decisions.

When the Writers Guild of America struck, about 27 months ago, they stopped working for networks, studios and production companies that constitute mainstream media; and by a Gentlemen’s agreement chose to restrict presentation of their side of the collective bargaining disageement to weblogs and various forms of alternative media…so there was practically no broadcast news of the strike until it was over; officially proclaimed by networks, studios and mainstream media.  Consequently, much of The Public still believes that the tantrum of pampered, overpayed screenwriters ruined the 2008 television season, damaged movie production and played a small but detrimental part in this ongoing recession — particularly in L.A. 

Wrong.

If the screenwriters are presently engaged in educating The Public to the meagre trickles of compensation afforded the creative comunity by transnational conglomerates that own their intellectual property and dabble in mainstream media, I’m not seeing it.  I think the architects of our entertainment squander their primary weapon (which ought to be brought to the rapidly-approaching next round of negotiations) by failing to educate Us. 

A strike wreaks havoc across the board, but a strategic, global boycott of studio product strikes terror in the hearts of corporate giants.  And the threat of the call for a global boycott doesn’t exist without the voluntary support of People who buy DVDs, watch television, go to movies.  The WGA and the wider creative community cannot get that voluntary support by leaving mainstream media to tell us all about the next catastrophic writers’ strike.  Nikki Finke, United Hollywood and independent cinema didn’t win the They Get Paid, We Get Paid fight last time, either.

So, disinformed, misinformed and cruelly led, we’ll vote for comfortably-fixed, propertied, white males with influential connections…again.

(I still don’t know how much of every dollar I donated to the Obama campaign was instantly given to Rupert, Sumner, Les, Bob and Jeff for my candidate’s spots in broadcast media.  And I probably never will know.)

That’s dumbocracy.

Blue Hands

In Sanctuary (Angel 1.19) Detectives Lockley and Kendrick converse casually but meaningfully while investigating one of Faith’s innumerable crime scenes.  They talk about pithy junk before Kendrick challenges Lockley’s faith in ooga-booga-stuff with unassailable, empirical and logical reason by nailing her with a topical X-Files reference, which Lockley corrects by undercutting Kendrick’s faith in his generally cocky cop-hipness.  Whatever.  The most remarkable aspect of this interaction is that all of the plainclothed and uniformed cops trooping around the room are sporting blue(-gloved) hands in an episode that aired 02May00, which is just about 28 months before the BlueHands guys made their first appearance on Firefly.

Sanctuary was written by Tim Minear and Joss Whedon, who must have noticed the striking visual peculiariarity of the viagra/TidyBowl-mitts-effect and  simply incorporated that unsettling visual event into the repertoir of the disturbingly bureaucratic and lethal Blue Hands duo, like an ace-in-the-hole.  The other intriguing similarity resides in the Firefly episode, Safe, in which some stress is placed on the irony of the episode-title in that nobody we care about (not even two very rich generations of Tams) is remotely free of danger — and just as Angel confidently comforts Faith in the certainty that no harm can befall her in the comfort of the sanctuary his ultra-low-profile fortress will afford, a heavily-armed Council of Watchers taskforce descends like nightmare terrorists into her morbid gloom and attempts to put the boot to the big damned hero-vampire, rogue slayer and most anybody dumb enough to be caught in Angel’s subtextual asylum.

I’m not saying that any of these casual observations are important or terribly meaningful, but they’re nothing less than noteworthy, either.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

I’ve always said that Angel 1.14 is my favorite episode in that series, citing the fine narrative devices that lead the viewer to the deeper reveal beyond the dear old hackneyed.  I don’t remember noticing previously that The Prodigal episode (that directly follows my permanent favorite)  drops our titular protagonist into the eternal Oedipal soup in the very same position that Ryan occupies in the preceding hour.  Angelus’ consternation arrives with Darla’s incontestible observation, to blight the hellish victory he’s made of his liberated future on the bodies of his parents and the blameless faith of his murdered sister.

I’ve always thought that  I’ve Got you Under My Skin speaks with uncommon brilliance, through the horror of an Ethros demon, of the writer’s void.  It also opens the cover on a study on the properties of bullying.  The thing is that The Prodigal ends by refreshing the infinite uncertainty of the challenged, writerly point of view, and expressing it in the wordless revelation of tragic futility or divine humilation that plays across Liam’s face.  A transposed and augmented echo that’s approximately as indescribably cool as the last chord in A Day in the Life.

There’s an allegorical warning there, lurking in the darkness.  It’s probably meant to caution those who aspire to be either vampires or writers; not so much to dissuade anyone, as to fairly present the first, unpublicized sacrifice that marks the turf where a person died and a writer arose it its place.  Great stories sometimes appear long before we’re ready to appreciate them whole. 

“Let’s get to work”, is an unremarkable phrase that ends the series’ final episode as aptly and succinctly as it punctuates the first.  It’s a phrase that goes entirely unnoticed on the first pass through the show, yet stands out like a hitchhiker’s swollen thumb sticks out from beneath the tires of the bus, whenever the story’s retold, with the shocking inevitability of half-forgotten prophecy.

Choices

I’m just sitting here ruminating about Episode 19 of Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer  in an exploratory kind of way.  Thinking that Faith is a fairly obvious name for a character that may also extend a metaphor made popular by J. Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5.  That

• faith and reason are your shoes, you’ll get farther with both.

There are two slayers in Sunnydale, despite prophecy and tradition and common sense which dictate there can be only one     at a time…on. the. entire. planet.  And Faith (Id) is a trifle unbalanced, perceiving the gift of her slayer powers as unqualified license to satisfy all of her amoral appetites, spurn all personal responsibility for her independent actions, and deny the importance of untoward consequences that flow naturally and logically from the free exercise of those powers.  It’s all 5×5 to terminate vampires, but the moment she exterminates one measly human, a scrutinizing circle of social condemnation converges on her judgment and her capacity for reason…which leads her into the ridiculous happy arms of affable, fatherly evil.  Faith in The Unknown versus rationally-deduced knowledge of empirical fact; there’s probably a wildly-successful televison show or 50, somewhere in that dogfight.

Two slayers in Sunnydale should lead one to the natural conclusion that Buffy, is probably the story’s repository of reason.  Um, no.  Regroup. (Return with us now to Dopplegangland, where ultra-inhibited Willow meets her evil alternative-self, who’s surprisingly attractive, amoral, and kinda gay [Foreshadow much?]) I’m thinking it’s gotta be Willow because this episode coincides with the (shockingly-arbitrary) natural order of high school seniors choosing which college (destiny) toward which they’ll embark for the following season(s).  Willow’s option-identity is exactly opposite Faith’s with regard to offers from Oxford, Harvard, MIT…while the more-amoral slayer (who dropped out of high school long ago) is presented with a decidedly limited number of far-less-illustrious options (that might involve hopping a freight out of town).  And this episode’s entitled, Choices.  But Willow’s abduction by the forces of mayoral evil (during the theft of the box of bat-spiders) forces the Slayity (Scoobies — I just prefer to call them the Slayity) to choose between rescuing Willow from torture and death or to thwart the mayor’s plans for the box.  Oz wordlessly casts the deciding vote.  No choice.

I’m going with the college-choice thingy, for now.   So if Buffy isn’t the Fort Knox of Reason, I’ve just got to conclude she’s always been the dynamic balance between two terms of an inspired contradiction; the primary target of terrifying evil…who just happens to be a champion evil-ass-kicker.  Buffy’s always been the pivotal oxymoron, the neo-iconic contradiction to the hackneyed stereotype of cheerleader victimization, damsel in distress, virgin/whore…and stuff, taking back the knight for refund (and maybe a delicious cookie — I just love the way she delivers that line, as though this show were Sesame Street and she’s a precocious 3year-old).  So Faith and Willow represent a cardinal opposition of faith and reason that encompases a rare confrontation between the two of them in the mayor’s office when (to my ear it’s entirely clear that) Willow’s the master of her destiny, while Faith is a leaf on the wind of fatal circumstance.  “Tough life?  Boo-hoo.” (Do better!)    ♫Willow, weep for M.E.♪  (Superego much?)

