“A tentpole film is one where you can seed the desire to see the film to everyone in every distribution channel. It’s the only kind of film you can spend $100 million marketing,” he said.
Hendrickson’s talk was mainly focused on solving problems in digital production on tentpoles, but he began with an “Econ 101” presentation on the movie business.
“People say ‘It’s all about the story,'” Hendrickson said. “When you’re making tentpole films, bullshit.” Hendrickson showed a chart of the top 12 all-time domestic grossers, and noted every one is a spectacle film. Of his own studio’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which is on the list, he said: “The story isn’t very good, but visual spectacle brought people in droves. And Johnny Depp didn’t hurt.”
Visual spectacle, he said, drives attendance in a film’s first few weekends. And unlike years past when a movie like “The Lion King” might stay in theaters as long as a year, almost all movies are out of theaters quickly now. “Once you’re out of theaters your maximum profit potential is over,” he said.
I went to see “Cowboys and Aliens” last weekend, so I’m feeling fairly tentpoled myself, and I don’t really like it. Terrible story (as all the critics said. I know, I know. I don’t know why I wanted to see it.) [click to continue…]
I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendor of the spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt … When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savage have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and Thevet? – Claude Lévi-Strauss
Speaking of which, I watched Midnight In Paris on the plane, coming home from vacation, which seemed a fine occasion to watch such a film. It seems like a good idea for a film. But I don’t think it ended up being a good film. It’s too self-satisfied with the fact of it being a film with a good idea for what it’s going to be about. It kinda rests on its laurels before it even gets started. Owen Wilson is just walking around, giving a passable dramatic reading of his lines. All the actors playing the famous figures from the 20’s are having fun, but in a light sort of Hey Kathy Bates is pretending to be Gertrude Stein and Adrien Brody is having fun with his Dali accent kind of way. The direction was … fine. Paris looked like … Paris as filmed for a nice American Express ad or something like that. Competent evocation of a beautiful city. Is this what all Woody Allen movies have been like for the last 20 years? I really haven’t checked in for a while. Seems like lots of people really liked this movie. It was ok. Did you like it?
Of course, there’s more to life than stuff with big words aimed at early readers. There’s stuff with few words aimed at early viewers! Here’s a good deal on a nice, quite comprehensive collection of the very earliest silent films, Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 1 [amazon]. I lectured about some of this stuff in my Philosophy and Film class last semester, because I focused on sf – crossroads of speculation and spectacle. It’s a common critical complaint that Lucas/Spielberg-style special effects blockbusters killed a lot that was great about American cinema, in the 1970’s. Then again, film was industrial light and magic from the start, pioneered by the industrious likes of Edison and Georges Méliès (stage magician). No film could be truer to the authentic roots of the medium than whatever Michael Bay is working on right now. Probably that new Transformers movie or something. Maybe that explains why so many of these early films are boring. But in a fascinating way.
What are your favorite early/silent films? What early cinema do you really, honestly, just love to watch. No grading on a curve or so-bad-it’s-good ironizing. I watched quite a bit of Charlie Chaplin, while I was reading Sunnyside. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I’ve posted before about loving Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. I’ve never watched any Buster Keaton; never watched The General, for example. Should I? I love Metropolis but I recently watched Fritz Lang’s Woman In The Moon and didn’t really get into it. It veered between dull and draggy self-seriousness and extreme silliness. Although Fritz Rasp (a.k.a. The Thin Man, from Metropolis) was fun.
Who do you think should get the moon gold, should it exist? Defend your answer. (Maybe that inter-title should be an inspirational poster.)
Like everyone else, I’m glad Ta-Nehisi Coates got a NYT op-ed. Unlike everyone else, I haven’t seen X-Men: First Class yet. (Hey, I like comic books.) But I get the general idea, so I’d like to weigh in on the whole Magneto Was Right issue (part ii).
Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X. [click to continue…]
Just listened to an interesting bloggingheads exchange between our Henry and Robert Farley on Egypt and zombie international relations.
Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.
Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism. [click to continue…]
Another film post: in teaching ‘philo and film’, I’m focusing mostly on sf, but branching into speculation in a more metaphysical sense, and spectacle in a more purely visual sense. One slightly oddball pick I’ve made is the Reinhardt/Dieterle A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) [amazon].
It was released on DVD for the first time last year and I really cannot recommend it highly enough for sheer entertainment value, and several other values as well. It’s not exactly a forgotten film, but this late arrival on the DVD scene is a symptom of some slippage between the cracks. Yet it’s got a great, big name cast. James Cagney as Bottom, the Weaver: [click to continue…]
Perrecentposts, I’m teaching “Philo and Film” this semester, with a focus on sf film. Here’s more of that, if you like that sort of thing. [click to continue…]
Teaching ‘Philosophy and Film’ this semester, with a focus on sf, I’m amused to read this bit from a Salon piece by Michael Lind:
If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval – hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.
He’s got the film history wrong. Metropolis came before Star Wars. Hell, so did Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times: that’s dystopian sf. Also, it isn’t really right to say that the theme of Star Wars is ‘technology bad’. Star Wars is really more a case of lacking a ‘science good’ message. Also, Star Trek is conspicuously moderate in its pro-science thematizing. Kirk is the captain, exemplifying the properly adventurous equilibrium point between McCoy’s emotionalism and Spock’s rationalism. Hell, that’s the theme of Metropolis, too. You need ‘mediation’ and ‘moderation’ between pure science and … some more human source of meaning.
I think we should distinguish at least six or seven stances. [click to continue…]
I agree this seems like a problem. But I think an awful lot of it has to do with the fact that Gatsby is basically crap, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone disagrees with me about this. Yglesias quotes a typical bit:
Or consider: “some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away.” How is it that Nick know for certain that Eckelburg isn’t practicing in Queens any longer but is unsure as to whether he’s moved or died?
I can answer that one. Fitzgerald is a bad writer.
Let me illustrate, by way of offering advice to aspiring 3D directors:
Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.
No, he doesn’t call them that. But here’s what he says:
I think you can be as outlandish as you want or as surreal as you want, as long as the characters are based in something real. You can put them in any situation or any reality as long as their reactions have something to do with humans beings and you’re focused on that element of it. I’m not interested in necessarily doing realistic things, obviously. I like fanciful stuff. But it can’t be just fanciful without people in it. Then it’s of no real interest. If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea, then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just a gimmick. (10)
I’m preparing to teach philosophy and film again and I’m looking for examples of films that hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs. That is, cases in which something impossible happens, and it isn’t identified as science or magic. It just is. Examples:
In each case, it’s not hard to think of other films that are clearly sf or fairy tales/ghost stories, but that are more or less the same story, in terms of set-up, general mood and themes. [click to continue…]
Highly recommended – Ajami, a film largely set in a part of Jaffa in Israel. Ajami is from the Tarrantino/Crash/Amores Perros school of multiple overlapping narratives shot from different points of view. It is basically unscripted and uses non-professional actors and improvisation. The movie concerns an Arab family in the Ajami neighbourhood who are engaged in a feud with a Bedouin clan. Drug dealing, a disappeared Israeli soldier and his relative in the police, romantic entanglements across the Jewish/Arab and Muslim/Christian divides are the other elements in the mix. I think that’s about all I can say about content without spoiling the plot. Politics are there, inevitably, but largely by implication – the film isn’t shouting a message at you. Get to see it if you possibly can.
I’m sure I first heard Joan Rivers the same way I did Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, on Frank Muir Goes Into… but she never entered my consciousness really till I moved to LA in the mid-80s and started seeing her on daytime TV. I found her captivating — the only thing on TV worth watching a lot of the time. Rude, self-deprecating, very funny, and very clever. So when Swift and I wandered past a theater showing her new movie last night we decided, whimsically, to go in after dinner.
