Ex Machina: Tech Bro Frankenstein

In the 1985 John Hughes comedy Weird Science two high-school-age geeks combine their technological talents to the only end they find logical: to create a perfect woman. Being 1985 and all, the preferred medium of creation is a personal computer and scanner. The result was Lisa, a magical sexy Mary Poppins who, though she may not have made all of her creator's dreams come true, leaves them far more popular in high school.

Films reflect the times they are created in, and the mid-80s there was a streak of optimism in science fiction.* Maybe it was that fact tech was still on the edge of larger society. We had cool home computers, IBM PC-ATs, Apple Macintoshes and and the occasional Amiga 1000, but no real internet to speak of. We were in full control. Fast-forward exactly 30 years…

"So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?"
It's so charming and innocent in retrospect that
a woman who just materialized out of a computer
would have to even ask that question.

Ex Machina, currently out in limited release and will be available for download June 1st, is the Millennial generation's answer to Weird Science. Caleb (Domhall Gleeson, who played the protag in Frank), a gifted coder in a very large tech firm, wins a contest to spend a week with the firm's CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis himself) in his private underground lab in an isolated corner of what seems to be Iceland. Caleb finds out he is supposed to deliver the "Turing Test" for indisputable cybernetic self-awareness to Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android of Nathan's creation. Ava is a stunningly good combination of seamless VFX and perfectly executed, full-body acting by Ms. Vikander, by far the best part of the film. Caleb quickly falls for Ava, who is confined to a glassed-in room. Tension soon develops when, during a power cut when Nathan's cameras are knocked out, Ava says that Nathan cannot be trusted. A strange power struggle develops between the secretive Nathan, the inquisitive (and smitten) Caleb, and Ava, who may well be manipulating him to prevent her erasure and gain her freedom.

All in all, it is a fascinating movie which asks some rather important questions about our current relationship with artificial intelligence, a popular cinematic subject these days (Autómata, The Machine, Chappie, etc.). However, in the late second act the limits of writer-director Alex Garland's vision become apparent. You never quite get ahead the central plot of the film, but you realize there is only one outcome for this story and that is the one that happens. Afterwards you are left with a large series of "what ifs" and "what the hells" similar to the questions audiences had after screening Prometheus: Not nearly as much or as bad (Prometheus squandered a lot of the goodwill of the fans of the Alien film series) but a realization that this film could have been much more if a few more rewrites could have been knocked out. Notes:

We just got our second-round VC funding, bro!

• The world of Ex Machina is both abstract and almost depressingly familiar. From my vantage point here in the Bay Area this stylized science-fiction world looked like something I see every day here. The interiors of Nathan's lab-- clean concrete walls, glass doors, hidden LED lighting-- looks like the inside of every tech start-up I have ever seen (with less stuffed animals and ironic wall art, maybe). Nathan and Caleb are absolutely spot-on Silicon Valley techies: overachieving expert coders with limited social skills. They wear skinny jeans, sweats and hoodies in neutral tones, drink expensive-looking beer and vodka, and eat sushi. They are engaged in the ultimate code geek endeavor: creating the perfect girlfriend.

• Sexy female robots have been around since at least the 1920s (Maria from Metropolis). Ava is clearly a part of this continuum, which explores the fetishization of technology. This is the fist film I can remember where a robot's sexuality is held up as a question: Caleb asks Nathan why he would muddy the waters of a Turing Test by introducing something as distracting as giving the subject AI a female body. Nathan's answer was, amazingly, ten minutes of hanging a lantern on this subject: all lifeforms come gender-specific, sex makes life fun, it makes the Turing Test more interesting, and shut up that's why.

The answer to the encroachment of AI and the
inevitability of both the Singularity and the
eventual extinction of the human race: Drink up, bro!

It was odd to waste so much time on the Fembot question because it has been answered long ago: YES, quite a few men find the idea of female robots sexy. Ask anyone from Japan. Hell, Svedka Vodka is betting their whole ad campaign on it. When you get right down to it,  Ex Machina could be a long mediation on the problems that would arise if the Svedka robot babe was actually created. The tech bro main characters drink enough to qualify as their key demographic.

• Seen at the Sundance Kabuki in San Francisco, up in the balcony of Theater 1. This is their biggest screen and back when the Kabuki was an AMC theater I saw some amazing stuff there: Jurassic Park, Fargo and the industry screening of Starship Troopers. The balcony is amazing now: there are tables between seat pairs and you can order booze from the 3rd floor bar. I spent half the screening a little ticked off that I wasn't drinking an IPA with my popcorn.

So ultimately I'd recommend Ex Machina-- but you may be happier about it if you wait for the download.

* Doing the research for this piece I have to say the biggest surprise was what a banner year 1985 was for science fiction films. Aside from Weird Science, Back to the Future, Brazil, Cocoon, Enemy Mine, Re-Animator, Legend, Lifeforce and Return of the Living Dead all came out that year. The only franchise installments of note were Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, both rather good films.

Zombie Night Football

It's incredibly easy to find images of
zombie football players on the web.
Just sayin'.

"The Walking Dead" did something not a lot of scripted television shows have done recently: it outdrew an NFL football game in the key 18-to-35 demographic last Sunday. This was the second episode of the season as well, and so far the fourth season has commanded the best ratings yet for the AMC show. Quite a feat: The NFL rarely allows other shows to take it's viewership. It may be a temporary thing, and the NFL will likely go on and continue to squash all other shows again, especially as the end of the football season approaches. It's still almost unheard of.

It leaves a big question:  Why is this happening? I think it is two factors, opposite and in tandem: How the NFL and "The Walking Dead" are remarkably similar-- and how they are almost exactly opposite.

