The way films are developed and marketed is blatantly sexist. (Of course, it is blatantly a lot of other things too, most of them bad, but that’s a conversation for another time). Studios are reluctant to give women leading roles, meaty parts, a share of the action, or anything resembling a fair shake to what men get in terms of real, substantial screen time. They are limited to sidekicks, girlfriends, and precisely-marketed for-women-only flicks like Sex In the City. Studios do this because they they follow the money, and their numbers tell them that films with male leads are more successful with the demographics that matter.
Which is why they should pay attention to the numbers that Wanted put up this weekend.
Wanted made $18.5 million dollars on both Friday and Saturday evenings, making it the highest June opening for an R-rated movie in history. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but there have been plenty of other forgettable action films released in June over the years, right? Wanted looks like a pretty good film, but nothing special – certainly nothing could predict that it would open with such huge numbers.
Then look at the breakdowns. The same number of women went to this film as men – that NEVER happens with a big, huge, explosion-y type of movie. That’s what made the difference here.
And why did women want to see Wanted? My guess is that it had something to do with how the film was marketed – namely, that Angelina Jolie was an action star extraordinare, kicking more butt than a woman has in a film since – I don’t know, Terminator?
So take heed, Hollywood. Look at what happens when you appeal to more than one demographic at once!
Posted in Uncategorized on June 29, 2008 by chasandres
The films we all remember, the truly great ones, are canonized for one of two things: Either they include the pinnacle of achievement in a certain area of technical or artistic expertise (think Chinatown’s script, Brando’s performance in On The Waterfront, the cinematography in Crouching Tiger), or they represent a great artistic leap forward – a vision that might not be perfect, but which opens up a whole new world of visual storytelling.
WALL-E is a perfect example of this second kind of cinema, a step toward a style of storytelling that combines the classic elements of literature and silent film with the big-budget artistic direction of the modern Hollywood era. It is a flawed film, to be sure, but it is also a triumph – a magnificent work of art so bold that its reverberations will be felt in movies for decades to come.
Let’s start by talking about the animation. While I enjoyed the strong sense of movement in Ratatouille, I thought that both Cars and Toy Story 2 were better films in terms of pure visual sensibility, detail, and animated realism. Well, WALL-E blows them both out of the water. The robots are rendered beautifully, their expressions full of life, their motions fluid and warm. The detail present in the blasted Earthscape was astonishing, and space looked even better: in a jaw-dropping scene where Wall-e and Eve “dance” around the spaceship, flying in perfect tandem, the realism present in the physics of their motion and their smooth modeling complimented the whimsy and surreality present in the art direction to absolute perfection. In fewer words, it was gorgeous.
But Pixar innovated in other areas, too. From a screenwriting perspective, WALL-E’s first act was unlike anything I have seen at the movies in years. It is nearly dialogue-free cinema – there’s some music, a gorgeous soundscape, and the robots’ very limited vocabulary that mostly consists of saying their names. That’s it. Yet, this section of the film was perhaps the most compelling. The pace is perfect, the setup is clear and doesn’t feel rushed, and even the exposition is done with taste. As a few other critics have stated, this section of WALL-E owes a lot to Modern Times, and I couldn’t agree more. The film brings back the simple type of physical humor that we all forgot can exist in a world where jokes are so specifically targeted, beaten to death, or just plain vulgar. There are a few cheap laughs here, but most of them are genuine, honest, and timeless. I laughed out loud constantly through this film.
And WALL-E is also a beautiful love story. I mean it – it’s a really romantic film. Hollywood tales of the heart have become so dry and formulaic, seeing something as sweet and innocent as the love between Wall-e and Eve is an absolute pleasure. While most kid’s films (especially ones with fairy tale roots) tend to dial the cheese factor up to 11 with their love story as well as set feminism back to the dark ages, WALL-E doesn’t fall into these traps. The film captures the innocence of childlike, unconditional love, the ache of desire, and the bitterness of loneliness better than any film I have seen in a very long time. These two robots somehow manage to be more human than, well, the humans in nearly every romantic comedy that gets vomited out of Burbank when women 18-45 are targeted by the studios.