But, while faith, reason and balance work just fine as a nifty, patented triunity of Goddessnessness ness, Cordelia presents an interesting problem in the narrow confines of my tidy little uberchick-community.  In Earshot, she’s the only person who speaks her disgustingly-human mind without restraint, shame, edit or euphemism…and Buffy’s new telepathic ability makes Buffy (Ego) a psychological leper in her tightly-knit knot of hypocrites, who uniformly flee her company – except for Cordelia, who seems never to have met an unpleasant thought she didn’t express immediately, which calls directly back to Out of Mind, Out of Sight; to the soliloquy in which she candidly expresses her preference for being an isolated, ignored and unknown star at the gooey center of popular attention, offering up a fascinatingly paradoxical perspective on the universal human condition of agonizing isolation with relatively-acceptable options.  By the way, she’ll become that solitary star more literally, a few seasons later.  Ripper Giles is a living validation of the hope of redemption, while Angelus and Spike are unliving examples of that hopey principle.  Anyanka and Amy also, kinda.  And Wesley will shortly justify some small extension of our charity, because, well, what the Hecate.

So, for now, I’m dropping Cordelia into the Goddess pot of tetrunity, positing faith and reason as opposites to the fist of secrets (Buffy) and the slap of streaming insults (Cordelia), as the four-part manifestation of  Joss Whedon’s philosophy of human ecology/psychology/entomolgy.  And that makes Xander…?  Joss!, the Jimmy Olson of The Daily Hellmouth, the erratic/spurious chronicler and life-restoring resident fuck-up whose attentions and affections wobble from one cardinal female character to the next (serially and in peculiar combinations), forming a kind of eternal pyramid that’s mystically resistant to network cancellation, which Willow chooses to maintain in Sunnydale.  Nice Choices.  Cookie!

In the best of Cartesian worlds, Faith and Willow define a locus of points on the X-axis; Buffy and Cordelia are on the Y; while Zander/Joss lends canny and inane perspective from the semi-illiterary Z. 

I stink, therefore I am.  3D!

Slaying Alias

The pilot episode of Alias presents a styilish whirlwind of information that shoots out at the audience like a torrent of unrelenting Cool from a gilded firehose.  It isn’t recognizably boring or flawed…until about 55 minutes into the episode, when Sydney Bristow races down a staircase in a public building with semi-automatic pistols blazing from her fists as she shoots the hinges off a fire door, then kicks the door down without breaking stride, while craftily and resourcefully continuing to elude her heavily-armed pursuers.  Bullshit!

There are a couple of glaring flaws in the scenario I just described: 

Doors leading into stairwells open into stairwells  (since the Triangle Shirtwaiste Factory Fire of 1911).  Kicking down a door from the stairwell side — even if the hinges were magically removed or shot away — could not permit you to pass fluidly through to the floor below.  The door would have to fall into the stairwell side of the opening.  (Disbelievers should consult the Uniform Building Code, or explore a stairwell door in any office building).  The absurdity of Sydney’s solution to the door problem completely prevented me from wanting to give a crap about the stylishly presented whirlwind of information (largely exposition) spewing from the Alias firehose.  More-or-less unfortunately, the bulk of Season 1 awaits me this Christmas holiday weekend before I can send the DVDs back to NetFlix.  Alias watching is taxing.  Lots of television and movies isn’t Show Business at all, it’s Tell Business.

The other flaw, apart from the door problem (that would have gummed up Sydney’s fast-paced, fluid escape from her pursuers), is that hinges on a closed firedoor don’t sit flush on the surface of the frame to be shot away (like a corral gate), they’re recessed into the reveal at the hinge-side of the frame; so a handheld disintegrator pistol from some episode of Star Trek might eliminate all three hinges swiftly, but the configuration of the frame (its stops) would still prevent the door from falling in the desired direction.  I stumbled over a stupid trick that prioritized storytelling style over substance.  I don’t want to look more closely for subtler cheats.  Alias is slimy-slick and interesting, but taxing.

Alias, on the strength of this otherwise insignificant moment in the pilot episode, doesn’t bother to earn the respect that’s absolutely necessary for this audience-member to bother following its rapid-fire permutations of narrative.  Buffy does.

Xander, in an episode I just passed through (The Wish, I think), at one point bars the entry of a mob of Xander-loving girls through the paired opening to the school library.  He pushes a heavy card-catalogue-desk up against both doors.  Moments later, Giles pulls open the active door from the corridor side, and enters the library.  It’s a tactical error in barricade-maunfacture that Xander makes quite frequently.  And it’s exactly the kind of pointless, swashbuckling actionism that underscores comedic flaws in his intermittenly-manly yet deeply heroic and intolerant character.  These flaws in Xander’s self-image naturally flow into his final confrontation with Jack O’Toole near the end of The Zeppo, when Xander’s (not particularly manly) capacity for self-sacrifice undercuts the dead bully’s lust for self-preservation (ironic).  Cowed, O’Toole defuses the bomb.  Xander leaves the boiler room triumphant.  O’Toole mutters a promise to make Xander’s life a living hell, as Oz, in the form of a werewolf, bursts into the boiler room to re-kill and devour O’Toole, which explains why Oz is “oddly full” the next day when Xander offers him snackfood.  Tidy.  Earned.  Fascinating attention to cohesive storytelling detail.

Doors, by the way, are far more wonderfully interesting machines than you probably think they are.  I’ll ramble on in this post for a while, but if the stuff I’m writing here leads you to explore any door of your choosing in minute detail (or two) I’m very happy to have been of some small service to you.

Joss sometimes speaks (in interviews and commentaries) of the inflence of True Believers on their social environments.  These scraps of information serve to shed particles of light on his use of True Believers as a force for ungood in Mutant Enemy stories, but gradually hypotheses form.  The Eliminati in Bad Girls are, for example, sword-wielding vampire warriors whose numbers decrease prodigiously because of their true belief in a bigbad pile of excrement who somehow inspires their unswerving alliegence, while barely lifting a finger.   I wish Joss would take the time necessary to define his use of industry terms more clearly; moments, beat, moves, earn, undercut…there are lots of them that don’t necessarily yield useful information when other people use or explain them.

Seemingly-heroic acts of terrible violence are perpetrated by dedicated followers of vengeance, mock-rebellion, nonsense, the whims of unprincipled leaders…these True Believers don’t get much respect from Whedon, who has them break store windows, sacrifice civilians, kill, mame, loot and destroy…usually under the cover of darkeness, various forms of flobotnam or simply out of deranged and misguided values.  These seeming-heroic acts of violence seem to fit into my view of his perspective on various forms of cowardice — unlike Angel’s surprising confession to Buffy in Amends that the demon within him is an insignificant threat to civilization compared to the weak and cowardly man he was even before the demon possessed him.  Human frailty, imperfection, and deep aspects of universal human character drive these stories.  Flobotnam is smoke that mirrors window-dressing.  Sometimes a window is a mirror that unites the viewer (rather than separating us from) the enactment of fantasy on the other side of it; quite often, when the fantasy is produced by Mutant Enemy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t as good as it gets.  I mean, for example, that the “play-all” (episodes) option on Alias DVDs is vastly superior to the Buffy format (which requires lots of cursor movement and/or remote-control clicking and interminable waiting between episodes for the annoying bits of redundancy and loudness, to which I objected in the previous blogpost).  But the good stuff (narrative content) that flows from Buffy episodes is vastly more valuable to me personally than the stuff that flows from Alias, LOST, Fringe and Heroes, because it’s about stuff that interests me in the real world.  The other shows dwell on moral particulars that only exist in their own storyworlds.  Buffy’s writers use the embarassingly manifold flobotinous devices (of mystical instrumentality, incantation and possession) unabashedly to tell informative tales about real people’s real problems. 

Most fantastic television builds fanciful stories about apocryphal science (Fringe) or covert operations (Alias) or a bizarre array of contradictions that were never properly explored on Gilligan’s Island (LOST) about entertaining problems people don’t have — see Heroes for an endless litany of choices you’ll never have to make;

• if I slip back in time to save my mother’s life, will I step on more history-changing butterflies than if I save my girlfriend’s life? or 
• is confessing my invulnerability to yet another guy who can fly an aspect of my dysfunctional and marginalized identity? or
• when does Heroes exceed the velocity of entertaining fun to become instructvely meaningful? 

It never, ever will.  That’s not its purpose.  It’s about commerce, like other forms of utilitarian pornography that don’t bother to earn the permanent respect of any audience by teaching us anything useful. 