I’d recommend it to just about anybody over 21. It certainly deserves to be seen by a wider audience than the scattering of old Jewish women and two middle-aged Englishmen who saw it in our theater. At first, Rivers simply appears to be a grotesque — right from the opening shot, through the introduction to her diminished life, whining about her lack of success and how it sucks being old. But slowly, gradually, the film humanizes her, never refraining from showing the warts. It is also very funny (not least because she is very funny).
Googling her afterwards I found this delightful profile from which comes this plausible, but odd, story:
As we wait for it to start, she tells me a story about Prince Charles, with whom she has been friends for several years. (“Not inner circle,” she says. “Outer-inner circle.”) HRH sends her a Christmas gift every year, which, more than once, has been two very fancy teacups. “One year,” she says, “I took a picture under my Christmas tree with the teacups and wrote, ‘How could you send me two teacups when I’m alone?’ Another time I wrote, ‘I’m enjoying tea with my best friend!’ and I sent a picture of me in a cemetery. And he never acknowledges it! He never says to me when I see him”—doing his accent perfectly—“ ‘Ohhhh, funny funny funny!’ So this year I thought, I’m just going to write him a nice thank-you note. And the other day our mutual friend calls and says, ‘Just spoke to Charles! He said, “I can’t wait to see Joan’s note this year!” ’ ”
Haven’t seen the new one yet (it will be the four year old’s first movie in the theatre, so we are trying to figure out a family expedition, so that everyone can enjoy him enjoying it), but its arrival reminds me that I’ve been meaning for ages to post on how _Toy Story 2_ maps out the major themes of Ishiguro’s _Never Let Me Go._ They both are driven by the same basic idea – of highly intelligent, potentially autonomous creatures who define their happiness entirely in terms of the happiness of others. In _Never Let Me Go_, this makes the (liberal) reader quite queasy. In _Toy Story 2_, this is treated as an entirely happy and natural state of affairs. Perhaps it shouldn’t be – and that so many people take the social relations in _Toy Story 2_ for granted, suggests that NLMG‘s clones’ acceptance of (and even joy in) their status is less socially unrealistic than some of its critics think.
There’s an article to be written on this (perhaps taking Gene Wolfe’s chilly little short story, “The War Beneath the Tree”:http://books.google.com/books?id=N-IemS8Uqn0C&pg=PA189&lpg=PA189&dq=%22war,+beneath+the+tree%22&source=bl&ots=d01op1lBBu&sig=3z2oDPQu93QmvgwOGa4MP7GKELQ&hl=en&ei=NLgeTLGDMYK0lQf96Nn9DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22war%2C%20beneath%20the%20tree%22&f=false in along the way. In the meantime, from this perspective, Stinky Pete is perhaps the only character in _Toy Story 2_ who is genuinely free, even if he _is_ stuck in a box for most of the movie.
Update: “Tom Houseman”:http://www.overthinkingit.com/2010/06/18/toy-story-proletariat/# has similar thoughts.
This is pretty good, though it tails off towards the end. The material about breaking the “colour bar” on the Bristol buses, the St Paul’s riot of 1980 and the growth of drugs in the 1990s is all very well done. (Best seen by going to “Playlist”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvI01RauSKU&feature=PlayList&p=70E1676A5ED3BE2A&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=1 )
[amazon]. I lectured about some of this stuff in my Philosophy and Film class last semester, because I focused on sf – crossroads of speculation and spectacle. It’s a common critical complaint that Lucas/Spielberg-style special effects blockbusters killed a lot that was great about American cinema, in the 1970’s. Then again, film was industrial light and magic from the start, pioneered by the industrious likes of Edison and Georges Méliès (stage magician). No film could be truer to the authentic roots of the medium than whatever Michael Bay is working on right now. Probably that new Transformers movie or something. Maybe that explains why so many of these early films are boring. But in a fascinating way.
. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism. 
(1935) [amazon]. 
[amazon], by Doreen Alexander Child. (No, I don’t know whether it’s good. Just started.)
