So, to paraphrase Ben Howe’s point, if you want to make a good conservative movie, first, make a good movie. The same rule applies to humor: funny first, politics second. When it comes to gauging the impact of a satire bit, 100 praises or retweets from fellow conservatives aren’t as valuable as a single grudging “I hate your stupid wingnut politics, but I laughed.”
We don’t do this, because we don’t study the arts, and we don’t study the arts because we think them namby-pamby careers. Because artists are overwhelmingly progressive, conservatives don’t want to study the arts.
Wait a minute, we said. Let us get this straight: No studio would budget $5 million for a movie with Damon and Douglas?
“They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us.”
Yeah, who wouldn’t want to see Matt Damon smooch with the fossilized remains of Michael Douglass in a film about a really really not very interesting performer? That’s called “Behind the Candelabra”?
Every day brings new evidence that Affleck was the smart one.
At Ace, the failure of putting Space Swashbucklers in a Military Bureaucracy:
Space travel in fiction has two major tropes in its depiction. I’m calling these the Institutional Phase, and the Commercial Phase.
The beginning of space travel — and this is the same for any previous mode of difficult transportation — is the Institutional Phase. This is the period in which only rich governments or the sci-fi standby of the Large Evil Corporation Which Has Some Governmental-Like Powers and Attributes can build and launch a spacecraft.
The Commercial Phase comes later in science fiction, as it has in the past, and as it would actually unfold in the future. The Commercial Phase comes when the technology has matured enough to make it practical for small private owners. In the Commercial Phase, space travel is relatively common, almost mundane. It might be a bit expensive, but you can still cross a good part of the galaxy in exchange for a down payment equal to the cost of an old, beat-up Landspeeder. It’s not cheap, but you generally expect that if you have a few thousand credits you can hire yourself a flight to almost anywhere.
The Institutional Phase is Star Trek; the Commercial Phase is Star Wars.
Apparently Prometheus makes (among others) the mistake of putting Commercial-Phase Rogues on board an Institutional-Phase Spaceship. I didn’t see it, because the whole experience of the Star Wars Prequels soured me on prequels altogether (yes, officially Prometheus isn’t an alien prequel, but it was clearly written as one), and I didn’t hear enough positive word-of-mouth to counteract this. The word I did get was mixed at best.
Prequels — the attempt to tell a story’s backstory — are rarely worth telling, because they aren’t stories. A story has protagonists and conflicts. Backstories don’t; they’re the things that happen before the real conflict occurs. Dracula sleeping in his coffin for four hundred years before Johnathan Harker comes to see him isn’t part of the story of Dracula, because there’s no protagonist, nor even any real conflict. One of the few things that I liked about Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the way they showed us Dracula’s Fall From Grace. But then they cut to the actual beginning of the story, because Dracula is not the protagonist. Harker is, and there is no story without him.
So when you make a prequel, you have to invent a story in another story’s backstory. And since the themes and the conflicts are likely to be similar, this has the effect of undercutting the story that happens later. Because if Dracula has been defeated before, it’s not as big a deal to defeat him later. Do it often enough, and Dracula becomes as much of a surprise, and as much of a problem, as a silverfish infestation or clogged toilet: It’s happened before, and you know what to do about it.
Now, in the case of the Star Wars Prequels, they did have a story all their own: Anakin Skywalker’s Fall and the Clone Wars. So we’re just going to have to chalk that up to George Lucas’ consummate failures as a director and writer. But anyone familiar with the Alien movies could guess as to what would happen in Prometheus:
The Ship Lands on the Planet To Investigate the Mysterious Something
The People Poke Around Until they Unleash Evil
?????????
PROFIT!
And somewhere, a deep dark secret is revealed, right?
Final Gratuitous Shot at George Lucas: From the Ace Piece:
Star Wars is commercial phase, and also comical. They’re funny movies. They have a comedic spirit. (The originals, I mean.)