Besides being a great family movie, an animation spectacle, and a top-notch love story, WALL-E is also a pretty good sci-fi film. Now, if you go in expecting deep revelations or discussion about the future of humanity, the technological singularity, or the nuances of the human race, you’ll be disappointed – this is not Bladerunner, it’s not The Matrix, and it’s not written by Vonnegut or Asimov. However, remember that it’s a Disney/Pixar film about a cute robot, and then realize that it poses the following questions to its viewers:
- What if, instead of robots taking over Earth, we just gave it to them because we were indifferent?
- Even if we develop superior technology, should we surrender to it unconditionally and happily?
- What makes us who we are – is it our actions, our lived experiences, or something deeper?
- What is the meaning of individuality?
- What is the point of being human without a deep, genuine sense of wonder and desire?
- What does it mean to be a robot?
And a whole lot more. Granted it doesn’t go in-depth that much into any of these themes and debates, but it brings so much thought to the table that my mind was spinning for hours afterward.
I could talk about this film for another ten pages, and I may have another entry about it later. For now, go see WALL-E. You won’t regret it.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 26, 2008 by chasandres
- Are you ever struck by the feeling that if humans were only a tiny bit smarter, our species wouldn’t be so close to self-destruction?
- If there was a dungeons-and-dragons style character sheet for your life, what would it look like? Also: why is this not available as part of an interactive website yet? Why can’t I screw around with attributes on a character sheet for a person? Of course, assigning racial attributes would get problematic really quickly.
- I don’t think people are meant to be alone, nor are they meant to never have privacy. Without the right amount of human contact, life gets hard to live very quickly. I can only imagine how rough it must be for those who move to a faraway country without knowing the language or having any family or friends.
- Putting tons of different, customizable toppings on your pizza is not only an option at every pizzeria, but is an expected part of ordering. Why don’t other foods work this way? Why can’t I get my spaghetti with a whole menu of different kinds of sauces, spices, meat, or vegetables unless I’m at some kind of whacky novelty restaurant?
- Why does work start so early in the morning when exactly no one likes waking up at the crack of dawn? Why not move the American workday back an hour at each end and let everyone sleep in?
- Beauty is not possible to quantify, yet most of us spend a fair chunk of our lives attempting to do exactly that.
- Why do so many happy moments cause a bout sadness when they’re called up for replay by your brain?
- The spell checker on this site does not recognize the word “Mouseketeer.”
- In a free-for-all battle between all fifty states, Texas would win
- My thoughts get smaller as I reach closer to sleep.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 25, 2008 by chasandres
“How on Earth could this happen?”
This is one of the phrases you hear over and over again, week after week, always in relation to whatever news story is on the cusp of the public consciousness. Usually, the answer is simple – a disturbed human being, pushing the envelope of perverse creativity, reaches his or her breaking point and does something that would never have been considered as an option by a sane person.
But not always. Let’s take Gloucester, for example.
If you haven’t been following the news, this Time Magazine article came out last week exposing the 1,200 student Gloucester high school for fostering seventeen (!) pregnancies, all in girls who are 16 or younger. It went on to claim that most of these girls were friends who formed a pregnancy pact together, hoping to have their babies at the same time so as to help each other raise them. One girl even went so far as to find a homeless man to help in the, uh, fertilization.
The rest of the article, of course, tries to figure out how on Earth this could happen, and reaching the following conclusions:
1) Juno and Knocked Up are to blame, because those who films made teen pregnancy look super rad.
2) The economy is to blame, because the fishing industry in Gloucester is not what it once was and families are struggling because of it.
3) The parents are to blame, because all the girls really wanted was “someone to love them unconditionally.”
4) The high school is to blame for secretly handing out condoms/not handing out condoms at all, depending on who you ask or believe.
I think the answer is much simpler: these girls wanted to feel like they were part of something.
Think about growing up in a small town that was once home to a vibrant, local industry but now is getting by solely on the backs of the few businesses that remain and whatever money comes in from the outside. I doubt this is a stretch for most of you – nearly every town in America, especially Eastern and Midwestern factory towns, suffers from the same problem these days.