SIMILARITIES:
• Basic Rules of Action. People, especially people in the key demographic, watch a football game and "The Walking Dead" for the intense action. As I noted elsewhere, a football scrimmage and a zombie attack are remarkably similar things: The offense swarms in from all directions, intent on tackling and gaining possession-- of a brain or a football (about the same size). A wave of undead and a line of fullbacks both possess a undeniably intimidating quality, and both are going to bring the hurt if not stopped. Stop a zombie attack, and seconds later they're lined up again, ready to re-attack. Stakes are higher with zombies, of course, and there is nobody to a call a roughness or unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

• Unpredictability. Media Critic Neil Postman claimed that sporting events are popular because, unlike scripted television, they offer genuine surprise to the viewer. The most ridiculous mismatched teams can face off, but the final score is far from guaranteed. It's a game of inches, and close one can be nail-bitingly tense.

The extremely clever show runners of "the Walking Dead" know that uncertainty can make for riveting television-- a rule that can be encapsulated by a single principle (one first put forth by, of all people, Joe Bob Briggs): anybody can die at any moment. The show is notorious for killing off key characters: No character shield in effect here, no sir. The way the show's shots are composed and edited is consistently and completely unnerving: long, quiet sequences (to raise viewer tension) with lots of off-center compositions (which make you wonder "what's just off-frame? What's behind that door?" etc.). Finally, there is at least one awful, surprise, pop-up zombie attack per episode. So the visceral thrill for viewers is remarkably similar in both a live football game and scripted zombie drama.

DIFFERENCES: Well, DUH. These two shows could not be any more different. DUH. Okay, but HOW they're different-- and why one is at least temporarily outdrawing the other-- says a lot about American culture and tastes. So yeah, DUH-- but DUH with a pedigree.

• Spectacle vs. Intimacy: To watch an NFL broadcast is to witness nothing less than a massive money bonfire. Millions of dollars of player's salaries clocking up on the field. 50,000 fans who plunked an average of $250 per ticket, wearing $80 replica jerseys. Commercial advertisers paying the most prime ad rates on TV. And the network itself, burning through a billion-dollar broadcast agreement, covering the game with dozens of state-of-the art cameras and the best graphics in the industry. In terms of color, action and sheer spectacle, no other regular broadcast comes even close.

"The Walking Dead," on the other hand, is scripted television playing on a basic cable network. It's produced on location in rural Georgia (the graphic novel was set there-- AND the state offers a sizable tax break for productions) and shot on film-- not even 35mm film: It's shot on economical, if almost antiquated, Super16. This lends the show a grainy, muted look. The episode budgets are surprisingly large ($2.5 million as an average) but it's hard to see it through the resolutely natural feel of it: the money is all in the realistic-looking effects, makeup and props. It's all designed to make the horror intimate-- and real.

• Transience vs. Permanence: The universe of the NFL is based on the temporary nature of everything you see in it. The very game you're watching will be history mere hours after the last play, just a jumble of statistics not even worth a re-run (unless something truly unusual or tragic happened on the field). Every product advertised has several newer versions of it waiting in the wings. Even the player's uniforms are subtly redesigned every year to assure a steady revenue stream. It 's disposable event which reinforces disposable consumerism and disposable consumers.

After the zombie apocalypse, however, the great American machine of consumer goods has completely stopped. The main characters of "The Walking Dead" struggle to survive with whatever worn-out tools and artifacts were left behind. Nothing is disposable. Nothing is wasted. Even bullets to kill zombies are carefully conserved. An interesting detail from last week's show highlights this thrift: Rick's toddler-age daughter contents herself playing with a stack of red plastic party cups, the very icon of disposable culture.

• Self-Image and Freedom: I think people form a positive relationship with a TV based on how it reflects on their self-image. You watch a police procedural to feel smart, a talent show to feel like a part of the talent discovery process, and a show show like "Here Comes honey Boo-Boo" to convince oneself that things could be much, much worse.

The big pull for the NFL is basically the same one for all professional sports: Rooting for the home team. Given the fact that the only local aspects of any given pro team is the stadium and the owner, this can be called a fading asset. So let's look at these through a very narrow filter: how the NFL and "The Walking Dead" define freedom, a tenet still held as near-sacred for the average American. We like to see ourselves as a free people in a free country: how do these shows interpret this for us?

To watch an NFL game is to be in the massive bear hug of free-market capitalism, meshed into the gears of a finely tuned hype machine. Everything is for sale: Every object is branded: every surface has a logo on it. The exception is the gridiron, which is reserved for NFL branding (for the time being: Premier League Soccer teams have had ads on their kits since the 80s). Filtered down as an expression of our freedoms, about the only aspect on display is the freedom of the wallet. We're free to buy everything we see and we're encouraged to express our relationship with our home teams by buying authorized merchandise. It's a relationship we all understand, but it is the hollowest expression of American liberty there is.

In the universe of "The Walking Dead" government, commerce, and the legal structures of society are gone. Freedom is total. The main characters are free of all but the basic responsibilities-- in fact, the only relevant values are those of collective responsibility: everyone helps everyone else survive. It's a scary world, but every living human has a vital place in it and an important job to do.

I can't help but think that there is some appeal to this simplicity. What sounds more exciting to an 18-to-35 year old demographic unit: watching millionaire NFL players give each other concussions, through a high-tech haze of self-serving hype and branding? Or patrolling the ramparts of an abandoned prison with an M4 rifle, the guardian of the last bastion of humanity?

Why did "The Walking Dead" beat the NFL? Maybe because eventually everyone gets a bit tired of being hustled all the time. Zombies may want to eat your brains, but at least they aren't trying to sell you anything.

Eximius Scaphium XLVII

A contest for the ages-- the favored XLIX of Civitas Sacti Francisci battled mightily but eventually fell in defeat to the Corvorum of Terram Mariae. The God of the Underworld even blanketed the stadium in darkness, reminding all of the fleetingness of glory. Still, the imperial nature of this event get a little more intense every year: A little more reflexively patriotic, a little more excessive and bombastic, a little more awesomely exclusive, a little less about football.