Whedon’s fancies (in terms appropriate to David Milch) are meaningful and applicable to Murrow’s observation that television can teach.  For all the Byzantine complexities of the shows I’ve mentioned, and dozens of others, the lessons are rich in information about stylish presentation, the limits of fantasy in audience-engagement, mirth, manipulation and crafty storytelling, but Buffy’s my chosen channel of engagement with entertainment.  It’s less concerned with its smoke&mirrors than with helping me make sense of the real world:  And yet it strives a good deal harder than most television to preserve several coherent layers of narrative consistency internally, within its constructs; so that the doors of perception swing meaningfully, as though a rare respect for the expertise of below-the-line crew (and other Ordinary Americans [like the national and global audience]) were just as important to ethical storyelling as the inevitable high-profile showrunning bullshit. 

Whedon’s fanciful ideas about reality are instructive, as are those of David Milch  (e.g., the functional utility of the Miranda Warning, as practiced or taught by Bill Clark).

I’ve hours of the first season of Alias to wade through before I sleep again.  One of us will slay the other.  I plan on playing computer solitaire while cruising through the DVDs, so I’ll probably have nothing more to say about Alias…I hope not.

I Only Have Eyes for You

My favorite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has, for years, been the eleventh of the first season, Out of Mind, Out of Sight.  I’m fond of the fundamental notion that people can be rendered invisible by the oxymoron of concentrated social negligence and focussed indifference, and then there’s Cordelia’s brief, casual, touching soliloquy in which she details the isolation from which she cowers, deep in the cover of her own cruel popularity.  Also the intriguing link between Sandollar Televison’s Marcy Ross and the bigbad Marcie Ross at the heart of this episode, which reminds me that Joss did (Toy Story) time at PIXAR long before Violet Parr appeared/disappeared in The Incredibles and the words in Marcie’s text at the end of the story require a pause-button to read John Lennon’s lyric.  This stuff was designed for broadcast, but was always meant to be revisited multiplatform.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970561.html?categoryid=14&cs=1

So there’s plenty to like in Out of Mind, Out of Sight.  It remains my favorite sode, but close on its heels is I Only Have Eyes for You, which comes near the end of the second season to foreshadow the season finale showdown between Angel and Buffy by turning them into gender-role-reversed dolls playing out an unresolved script enacted by mismatched lovers forty years earlier (40 centuries?).  What appears to be a discrete, episodic, 43minute short story really isn’t, because it so greatly enriches, cures and flavors the contradictions that culminate in the season’s very-serial, un-reconcilable conclusion.  Meredith Salinger and John Hawkes bring impressive chops, and I always liked James Whitmore, Jr. (even when he’s only directing), and Marti Noxon’s some kind of branding touchstone for me.  (“Irreconcilable” is the wrong word.)

There’s also a thing involving the 50s that accentuates Mutant Enemy themes that always heighten the recognizable paradoxes of choice & consequence, appearance & reality, vengeance & redemption –  as though those things we had ”yesterday” (standards) lend judgmental dimension to everything that plays out contemporaneously at the end of the 20th Century.  The Angel episode, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…wields that discrepency brilliantly, like an inescapable weapon.  By Out of Gas on Firefly, the scathing edge of backstory was so finely honed it isolated vital organs (of the riveted) absolutely imperceptibly…but the effect is nearly identical to the noir presentiment of inevitable surrender to an utterly distasteful fate; used car dealer(s) pimping junk, wooing Jayne into betrayal of his previous crew, Zoe’s contempt for Mal’s flying car, Wash contemplating modifications, Kaylee caught starkers in the backseat while she toils beneath the hood.  (I think that everybody in the 50s strove to appear adult and middle aged, which looked especially strange on us kids.) 

Recruising Buffy is a wonderful treat.  It’s like gazing through a telescope backward and looking for thematic similarities to show themselves in the context of DollhouseHorribleDriveWonderfallsFireflyAngelBuffyToystoryWaterworldSpeed and information gleaned from interviews.  It’s fun to keep revisiting a body of masterworks-in-progress.  Aspects that once seemed set-in-stone transform like treasured, moth-eaten butterflies because I bring a different set of stones on each successive pilgrimage.  (Veiled cathedral reference with a hint of gallows humor [masquerading as windows humor; because I don't do gallows.])  I also don’t do emoticons with punctuation symbols; well, not here.

Interestingly, Mutant Enemy products are always about real life in ways that LOST and Heroes are not.  In fact, the entertainment values (that woo the crap out of an audience) often disguise the bedrock aptness of salient points, and only upon revisiting these stories do specific diagnoses and potential paths to remedy for universal human conditions become clearly visible behind the joys of clever language, layers of wit, knowing winks, cheesecake/beefcake, abundant humor and cool flobotnam.  They’re stories about people in remarkably familiar situations.  Not cinematic manipulations, not superpowers, not idiosyncracy and formulaic media-enabled nonsense.  Okay, less rote and manipulative than most popular shows built for more popular networks, but lots less locked into bait-making…with frequent revisits, the moves grow less novel, but the moments emerge like amendments to the viewer’s constitution…chief among which is the right to be wrong in every previous assessment.

If Hansel and Gretel are society, the breadcrumbs that lead them to permanent gifts of culture come from bakeries with familiar names that build strong imaginations 12 ways.  Mutant Enemy’s one of these.  They’re rare.  That’s all I’m saying.

Oh yeah, the downside:  I’d download all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if I could afford to do so, to fix what’s wrong with the DVDs:

1. Slow down the vitally-important credits so I can fucking read them.
2. Drop the volume of the music that runs under credits.
3. Make the volume of commentaries independantly variable.
4. Always engage subtitles because the language in performance is often underarticulated, and at least as important to me as the extra-verbal interpretations of the actor(s).
5. Edit out the terribly redundant ”Into each generation…” speech that intrudes on the top of early episodes and usually leads directly into the same too-damned-loud credits-music that runs under titles. 

Point 4 deserves the additional note that Joss Whedon’s adventures in graphic novelty (X-Men, BtVS, Angel, SereniFly) have always suffered (in my opinion) from a devastating lack of continuity from panel-to-panel, as though the actors in his television shows were absolutely necessary to communicate the flow of context between moments that are storyboarded into a hell dimension devoid of coherence.  It’s WAY too easy to blame the illustrator/penciler, because this enthusiasm for Whedon-narrative led me to the graphic novels of Brian Kellar Vaughn, whose stories are wonderfully fluid when rendered by a handful of splendid collaborators.  So Point 4 is partly a criticism of young actors who generally speak/mumble their lines too quickly for my taste, and it’s a reminder that the success of a television showrunner doesn’t necessarily signify unqualified genius in every medium.   I won’t part with the bucks necessary for experimental editing of the intellectual property owned by 19th Century Fox Home Entertainment…yet.  There’s plenty of stuff I can fail to accomplish in the meanwhile.

I think our most valuable cultural endproducts reflect the contributions of collaborators more than we’re disposed to believe.  Auteurs, studios and expensive logos may be lightning rods for attention, but under-hyped people below the line-of-sight are probably more indicative of quality in the endproduct than the famous names that garner most of the attention.  So I want to see credits clearly and follow people like (for example) Jose Molina,whose work with Mutant Enemy led me to Castle, which also involves Nathan Fillion, but the lightning rod was Molina.  So I’m inclined to believe that modern storytelling (transmedia or whatever) is and has always been far more rooted in the complex relationships, skills and dedications of the armies of people who make them than the reputations of branded auteurs, studios and networks.   You follow the money.  I’m following the people.

I’m saying this entertainment stuff is

• of people,
• by people and
• for people

…a whole lot more than it’s about business plans, MBAs, egomania and box office receipts.   And probably shall not perish from the earth when things (like the fortunes of media moguls) change.  Things do.

Coraline

I found a lot to like last night in the iTunes rental of a very photogenic movie that reminded me of Buffy Summers taking up residence a the lip of another hellmouth.  A plucky, prickly, idiosyncratic,  female hero contradicts my sixty years of Dudly DoRight programming.  I like that kind of a lot; but upon reflection, this morning I’ve begun to see a certain resemblance in Coraline to the desperate American themes that flowed out of 9/11.

Coraline Jones’ dissatisfaction with intractable governance by her modern, negligent, (and wired) distracted parents leads her to explore a new domain in which more-attractive alternatives eventually reveal themselves to be an incontestible evil presence that threatens the security of her homeland.