No imagine that, for whatever reason, college isn’t a realistic option. Maybe the grades aren’t there, or maybe money is far too tight. Heck, leaving Gloucester at all doesn’t seem to be in the cards – life, from this fifteen-year-old viewpoint, looks like it will probably consist of either working in the fishstick factory, the semiconductor plant, or as a cashier in a downtown restaurant.
Your home life is probably not as horrible as some of the folks reading Time will probably assume, but your parents and older siblings are certainly going to be busy making their own ends meet. Your schoolteachers aren’t really capable of giving you much one-on-one attention, either. After all, in this era of No Child Left Behind, every kid is a number and that number grows larger every day.
Then you look at how much attention a woman with a baby receives.
The experience of giving birth is an immediate ticket to the exclusive club of motherhood. Mothers, as everyone knows, stick together. It’s biological imperative. They make certain that nothing happens to anyone’s children, and especially not those of their friends. They look out for each other, and in such an uncertain world this type of allegiance cannot be understated.
Plus, having a kid at fifteen or sixteen is going to get a reaction out of absolutely everyone. Heads will turn as you walk down the hall, pushing your pram. Some will fawn over your child and some will flash you the stinkeye, but you will never be invisible again. It is a cry for attention on a grand scale, a rebellion that is all at once romantic and foolish to the nth degree.
But you can see why some people might be drawn to it. Heck, at fifteen, no one has any perspective. “You have the rest of your life to figure that out” is a nonsense phrase, and the idea that you have the power to bring a life into this world doesn’t seem remotely real.
I bet all it took was one friend who came up with this idea, a girl who was socially influential enough to sell all her friends on the concept. It’s not a conclusion that most teens are going to reach, certainly, but now that it’s in the public consciousness I bet we’re going to see more incidences of this cropping up around the country. After all, one of the most interesting things about this case is how unexceptional Gloucester is in terms of the atmosphere that could foster such behavior. It could happen anywhere.
Understand: teenagers, especially younger ones, are all at once brash, idealistic, cynical, and absolutely certain of their own infallibility and ability to make the correct decision all of the time. If you want to avoid a repeat of this situation, let’s actually sit down and teach kids about what it’s like to have a child.
And while we’re at it, how about changing where we’re at as a country so that our nation’s children can hope again?
Posted in Uncategorized on June 24, 2008 by chasandres
Please Note: The following piece is intended to be a work of creative fiction. It is not evidence of any actual lawbreaking, so don’t go reading too much into it.
“This is a travesty,” I sighed, gazing up at the newly paved road leading up to the housing development. It was one of those slash & burn, build & run jobs – the workers cut all the trees off the top of the hill, threw up some particleboard McMansions, and planted an open house sign at the intersection with Littleton Road. It couldn’t have taken more than a few months, I knew, because none of what I saw had existed over winter break.
It was summer now, but it was one of those gray, drizzly days where line after line of thunderstorms slowly pass through the region without every fully clearing out. I sat in the passenger seat of Marc’s Mini Cooper, which was idling by the side of the road. He had one eye on the construction site and the other on the road, his face sullen and lips terse. Emma, her hand lovingly kneading my shoulder, sat in the back and stared up at me, quizzically. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What used to be here?”
“Snake Hill,” I told her, and Marc nodded. “It was a road we discovered back in high school. Eric and I were driving around, probably cruising between one game store and another, when we saw a street with a name that make us both crack up.”
“Snake Hill?” She asked.
“Snake Hill,” I replied. “I mean, why would you name your street snake freaking hill unless there was a really good snake-related story behind it? Anyway, I coaxed Eric into driving me up it, which he immediately regretted.”
“Why?”
“Snake Hill was a disaster. It had probably been paved once, about forty years prior, and instead of fixing it they just put up a big metal sign that said “DANGER: TRAVEL AT OWN RISK.” Eric swerved to avoid most of the potholes, and he actually did a pretty good job – until we got to the very end of the road, where the boss pothole was waiting for us. It was the width and breadth of the whole road, and was several inches deep with muddy water. We both started shreaking. The car made it through, but the splash was novelty-sized.”
“Sounds…fun,” she offered.