Heck of a game, so-so broadcast. Still a hugely watched event, 108 million viewers, the third most watched ever.

• Good, weird game. It was a story of competing tempos: The Ravens had it in the first half, and after the blackout the 49ers had it. Unfortunately, that's the wrong time to gain tempo: Super Bowl games can't be won before halftime-- but they can be lost.

• This was a hometown game. When the Giants won the World Series a few months ago, it was double 4th of July in my neighborhood. After the Super Bowl was over, you could have heard a pin drop outside.

• Halftime was professional, none of the coarse goings-on like last year's Madonna jamboree. Beyoncé and the Clones of Doctor Funkenstein did a great job. They probably pulled too many amps with all those video displays and 5K spotlights, which overheated something and lead to a blackout.

Beyoncé and the gang, backstage before the big show.

• Commercials: Blah, for the most part:

• The one that lead in survey as most memorable was a Budweiser ad featuring a horse breeder reunited with a Clydesdale running unbridled through the streets of Chicago, all set to "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac. Eh. First of all, using "Landslide" to tug heartstrings was done first and better in "You're Getting Old," an episode of South Park from 2011. Second of all, If I know anything about Chicago police, if they saw a huge horse running down the street alone the poor beast would experience a sudden and decisive animal-control action.

• Chrysler featured the highlight and lowlight ads. "God Made a Farmer" was a brilliant two-minute ad, stunning in it's simplicity: a slideshow of hyper-sharp stills of real farmers set to an old Paul Harvey spoken piece. It was the anti-Super Bowl: simple, unglamorous, VFX-free, and told with undeniable sincerity. It was so light on product push the product (Dodge Trucks) was not seen until the last title card. People are already making fun of it, which is a predictable pattern: much like the critical reaction to Les Miserábles, It's sincerity flew under their Ironic Radar Systems.

• Oprah Winfrey narrated an ad for Jeep illustrating the lives of military families and veterans. This pisses me off. I don't care if they stuck a USO logo in the final title card, using members of the military to sell things (like, as someone tweeted, a car that gets 13 MPG) is borderline seditious.

• The rest of the ads were unmemorable, and for the most part most of the Bay Area would just as soon forget the whole thing.

"Community:" You're Only Dreaming You're Reading This

"Community," a comedy on NBC that notionally chronicles the adventures of seven diverse members of a study group attending a mediocre 2-year college, is a rare beast: a half-hour comedy that serves up laughs while actively de-constructing itself and the entire idea of commercial televised entertainment. There's far, far too much great stuff about this series to encapsulate in one article ("Law and Order" episode; "Elementary Chaos Theory"). I'm more interested in examining the May 10th episode "Curriculum Unavailable," and it's unusual pedigree.

Community's third season is wrapping up on a rather apocalyptic arc: Señor Chang (Ken Jeong), former Spanish teacher and now head of security, has engineered a coup, installing himself as the despotic head of Greendale Community College, with an army of junior-high-age minions to do his bidding. He has replaced the spectacularly quirky dean (Jim Rash) with a doppleganger and, to eliminate any challenge to his hegemony, has expelled the study group. "Curriculum Unavailable" begins two months after their expulsion: Abed (Danny Pudi) has been picked up by the police for dumpster-diving (for evidence) at Greendale, and has been compelled to visit a shrink. Being a sitcom, all seven study group members attend the therapy session, with John Hodgman guest-starring as the psychiatrist.

The Study Group, in Greendale Asylum,
imagining themselves as community college students.

By the end of the third act Hodgman makes his stunning-- and strangely convincing-- diagnosis: The entire study group was, at one time and for various reasons, all institutionalized, and Greendale College is entirely imaginary: he contends the group collectively invented a ”fantastical community college where everything that happens is unbelievably ridiculous-- and it all revolves around you.” The study group all freeze in the realization that he just may be right...

This idea-- that the premise of an entire fictitious universe may be the construct of a character in the same universe-- has been trotted out over and over again, especially in movies: Shutter Island, Inception, Total Recall, etc.

Easy to do in a movie-- but not so much in TV: that's because commercial TV series, due to the needs of breaking up story flow for advertising breaks, are dominated by structure and precedent and genre. A sitcom, for example, has a very specific structure: one-camera, three-camera, serial or episodic, every comedy consists of unique elements built upon a solid framework of familiarity. If the "acts" (the spaces between commercials) don't end on satisfying climaxes, the viewer will change the channel: this requires even more structure. It all results in a strange interpretation of reality, where for the sake of storytelling everything revolves around the leads, there are four important revelations per episode, and everything returns to status quo by the tag.

So when an "all this is a dream" idea is put into a TV series, the novelty of it and the structural requirements of serial TV grind against each other, and things get really memorable (and from this point on it's non-stop ••• spoilers••• if you ain't watched too much TV):

Jack, in his final moments.

• ABC's "Lost" (2004-2010) was always tinkering with it's own premise. Characters would die, resurrect, assume different personas, and in the final season the entire cast was duplicated in two separate timelines. In the end, the very very end, the island the show was centered on turned out to be the mental projection of a dying character, a fugue in his final moment of life that lasted and lasted and lasted. BBC's  "Life On Mars" and "Ashes to Ashes" worked the exact same idea.

They even got the bedspread right.

• This dream idea, when first applied to a sitcom, resulted in what was probably the finest show finale ever: "The Last Newhart," the last episode of "Newhart" (1982-1990). Bob Newhart's character, a beleaguered owner of a Vermont inn, is struck in the head by a golf ball: he awakens in bed as his character in "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-1978) next to Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from that earlier show. The entirety of "Newhart" was apparently a dream brought on by bad sushi.