Maybe I’m responding to the film with ingrained male chauvenist resentment for the subordination of maleness in a story that features three females in positions of preeminent power, and maybe it doesn’t matter.   The most intriguing consideration is that the source of evil in this movie receives no particle of sympathy, which reminds me of our president’s near-simultaneous Nobel acceptance speech in which the presence of absolute evil in the world justifies the inevitablity of war.  It’s a point of view that negates for me the attractive platitudes about hope and change that raised a contradiction into preeminent prominence.

I really liked the film, but I find the reality nauseating.

Not long ago, I mentioned an interest in learning more about India’s struggle for independence from Britain.  Unfortunately, I NetFlixed Lord Mountbatten:  The Last Viceroy as a DVD tele-remedy for my woeful ignorance.  It’s one tough slog for several reasons. 

Everybody speaks English in this 6hour presentation.  Nobody speaks American, and the various characterizations of famous and notorious personages weigh in with interminable passages of important exposition that’s more or less incomprehensible, while millions of Hindus and Muslims are busily wreaking profoundly irrational vengeance against one another and kicking the crap out of Sikhs.  The entire native populations of India come off as relative nutbags as the representatives of Britain appear to be ingenious, resourceful and steadfastly rational.  This is not the story I need to learn anything about the release from colonial bondage of a people engaged in the successful search for freedom (from the box of intellectual property confusion).  It’s, instead, the ideosyncratic tale of a landscape of victims, as far as the eye can see, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is even worse, although the Le Carre interview in TTSS‘s special features is deeply and remarkably insightful with regard to the conscientous consequences of maintaining imperial dominion.

“Ideosyncratic” isn’t spelled correctly, but it says precisely what I mean; that an ideational agenda (supporting the benevolence of despotism) underlies the quirky and more-or-less entertaining recitation of docu/fantasy events that compose the theme of all three stories.  The idea at the root of that common agenda is that incarnate evil exists and must be violently opposed.

In Coraline, that evil is an older, desperately-loving and empty version of Coraline Jones.  In The Last Viceroy it’s an undefined age-old history of religious intolerance.  In Tinker…it’s duplicitous indifference in the imploding-vacuum consciences of our best&brightest undercover patriots.  But in all three stories, the villain is an interesting and familiar two-dimensional stereotype whose point-of-view is underrepresented, except as a terrible force that thwarts the good guys.  The good guys ultimately win, and the benevolent, confusing despotism of copyright law prevails.

Max comes closer than anything I’ve read or seen to a sympathetic demonstration the rationale of evil incarnate; self-interested opportunism.  That’s good enough, for now.

Narrative Perplexity

I’ve spent the past couple of days of this long Thanksgiving weekend streaming Heroes, courtesy of NetFlix.  The remainder of the afternoon will be whiled away with Volume 5, but there are a couple of things I’d like to mention before making the final drive toward the last several hours of plot reversals, adrenal effusions and bizarre surprises.

Richard Stallman’s paraphrasing of Stewart Brand’s pronouncement (that “…information wants to be free…”) starts with this:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

–Brand

and goes here:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

–Stallman

The Brand proposition attributes intent to data that people value, while the Stallman revision restates the original premise as a personal committment to people.  The difference is enormous, and Heroes manifests that disparity in the form of a contradiction.  (Many contradictions strike a precisely negotiated balance between extreme terms in continuum.)

Heroes is a television show that was born in the midst of media-industry transition from old-school TV to new.  It led a captive audience through a first season of exciting revelations concerning fictional characters that were designed to resemble our friends, our families, ourselves.  It did this by cleverly withholding thematic information selectively while supplying visceral thrills, moral questions and an intimations of overarching mystery, season after season…without ever actually satisfying the audience hunger to know why Heroes exists as a compelling, fictional metaphor for ordinary human existence.  And ultimately, it doesn’t.  As the seasons roll on and on, the thimblesful of insight into the human predicament afforded by this television show don’t adequately feed the appetite of the information-hungry audience it created.

Ordinary people are elevated in the fourth season to places of importance that rival the super-able stars of the show.  These ordinary people,  like Annie the anal roommate become grist for the mill of Heroes plot lines and kill themselves, are incinerated, disemboweled or are otherwise sacrificed to the penurious dispensation of truly-useful information that’s held tight to the bosoms of writers, while the audience’ attention turns elsewhere.

The barrage of visceral thrills, intriguing moral and intellectual issues, character studies and evolutions…don’t justify waiting around for four years for the persistent denial of service to the fascination that turned us on to Heroes in the first place.  What happens when several ordinary people discover special abilities in themselves?  Eventually the layers of perplexity surrounding a television show that asks that question loses its impatient audience to less ambitious questions…because Heroes doesn’t provide much information that’s particularly useful to (ordinary) people, let alone us real folks who aren’t een remotely ordinary. 

 Heroes hasn’t changed my life, and I don’t feel any wealthier, but do I find myself resenting its persistent refusal to service the premise that brought me to Heroes in the first place.  There’s a point at which narrative complexity gets lost in narrative perplexity.  Each of the seasons I’ve explored this weekend reaches that crisis by episode 5, when the Previously…On Heroes presents a ridiculously labyrinthine montage of memorable mysteries that always leads me to snort derisively at my stupidity in watching a show that promises to resolve straw-man mysteries it fabricates without ever resolving dick that’s truly meaningful beyond the fanciful confines of the show.  Heroes is about Heroes.  It’s bearing on real life is negligible compared to the investment of time and attention required to find it valuable weekly over several seasons, given that I’m having trouble staying interested in the course of a four-day weekend.

Jason Mittell’s landmark essay on Narrative Complexity needs rereading; the write environment DVD (featuring Joss Whedon and hosted by Jeffrey Berman) arrived in the mail yesterday, along with the Whedon/Jones Dr. Horrible prequel comic; Tim Minear on Breaking the Story and Joss’ remarks in The Master at Play…these things offer greater promise of deeper satisfactions between now and Monday than the balance of  Heroes episodes remaining before me in Volume 5 of Season 4; a perplexing numbering system, too.

“My favorite procrastination is working on the sequel of the work I haven’t finished.”

– Joss Whedon to Jeffery Berman for The Write Environment

http://thewriteenvironment.blogspot.com/

A Matter of Life and Death

I’ve been cruising The Archers’ films because they’ve slipped way under my radar forever.  A Matter of Life and Death is a remarkable film on every level, but I’ll touch on only a few of the points that strike me as unusually clever, after making this single reference to the astonishing ability of these filmmakers to build even the simplest premise into a deeply moving, visceral experience that’s worlds of complexity apart from, yet very like I Know Where I’m Going!

The film opens in the midst of the cosmos with narration that gradually turns our attention to night on Earth, driving us slowly into a story that begins from an objective vantage very high over the English Channel and glides us into the belly of a severely wounded WWII British bomber; panning past the vacant cockpit as David Niven’s voice cheerily explains his dire situation to someone pleasantly female at the other end of his radio connection.  Eventually Niven, the pilot, makes his appearance visual, wearily slouched beside the body of his dead friend, Bob, as he draws the noose of this very tense tale taut around the neck of these first few minutes, with technicolor flames licking boldly past new windows blown in the fuselage while he’s facing the tail of the plane.  Then he jumps through a port in the floor of the burning aircraft, into the foggy night from an indeterminate altitude, prefering to drown, not fry.  No parachute.  Terse.  Abrupt.  Laconic.  Poetic and cool!

All through this opening sequence, Niven varies his tone around the theme which his variations circle like giddy vultures in a kind of intoxicating gallows-cockiness, as he falls in love with the American girl who’s sharing his very last words.  I found myself thrilling to the realization that the pilot was flying blind on autopilot, having lost his battle to save Bob’s life, he strikes up a final conversation with the nearest airfield, and gently passes a message for is mother into the shell-like ear of a real nice girl, before hurling himself into the abyss. 

The kicker is that he survives the fall, meets the girl on her way home from work, and that still leaves unspoiled about 80 minutes of this darkly beautiful and deeply enthralling film.

Ian Christie’s commentary is informative and reverent, pointing to the Archers’ intent to soothe tattered British-American relations at war’s end by putting the Empire on show-trial for crimes against the races of the world, with no less formidable an American prosecutor than the fearsome and fiery Raymond Massey demanding the life of this aviator, who stands in for the British Empire, but then, so does his plane.