“Well the best part was the soundtrack. I inadvertently managed to turn on the best possible song for the journey when we first pulled onto the road; ‘Somebody Told Me’ by Strong Bad. By the end of the ordeal, we were laughing so hard that we came back all the time drove up Snake Hill nearly every chance we could. We always played the same song and always freaked out whoever we took up there.
Somebody Told Me, with someone’s crappy idea of a slideshow to go along with it.
“Awesome,” Emma replied, smiling. “I’m sorry I never got to go.”
“I wish you had been there” I sighed, looking up at the housing development and the new street. It had been renamed ‘Pingry Hill’ so as to avoid any association with a crawly kind of reptile that may or may not have actually inhabited the area.
You could see the old road, I noticed. It was covered in sod and dozer tracks, heading up the hill in parallel with Pingry. Next to 110, where Snake Hill used to begin, the old street sign still stood; a beacon that had always represented irreverent fun, especially in the harsher times.
That was when I got the idea.
“Marc,” I said, turning to my friend. “I want the sign.”
He mulled it over in his mind, and then grinned at me. “Sounds like an adventure.”
That night, after eating dinner with Marc’s parents and carefully slipping a pair of big old hammers into his backpack, we approached Snake Hill again.
Marc had already tried to pry the sign from its mooring earlier in the day, but the transgression was too visible and the bolts were stuck on tight. Deciding to wait until the cover of dark, we parked the Mini next to the railroad tracks on Pingry and sneaked back up the hill from the opposite side. Our footfalls and breathing loud in the midnight air, I decided to break the silence with the least sneaky thing I could possibly do – but something that absolutely had to be done.
“Somebody told me,” I sang in a mock whisper, trying to match the gravely tone of Strong Bad, “that you were so stupid. But I didn’t beleive them, but now I believe them.”
Emma laughed. “Everybody’s stupid,” she chanted, “everybody’s stupid. Everybody’s stupid but me!”
Marc joined in, and we giggled and sang in the moonlight as we climbed up to the clearing where the old part of Snake Hill met the new, paved road. Once we got there, Marc hushed us and we waited for a moment, making certain we were alone. When enough time had passed, we sprinted through the clearing and slipped into the shadows of the road formerly known as Snake Hill.
However bad the road was in a car during the day, in was infinitely worse on foot, at night, with no flashlight and a layer of sand and mud covering where the pavement used to be. All three of us stumbled, but none of us fell, and before too long we made it to the end of the road – the final drop down the mountain to where Snake Hill had met 110 and our street sign was waiting for us. Marc, being the ninja of the three, decided to go for the actual hit while the two of us stayed back. It was strictly for the best – while Marc and I have gone on many adventures together, covert ops was never my specialty.
Marc skulked down the hill and into the darkness while Emma and I stayed as invisible as possible. We looked and listened for Marc, but we never saw nor heard him. Every thirty seconds or so a car drove by down 110 and illuminated the sign with its high beams, but we never saw anything from our vantage point. Marc later told us that he had to lie flat behind a barrier every time he saw lights.
The time went glacially slow. “Hey, Emma,” I asked. “What’s our cover story if we do get caught?”
She thought for a moment. “We’re up here making out,” she smiled at me.
“And Marc?” I asked.
“We’re swingers,” she replied.
Five minutes passed. Then six. Then seven.
Then we heard the loud ‘CLARGH!’ of metal-on-metal as the hammer smashed into the sign. Before we could react, a car came by and Marc was once again nowhere to be seen.
At the next lull, we heard another ‘CLARGH!’, followed by a ‘tinktinktinkCLUNK!’ and a flurry of moving feet. When the next set of lights came down the road, Emma and I could see that the entire sign assembly was missing, both Snake Hill and the cross street!
A few moments later, Marc was scurrying up the embankment holding the entire assembly. “Couldn’t do anything with that rivet,” he explained. “Had to rip the whole thing out.”
We brought it back up to Pingry, where Marc stashed it behind a fallen tree and we walked back to the car awash in our victory. On our way back, Emma simply got out of the passenger seat when we passed by the hiding place, grabbed the sign, and thew it to me in the back. I put Marc’s coat over it, and hid it the whole way back.
We had won. Snake Hill was ours forever.