Duller than a great thaw is Vertigo, hurdling contrivance upon contrivance with such impossible conveyance of thought that one watches it like a man at a mark, praying that the firing squad kills you straight off. And while the preceding bastardization of Much Ado About Nothing is entirely too pretentious to be clever, it’s still less pretentious and more clever than Vertigo. Anyway, here’s Lileks:
But suspenseful? Not really. The filthy, dirty, ugly “Frenzy” has ten times the nail-biting quotient. Humor? None. It’s soaked with obsession, which means it’s serious. Look: “Rear Window,” my favorite Hitchcock movie, is also about obsession, in a way – but it’s intellectual, questioning, deducing. And it’s overflowing with life and characters and subplots, most of which we never see in detail. Technically, it’s magnificent – much more so than “Vertigo.” Everything in it is believable. Most everything in “Vertigo” is hokum.
It’s as though Hitch decided in the wake of Psycho that if an audience will sit through a plot-shift, they’ll sit through a shift to no plot. He was wrong. Psycho works because after investing an hour into Janet Leigh, we want to see her killing punished, or at least explained. You don’t get very far into the third act of Vertigo before you realize that nothing is going to be punished or explained.
My choice for the greatest movie would be “Casablanca” – the easy, popular, ordinary choice, yes. But quick: quote me one line from “Vertigo.” Find me a minute in “Vertigo” that has the visual ingenuity of “Kane” or the dramatic tautness of “Casablanca.”
“Jaws” is better. “Metropolis” is better. “The Great Escape” is better. Hell, “From Russia With Love” is better.
Let’s milk it, shall we?
Top Ten Commercially Successful Films Which Are Better Than Vertigo:
I’ve always rather liked The Great Gatsby, because I find Fitzgerald’s prose far better than any of the other Greats of the Roaring Twenties, especially Hemingway, who reads the way sawdust tastes, and Faulkner, who seemed to think that Henry James wasn’t quite loquacious enough. F. Scott never forgot that writing serves the story.
I don’t hold Gatsby as some sort of Iconic Figure of the times. I never felt any sorrow for Gatsby, because Daisy bored me. Yes, yes, I realize that she was supposed to represent something, just as he was, just as the light across the water was, just as the big enormous eyeglasses represent Fate or the prevailing moral sense or conscience or whatever you please. It’s a good book. It’s a great book. It spoke to the dreams and fears of a society that was suddenly flush and young and bent on fun. It was a Cautionary Tale. It channeled the romantic flush of one’s early twenties into a story that mistook those passions for tragic signifiers of the human condition in general, and the American experience in particular.
That’s just it: Daisy’s voice is full of money, and that’s about it. It’s not just that she’s a bad person; there’s no there there. She does not act, nor engage, nor say anything of note. She is an object, a Golden Fleece with one two many Jasons in the hunt. The nice guy loses. The end.
But will I see the movie with DiCaprio? Probably. It can’t be worse than the Redford version, which is indeed “gauzy and inert”. I’ve rather liked DiCaprio’s work of late, from The Aviator forward (Revolutionary Road excluded). But the story has that touch more ambition than its structure can carry (how meta), which is why it always feels murdered at the end.
Love Your Movies, which had the sagacity and good taste to like my post from yesterday, has an exhaustive and mostly truth-telling list of what Hollywood is throwing at us this solstice:
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I actually think this will do pretty well. It will bring in the Zombieland audience — people who like to keep horror genres at irony’s distance while enjoying their thrills.
Battleship. The cheeseball version of Battle: Los Angeles. Appears abyssmally stupid.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation. It’s amazing how much stuff I spent my childhood with that I don’t care about anymore. For example, I haven’t seen a single Transformers movie, despite still having a box of old Transformers toys from the 80′s. I just have no interest in seeing that story told again. Same thing here. Maybe it will suck, maybe it won’t. This is the last time I even want to consider the question.
The Amazing Spider-Man. I don’t think anyone is going to want to see this. Eight years passed between the excreable Batman & Robin (1997) and Batman Begins(2005). By contrast, Spiderman 3 only came out five years ago. Nostalgia needs a little more time than that.
Total Recall. That’s more like it. I have a feeling Colin Farrell will not be favorably compared with Ahnuld, though. Just a hunch.