• Let's not forget the season 8 cliffhanger of "Dallas" in 1986, where Bobby Ewing turns up in a shower and the entire preceding season was revealed to be the dream of another character. But this was not an organic part of the show: rather, a way to paper over some cast changes. The general reaction was either annoyance or amazement at the show's audacity.

Buffy Summers, awake and "lucid" and wanting
nothing more than being able to leave Sunnydale.

• "Curriculum Unavailable" has a direct and unlikely precedent: It refers to "Normal Again," an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" which aired almost exactly ten years ago.  Protagonist/super-powered Slayer Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is enmeshed in the typical events in this show's enchanted Sunnydale universe (fighting demons, vampire lovers, using witchcraft, etc.) when she begins to experience hallucinations induced by a demonic toxin. In these hallucinations, she's a mental patient in an asylum in Los Angeles, and has been for six years. Her mother and father, dead and gone in Sunnydale, are there: Buffy's sister Dawn, who magically appeared in season five, never existed. In "reality," Buffy has retreated into an elaborate invented world of magic and monsters and can no longer distinguish her fantasy from reality. But the kicker is: when she describes her situation to her friends in Sunnydale, they exchange nervous looks-- and are unable to refute her assertion that they and the world around them are nothing more than a farfetched illusion. At the end she breaks from "reality," and fully enters her Sunnydale existence: The last shot is Buffy's parents being told by a psychiatrist that she is now hopelessly "gone." It was-- and remains-- one of the most amazing hours of television I have ever seen. It was Joss Whedon acknowledging the intrinsically fantastic premise of his own show: in "Normal Again" he completely shredded it, to let us know how fragile and artificial it-- and any television universe in general-- is. (This idea was so good it was lifted almost note-for note in a 2007 episode of "Smallville.")

The perfectly cast John Hodgman.

But of course "Community" is far too clever for that: Seconds after walking out stunned from the psychologist's office after being told their college is imaginary, study group leader Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) stops and says, "hey, wait! That makes no sense!" Abed, indeed, has hundreds of pictures of campus on his phone and Annie (Alison Brie) has a backpack with the school's logo on it. Hodgman was an impostor, hired by Chang to keep the Study Group from discovering his machinations. In other words, the implausible sitcom premise is correct and the explanation that makes sense in our universe is entirely wrong.

Which is how we like 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!

The Year Oscar Begged For Help

The Kodak Theatre, before.

I mentioned earlier that if The Artist won best picture it would be an indication that Hollywood has fallen into terminal narcissism and given up on caring about the outside world. I was wrong: it was an indication of something far more alarming.

Indeed, it's too pat to suggest that the Oscar telecast was more narcissistic than usual. Narcissism is the lifeblood of the awards telecast: it's what kept the lights on in the "'Your Name Here' Theater" (Billy Crystal's reference to Chapter 11 Kodak), suspended the Cirque du Soliel acrobats up in the air, paid for the overstuffed goodie bags in the pre-awards luxury lounge. I misspoke here: goodie bags are over-- not very image-friendly in these class-divided, tough times. Now there are discreet "gift suites" set up in key hotels in Hollywood, full of amazing stuff nominees and celebrities can get their hands on-- no charge, free, gratis, thank you for being you. So if you're gonna be in Zanzibar the next few months, say hi to Adrien Brody, who was given a $35,000 resort vacation there at a gift suite. He was neither a presenter nor nominee. So when they say "it's an honor just to be nominated," this is what they're talking about.

It may have seemed to some like a boring, remarkably short Oscars (shortest in 30 years!) but you didn't have to look very hard to see a complete and articulate subliminal message, repeated over and over the entire evening. No courting kids, no young hosts (were James Franco and Anne Hathaway even there?), no Facebook or Twitter or mention of YouTube or anything like that: just a basic, existential subtext:

Gee, what's been covered up?

"Get off your butt and go see a movie!"

The big winners: The Artist and Hugo celebrated the nascent days of the film industry, the invention of film language and the advent of sound in the glamorous days of the silents. "See how amazing and historical movies are? Impressed? So get off your butt and go see a movie!"

Cirque du Soliel did an entire acrobatic dance dedicated to the experience of getting off one's butt and going to see a movie.

That weird montage of older movies near the beginning-- all of which are much, much better than anything nominated this year: "remember these? Now, get off your butt and go see a movie!"

Tom Sherak, head of the AMPAS, made a short and dull statement. Guess what it was?

Even Angelina Jolie's mile-long leg had a freighted meaning. She wasn't just showing off her gam: Jolie is Hollywood glamor personified, and that winking leg flashed a semaphore to a vast movie-going audience: "Want to see more? Then get off your butt and go see a movie!" (J-Lo's semi-exposed areola may have also had something to say to this area, but not quite as convincingly.)

The motion picture industry is in trouble. box office is down, attention-getting films are more expensive to produce, profit margins and therefore production slates are slimming. It may not be apparent when watching the Oscars, but Hollywood has a lot of experience in image management. There was a shocking column by a screenwriter in the New York Times last week which outlined how dire things are getting for those in the middle and lower rungs of Hollywood-- foreclosures, bankruptcies, careers evaporating as production gets cut back or exported.

Which leads back that unified, existential cry for help, which ran under the proceedings like the recurring audio feedback that plagued the whole show. And it's hard to ignore the fact that everyone was gathered in the Kodak Theatre-- the bankrupt former pillar of The Industry, victim to the digital technology which is gnawing at every level of Hollywood, from mighty L.A. basin studio to tiny Valley adult-film shingle.