Christie mentions the initial critical disfavor for the inappropriate denunciation of Britain that’s neatly articulated in the climactic scenes of this so-called “dated” film.  I’m amazed at the eloquent intelligence that an utterly (self)righteous American levels at England, as every scathing accusation he hurls fits post-1945 America at least as well as it fits Imperial Britain since the Battle of Cadiz, and even more especially well since 9/11.

Apart from (or in addition to) the bittersweet political irony, A Matter of Life and Death magically found its way into my gut and squeezed before it twisted; very much in keeping with the powerful emotional experience I found in I Know Where I’m Going!  Black Narcissus and Peeping Tom…not so much, but there’s plenty more of Powell and Pressburger, so I too know where I’m going; straight to Helen Mirren (40 gorgeous years ago), Colonel Blimp and Canterbury.  

FoE4 is a good deal glitchier than I’d ever imagined it would be — podcasts next week, if the good lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise.  Like I said, glitchy.

A Boil to Lance

I spent the end of last week with two of Lance Weiler’s films, The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma.  No spoilers, nor plot-recitation here, but I’ve been thinking about a couple of points of reference in two transmedia horror-mysteries made with the very-direct involvement of a pillar of the transmedia community.

At the heart of both films, a deeply buried injustice leads to two different approaches to telling a mystery story: 

In The Last Broadcast, a character named David Lee is making a film about a multiple-murder involving the two hosts of a cheesy, cable-access television show called Fact or Fiction.  Lee’s process of telling the story frames a succession of concentric frames around the story-within-a-story-within-a-story…and each of those frames is distorted by the dissonant agendas of each of the successive, objective storytellers who’s controlling the frame of the story-telling.  The most obvious of these agendas belongs to the unseen team of prosecutors who hire a disinterested video editor who they charge to bolster their case with a rhetorical video argument that hangs responsibility for the murders on the defendant of their flimsy, circumstantial case. 

But (almost) each of the several storytellers interviewed in the course of David Lee’s documentary filters, edits, and distorts information to redefine and scramble the pilosophical opposition of fact and fiction.  It’s a fascinating film on numerous levels, some of which exceed the confines of internal narrative by leaching into the processes of making a digital film, distributing it independently and outside the parameters defined by conventional practice, and exhibiting at Cannes.  Go define “success”.

Head Trauma elevates guilt to the status of a central character, whose crucial influence throughout the film leads to a very Weiler-y notion (as the story ends with the protagonist’s next-door-neighbor drawing images in his bedroom that suggest that) the connections between people may be more substantial, valid and influential than we’re inclined to attribute to reality; more important than stuff that fits in our philosophies, Horatio.  The viewer’s imagination lingers on the possibility that Julian’s friendship with George just might demonstrate the faith that no man is an island of isolation, that responsibility for an old injustice is most mysteriously shared.

I wouldn’t dare to deem these metaphysical themes beyond the reach of a filmmaker whose defiance of convention, established practices and teams of influential naysayers has already made history.  Whether Julian Thompson shows up as a sequel-character in another of  Weiler’s films matters a whole lot less than that Lance is making films that boil furiously beneath the surface, depict in narrative cinema and in cinematic practice the minority belief that the processes of making connections between people are significantly more important than the product.

State of Play

Every character appearing in this 6episode BBC television series is a traitor.  And the greater the interval each character spends on screen is the rough index of exacly how complete, complex and intricate is the betrayal of  each one’s nexus of conflicted faiths.

One interesting and inevitable difference between the series and the movie resides in the difference between 127 minutes and slightly more than 300, but the television version is vastly more sophisticated and interesting because it questions practically everything in which the audience places its confidence, including the blameless innocence of the television audience that relishes celebrity scandal, corruption in high office, and juicy stories that betoken the fall of comercialized journalism into the valley of the shadow of Internet.

Both stories center on the strenuous intelligence efforts of crusading journalists to dig ever deeper through layers of misleading lies while ferretting out Absolute Truth.  The American version keeps the protagonists (mostly Russel Crowe) reasonably pristine and admirable as he fearlessly plunges into the corrupting fusion of Big Business with Big Government that’s localized, crystalized and focused on a personal story to which he’s intimately tied through friendship, personal history and covetous, romantic aspiration — Big Media’s also complicit, by the way. 

The American version whitewashes the protagonist for an NC17 audience that doesn’t really need to know about the British version of Cal McCaffery’s realized erotic liaison with his former best friend’s wife and the innumerable instances in which he lies to practically everybody with whom he comes in contact (recording conversations, bluffing to achieve advantage, betraying every confidence and in the process resigning himself from a personal life) while chasing the tail of a really Big Story, as though the don’t always shoot the messenger, because they always do.

All of the people in the British version are versions of Dominic Foy, deceitful, comedic tool and moderately-competent intermediary for deceitful Higher Powers.  The public face of decency, particularly in Foy, is always a dubious cover for the increasingly obvious treacheries that teem beneath his twitchy exterior.  The transparencies of Dominic’s various poses make him the comic foil pushed by the crusading journalists, and pulled by the various aformentioned Higher Powers, to spill every last bit of his guts with a ridiculous reluctance that’s drawn out through the length of the series, and culminates in a pathetic symphony of bathos in which we clearly see ourselves.  The thing is that everyone else who appears in the series goes through the very same process of being compelled by external forces to spill the truths of their chosen melange of indiscretions.  That even applies to Sonia Baker, whose single, deliberate act of conscience results in her suicide/murder that gets the whole gigantic wrecking-ball started.

The tale of the unravelling of John Simm’s Cal McCaffery takes upwards of 300 minutes to tell, but it procedes with a dark and ominous inevitablility that dwarfs the crises of conscience illustrated by Russel Crowe.

The state of the art of double-dealing is exquisitely rendered in the longform version of State of Play (which concludes without a conspicuous, resounding thunderclap of private resolution), although I very much enjoyed the movie version that offers a shred of hope of redemption for a world that’s now run by…(wait for it, Dominic)…my everloving peers.

Transmedia As Pretext

Transmedia storytelling, as defined by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 book Convergence Culture, is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer/user/player’s understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, it attempts to create “entrypoints” through which consumers can become immersed in a story world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship, or transmedial play as defined by Stephen Dinehart in his 2006 transmedia thesis project “Journey of Jin” at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

There are two prominent factors driving the growth of transmedia storytelling. The first is the proliferation of new media forms like video games, the internet, and mobile platforms and the demand for content in each. The second is an economic incentive for media creators to lower production costs by sharing assets. Transmedia storytelling often uses the principle of hypersociability. Transmedia storytelling is also sometimes referred to as multi modality, referring to using multi-modal representations to convey a complex story through numerous media sources.

Transmedia Storyteller, Jeff Gomez, defines it as “the art of conveying messages themes or storylines to mass audiences through the artful and well planned use of multiple media platforms.” Jeff furthers this explanation stating the following: “Most of us flow naturally from one medium to the next. Unfortunately most of our content doesn’t. Instead the stories are repurposed and repeated. They do not extend the franchise nor do they build brand equity. With transmedia, each part of story is unique and plays to the strengths of the medium. The result is a new kind of narrative where story flows across each platform forming a rich narrative tapestry that manifests in an array of products and multiple revenue streams. The audience is both validated and celebrated for participating in the story world through the medium of their choice.”

I lifted those three paragraphs directly from Wikipedia in order to riff on “bible” as the name for the masterplanning document that ties together all of the various media that constitute the continguous, immersive storyworld of a gargantuan transmedia narrative.  I think “score” is a significantly better word for at least the following reasons:
1.  A bible is a holy book that is not meant to be modified by anybody but God.  Ask anybody at FOX News, the Jerusalem of divisiveness.

2.  The unifying basis for hypersocial behavior is significantly less important than the act of unification.

3.  The conductor of a symphony orchestra leads dozens of musicians (with the aid of a score which documents the intended sequence of performance for players who are engaged with a wide variety of instrumentalities across variations in key, meter, mode and ambiance) to invoke the wholehearted and selfless participation of an otherwise passive audience; from auteur to superconductor.

