Jon Versus Kim, Smart TV versus Stupid TV

There is a fascinating exchange going on via the entertainment news, one that speaks volumes to the cultural conflicts raging through television and, by implication, the larger world. It's a war of words in a fight that is measuring the very viability of intelligence in public media.

It all started last week, when handsome, handsome actor Jon Hamm talked to Elle (UK) about the sad decline of public culture:

We’re at a place where the idea of being elite is somehow considered a negative. Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated. Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly. Incuriousness has become cool... It's celebrated. It doesn't make sense to me.

This is what I consider a lovely bit of portable wisdom. It ties in the latest trend in FNC/RNC name-calling (in 2012, "elite" is a GOP obscene epithet, even though the candidates could objectively be called nothing else) with the depths of reality TV, where there is nothing more telegenic and ratings-grabbing than the combination of wealthy people acting like total fools.

The point Mr. Hamm was making was quite clear-- but in doing so he also made a huge tactical blunder: he mentioned Kim Kardashian by name in public. There is no opportunity for public exposure too insignificant or obtuse for her to pursue. So of course, she weighed right in (via Twitter, which is about as thoughtful a medium as she uses):

I just heard about the comment Jon Hamm made about me in an interview. I respect Jon and I am a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that not everyone takes the same path in life. We're all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, "stupid," is in my opinion careless.

At this point, you could step back and call this whole thing entirely superfluous-- the opinion of an actor being rebutted publicly by a… by a… I guess you could call her a reality-television personality. Anyway, some might see the antics of the Kardashians are harmless entertainment put out by people willing to make their private lives public in lieu of something that requires actual talent.

(I'm obviously taking Jon Hamm's side here-- especially when Kim claims to be someone who "produces, writes, designs, and creates." There are all sorts of levels of that kind of thing, and her level of reality-TV creativity is risible. The only creative guy in reality TV is that keyboard guy who puts the cymbal crashes on all the bug-eyed revelatory shots-- and, steady paycheck or not, the poor bugger probably contemplates suicide on a weekly basis.)

But that's not what this publicly conducted argument is actually about-- this is the inside view of an epic fight: The Battle for Television's Soul. On one side is scripted television: written and created by studio-level artisans and professionals, expertly produced, expensive and risky. On the other side is reality television: created by pandering cable-level producers, shot on the fly and cheaply, calculated to sensationalize the lives of the privileged and stupid. On basic cable, Reality TV tends to outdraw scripted shows: on the big nets, it's pretty much 50/50, "American Idol" and it's ilk versus everything else.

"Mad Men" is the standard-bearer for Smart TV:  Crazy melodrama aside, It takes great pains to recreate the world of the 1960s and explore the societal and cultural changes under way in that era. Watching it is often a history lesson, and we can glean much about how modern society was shaped by the larger conflicts raging in the subtext of every episode. Jon Hamm is the star of that show, and it's obvious to any viewer that the cool intelligence of Don Draper flows from him organically.

"Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and all the other grubby little satellite shows in it's orbit are, of course, the apex of Stupid TV, escapist, disposable entertainment. The intricacies of the human condition are indeed on display on Kardashian-centered entertainment, but in a debased form: envy, backbiting, awe in it's trashy McMansion splendor, and petty conflict. If it has any redeeming social value, it must be at such an ultra-sonic level of irony it's only understood by ironic dogs.

These shows often out-draw "Mad Men" in ratings. This is what motivated Jon Hamm to speak out: he and his show are on the parapets of traditional Hollywood, watching the hoard of Kardashians and Snookies and Real Housewives coming right at them. Notching an arrow in the bow and and letting fly is preferable to being overrun.

Jon Hamm did, in time, realize his tactical blunder, and via "Inside Hollywood" issued a response to Ms. Kardashian's barbed tweet. Don't call it an apology-- He's not about letting Reality TV off the hook anytime soon:

It’s surprising to me that it has become remotely a story… My quote was simply about that version of television and that version of American culture being celebrated. It’s not something that I particularly enjoy. The quote was obviously taken out of context, but I said what I said. I just wish it had been reported correctly. I don’t know Ms. Kardashian; I’ve never met her (and) I would never say anything personally about somebody that I’ve not met. What I said was meant to be more on pervasiveness of something in our culture, not personal, but she took offense to it and that is her right.

I'm sure it'll end here-- Too many big words for Kim to possibly match.

ADDENDA: Kim may be done, but apparently her proxies want to get in on this ginned-up "feud." Ms. Kardashian's best friend Jonathan Cheban has gone on the record with this reposte: "Jon Hamm just needs to shut up and stop being such a mad man." Um... zing, I guess.