Okay, that 's a bit apocalyptic-- It was still a very amusing, glamorous night. I got to watch it at an Oscar pool party thrown in a loft apartment in downtown San Francisco, with big wraparound views of the city and the bay. Amazing. There were about two dozen folks there, all charming and nice. I got to show off a little screenwriter wisdom, such as the difference in "&" and "and" in screenwriting credits. Somebody else won with something like 17 correct picks. I have never, ever won an Oscar pool.

Talking Back to The Screen: the Movie

People can sometimes foster an intense bond with their favorite films, which is what fandom is all about. The question is: What can be done about this intense bond, aside from seeing the film over and over and buying all the action figures and video releases?

The traditional answer was to join a fan club and seek out people who share your interests. Studios love fan clubs-- it's the right kind of adoration, and best of all it supports the ancillary marketing industry.

Still, if you wanted to go further, and you were handy with a camera, you could make a little tribute film (God knows I've made my share). Some of my favorite stories in this area are those of fandom gone seriously overboard: in particular, that kid who built the Enterprise bridge set in his mother's basement-- becoming the perfect 10.0 on the “Trek-O-Meter.”

Perhaps the ultimate fan tribute of all time was pulled off by three kids from Mississippi who took seven years to create their own shot-for-shot adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apparently, Steven Spielberg was impressed. Why not? These teeners did it the old-fashioned way: using the movie as a script and painstakingly recreating all the scenes by hand. Gotta admire their gumption-- and since what they made will never cut into the Indiana Jones revenue stream, why not embrace it?

The trend in fandom (or at least film geekdom) we're seeing now is repurposed Hollywood films. It's much, much easier to rip a DVD, re-edit scenes from it, and post the results on YouTube than it is to make Captain Kirk's chair out of plywood or fashion a huge rolling booby-trap boulder out of papier-mache.

 In the early days of this tendency, the results were clever and justifiably famous: The recut of The Shining as “Shine,” a trailer for a romantic comedy, showing not only the deftness of the creator's editing skills but the hollowness of RomCom cliches.

Later that same year (2006) somebody re-edited Mary Poppins as a horror film-- not as clever as the “Shine” trailer, but still effective.

Woefully, it has become too far easy to cut up feature films. It's the “mumble core” effect: more and cheaper ways to make films has not resulted in a flowering of new auteurs, but rather a wave of mediocrity and unreleasable movies. If you want an idea of the current state of things, go to YouTube and type “Hitler on” in the search box. (Of course, in a perfect reversal of this trend, some wiseacre took this overused scene from Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004) and, in Raiders Adaptation fashion, reshot it word-for-word.

What are these innumerable Hitler rants with funny subtitles? Not much more than Talking Over the Movie. It's more or less the same as what those “movie talkers” do, keeping up an imaginary two-way dialog with the big screen. Or what you do, in the privacy of your own home, adding witty commentary to “American Idol.” it is the quickest, least clever, and most immediate reaction one can have to a film or TV show.

But just when I was completely exasperated with the entire deal, my sister turned me onto a new example of a repurposed movie, and a clever and hilarious one at that: “Guy On a Buffalo.” Like “Shine," this is an example of how someone with a good sense of humor and talent-- in this case, Austin-based musical talent-- can take a nearly forgotten drive-in B picture from 1978 and make it into something amazing-- Talking Over the Movie done well.

And how does Hollywood feel about all this? They hate it, of course. It's not as bad as bit-torrenting whole movies or TV series, but it is a basic intellectual property violation. Still, nobody has ever been prosecuted for re-purposing films on YouTube-- so long as there is no profit in it.

In fact, they may be getting into the act themselves, throwing in the towel and joining in. One of the pre-release trailers for Man On a Ledge (2012) features one of it's stars, Elizabeth Banks, talking over a trailer for the film. It seems a bit like DVD commentary, but it's so funny-- and so totally at odds with the action-drama genre of the film she's talking over-- that it's quite clear the studio has given up trying to be serious. If someone is gonna talk over our film, the producers must have reasoned, let it at least be someone with talent, and on our payroll.

Eximius Scaphium XLVI

A fierce contest between the neighboring and rival civitates: The unfavored Gigantes of Nova Eboraci delivered a decisive blow to the Bonorum of Nova Britannia. Much skill and fortitude was displayed, but the ultimate victory seemed to be mostly in the hands of the Parcae: Nona, Decima and Morta, who spun their webs of luck and fate. I mean, the first points on the board came from a safety, for Jupiter's sake!

It's been my schtick here to parse the Super Bowl as some kind of modern Roman spectacle-- So it is with either delight or horror I can report that for the first time the NFL beat me to it. Madonna, the main lip-syncher for the halftime show, was carted out to the main stage by a maniple of the Roman Legion: shiny gold plumed galea, armor and everything. Madge herself initially appeared as a vaguely approximate version of Egyptian royalty, which means she was likely portraying Cleopatra VII Philopator.

A few observations:

• Good close game. I guess. Saw a lot of flubs on the field. And really, since the Giants knocked the 49ers out of contention two weeks ago, I had absolutely no stake in it: It may have well been a Harlem Globetrotters game. I'm sure it made NBC happy: TV market #1 versus TV market #7.

• The coarsening of American public discourse got a huge advance in Super Bowl XLVI. At halftime, we got a 4-fer: M.I.A. gave 80 million 111.3 million viewers the finger. Nearby was a band of annoying fratboys in joke-shop afros called LMFAO. Next to them was a singer whose stage-name was coined from a group sex act. Following up was a guy who had a monster hit titled with the same word that centers the annoying fratboy's band. The Valentine-themed ad featuring Adriana Lima in black lingerie was either for flowers or a really expensive escort service. The female embodiment of the Fiat 500 Abarth wants you to lick latté foam out of her cleavage. This all made the inevitable Go Daddy ad look like a Disney Channel promo.