If the evolution of transmedia entertainment relies on a biblical metaphor it will probably neglect or underserve the contribution of the audience to change a narrative course that’s set in stone.  I think it’s significantly more visionary to regard the narrative as plastic, even dispensible, when the masterplan is introduced to the vagaries of audience participation; the urtext is only a pretext for hypersocial interaction.  Symphonic orchestras rarely encourage members of the audience to rise in the aisles for inspired choruses of air-guitar virtuosity, but that’s exactly the kind of participation transmedia entertainments are designed to facilitate and nurture…unless the bible metaphor persists, which makes this new media model especially vulnerable to mercenary exploitation, literalist misinterpretation and irrational stumbling blocks of Biblical proportions.

The two-hour video at the other end of this link:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/538

is introduced by Dr. David Thorburn who reappears 106minutes into the lively discussion with skeptical observations and invaluable advice about reinventing media.

Spinning Wheel

Jamie King (Steal This Movie) said that conversations about intellectual property commonly focus on fan appropriation of the holdings of corporations rather than the view that transnational conglomerates have colonized global information markets and preserve colonial rule through copyright law and other information management tools.

“We talk about intellectual property as if it was about the rights of small creators, whereas it’s far more, far more often the extension of colonial might across the whole world enforced through legal means…through these legal compacts.  And that’s something that’s never really recognized in these discussions, is that if you buy the idea that intellectual property is just about supporting your rights, in fact,  you’re buying into a system which is specifically and precisely a system of domination.  And quite a terrifying one.”

He cites the rumor that he’s especially famous in Brazil because Monsanto’s program to cultivate genetically modified soil terrifies some Brazilians who have limited access to information to gain global traction in any popular movement to oppose that program…except through those means advocated and authorized by Steal This Movie.

I think the now-familiar binary (that polarizes media-audiences and media-producers into pirates and moguls) simplifies this current period of transition excessively.  As the technological means to focus attention grow less exclusive and costly, signals of dissent will get out.  The challenge seems to be where else to look, how else to listen.

I think I need to know a LOT more about India’s liberation from colonial domination.  That seems like a more appropriate model of this period in the evolution of information than the usual vision of fans dressed up as Klingons versus cigar-chomping emperors of entertainment fiefdoms.

http://www.babelgum.com/browser.php#play/PLAYLIST,order:FEATURED/1,4002796

In case the link is useless, it’s meant to lead you to Bablegum; to a 32 minute Q&A in which MDot Strange, Timo Vuorensola, Jamie King, Lance Weiler and Arin Crumley answer questions from the audience at the (June 2009) Edinburgh International Film Festival conference panel moderated by Liz Rosenthal for Power to the Pixel.  Last week’s London BFI conference should soon be added to the Babelgum library.  Or there’s this alternative route:

http://powertothepixel.com/videos-london-2008

I guess I’m trying to say that the labels affixed to factions in this arena are profoundly misleading.  Producers, fans and critics, academics, masses and stakeholders aren’t as discrete and dissimilar as they used to be — the architects of transmedia entertainments are usually voracious fans of media whose work can be recognized as critical of what-they-love(d).  The hundred-days-strikers said we’re all in this together.  I think that wasn’t just a slogan, it’s becoming increasingly necessary as a means to enrich, enliven and liberate global culture from those who disagree.

The writers also said They get paid, We get paid.  I don’t think they were talking about attention, but an explosive expansion of the lexicon of attention (as the most legitimate medium of exchange) seems to be what’s called for first.

Kindly check this out:

http://springboardmedia.blogspot.com/

That Minbari Woman

Maybe it’s just a mirage of parallels, but I do see subtle similarities in the shape and scope and a couple of details that align That Hamilton Woman with the first four seasons of Babylon 5.

I inserted the film in my NetFlix queue to round-out the flow of disks in the mail and also to provide an overdue peek at Leigh and Olivier working together, apart from Fire Over England,  so I’d no expectation of Lord Nelson’s arrival at Naples as master of the Agamemnon, coincidentally, the name of John Sheridan’s command when he won The Battle of the Line at the end of the Earth-Minbari War.

According to the film, Nelson’s military career came to resemble that of a diplomat as the admiral’s predictions regarding Napoleon’s intent (global domination) were eventually recognized by the admiralty and Parliament as prescient.  The commentarian describes That Hamilton Woman as an overlooked jewel of an underfunded film largely because it was rushed into production to help draw America onto the side of the British in the run-up to World War II, so Nelson resembles Churchill in Korda’s film…and to my mind Sheridan resembles both of them as relatively ordinary military men coping with extra-ordinary diplomatic circumstances.  And Delenn and Lady Hamilton share divided loyalties, rising (or falling) from their comparatively straight and narrow paths to merge in the popular imagination with fascinating places in history.  And both of them were metamorphic changelings.

I don’t know that Joe Straczyinski would validate any of these allusions as his influences, but That Hamilton Woman is a remarkably interesting “propaganda” film in which instances of surprisingly astute visual imagery (shot in a rush on a shoestring — that really doesn’t show) bring history to life in the form of an allegory that remixes elements of mythstory brilliantly to serve contemporary audiences, and it probably always will — so long as we keep making dictators and people to oppose them.

The final episode of Season 4 is 90% pipe-laying and 50% bewilderment, but despite the confounding limitations of budget and seasonal continuity, Straczynski’s The Deconstruction of Falling Stars is a good deal more than a thrilling segment, it ties up more of the loosest ends of a 4year series than I imagined possible, while dropping the second shoe on the pedal and accelerating into a fifth season like an 11th hour stay of execution that requires the condemned to be exhumed.

Needless to say I’m looking forward to the arrival of the fifth season and to the several feature-length television films that round out the saga of this universe in which Nelson, Churchill, Hitler, Napoleon and Agamemnon all make interesting cameo appearances.  Maybe they’re all just a mirage of parallels, and then-again maybe there’s something constant in the human condition that makes Norman Corwin’s question intermittently answerable.

“What have we learned?”

I wonder if somewhere in America there’s a Truman’s Column in Hiroshima Square.  I hope it’s a rhetorical question.

Half in the Blog

Twenty-four fluid ounces of Corona is like a semianual (re)treat because I’ve never been much of a drinker, and I probably should have spent the morning meditating on The Unexpected, because pretty much every possible “t” has been dotted and every available “i”‘s been crossed since I set off this afternoon primed for Brown Pelicans and Forster’s Terns, and ultimately, kitesurfers (‘long about 1600) when the wind kicks up on a fairly glorious veryearly Autumn afternoon.

But like I said — The Unexpected — resulted in practically zero birds, zero wind, and by 1800, when I’d snagged an extralarge WomboCombo, along with the aforementioned mini-jug of Corona and who’d a thunk it?   Baklava! was sitting right there at the supergrocery.  So, arriving a casa, I hauled all my paraphernalia thither and picked up the mail, noting my NetFlix envelopes — which turned out to disinclude Babylon 5 Season 3 Disc 4.

I noted earlier in the afternoon that anything I happened to have that happeneds to have a strap on it got snarled or otherwise entangled on a windowcrank or a shiftlever or a whatnot shelf or an ashtray or any old thing kids make at sleepaway camp one waaaylongago Summer.  So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Babylon 5 Season 3 Disc 4 (apparently) involves missing episodes called Ship of
Tears, Interlude and Examinations and War Without End Pt. 1 .  Tying into the WomboCombo, all 24 ounces of Corona and Babylon 5 Season 3 Disk 5, that is, War Without End Pt.2, I discovered that the temporal paradox that appeared in Season 1 (in which Sinclair was introduced to Zathras on the temporally intermittent Babylon 4) figured prominently into a plot that has me so thoroughly turned around that I’ve got no clue which way is up…but three muted cheers for the boneheaded folks from planet Minibar.

Undaunted, I’m downloading the three missing episodes from iTunes while blithering and giggling like a junkyard dog, but not without noting that Zathras is probably my hands-down favorite character, at par with Garibaldi and the more-recent renditions of Ivanova, because he’s looking around and spelunking in Babylon 4′s brown section for appropriate tools and materials to effect repairs on the White Star’s time machine and vocalizes each evaluation with a wholly unnecessary sentence that puts inappropriate tools in their places.  “Time is not short.  Time is infinite.  You are finite.  Zathras is finite…nice tool.  Won’t help.  Nice tool, though.”, and wonderful junk like that.