Weekend Box Office

Thanks as always to boxofficemojo.com for the chart.

March Oddments 2012

••• John Carter of Ishtar: I made comment almost exactly a year ago about how weird it was to be witnessing another entry in the "biggest flop of all time" contest. Now it's super-weird, because both are big-budget films by big-name directors with associations to the animation industry-- and both flops have Martian themes. The difference is budget: John Carter cost roughly double of Mars Needs Moms. The regularity of this phenomenon allows me to predict the article I'll be writing for "March Oddments 2013:" It'll be about the box-office failure of (I'm guessing) Disney's adaptation of Fredric Brown's 1955 novel "Martians Go Home." It'll star nobody, be directed by Nick (Wallace and Gromet) Park (his first live-action film) and in keeping with the trend it'll be budgeted at $500 million.

The New York Times has an unbeatable headline for the epic John Carter fail: "Ishtar Lands On Mars." I'll save you the effort of scaling their paywall and give you the gist of it: John Carter was a passion project by Pixar honcho Andrew Stanton. Because Disney wanted to keep him happy, they greenlighted everything he wanted, even though there were red flags from pre-production on (No stars, cryptic source material, somebody had already made Avatar, etc.)From the Times article and what I learned from John Lassiter speaking at the Austin Film Festival, it boils down to two big problems:

1. The collaborative Pixar production method was much vaunted at Austin as the antidote to dumb producer-based decision making. Unfortunately, this method seems to not work on live-action films. Stanton had to do expensive re-shoots on John Carter to get the film he wanted. For a front-loaded Pixar production, this is no big deal: Nothing is really final in computer animation until someone pushes the "render" button. But live action, where you need a lot of expensive equipment, craftspeople and artists to show up to help realize your revision, is another beast entirely.

2. It was, like Ishtar, a case of studio management worshiping celebrity-- in this case, the guy who had a hand in some of Disney/Pixar's biggest hits. Hollywood is unique in the entire crazy capitalist world for occasionally investing huge amounts of capital purely out of deference and admiration of talent. In fact, a lot of problem films can be traced to this, the inadvertent reversal of celebrity worship. It's supposed to go down and out, like a storm drain: When we ordinary folks become glassy-eyed at Angelina Jolie's leg or start hopping up and down anticipating the release of a long-lost Joss Whedon film*, the celebrity engine is working properly. But when studio executives start worshiping their own employees, well, the engine starts backfiring and will eventually catch fire.

••• Hollywood Echo Chamber: Managed to catch Hugo and The Artist this week. Liked The Artist better: It was fully committed to it's premise, that of being a silent film. It was even shot in 4:3 Academy format aspect ratio, end to end, admirably authentic. Hugo had a layer of "Film History 480" to it-- Martin Scorsese trying to educate all of us on the protean era of cinema. The Artist is steeped in the world it portrays (Hollywood 1927-1932) but it's all in the service of pure entertainment: at the end, unlike Hugo, you don't feel like someone is going to slap a quiz sheet and a #2 pencil in your lap during the final credits.

••• Under The Bus: Over the last few days and months I think I figured out a new and strange decision process used by the producers of compelling shows like "Game of Thrones," "Breaking Bad" and especially "The Walking Dead." This involves dispensing with The Character Shield. "You viewers like interesting characters, right? Then let's kill some of them off! You're sure to come back next season and see how we're coping with it!"

*The Cabin in the Woods. Just thought I'd warn all that, much like Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words, when a film is delayed release for four years there may be more than one reason for it.

The Martian Curse

Coming Friday: John Carter, the epic sci-fi / action film, set mostly on the planet Mars, based on the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Never heard of it? You're in good company. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Disney is already flipping out: public interest is almost non-existent, the buzz isn't good (critical consensus so far: "you have seen this film before"). The prognosticators have downgraded projections for opening weekend box office from $25 million to $20 million. This is for a film that engaged four effects houses to complete, with a budget estimated from the official and astounding tally of $250 million to a flabbergasting (and off-the record) $275 million.

Teaser one-sheet from last summer.
JCM = John Carter of Mars. it was also
apparently NOT supposed to come out
'til June.

Show of hands: who has ever read the Barsoom novels the thing was based on? Who has ever heard of Taylor Kitsch, the star? Do you remember the early promotional material from last fall, when it was called John Carter of Mars? When we saw a trailer for it, my wife thought it was the sequel to Terminator: Salvation.

I honestly would never have thought there was such a thing as The Martian Curse-- but at least for Hollywood films, depicting or mentioning or even pointing a camera in the vague direction of The Red Planet is box-office doom. Big doom. Doom-de-doom-doom-style doom. Here are a few examples:

Martian with Dreads:
WTF, right?