• As for the ads: My favorite was Chrysler Group's "Detroit" ad. Clint Eastwood has a silhouette that's as recognizable as a Founding Father and a voice like an overheated, under-lubricated 5-speed transmission. The rest were sort of a blur: Lots of uninventive, laddish stuff this year. I started a count on the number of ads which drew an annoyed sigh from me: I counted ten.

• I've already read some columnist calling the Acura ad featuring the bullet-headed Jerry Seinfeld their favorite. I think you had to have been a "Seinfeld" person to agree (I was a "Friends" person). To me this ad-- where Jer tries to entice some schlub into giving him his reservation for a concept car-- was a tone-deaf, icky example of an obscenely rich guy trying very hard to get his way.

• There was a promo from the NFL (which I guess they can show for free, as opposed to $4 million per half-minute) which cleverly demonstrated the evolution of the rules and safety equipment in football, from it's mudslinging rugby-like origins to the super-padded, tech-helmeted present. It was actually an indirect message from league management to the player's union and countless tort lawyers: "Please don't sue us for your inevitable and debilitating concussion-caused dementia! We're trying really hard, honest!"

• There was an actual MARCHING BAND on the field of the Super Bowl during halftime! Not since 1990 has there been one. I think even those shako-wearing musicians were lip-synching-- or drum-synching, or whatever you may call it.

Hollywood's Immune System

In order to see Contagion comfortably, I chose a late, late showtime: 10:55, the last showtime at the Tanforan 20. From what I'd read about the effectiveness of Steven Soderbergh's new thriller, I wanted at least a few rows of seats between me and the next moviegoer. There were only 8 or so in the auditorium, and nobody was coughing. (but there was, as there always seems to be in late-night movie screenings these days, a couple dragging their toddler-aged kid along.)

Contagion is a very good, very scary film. Soderbergh calls it a horror film, evading the "thriller" tag, and he has a good point. Good horror plays on primal fears-- remember that grotty dude hacking away without covering his mouth at Starbucks last week? Sure you do. That, coupled with the always-unsettling glimpse of the thin veneer of society peeling away at the epidemic's later stages, creates feelings of rising unease as the film progresses. And as it uses Soderburgh's signature multiple-storyline style, you're never quite sure which of the Oscar-caliber ensemble is going to bite the dust next.

Later in the film there are plenty of scenes of National Guard troops in digital camouflage and Hum-Vees keeping roadblocks. This aspect calls back to the discussion about Torchwood: Miracle Day, which covers remarkably similar ground concerning profound social disruption. But here's the thing: the high-concept sci-fi idea of everyone on earth inexplicably granted life everlasting is sort of fun to think about, but the hard-science idea of an unstoppable virus wiping out millions is not only depressing and scary to ponder, less than 100 years ago something very similar actually happened.

Aside from the micron-sized and therefore un-telegenic virus, there's a human villain in this piece: Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), a crummy, weedy fellow who sows fear and misinformation and false hope in alternative medicine cures through his blog. In a film that focuses on the selfless efforts of government scientist to save lives (a la Outbreak and The Andromeda Strain) he represents the conspiracy nuts, the anti-vaccine moms-- the whole, weird anti-science know-nothing movement that seems to depressingly be steadily gaining traction in larger society.

But I think there's something more subtle going on here. This is at least the second major feature film which paints a harsh picture of the internet in general and social networking specifically. Recall the tone of The Social Network, a film that exposes Facebook's roots as a crude sexist college diversion and it's founders as litigious snobs or prickly sociopaths. And in Contagion, it's made clear that everything would be going so much better for humanity in general if it were not for some nutty blogger from San Francisco (surprise: Hollywood yet again portrays the Bay Area as a scenic loony bin).

And why shouldn't establishment Hollywood view the Internet in the worst possible light? As far as the studios are concerned, it's a disease.

I think such negative depictions of internet culture in major movies are a sign of Hollywood's immune system going into overdrive. Even now, there is little the internet and social networking can do to help studios sell tickets: viral hits like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project are so rare they've become cautionary tales (as in: never mention either of them when you're pitching a script). In realpolitik, internet film marketing is just another money-suck for which studios are obliged to staff buildings full of web designers and marketers to create feckless web presences for their movies.

The internet has come to represent nothing less than a full attack on Hollywood, a galloping infection that attacks both control of product and the bottom line. The studio buys a script, and they have to make sure it doesn't get uploaded somewhere. Greenlight, and there are even more potential leaks. Outright piracy begins generally at the first pre-screenings right through general release, eating away box-office as effectively as a blood-borne parasite eats red blood cells. As whole films fall into bit-torrent oblivion, snippets of their films get cut out and put on YouTube or Daily Motion and there's little to be done about that either. Finally, even the home video market and it's tidy widget-style sales model is being sapped by streaming services, offering the same film for a fraction of the cost of a DVD or BluRay version.

As falling revenues draws the industry into existential crisis, we're seeing it's immune system deploy T-cells and leukocytes, out to destroy the malignancy. Expect to see more.

Once upon a time, internet culture as depicted by Hollywood was a rich source of pseudo-high-tech, blatantly unbelievable tropes: "I'll have to hack their IP with a custom-written worm to access their triple-encrypted password. And… there it is!" Remember Hackers (1995) with Angeline Jolie as "Acid Burn" and Jonny Lee Miller as "Crash Override?" Hoo-boy. But that was then: the era of that sort of fun-loving naivete is over.

Eximius Scaphium XLV

Another splendid event of imperial scale, in which the battle-tested Sarcinatori of the tiny outlier settlement of Sinus Verdis faced off against the favored Faberici Ferrum of the mighty Civitates of Arces Pittus before more than 100,000 lustily screaming citizens. The gods of the republic were sated by the spectacle-- particularly Bacchus, Mars and special guest deity Mammon, god of money.

