Right Now: Top 9

I”m going to do this again, without looking at the original list. Let’s see how they compare:

1. Brick
2. The Brothers Bloom
3. Sunshine
4. The Nines
5. Sleuth
6. Collateral
7. The Edge
8. In Bruges
9. Léon (The Professional)

I know a few have changed: The Brothers Bloom wasn’t out last time I made my list, and I don’t think In Bruges or Sleuth were on there last time. I know Man on Fire fell from grace, certainly not an easy choice, but some stuff had to go to make room for the films which have wormed their way into my life.

 

New Moon and the rise of Consumer Stupidity

I had the privilege of seeing an advance screening of The Invention of Lying last night, which was excellent. before it showed, there was one, and only one, preview: Richrd Kelly’s The Box. Now, I get pretty excited about movies, not necessarily the ones you’d expect, but when I say that I cannot wait for The Box, I mean that Richard Kelly is a genius and I would sit enthralled to watch someone read the back of a cereal box for two hours if he wrote the script. This movie looks so cool, I almost don’t even care if it’s good. It’s going to be awesome. Southland Tales was not what I would call great (maybe because, several viewings in, I still don’t get it), but it is cool as all hell to watch. Donnie Darko initially gave me the same reaction, except I knew it probably was great, I just didn’t get it (until I saw the Director’s Cut, whence it made perfect sense and is one of the most influential movies in my morbidly obese collection).

So, this preview comes on, I’m bouncing in my seat like a 4-year old on the way to the toy store, and after it, in the row behind me, I hear the following two-line conversation:

Idiot Girl #1: That looks terrible. I hope I never see that, like, ever.

Idiot Girl #2: Ooh, I know. OOH! I wonder if they’ll show the New Moon trailer!

I almost had an aneurysm. No word can describe my mood, my level of angered disappointment. Maybe “Lewis Black-ish” suffices. Nobody can ever remove that conversation from my mind. It will haunt me forever. I’m not really a violent man, but if I were… oh, if I were.

These two lines represent everything that is wrong with consumer culture. New Moon is not good. It’s not even out, and it’s already not good. Twilight was not good. Whatever-the-hell the third one is called will not be good. Hopefully there won’t be any more. If there are, they won’t be good. Bad writing, worse directing, worse acting, no cinematography. Those movies are the death of art in cinema. They aren’t alone, but they are in a unique position.

Their popularity is causing them to influence the entire next generation of indie filmmakers, currently disguised as socially awkward teenagers who now think this is what a good movie is. If any of you are reading this, IT ISN’T. Stop buying in to shitty cinema and go see a real movie. Go watch something by Danny Boyle (other than Slumdog Millionaire). Go watch some Darren Aronofsky. Some John August, some Rian Johnson. How about some foreign film? Some Michael Haneke? Some Takashi Miike? Or more importantly, how about some Richard Kelly. Go see The Box.

Throw your Twilight crap in with the rest of the trash and watch something that takes your breath away. Something pretty to look at, something you can’t possibly understand the first time, something… human. A good movie is like a person. It should take you years to figure it out, and even longer to appreciate it. Donnie Darko is Gandhi. Twilight is Miley Cyrus (that’s a bad thing, which you probably don’t know if you liked Twilight). Richard Kelly is a Picasso of modern film. Stephanie Meyer and the New Moon director are the artistic equivalents of a drunk four-year-old.

Those girls should be ashamed to be so stupid, but they’re too stupid to realize that. Don’t follow in their footsteps. If the world loses even one great filmmaker to consumer stupidity, I may snap.

One final note: I will say the soundtrack for New Moon unfortunately looks quite impressive. Thom Yorke, Death Cab, Muse, Grizzly Bear, they have gotten some goodies. All this tells me is that these musicians want money. A lot of money. They will get it. There is no such thing as artistic integrity in the soundtrack business. Thom Yorke has already established his artistic integrity about 9 times over, he doesn’t care. Money is not a shameful thing to pursue. Sure, they’re making money off of stupid people, but if you ask me, people stupid enough to buy into the Twilight culture of ignorance don’t deserve their money. Give it to a good cause. Like Thom Yorke. Someone with something to say in his life.