Mars Needs Moms (2011, last year!): Disney's $150 million motion-capture all-CG bomb, based on a children's picture book. This one famously opened with $6.9 million in box office, which would be respectable if it were a mumble-core live-action film with non-union actors just talking about going to Mars. It realized a final profit of just over $20 million, which is horrible. It may have killed Robert Zemeckis' career: let's wait and see if he and M. Night Shyamalan (The Last Airbender) go into the wedding video business together. Still, compared to $275 mil, in retrospect it might have been a bargain.

"Open the pod bay doors, please-- Never mind, wrong movie."

Mission to Mars (2000): Featuring Tim Robbins in basically a long cameo and Gary Sinese with an incongruous amount of eye makeup, Mission to Mars was not all that bad a film, and alone among sci-fi films of late, it dealt with the actual technical details of going to Mars (i.e it's gonna take a long time). It was Brian DePalma's plodding tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey, it even featured space helmets that looked like they were swiped from Tony Master's (2001's art director) prop closet. Cost $80 million to make, took in $60 million total, after an unimpressive $20 million opening weekend.

Mars Attacks card from 1962. Kids were really
on their own back then, huh?

Mars Attacks! (1996): Based on kitschy (but not Taylor Kitschy) trading cards from the height of the Cold War, Tim Burton brought his own brand of strange whimsy to the entire thing. I actually got a huge kick out this film, which absolutely refused to take itself seriously for even a second. But with a $70 million production budget, it opened on nearly 2000 screens and took in $9.3 million. It took until about three months ago to gain a modest profit, a rare failure for Burton.

Almost forgot these entirely (which says something):

Red Planet (2000) featuring Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore. Cost $70 million to make, took in $8.7 million opening weekend for a sad $17 mil total. Don't remember this film at all.

Ghosts of Mars (2001): It's exactly what the title says it is: Mars colonists from Earth being possessed by Martian ghosts. made with a $28 million budget (modest for this crowd), it lumped together less than $9 million in receipts with a $3.8 million opening. The anticlimactic final big-budget film for John Carpenter.

Why do Mars movies fail so badly? I haven't a clue. All the film mentioned have solid pedigrees and represent the best values of production Hollywood has. I guess a curse sometimes is just that: a mysterious sort of ill fortune. maybe it's a planetary version of "the Scottish Play," a celestial body None Dare Call By Name.

So: I'm taking all bets! Does John Carter join this gallery of cinematic ignominy, or will it somehow find an audience? The lower you guess, the better the payoff!

Weekend Box Office

Thanks to BoxOfficeMojo.com for the cool chart I'm using.

Killer's Kiss: Casual Friday Kubrick

God bless Criterion. They only handle movies that impress them (mostly), they really heap on the special features. Plus they had a half-price sale on Valentine's Day. I thought that I picked up four movies that I always wanted to have on Blu-Ray, but it turns out they sent me five! To whit: if you're interested in owning Stanley Kubrick's heist-caper film The Killers let me sweeten the deal by telling you that among the extras is a beautiful transfer of Kubrick's 2nd feature Killer's Kiss.

Killer's Kiss is best described as a kind of minimalist thriller; a story about three characters, shot in black and white, coming in at an economical 67 minutes. Kubrick notwithstanding, it's not a particularly good movie. If anything, it plays like the work of a guy who wanted to make a movie and was willing to use any old story to do it. Boy (washed up prizefighter) meets girl (dance hall "hostess") and falls for her after scaring away her boyfriend and boss (creepy older minor-league mobster). But the mobster won't give the girl up.

Most of the action takes place within a flashback of the prizefighter's previous 48 hours, and during that flashback there is another flashback filling in the girls backstory. Being Kubrick, the whole things is very, very well photographed. More so when you consider that he was director, writer, cinematographer and editor as well. The compositions are sharp, the use of light, shadow and contrast is eye-popping. And the story moves at a quick clip, hampered only by the problem of characters who think like movie characters rather than people. And talk like, well, like nobody who ever lived. It's probably this movie that convinced Kubrick to start paying other people to write his dialog. Weirdly, he mostly chose novelists but I guess it worked out for him.

I think the most fascinating thing about this movie is that it's almost completely Kubrickian except for one major thing: he didn't have the budget or time to do retakes. The thing you look for in Kubrick movies is the eerie gloss he brings to scenes by using the 50th take. This is an off-the-cuff Kubrick. It's casual Friday Kubrick. It's like The Shining directed by William "One Shot" Beaudine. And those actors, frankly, they could have benefited from another 48 takes or so.

Worth seeing, especially either in the context of The Killing or of this, if you can find it. Check it out.

Weekend Box Office