Now, I don’t support random acts of vandalism, but this was a part of our childhood. (Not to mention that the road it was denoting didn’t even exist anymore). Honestly, most of the places I went and things I did during that part of my life don’t exist any more – the card stores, the restaurants, the roadside landmarks I always used to laugh at and the houses of the people that defined my existence. Friendships have shifted and grown in some cases, but whithered and died in most. Adolescence is fleeting – that’s the nature of the beast, and no one could survive more than four of five years of it, anyway – but I needed this. I needed a small part of this to survive
If you ever have the chance to save something meaningless to the world but important to you from needless destruction, please do it.
I once wrote the following few paragraphs as an aside in one of my short stories. It’s more than a little bit autobiographical:
My roommate Jay back in Boston had this theory he’d never shut up about. Back in high school, he dated a girl named Amy – a cute blonde bookworm with sparkling blue eyes. Once he inherited his mother’s old minivan, the two of them started taking day trips all over New England.
One fall afternoon, they ended up eating dinner at a place called Moulton’s Pizzeria in North Adams, a small Massachusetts town by the New York border. The whole time he was there, he was overcome with a strong feeling that whatever he said or did within those walls represented the sum total of his worth as a human being. Somehow, Moulton’s Pizzeria was his conduit to the realm of the eternal.
Once he found the spot, its natural gravity kept pulling him back. Any time he tried to venture anywhere near the western half of Massachusetts, he ended up eating at Moulton’s. Amy eventually left him, but every girl he’s ever been halfway serious about has eaten chicken risotto or pepperoni pizza with him in North Adams. He claims that the restaurant is his spiritual hub: The nexus of his personal universe.
This afternoon, I drove home through Maynard. I had the windows down and music blasting. It was a gorgeous summer afternoon – the solstice no less! – and I wanted to see if the local game store had any boxes I could use to store my magic cards in for the journey to Los Angeles.
Then I was stopped by a cop for doing 37 in a 25 zone.
Now, not to derail my post, but I think I deserve a goddamned medal for only going 37 miles per hour on such a nice day. In addition, 25 is never a reasonable speed limit unless you are driving near a school in session, a park with small children, or some other place where driving at a normal speed would be too dangerous. This was just a 200-yard stretch of pavement that cops use to bust people.
The officer came up to my window. “Do you drive this way often?” He asked.
“No,” I replied, lying through my teeth. He had already asked me what I thought the speed limit was, and I had guessed 35 and was wrong. I needed some plausible deniability.
When he sauntered back to his car, my license and registration in hand, I suddenly remembered something that would have been pertinent a few seconds earlier: I had gotten my only traffic ticket ever less than 20 yards from where I was currently stopped! That one was about a year and a half earlier, (or was it two and a half now…?) on a cold and foggy winter’s eve. I took a right on red, not knowing that there was a “no right on red” sign hidden somewhere in the fog. The vindictive cop gave me a ticket for running a red light.
I looked in my rearview mirror. This man was, of course, looking up my record. Which certainly has that citation displayed front and center. As the only citation. It was proof positive that I was no stranger to this stretch of Maynard’s less-than-scenic byways.
The cop gave me an odd look when he got back to my window. “I bet you come down here more often than you think,” he told me.
“Well, I mostly live in the city. I went to college there. I just got back for the summer,” I stammered.
“Er, alright. Well, I’m gonna let you off with a warning. Don’t do it again.” He finished, causing me to breathe a sigh of relief that was probably little too overzealous.
Anyway, driving off (and being careful to wait for the traffic light before making my right turn), I came to a lurching realization: This was the traffic light! This was the intersection! How had I never noticed this before? I was coming at it from a different angle (up 62 instead of 117), but still.
For those who haven’t known me since High School, the traffic light used to be the bane of my existence. You see, every lazy, summer night that I drove my then-girlfriend Emily home from anywhere, we would never fail to pass through these three traffic lights on 117 between Concord and Stow. Every single time – and I mean EVERY TIME, without fail – the first two lights would be green and the last light would be red.
It wasn’t like I didn’t try to make that last light turn green. I would speed up. I would slow down. I would try to drive naturally, to use the power of positive thinking, to pray to the Gods above. Never happened. Never turned green. Not once. We’d always miss it by seconds.
