Rollercoaster Ride

In the movie industry right now, one of the biggest challenges for the Motion Picture Association of America is balancing between theater owners, who are desperate to keep getting people in seats, and content providers ranging from Amazon to Netflix to Comcast, who by expanding the video-on-demand and streaming market, are making theaters increasingly irrelevant. It's one of the reasons there's such a huge push for 3-D, and for innovations like the ones that turn movies into theme park rides for movies like Super 8.

I think the problem for theaters is a matter of perception, rather than innovation. An adult, one-day ticket to Disney World is $82. But we're conditioned to believe that Disney World is a special treat, perhaps a one-in-a-lifetime experience that's worth the extravagance. Movies are reasonably competitively priced in comparison to Disney World tickets: if you spend $11-$20 for two hours, you're paying $5.5-$10 per hour in comparison to the $10ish per hour you'll get if you spend 8 straight hours at Disney World. But we're conditioned to think of the movies as much more routine entertainment. What theaters need is a combination of innovation, good story-telling, and a Disney-level advertising campaign. No one's going to beat back the demand for quicker and more multi-platform delivery, and that's probably not a winning battle for theaters. They need to make the affirmative case for their medium.

Secret Societies

This looks like a good exploration of the dark side of geek culture, but it also seems like an argument for why someone should make a movie adaptation of The Secret History:

Fresh Start

Nikki Finke has doubts about its execution, but Fox's decision to devote resources to an initiative incubating wholly original screenplays (remakes and literary adaptations are both out) by emerging screenwriters is a great idea. I'll be curious to see the gender and racial mix of who they hire. Life experience matters in the kinds of stories people decide to tell, or decide are worth telling, and not in predictable ways. I don't know that we'd have gotten District 9 from an American director.

Solving the Problem

The trailers for The Bully Project are undeniably moving:



But I feel like it how I feel about a lot of "issue" movies, maybe even more so. Having given us this information, what the hell are we supposed to do about any of it. Art like this demands some kind of moral response, but bullying is a particularly intractable issue. The only way to prevent it entirely is to raise kids who are homeschooled, cut off from the phone and internet, and entirely unexposed to any social situation, be it school, church, community activities, a generation of twenty-first-century boys and girls in bubbles. You can monitor your kids' communications, but only for so-long. You can try to create an atmosphere where they'll self-report, but it's not clear how many kids will come-forward. You can try to raise children not to be homophobes, but how do you create compassion for kids who are physically awkward or not conventionally attractive, or the herd instinct kids seem to have to target someone? You can improve mental health services for kids (and goodness know we should do that at all levels of society), but then you have to overcome the stigma about use, and it's a huge thing to try to do.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't do any of these things, or that the right response in the face of this kind of social problem art should be resignation. But I do find art like this frustrating, if only because watching it is not enough.

The Bones Spinoff

Did any of you watch the backdoor pilot for Fox's Bones spinoff, The Finder, last week? It was...troubling, I thought, and a worrisome indication of what Hart Hanson thinks is good. Among the problems: casual homophobia (the assumption that someone is insecure, and because she's insecure, she must be a lesbian, and because she's a lesbian, it's a good idea to send an operative over to seduce her buy buying her "something gay, like a slippery nipple), Michael Clarke Duncan as a legal-koan-spouting Magical Black Man, fat girl jokes, the obvious but oddly disgusting pandering of Geoff Stults going into a stranger's house to investigate him and TAKING OFF ALL HIS CLOTHES.

The thing that works about Bones is there is a legit idea there, a use of science in service of an old, old story. This doesn't appear to have an idea, just a collection of objectionable tics.

Closing Credits

-I finally watched all of Parks and Recreation.

-I love hearing artists talk about other pieces of art they adore.

-Playstation is in for a world of hurt.

-I'm going to lose it watching the Young Snape and Young Lily stuff in Deathly Hallows 2.

Attributing Motivation

I'm not a censorship advocate, or anything, but doesn't it seem a little soon for Law & Order to be jumping on the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and her staff and constituents as episode fodder? There is something a bit weird to me about an episode that will inevitably try to assign motivation to Jared Lee Loughner before his trial's actually begun, before we know anything for real. It's not so much that I think the show will impact the proceedings of the trial, but that figuring out what happened, how Loughner became the person that he is, how he decided to try to kill Giffords, and how he was able to accomplish it, these are all important things to actually discern and understand. Filling in the gaps with fiction won't bring meaningful resolution or answers to the victims and their families, and it seems a bit odd to seize upon it.

I Like The Way You Move

Man, I was going to use this news as an excuse to push the delightfully strange video for Big Boi's "The Way You Move," except it's apparently not readily available on YouTube anymore. So instead, have a mash-up of "The Way You Move" and "Push It," which works surprisingly well!



All of which is a long way of saying I'm glad Fonzworth Bentley has taken enough time off from carrying around umbrellas or floating down from ceilings holding them to drop an actual mixtape. And I'm even gladder that it's delightfully weird and good, and has a self-doubting Martin Luther King Jr. reference in the tradition of Cee-Lo Green.

Class and the Fight Against Aliens

I've been talking about this with folks at work, the fact that American pop culture is so solidly middle class these days. We've got rich people, sure, but everyone else is relatively financially comfortable, unless they're the object of some well-intentioned white person's salvation project (there are exceptions, of course, like Shameless). There aren't really respectable, star-level blue-collar or working-poor characters, especially in television. I've long thought that American and British attitudes towards public housing. In the UK, council estates may be menacing, they may have the potential for violent unrest, but real people live in them, and real stories get told there:



I don't think you'd ever get a movie like Attack the Block made in the U.S., at least without some sort of sub-plotline about an eventual reconciliation between people who live in public housing and the cops. The presence of public housing in American popular culture almost flips a genre switch, winnowing down the kind of stories that can be told there to heartwarming tales of rescue or tough-sounding stories of hardness. In the UK, you can tell a story where the residents of council estates aren't just able to manage aliens, they're the best possible people to stop an invasion because the estates are rough. Sure, that says something about what it means to grow up in council housing, but it manages to be comedy rather than primarily sociology. The message gets delivered, but there's no particular exhausting need to dwell on it, and as a result, maybe it's less easy to shake off or groan over.

Closing Credits

-Paul Greengrass's MLK assassination movie is delayed.

-Game of Thrones speaks to the difference in experience between reading and watching television.

-You should be more excited about World War Z than you were previously.

-I want to be Queen of Mars.