 

Two Lovers

Fair Warning: This post is really about Joaquin Phoenix. The movie was really well done. I enjoyed it a LOT. It isn’t for everybody. Not a very happy movie. It’s mostly about the illusion of happiness.

Consensus: 82/100

So I don’t know if people who aren’t as crazy into film as I am knew about this, but Joaquin Phoenix went off his rocker. He has apparently retired from acting and is starting a career as a (horrible, so I have heard) hip-hop artist. His E! Announcement was barely intelligible, and the subsequent Letterman Appearance was ridiculous. There have been rumors that he is doing this as a sort of immersion for a movie about a white hip-hop artist; Casey Affleck is doing a documentary about this whole thing. In either case, people are saying they respect him for going after what he wants to do, and people say those who come after him are just making fun of him, but I’m not impressed.

 

Not a phone.

I have an iPhone. I bought it the day the 3G hit the market (I got up and got in line), and I love it. It changed my life in a bunch of ways. I look at the weather now. I read news (something I always wished I did more of), thanks to an incredible USA Today app. I could have written this post from it if I had wanted (yeah, I know). Facebook, an eBook reader, a guitar. A FRIGGIN GUITAR. And the games. Whoa Nelly, do I love some of the games. And now, I have a really nice photo editor:

Yeah.

My point is this. That little bugger is NOT A PHONE. It has a phone in it, as part of it. But anytime something advances beyond a calendar, a shopping list, a crappy little camera, and a phone, it should no longer be called as such. I listen to music on it every morning as I walk to campus, check my email in class (along with Facebook, and maybe a game or two if it’s really boring), check the weather, and then maybe make a call. It is a phone for so little of its active use, that I feel even the word “iPhone” is a tragic misnomer. Unfortunately, I don’t do marketing, and so I don’t have a better idea. the iHOLYS***LOOKATALLTHECRAPTHISCANDO is too long to print on the back of this tiny thing anyway.

 

Bad Movies

In keeping with the spirit of the end of the post below, I have something that really bugs me that I always talk about, so I’m going to put it here. Bad movies. Especially bad expensive movies. Take two of my favorites (to complain about): 10,000 BC and The Golden Compass. They cost 105 Million and 205 Million to make, and they were both awful. Just awful (please don’t argue, you are wrong if you think otherwise). 310 Million dollars, pissed away. Honestly?

I live paycheck to paycheck, and I make like 17 Grand a year. I guess the school pays tuition too, but I never see that money, so it’s around 17 Grand. I have 25(?) Thousand dollars in loans waiting for me when I get out of school. And I don’t even have it that bad. I’m far from a humanitarian, but there are billions of people far less affluent than me, with far bigger problems. And somebody will waste Millions and Millions (almost) without batting an eyelash to make a movie that isn’t worth seeing. Think of all the lapses in plain common sense that have to occur here:

Writer: Yeah, this script isn’t terrible.

Studio Exec: Yeah, we could make this good and people will want to pay to see it.

Director: Yeah, this is a respectable project.

Actor: Yeah, I might win an award for this.

SFX Coordinator: Yeah, let’s spend Millions tarting this up so people don’t focus on how bad it is.

In this last case, one even has to resign to the fact that it’s bad in the first place. Attention, everyone, I have a news flash for you: An ugly person in makeup is still ugly.

If you’re still reading after that last comment, let me pose the question to you: Even though there are people far worse off than I, what do you suppose I would do with even a fraction of that money?

Nothing. Not for a while, anyway. Well initially, a little bit. Let’s speak in hypotheticals here. I’ll take a million dollars off the budget off of The Golden Compass, and they can shorten the final non-battle sequence (where no good character dies, and the bad guys all fall over) by 1 second (you may not realize that this figure is probably reasonable). I’d take $100,000 of that money, pay off my loans, buy 25 thousand dollars in comforts (are you kidding? That’s so much money. A flat screen, surround sound, an egg chair with speakers in it, a new laptop, and still probably with 10 Grand left over), and put the rest into a checking account, and I would not have to worry about money even remotely while I finish grad school. The other 90 thousand? Put into a CD, or high yield savings account, something like that, for 10 years. And then, you spend the rest of your life working to pay the bills, and living off the interest.