The Super Bowl is a celebration of American exceptionalism, and in that respect the comparison to a Roman triumph is most appropriate. Barbarian pastimes like soccer are unmentioned; decadence is taken to the extreme ($900+ for SRO seats for the game; $200 to watch it from the parking lot); and viewership outside the sphere of our direct control is noted only as affirmation of the superiority of our particular form of SPQR. It is a far more reassuring indicator of the state of the Union than the presidential state of the union address could ever be, and it is far more effective at addressing the needs and fears of our collective psyche.

Some random observations:

• The game itself was, as last year, quite a good one. And this time I almost nailed the point spread: I picked Green Bay by 5, and they came within a point of that. Good passing, some amazing plays and smart officiating. The pros down on the field conducted their game with professionalism, unlike...

• No wardroom malfunctions per se, but a few things did go spectacularly off the rails. Christina Aguilera muffed the lyrics of "The Star Spangled Banner," the anthem for the country where the Super Bowl is being played this year and, coincidentally, the nation Ms. Aguilera was born and raised in. Blowing the national anthem at a professional sporting event-- now there's something I've never seen before. When Rosanne Barr's performed her notorious crotch-grabbing version back in 1990, even she got the words right.

Around the middle of the halftime show some massive lit-up stage pieces were wheeled in so the performers could cavort about on them. one section malfunctioned--leaving what should have been the word "LOVE" looking like "LO\'E."

• Ah, the half-time show. To quote someone else's Twitter, "It was nice of the Black Eyed Peas to come back in time and warn us about the future of music." Funny, but the show was definitely a look at the present state of pop music, which looked like a Broadway version of Tron: Legacy-- LED-lit costumes, inexplicable geometric patterns and very serious, Cylon-sounding AutoTune abuse. Slash appeared as Slash, doing a Slash guitar jam. Usher showed up, doing a very convincing Usher. And hey-- if the BEPs were doing a medley, where was "My Humps," dammit?

• The commercials for the most part were banking on familiar American themes, nostalgia, trivia and slapstick humor. Some seriously thin retreads were shown--GoDaddy.com, Snickers, eTrade: same s***, different year. Two car ads caught a lot of attention, both highlighting some rather arcane and useless new features of their vehicles: The Darth Vader VW ad (keyless ignition, which looks kinda dangerous) and Chevy Cruz's Facebook capability (which probably IS dangerous).

My favorites were the ones that pushed against the paradigm a little: The stirring, beautifully shot Chrysler ad featuring Eminem-- with the tagline "Imported from Detroit," which re-brands it as being somewhere outside the USA and confirms just about how far the Motor City has fallen. The Groupon Tibet ad, which started like a far-left political message and came within a hair of pissing off the Chinese government AND most liberal activists.

• Although there was nothing but loud cheering throughout the telecast, much of what has been written about this contest has a vaguely apocalyptic tone. The feeling is that Super Bowl XLV may well be the biggest, best one we'll ever see. A dispute with the NFL player's union looms, and there is much talk about a shutdown or lockout in the upcoming season.

Even if the players, the league and the owners iron everything out, the awareness of how the modern game exacts such a high physical and neurological toll on players is rising. The men on the line of scrimmage have been leading tackles "from the hat" (i.e. helmet-against-helmet drives) for years now, and the majority of NFL players have had serious concussions as a result. 2011 may see the beginning of a wave of class-action suits against the league from punched-out, demented former players. Dark clouds are forming on the horizon, and the barbarians (or at least barbarian-sized former players) are gathering at the Danube.

So if this were were a Roman spectacle, Super Bowl XLV is set during the reign of emperor Trajan (98-117 CE), a time when the Roman  Empire reached it's maximum extent.

Oh, and forgive the bar-floor Latin. The title, I realize, would be better translated as "Scaphius Maximus XLV." Oh well: Sic transit Gloria Cheeseheads.

"Skins" Proves Teens are Immortal

The American (kinda) version of the UK teen drama "Skins" had it's hour-long premiere on MTV last week. As it wasn't aimed to my demographic, I had planned on ignoring it-- even though widespread moral panic is building over it, and advertisers have been marching away from it one by one. But when I read a review in the Washington Post that said it had no redeeming social value, well, I just had to see it. That's strong sauce!

The main character in "Skins" is Tony, this new century's Ferris Bueller, and the bunch of Hollister model-looking high-school-age kids in his orbit. He and his friends conduct themselves in most ways in the manner of hard-core hedonists, much as Ferris did-- but he was about cutting school to go to Chicago, not getting his friends laid, trashing nice houses, stealing cars, treating adults with undisguised contempt, and dealing stupendous amounts of weed. (then again, it was Ferris' dumb idea that lead to the destruction of Cameron's Dad's Ferrari, and therefore Cameron's implicit, offscreen murder.)

It's a strange-looking, strange-sounding show as well. "Skins" is, as mentioned, a remake of a British show of the same name, and as far as I can tell the scripts have not been altered one bit for American audiences. So the dialog is chock-a-block with English slang (like the word skins itself, which means rolling papers) and Clockwork Orange-like cadences that sound bizarre coming out in American inflections.

Make that Canadian inflections: It's set somewhere in America (Baltimore, I read) but it's shot in Canada, an often torrid show set in the cold, bland interior and exterior spaces of greater Toronto. I did not detect any vowel risings among the pale, pale cast, but the Canadian-ness of it all just makes the British dialog even weirder-sounding. This all means "Skins" may be thought of as an apocalyptic "DeGrassi," or "6teen" if it had imitated "The Jersey Shore" rather than "Friends."

Folks out there are afraid that "Skins" is some form of child pornography. It ain't: It's a teen drama with teen actors portraying teens who are obsessed with sex, not a vehicle for distributing illegal images of naked kids. Still, considering the ages of the actors, they are skirting the edges of the law: If there is a nude scene with an actor under the age of consent, it's technically child porn, and from the look of things on "Skins" it's just matter of time.