It mocked me, because I always knew that it was a pound-you-in-the-face obvious metaphor for the fact that our relationship would have to come to an end. It could never make it past that last goddamned light. And, in the end, it didn’t.
So, of course, it would make sense that my only run-ins with the law have happened within fifteen yards of the very same light, right? I’ve started to wonder if it is my second nexus: the evil twin of my first one. Some kind of physical representation of what I can and will never have in life.
Of course, it’s probably just a really effective speed trap, but I like to assign meaning to coincidental moments in my otherwise scattered existence. It makes me feel important.
Anyway, a question for the readers: Do any of you have nexi, either good or bad?
Remember how you felt the night you first drove home by yourself, cruising through the night well after bedtime in your parents’ car? Or how about when you really sat down and truly thought about God, religion, spirituality, and the afterlife instead of just following what you were taught as a child? Or how about the first time you made love – not the awkward, stumbling of when you first had sex, but the time when you first felt you were truly one with another person?
Or maybe you were sitting in your room at two AM, pondering the nature of reality, and this song came on:
These are the moments when we seem to grow up in an instant, when pieces of the puzzle lock into place, when the veil is lifted and the grand schemes of the universe become clear, if only for a moment. I call them Moments of Cosmic Clarity, but you can just call them “those moments” or movie moments” if you prefer something with less hippified nomenclature.
My question is this: why haven’t I had one in an awfully long time?
Perhaps the MoCC is something only experienced during a particular period of adolescence and individuation, a time when significant change occurs on a level so grand that adults no longer experience it. This seems plausible on the surface, but it doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of my life – after all, I am on the verge of one of the biggest changes in my entire life (moving away from my folks for good, starting my own post-college life in Los Angeles). I am also in a beautiful, loving relationship. So how come I feel so little on this cosmic level?
Maybe it has to do with the desensitization we all feel as we age. I have moved before. I have had a job, been on my own, hoped, dreamed, loved, had my heart broken and healed and broken and healed again. Life doesn’t yet feel predictable, but I can’t imagine experiencing anything in the next several years that is completely outside of the realm of my past experience – it will be different, certainly, but nothing as alien as high school or college were when I took those leaps. (Unless, of course, we face a major war or environmental crisis).
Or maybe it’s just a lull. Or maybe my brain doesn’t work that way any more. Or maybe I am experiencing them, but they don’t register the same way they used to.
Does anyone out there have any thoughts on the nature of the MoCC? I would love to discuss this at length.
You know those old people that like to stand on their front lawns and shake their canes at whippersnappers? Apparently they’ve joined the technological revolution.
Some old guy in Wales invented a device back in 2005 that emits a high-frequency noise, much like the whine of a mosquito. He decided to set it up in his grocery store and see what would happen. Because it emits sound on a frequency that is inaudible by most humans over twenty, (you know that weird ringing in your ears every once in a while? That’s a frequency dying. Your range of hearing shrinks daily.), the device lowered the amount of youthful loitering in the store by some absurd amount.
Isn’t that wild? That some people dislike young folks hanging around their property so much that they’d go to the trouble to buy an device to chase them away like some sort of bug zapper or electronic dog fence? Of course, a few human rights organizations are attempting to get the thing outlawed, but for now it remains legal in the UK, Canada, and United States, and pretty much everywhere else.
My favorite part of the story, though, is how the youth of Britain responded. When the adults told them that there was a frequency only they could detect, thousands of them set it as their cell phone ringtone so they could know when their phone rang in class without the teacher finding out. Brilliant, no?
A few months ago, I was listening to an episode of “This American Life” and I came across a story that literally blew my mind. It was about a man who devoted his entire life to the quixotic task of building a working time machine.
Here’s the lightning-quick version of the tale: a young African-American boy of about ten years old, living in a small apartment in New York City, is grief stricken when his father dies suddenly one night. All he can think about for the next few months is finding a way to have even one more moment with his dad. He reaches an epiphany upon picking up a comic-book copy of HG Wells’ “The Time Machine,” and spends the next part of his life trying to build a real time machine, believing that it would work if he built one that looked like the one on the cover of the comic. It failed, naturally, but he devoted THE ENTIRE REST OF HIS LIFE to learning the necessary physics to try and reach his goal. Pulling himself out of poverty with nothing more than a burning desire to learn. Years of learning quantum mechanics and all the rest, all the while doing his time travel research in secret because he didn’t want to seem like an absolute crackpot. He is an old man now, and he has long since come to terms with the fact that he will never see his father again (at least in this world), but he did accomplish something remarkable: a theory that might just let some limited form of time travel actually work.