Men in Black 3. If five years is too little for a re-boot, ten years is too long for a sequel. I don’t even remember anyone particularly liking MiB2; everyone I knew who saw said that the little gravel-voiced dog stole the movie. And now we’re tacking on a lame time-travel premise? Hey, K, what’s this thick, viscous stuff down here? Why, that’s the bottom of the well, J.
Bourne Legacy. In which there is no Jason Bourne. So this is a movie about stuff that Jason Bourne might have done, if he wasn’t too busy buying a zoo. Yeah, whatever.
Prometheus. Hold the phone a second. Are you telling me that Hollywood is actually giving us a summer blockbuster that isn’t a sequel, re-boot, mash-up, or homage to another film or TV show? Really? Well, hell, I might just go slam down money to…what? It was originally supposed to be an Alien prequel? *sigh* Nevermind…
The Avengers. Everything I hear about this is that it’s AWESOME and AMAZING and AMAZINGLY AWESOME and BETTER THAN THE DARK KNIGHT and TOTALLY WORTH WAITING THROUGH SEVERAL NONDESCRIPT MOVIES WITH THE NOTABLE EXCEPTION OFIRON MAN FOR. I’m not saying the movies being hyped. I’m just trying not to go in with huge expectations.
The Dark Knight Rises. I actually don’t care all that much if this is as good as The Dark Knight. If it manages to be the Return of the Jedi of the series, I’ll score that a win. The only thing I don’t want to happen is for Batman to get killed. I can’t expalin it, but that would kind of ruin it for me.
I was up until 3:30 in the morning putting together a video for my students. We’re startingThe Screwtape Letters this week, so I thought a little introduction to the Dark One was in order. It might not have taken so long if I were not such a perfectionist about these things. And if iMovie did not keep crashing.
You can’t give a sci-fi fantasy epic a prosaic name like that. People assume that it’s ironic, that you’re not really doing a real epic, but some kind of light fish-out-of-water comedy with swords. It might as well have been named Scott Pilgrim.
Did anyone know that this movie was based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series? Did anyone know that the Barsoom series is 100 years old this year? Of course not, because the ads didn’t tell us. Because Disney wanted to name the movie after its protagonist, without explaining anything to the prospective audience. There was one ad that suggested that this story was “older than Star Wars” but nothing to flesh that notion out.
Just to underline the Fail, the names of the first three books of the Barsoom series, which feature John Carter, are as follows:
Princess of Mars
Gods of Mars
Warlord of Mars
You can’t tell me that a better title, one which conveyed actual information about the intent and tone of the picture, could not have been pulled together from that raw material. Hell, if the flick had been named Princess of Mars and the ads had said “Based on the 100-year-old saga by Edgar Rice Burroughs,” I might have considered checking it out.
But John Carter? Who gives a moldy crap about John Carter?
Those idiots at Disney apparently were so paranoid over the word “Mars” that they passed over the perfect title: “A Princess of Mars”, the actual title of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Barsoom novel. The immediate disjunction between “princess” — which suggests knights and chivalry and fantasy — and “Mars” — which suggests space and rockets and science fiction — provides a compelling hook. Princesses on Mars? Really? How can that be? It immediately tells you to expect the unexpected — as opposed to the title “John Carter”, which tells you nothing at all.
Names matter. It’s your first and perhaps most important piece of branding.
The PG-13 rating is misleading. It doesn’t have the typical red flags of an R-rated movie. And I guess you can’t give someone an R for mood and tone and pervasive morbidity.
So they got a PG-13.
But it’s really an “R” movie, as far as kids.
This is a problem with the ratings system. Total Recall has graphic violence, language, and nudity, so it’s R-rated, but let’s face it, it’s cartoonish (fun, but cartoonish) and is going to have next to zero impact on a kid.
On the other hand, this movie doesn’t have those things, and is going to cause nightmares.
The MPAA doesn’t exist to prevent nightmares, but to provide a fig leaf against criticism from the cultural right. As long as it exists, the movie industry can say that it is censored and oppressed by prudes, hence the need for daring, bold films which attack your taboos re: sex and violence.