And yes, the amazing thing about this show is how it shows kids doing irresponsible, even dangerous kid stuff without consequences-- an after-school special from hell, a nihilist "Sweet Valley High." From the Hayes Office to broadcast TV standards and practices, moral balance has been a bedrock requirement of popular entertainment. The good are rewarded, the evil punished, actions have consequences.

But the funny thing about life is there often aren't consequences. Plenty of mobsters die in their own beds at age 99. Don Draper had raw eggs cracked into his Caesar Salads for years, and he's only gotten healthier. It's impossible to prove, but I'll venture a majority of petty criminals are fairly successful-- Maybe only the greedy or stupid ones get caught. Perhaps consequences are merely a social construct, how we pattern-seeking human beings find ways to make sense of a chaotic world. We seek authority and the certainty of morality in a Godless universe where morality is as substantial as a moonbeam.

And what are consequences to teenagers? Teenagers, bless 'em, think they're immortal, that they'll live forever. This is the key to understanding "Skins," a show that just confirms this conditional worldview. As a fun coincidence, this widely held teen belief is also the reason why, in times of war, teenagers get drafted.

Just food for thought.

Today in super-obvious movie news

LA Times:

Online critics name "The Social Network" best picture

I suppose this could have alternately been headlined "Today's 'to a person with a hammer, everything is a nail' news."

A few days ago, after the tag of some show like "The Middle," I witnessed the following commercials run in order (verified via my DVR):

People's Choice Awards Show promo (:15)
Critic's Choice Awards Show promo (:15)
Ad for toilet paper coyly featuring animated bears in woods (:30)
Golden Globe Awards Show promo (:30)

These first two I have barely heard of, nor have I heard of the Online Critics dealie referred to in the lede. Amazing that someone keeps creating more awards and awards shows-- it's as much of a growth industry as film festivals were pre-2008.

I wonder where it's all headed, especially when one considers the overall number of motion pictures being distributed slips a bit every year. I can see a time in the not-too-distant future when the number of released films and awards for them coincide exactly. Then we'll be in feel-good heaven where, as in elementary school athletics, everyone wins!

Eximius Scaphium XLIV

An awe-inspiring clash it was! The scrappy Sanctus of Nova Aurelianeum were pitted against the seeming unstoppable Equii Juvenii of Civitas Indium. Janus himself could not have forseen the outcome.

The Super Bowl allegedly surpassed the finale of "M*A*S*H*" as the most-watched broadcast in American history. I watched it. I didn't watch the final episode of "M*A*S*H*"-- it was broadcast during a particularly nasty storm, and most of Santa Cruz County was blacked out.

A few thoughts:

• Very good game. I lost a buck or two on it-- I went with the prevailing odds, Colts by 7.

• CBS and the NFL were pushing the post-Katrina narrative hard. Apparently, New Orleans HAD to win, to achieve "closure" after the devastating 2005 hurricane. Psychologically, I can see the point. But realistically, a lot of bars and T-shirt sellers got richer, an already rich team owner got a nice trophy for his enormous mantelpiece, but the neighborhoods that were ruined by Katrina will still be ruined after the victory parade. Maybe everyone thought the Super Bowl was played under special Late Roman Empire rules, which allows the residents of New Orleans to sack and pillage Indianapolis at will.

• Way too much hype for the "NFL Scouting Combine." This is an "American Idol" sort of affair where inarticulate college athletes do workouts and answer questions in front of NFL coaches and scouts. This happens in a few weeks, and will be followed by the NFL draft, which happens in April and will be broadcast from (honest to God) Radio City Music Hall. Year-round football has arrived.

• The commercials were underwhelming. My favorites were the ones for Kia (with the sock monkey) and Snickers (Betty White and Abe Vigoda being tackled). The Super Bowl is supposed to be a Roman Spectacle of our age, Displaying the awe-inspiring might of the NFL and the power and glory of American consumer society. The NFL got it down cold (I have never seen so many completed passes in any game, period) but the consumer part was looking a bit tired. Following the Roman analogy, the commercials were the last legion in the triumph, fresh from a savage beating from the Visigoths in Illyria.

• The sexagenarian survivors fronting The Who didn't look winded at all. Then again, there were a LOT of long shots of that enormous luminous flying saucer deal that surrounded the stage on all sides, which left the guys a moment to catch their breath. What was that thing? The ultimate crowd control barrier?

• The "Late Show" promo was the highlight of the evening. It was so surprising to see Jay Leno sharing a couch with David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey I had to back up the DVR and watch it again. I can see why NBC and CBS went along with this, which was apparently all Letterman's idea: It makes both of them look collegial and good-humored, above the contentious late-night fray.

See you at the NFL Scouting Combine pre-show!

Extremely Stealthy Viral Marketing

First take a look at this:



Then, to follow up, look at this:



And understand that neither of these things would belong on this blog, except in the light of this.

Here's a theory: These video are an elaborate viral marketing campaign for Butterfinger. Green signed on as spokesman for the Nestle candy bar just last month. What little is known about Butterfinger's future creative direction going forward, as spelled out in this press release, is the brand's intent on reviving the tagline made famous by Green's predecessor, Bart Simpson: "Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger." The product was already treated to an online campaign, ProtectYourButterfingerBar.com.

Hmmm, all this talk about "laying a finger" and protecting the bar. Could it be that videos about a pitchman being attacked is a new spin on a familiar campaign? Strange as it may sound to trot out videos that don't feature the product being promoted, it's exactly that kind of anti-ad that's likely to lure Gen Y-ers in, presumably before somehow working Butterfinger into some future installment of this intriguing series.

Sounds credible to me, but kudos to the people behind this (if there are indeed "people" who are "behind" this) for their commitment.