Anyway, I knew right away that this would make the perfect film – and one that I would kill to write the script for. Love, sacrifice, and time travel? I am SO in. In retrospect, I really should have found a way to contact him and try to get the rights. I just figured I wouldn’t have a shot in hell. Not with a story that fantastic.
Anyway, today I was browsing Ain’t It Cool News, and stumbled upon an article saying that Spike Lee just bought the rights to the story. Now, I think Spike Lee is an excellent filmmaker. Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X were masterpieces. But is THIS his sort of film? I just don’t see it. And honestly, as much as I believe Spielberg is overrated, he would knock this out of the park – I mean, he puts daddy issues in all of his films anyway, (whether they belong there or not), why not tackle one where it’s the main plotline?
No matter what, though, I will see this film opening day. The more I read about Ronald Mallett, the more I am convinced that his story, whether his theory proves true or not, is one of the great American tales.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 17, 2008 by chasandres
I just finished reading this Variety article about the possibility of the Screen Actor’s Guild going on strike when their labor deal ends on the 30th of this month. This time around, though, I’m not sure I can throw my support behind the union.
The WGA was different, and not just because I am an aspiring television writer that hopes to be a member of that union at some point in the future. Writers have continually gotten the short end of the stick from Hollywood executives for years – on credit, on pay, on pretty much everything. That said, most of what they struck for had little to do with an increase in pay or recognition but instead a portion – any portion – of the massive amount of money that is going to be made via the internet, which will be television’s biggest distribution medium sooner than anyone things. They HAD to strike, or risk getting locked out of that money forever.
But this is why I won’t support SAG.
- The timing. It’s only been a few months since the WGA strike ended, and the TV industry is only starting to recover. Those thousands of people that were laid off are only now getting their jobs back (well, some of them), and most of the smaller production companies are really struggling. In addition, the US economy is in a horrible place, and the growing recession is only getting worse. And you want to strike NOW? really? You can’t reach some sort of interim deal and figure this out a year or two from now?
- The demands. I get it. Studio executives pocket more money than they should from basically everything, and actors deserve more. I agree with this. I also understand the reality of the situation, which is that actors tend to get more notoriety and cash out of a project than any of the other creative or technical positions involved. If you want to try and fix the entire system, fine. Let’s do that when times are good. It just isn’t worth it right now.
- The WGA deal. After 100 days of work stoppage in Hollywood, the studios won. The writers took a deal that was only negligibly better than the one offered to them before the whole mess even started, and then had to pretend it was a huge victory for the union. Does SAG really think they’re going to do better without a longer, even more bitter strike?
- Solidarity. When the WGA announced their strike, a few TV shows like The Office had their cast walk off the set and refuse to tape any more episodes until an agreement was reached, but this was the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, production continued – often on scripts that were still in an early draft and were far weaker – right up until the new material ran out. Also, all of the live talk/variety show hosts, (shows which usually require a team of writers), decided to come back early so that they could continue their careers despite everyone who was still on the picket lines. Most actors showed no solidarity for the writers. Why should anyone show solidarity for them?
The end of that article quotes AFTRA, saying “Don’t be fooled by spin. AFTRA, like the WGA and DGA before it, has negotiated a great agreement that delivers substantial improvements in wages and working conditions for all its members. We’ve done this in the midst of a challenging economic climate, at a moment of rapid and unsettling technological change, in an industry that is still recovering from the economic devastation of a 100-day strike. This is a time for tough-minded realism, not posturing and empty rhetoric. If you vote against ratifying the AFTRA deal, you are essentially voting for chaos in the industry.”
This makes sense to me. A SAG strike does not. If you feel differently, though, please enlighten me. I’m so used to automatically being on the union side of everything that opposing this strike still feels wrong. I just don’t see how it makes any sense to strike now.