This is why people who win the lottery go broke: they have to have it now. People don’t understand, if they would just take a little, for fun, and then be patient with the rest, even for a little while, they would never have to worry again. This isn’t high-level math. Just don’t be an idiot.

I’d like to end this with two lists. First, movies that cost WAY TOO MUCH to make:

• Spider-Man 3 ($258 Million)
• The Golden Compass ($205 Million)
• Prince Caspian ($200 Million)
• Spider-Man 2 ($200 Million)
• Rush Hour 3 ($180 Million)
• Evan Almighty ($175 Million)

And many, many more. I’m just illustrating that we have over 1.2 Billion dollars of film up there. Even if any of it was incredible (it is not), that’s 1.2 Billion dollars. For like, 14 hours of “entertainment”.

Next, we have a list of movies that cost less than the $100,000 that would change my life forever, each of which is better than any and all of the above:

• El Mariachi ($7,000)
• The Brothers McMullen ($25,000)
• Clerks ($27,000)
• The Blair Witch Project ($35,000)
• Super Size Me ($65,000, a bit high for a documentary, but still)
• Pi ($68,000, which is astounding)
• Night of the Living Dead (I’m putting this here even though it cost $114,000, because it was more successful than anything on the first list)
• Once (Again, it may have cost $150,000, but it was better than anything on the first list)

This just makes me sad.

 

Super Bowl Commercials

According to USA Today, it costs 3 Million dollars to air a 30-second commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. That’s $100,000 per SECOND. The economy sucks, there are billions of people in poverty around the world, but some pompous American company will spend 3 Million dollars to be on TV for half of a minute. There are few things that speak more of American greead and ignorance than this. It embarasses me. It does. That 3 Mil is not even to MAKE the commercial, just to air it. I mean, really?

I also read something I did not know. There are only 33.5 minutes of available commercial time that go on sale for the Super Bowl (the rest is reserved for local ads, station ads, etc.). That’s 67 commercials, which I guess isn’t too bad, but it had always felt like more to me. Even so, let me throw a number out there. 201. Million. 67 ads at 3 Million each is 201 Million dollars. Do you know what could be done with 201 Million dollars? I don’t. It’s too large a sum for me to get my head around. I suspect you could solve a lot of problems for that. But instead we get to watch belching frogs, dancing silhouettes, or whatever some tool concocts this year. But only for half an hour.

EDIT: Anheuser Busch bought 4.5 minutes of commercial time, bringing their tab to 27 Million, and Pepsi bought 5.5, for a pleasant 33 Million. I would not be upset if the government decided to execute these marketing idiots.

2ND EDIT: You know, I’ve been thinking. Especially about Pepsi. It occurred to me, and so I polled one of the classes I teach, as to “is there anyone here who has never had a Pepsi?” Big surprise, no hands went up. Is anybody really more likely to buy a Pepsi becausse of the ads? I think the answer is doubtful. You have had a Pepsi, so you either like it or you don’t, and you buy one if you want one. Or you don’t want one. And then you don’t buy one. Pepsi is advertising to a nonexistent market: the potential consumer. Back in the day, when nobody knew what a certain product was, or when a product was new, commercials made sense. The intended response: “Hmm, I don’t have one of those, and it looks good.” But now? That market is nonexistent, people either have or don’t want products like that. Does the marketing department even expect to make back the 33 Million they spent buying that ad time. I may already have an M.S. in math, but I don’t think I need it to say those people are dumb. They wasted most, if not all, of that money, and that makes me really sad. Next time, try doing something good with that money. Give some to a poor graduate student. Not all of it, I’m not greedy. But honestly. Even 100 Grand would change my life for the better forever, and they wouldn’t even notice it was gone. (See the above)