That’s 1.5 missing episodes presently downloaded since starting dinner and including this blithering.  I’ll be caught up in no time.  Is no time finite?

On a more serious note, the fair use exception to copyright restrictions, as outlined in a couple of places I’ll site when I’m less half in the bag, don’t even step in the general direction of the promotional defense of media scholars and educators lifting stills and clips for purposes of demonstration/illustration of principles taught to students.  And I don’t know why that is.  If the alliance of motion picture and television pimps (AMPTP) can claim in the course of a writer’s strike that the internet’s utility to networks and studios is under study and all web distribution is “promotional” (non-revenue producing), then I don’t understand why watercooler-conversations-on-steroids (moderated by media scholars and educators) is generally presumed to decrease the commercial value of the intellectual property of the corporations and individuals who own the IP.  Liken it to “buzz”, and demonstrate the utility to studios of introducing perenial loss-leaders to a brand new, innocent, nationwide audience of media students.  There’s no need to prove transformative whatever if teachers are helping these stingy bastards sell their shit.  No doubt I’ve missed some important legal point, and I’m also losing my buzz.

There goes the completion of the download of Interludes and Examinations, with a mere 48 minutes to the point at which I can begin to watch the start of the two-part temporal paradox episode (if I start watching Ship of Tears now, I’m only 96 minutes away from continuity with the episode that is now only 36 minutes from completing its download) that got me so confused that I knew exactly what to do.  This is me begging your pardon for wasting your infinite.

Fidgetal Culture

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/462

Dr. Thorburn’s intoductory remarks underline the arbitrary separations that:

1. prejudicially divorce high and low culture from one another, and that
2. make the future SEEM so different from the past that looking to  history for insight only happens in retrospect.

It’s probably accurate (enough) to say that digital technology/culture actually had a beginning, and that we’re presently ploughing though its middle.  If the end of folk and digital culture is written anywhere (other than the totally-suspect Book of Revelation) it spoils this entire season of metareality technovision.  Where this interesting, modern era fits in a halfassed, arbitrary category-system: comic, action/adventure or dramatic…? remains to be determined by somebody who jumps the gun by anticipating its end and defining the character of this age based on the arbitrary insertion of a delusional barrier.

“Modern” life is just like a massively-multiplayer ongoing television serial (for excellent reasons), and the showrunners’ identities are assigned retrospectively by wallflowers in subsequent eras, often for underscrutinized reasons.

Last night I caught a few minutes on television of a PBS documentary called The Sixties, in which a number of fascinating speculative conclusions were drawn, that:

• The new&improved “less ruthless” Robert Kennedy’s presidential candidacy in 1968 was significantly shaped and tempered by the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy and Bobby’s literary introduction to Albert Camus.
• The revolutionary movement in 1968 was global and thwarted in America by the murders of MLK and RFK, transforming boomers and our sympathizers from a generation dedicated to profound political and social change (back) into an enormous mass of addicted freaks who instantly became nostalgic for what might have been.
• Had Richard Nixon refused to appear on LaughIn, his paper-thin 1968 victory over Hubert Humphrey might not have happened.  As though 40 years of conservative political dominance in America stems from vastly improved candidate marketing practices.  Half of that sounds to me like it’s absolutely true, but the other half sounds like an alibi.

This documentary was narrated by Peter Coyote, whose previously-discovered penchant (San Francisco is a city of seven square miles, and 24fps is Ed’s legacy) for mouthing intriguing nonsense leaves me less than confident in the speculative conclusions scripted by the documentarians.

I don’t have an insatiable appetite for the study of history, but the comforting appendices and soothing conclusions afforded by better students than me (and narrated by Peter Coyote) should facilitate a hunger for much closer inspection of arbitrarian rhetoric and a brand new lust for the constant discomfort and fidgeting of living culture; folk, digital, media, commercial, “modern”…because the fat lady’s singing is probably always going to be some arbitrarian’s hallucination.

Possession and Duplicity

These are two contemporary films that pull in opposite directions: 

Duplicity is the complex, convoluted love story of a couple of awful shits reduced (by choice) to finding themselves so entirely unloveable that the only other person capable of fashioning a life together with them is an utterly untrustworthy mirrorimage of the covert-operations scumball each of them has become.

Possession brings together two young, jaded, malcontented, 2002 academics whose mutual interest in an illicit 19th Century liaison takes them from their stale complacency to the gradual discovery of an incandescent obsession that exceeds the tight, repressed, Victorian focus of their common interest into the bold adventure of shaking off their respective dreads and making a life together.

I disliked everybody in Duplicity (with the sole exception of the character portrayed by Tom Wilkinson) from start to finish.  That’s despite the fact that I admire the Gilroys tremendously for their ability to tell enormously complicated stories.

Neil Labute’s individual sensibilitites were far less evident to me in Lakeview Terrace, but his Possession commentary radiates a very deliberate, oldschool austerity that dwelt on the stillness of camera, emphasis on the actors’ conception of character, and the creation of a film bent on physical authenticity that leaves the audience knowing more about the narrative than the characters who lived it.

The difference between these two films is most evident as each concludes; with the comparatively staid academics utterly reborn and revitalized, and the shits beginning to realize how completely they got screwed. 

By the end of Possesson, Paltrow and Eckhard have exemplified and demonstrated a remarkable range of human imperfections, many of them unspoken, compassionate projections that replicate for the audience the process scholars (and audiences) employ in transforming negative capability into positively meaningful elements of universal, experiental art.

Roberts and Owen, conversely, bring a few persuasive speeches through to the end of their story that’s barely about the power of  their deeply disguised affections for one another, and mostly dedicated to the multiple whining engines of glorified self-interest that actually drive the film.  Duplicity adheres to The Great Man Theory of Everything if greatness is measured in degrees of harm.

These two films find the fork in The Conversation like a surveillance camera that eventually moves to follow action.  I prefer the choices Labute made that seem to be more conscious of the mental and emotional life of an audience scenting story than the Gilroy approach in Duplicity which was quilted from swatches of various timeframes to deliver an icy vision of people inclined to freezer-burn.  Not that the excellent performances needed thawing, it’s the original what-if premise that’s simply unbearably cold.

Years ago, I caught the first five minutes of the first episode of Babylon 5.  The gala, ambassadorial setting nearly made me puke.  Now, because of Henry Jenkins’ interview with J. Michael Straczynski, I’m taking another look, and impatiently awaiting NetFlix’ delivery of the remainder of Season 3.  It still isn’t much to look at, but the story is infinitely more engaging, complex and fascinating than a peek at the pilot betokened.

Remedial Entertainment

Struggling to follow along with various discussions of transmedia entertainment, I’ve come to think of this inevitable trend as “remedial”. 

I was deeply surprised a few years ago to find, while participating in a couple of Firefly forums, that I was  rubbing virtual shoulders with profoundly conservative Browncoats, whose interpretations of the beloved text (we’d all studied scrupulously and thoroughly admired) reflected political views that were diametrically opposed to mine.  I was shocked that I’d never noticed that my unspoken assumptions about government, personal responsibility and junk like that weren’t shared by 100% of the Whedon-loving community.

A little research led to the realization that my reading of Whedon’s liberal intent onto the material was no more valid than the libertarian and reactionary readings of people I’ve always tended to visualize as rednecked mastercriminals.  Define evil.  Nope — try again.

The simple fact that a single property has the power to draw together wildly divergent audiences under a common banner is the primary reason I like to call this stuff remedial; it facilitates healing of the bleeding, hostile chasm that prevents adherents of opposed political agendas from talking to one another with good ol’ indispensible civility.

Remedial also applies, in another sense, to my personal history (in the 80s and 90s) of having dropped the habit of reading, going to movies, watching television, and feeling plugged into contemporary culture.  I was busy failing to teach myself to draw for 15 years, pretty much 16 hours/day.  So when I was loaned the Serenity DVD for a weekend in 2005, I (reluctantly but spontaneously) devoured the film four times that Saturday afternoon before racing out to Tower Records to buy myself a copy and snag the season of Firefly…which blasted open my perceptual doors to a great many unexpectable things and scads of additional “branded” purchases over the past few years.  “Branding” has absolutely nothing to do with the studio (20th) that owns the IP, nor the FOX network that botched&cancelled the 2002 broadcast presentation (my money’s on Sandy Grushow for that unforgivable series of blunders). 

Since 2005, I’ve been engaged in an autodidactic bonehead crash-course in media culture, trying to catch up (to the communal worldview of an audience and writer-director who’ve been paying attention to stuff I stopped watching for a couple of decades) by following some of the vaguest and most ill-concieved treads of association imaginable.  A comprehensive list here is impracticable, but among my most peculiar trains of thought are examples of deranged rumination that led me to see the operative as Paladin (in Have Gun – Will Travel) Season One, and Tom Whedon (father of Joss) has a few things to say in the special features of the DVD re-release of The Dick Cavett Show:  Comic Legends.  Although, looking for Reaver-spoor in Texas Ranch House is more wishful thinking than common sense.  I’d estimate 75 pounds of better choices amassed in the past four years.  I’ve even made a chart of the ideas I wanted to pursue across dozens of properties that have nothing to do with 20th nor FOX, except coincidentally.

The thing is that the casual loan of a DVD four years ago ignited in me a hunger I didn’t know I had, and the hunger still burns fairly brightly.  I didn’t know one could read by the light that hunger gives off.  So…long after “the death of print”, I’m reading more now in a week than I read throughout the 80s (except for three bewildered passes though The Photoshop v2.5 Bible, before I had a computer) and injecting annoyingly irrelevant remarks at Henry Jenkins blog:

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i_2.html

for example.  And even though I usually feel like a Special Ed student at the back of a class designed for the best&brightest pupils, the informality of my remedial education doesn’t seem to prevent me from participating, yet.  Perhaps it’s just a lack of common decency.

Early in Convergence Culture, Professor Jenkins differentiates communication platforms from media.  I suspect that the differences between these two closely-related phenomena are easily and frequently confused, and that that confusion impedes a clear understanding of the role the transmedia movement will play in healing a divided and mistrustful Union.

It’s just preliminary thinking on my part, but I think certain platforms effectively target particular communities. 

• Radio (now often called audibooks at iTunes) is probably far more appealing to people who don’t see or don’t read than books and graphic novels are. 
• Radio leaves a lot to be desired by the deaf as a means to communicate nuance. 
• Silent films (in particular) with their frequent use of intersitial text, but all movies and television that condense exposition with printed verbiage don’t really keep illiterates optimally engaged — likewise, subtitles. 

The point of this (my exercise in transparent stupidity) is to suggest that transmedia (in this example, trans-platform) entertainment presents any one singlularly immersive world of engaging content from as many platforms as is feasible in order to attract to that media property the largest audience possible.  If I knew more than I do about videogames, I’d lump them in here, as well.

From this perspective, perhaps Bob Iger sanctioned Marvel to draw the nuclear family together again.  Pixar attracts everyone in the family to a seat under the Disney entertainment umbrella, except the leather-jacketed, disaffected rebel, who’d rather be out raising hell or clubbing than joining in family night at the multiplex.  Remedial entertainment from a vertically integrated, transnational conglomerate that’s hellbent, Buy’nLarge, on grabbing Up the attention of the entire family with wholesome family entertainment, whether they want the entire Disney-ethos package, or not.

On the subject of enumerating “platforms”, I’ll probably stay fairly fuzzy and confused until I can learn to differentiate traditional classroom education from other forms that strongly resemble it.  Stand-up comedy is often indistinguishable from modes employed by classroom teachers.  So I’ll pull out all the stops and stop blithering entirely, once I’ve suggested that remedial edutainment is desperately needed in the necessary evolution of the dying discipline of journalism, our government’s holiest and most-reviled limb.

…except for one more thing and that’s that X-Men Origins: Wolverine doesn’t just kick ass, it pulverizes it — and Lynn Collins brought all the juice to her role as Kayla Silverfox, Wolverine’s girlfriend, that came with her to Portia in The Merchant of Venice.  We’re talking bout the quality of mercy, here.  Vaporized it.  Jackman, Schreiber, Kitsch and Reynolds! Nobody phoned this one in.

Random Harvest

This is an amAzingly moving film.  It’s built on ideas that groan beneath the incredibly awkward weight of

• battle-induced amnesia,
• lives that reboot in fugue-states, and
• utterly unbelievably convenient conversations and coincidences that bear no relation anything other than plot devices. 

Despite these fatal flaws (and hosts of extremely idiosyncratic characters who advance the story one or two ticks and promptly disappear) this movie really rocks with relentless pace as it lunges through innumerble series of powerful emotional states…to leave me on one ear.

Greer Garson and Ronald Colman were exceptionally adept at spoken English, but far more importantly, each of them brought an invisible and tenacious grip to the clunky material that inflected their lines precisely to render completely authentic moments in synchronous concert.    They impart affective english that communicates spin to the bone.  This film is a wonderful, profoundly engaging testament to movie stars and radiant acting.

I have a quibble.  Colman’s shell-shocked amnesiac character appears a few moments into the film.  In light of more recent films I’ve seen lately, I wish he’d played Smith as though he were a consummate gentleman slowly recovering his lifelong composure from the inexpressible monster he’d discovered in himself at war.  Smith is played, instead, as the victim of external forces beyond his control and not as the author and audience of inescapable actions witnessed and perpetrated in the ungentlemanly theater of war. 

It’s a slight, but significant difference that would lend weight to the unintended violence he metes out to the women who will penetrate the fog of him later and repeatedly throughout the breadth of the film.  His fuzzy impressions of inestimable damage he’s done to those he’s loved are precisely correct, and the distance he preserves from everyone is neatly cloaked in the guise of an elegant, capable, kindly English gentleman.  Jekkyl/Hyde sans fantasy bullshit.

The film is laden with rich and insightful opportunities for Colman to have made the beast more recognizable within the scope of his character.  Lydia’s bad penny remark at the homecoming breakfast table, delivered exactly one hour into the film, is an ideal opportunity for Colman to have demonstrated the kind of rapier-like sardonic wit for which British intellectual aristocrats are very justly infamous.  Her self-interested, arrogant ignorance of the toll exacted of war veterans makes this moment eminently suited to the complex demonstration of Charles’ merely physical resemblance to the man who went to war and the enormity of experiential difference between the original and the returning prodigal.  Still, it’s only a quibble.

Kitty’s profound maturation is performed by an actress I don’t yet recognize, but the strained plausibility of her transformation from adolescent to knowing woman is remarkably exemplary of that self-same wonderful grasp of material exhibited by the leads.  The entire tale hinges on underspoken communications, like kilted Paula in her music hall dressing room exuberently inching her chair (and her super-abundance of LIFE) closer to the damaged Smith while flying past emotional stops that range across vast continuua.  It’s an unbelievably satisfying adventure, just watching these actors work far beyond the confinements of a groan-inducing, yet fascinating script. 

I enjoyed the daylights out of this one!

Don’t google Susan Peters if your heart is even a little bit brittle.  She’ll wreck you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Peters

Oppenheimer

Smarter and more industrious folks than I am lead me to believe that the plan to detonate an atomic bomb above the unalerted Japanese city of Hiroshima was carefully devised because a more humane demonstration of overwhelming power might have failed miserably (with disastrous consequences to American military and political [not scientific] careers).

No prior warning was provided to anybody Japanese.  Civilians were commonly held to be every bit as hostile to American military action as were members of the Japanese military. 

The bomb was regarded as an unreliable means to persuade Japan to end the war; unreliable, because it might fail to explode and an humane warning would only serve the counterproductive purpose of calling attention to an American failure.

Civilian target.  No warning.  These choices were made to insure that American face would be saved if the demonstration of our power fizzled.  But the atomic device didn’t fizzle, it worked — and any pretensions of  our moral superiority were vaporized in each of the successful detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  911 outrage loses luster in this context.

The American government’s race to beat the German government to the creation of unparalleled destructive power resulted in the obliteration of lots of Japanese lives because the Japanese people were known to be incredibly loyal to their government.  Loyalty…bad.

Ken Burns’ The War and the BBC’s Oppenheimer haven’t helped me to an understanding of the pleasure we Americans took on VJ Day.  Both presentations strive to be fair, but the information they present doesn’t (attempt to) disguise unfathomable atrocity, instead they spread before me entire feasts of nauseating wrongs, American and otherwise.

Perhaps a more strenuous course of investigation (following lines of research previously covered in these two productions) will yield reason for more comforting evaluation of these facts.  Comfort…good.