The Trouble with Lana

I have a bit of a confession to make, and I feel a bit weird, almost guilty saying this: I kind of like Lana Del Rey. Kind of. I've felt this way for a while now, and despite my normal sense of comfort with my own tastes, I have made an actual effort to keep this fact hidden. I only listen to her when I'm alone, I feign ignorance when she's mentioned in conversation, the very few people I've admitted this to I've sworn to secrecy. For the first time, possibly ever, I have felt a certain amount of embarrassment for liking something. This feeling is new to me.

You can probably tell.

But the fact of the matter is, I can't help it. I like her music, whether I mean to or not, and the sooner I come to grips with this fact the better it will be in the long run. However, that doesn't mean I don't have a few problems with how she does things. After all, the reason I'm embarrassed is because I actually recognize why so many other people dislike her. With all the hate coming her way, I totally get where it's coming from. So what is the problem?

In a nutshell, it's her image. Everything wrong with her career just sort of revolves around her image, but it's not so much what that image is, it's that it's so central to her.

No, really, I just listen to her for the songs.  I swear.

Think about it; despite the fact that she's got a song about how she's on the radio now, I have not actually heard her on the radio. The first most people heard of her is what they saw at the same time in her music video to Video Games. And what they saw was exceedingly obvious hipster bait. From the get go of her career, she was attempting to attract a key demographic through means other than her music. And by the beginning of her career, I'm talking about the album she released, then rescinded, under the name Lizzy Grant. It was available briefly before she bought the rights back, and she has refused to re-release it since. While there's probably a good reason or two out there to explain a move like this, the most obvious possibility is that she was giving hipsters an opportunity to do what they do best: brag about being into something before anyone else. It's just that it's so obvious she was doing it. Throw in her (often sung about) time spent living in a trailer park (after she signed a recording contract for $10,000) and the fact that she's a little white girl from New York going by an artificially exotic name, and you've got all the markings of a singer trying to influence her way into a position of fame and adoration.

But she made a couple major mistakes. One, she estimated her intended audience wrong. She's relied on her image way, way too much, and while it's true that musicians make careers out of good looks or image alone all the time (see American Idol, seasons 1 through 11) it doesn't work quite so well when you want to be taken seriously as a musician. Lana wants to be loved and respected as an artist, and image based careers only work to this degree on pop music audiences. I mean, pop audiences adore Katy Perry and Justin Bieber enough to go to movies about them, they're not overly concerned with quality. She tried to illicit that same level of devotion starting with a core audience of underground music snobs and spread out from there, but she was so obvious about it that even hipsters recognized they were being manipulated. So they turned on her.

Her other problem is in her sexiness. Currently, audiences are completely fine with strong women who are comfortable in their own sexuality (Pink!), which can be empowering, and with women who use their sexuality in a way to attract a male audience (Katy Perry) and exert some level of control over them, which can be a kind of empowerment. Audiences are even fine with whatever Nicki Minaj counts as, and while not necessarily empowering, that certain counts as some kind of kind of self confidence. Lana Del Rey's approach to using her sex appeal consists of a creepily subservient “I exist only for your pleasure” image that I can't quite tell if it's for real or not. On the one hand, I'm not convinced it isn't just a satirical look at the image, on the other hand, she awkwardly flaunts it in ways that prevent me from being convinced that it is.

You see, this. This? This is exactly what I'm talking about.

She might be trying to show how dull and lifeless women are when seen as mere sex objects, or she might just be a sex object who's not all that into it. It's hard to tell. She makes it hard to tell.

Lastly, there's her SNL performance. Yeah, it was just really bad. There's not some greater issue with her persona or business tactics here, it's just that it really was bad. Like, probably not “worst ever” bad, but maybe within the bottom 25.

And all of this is a shame, because beneath the awkward sexuality, the fake name, the obvious manipulation, and the focus on her image and persona over her music, there is a talented musician with good music to perform. I don't care if some of her lyrics seem disingenuous; I only care if she feels the need to make us think they are genuine because then she'd be missing the point. I don't care if she wants to change names or labels; I only care if it starts to affect the availability of her music or if that music is sacrificed for (or worse, created as) a publicity stunt. I don't care if she isn't as good live; as long as what she puts to recording is listenable and good, I'll be listening and good.

Job Jitters: We Don't Need No Education

Nervously, I sat in the chair of my superior's office, waiting as he slowly read the conduct reports. Actually, I say “my superior”, but he really wasn't. My superior was the secretary (I'm sorry, administrative assistant) who worked in my same office here at the college. Her superior was the administrative assistant in the office next door, and her superior was the dean who she directly assisted. And when I say dean, he was technically just the dean of the art school, and his superior was on the school board representing the whole college, and his superior was in the Administrative Building. It was in the office of this last superior that I sat, awaiting my judgment.

“Well, Harry, I assume you know why you're here.”

“My work isn't good enough?” I ventured.

“No, no, your work is fine. You have been an excellent...” he adjusted his glasses while scanning the paper for confirmation of my title, “...administrative assistant's assistant's assistant.”

“Oh, well then have I not been getting along with my co-workers?”

“No, actually, they all seem to love you. The assistants called you a life saver, and one teacher called you brilliant.”

“Oh, then this can only be regarding... the outburst.”

“Yes, that's it. The outburst you had last Friday. You had, um, quite a lot to say, didn't you.”

“I tend to express myself creatively, sir.”

“Indeed. It says at one point you described this job as 'a huge, steaming pile of... baloney sandwiches'. Wait, why baloney sandwiches?”

“This is a pretty tame blog, sir. Families read this, children even.”

Children exclusively, I should say.

“I see. Well, what, might I ask, is the main reason for your concerns?”

“Well, this job just carries with it a whole lot of baloney sandwiches. Like, all the paperwork. I mean an insane amount of paperwork. We have books that keep saved paperwork going back as far as 2008, and that's just on the shelf. In the storage closet, we still have final grades that go back twice as far. And most of it's so useless. There was a huge stack of papers, I kid you not, 600 sheets at least, that were two days late being sent out and were suddenly useless. And I had to shred all of them, one by one, because they had private info on them. There's so much paperwork, 90% of it useless, that our file cabinet just for the empty forms that people have to fill out for any little thing looks like the closet in Zaboomafoo.”

Editor's note: Harry, I want you to make more nostalgia jokes. Internet audiences really respond to nostalgia jokes.

“Okay, well, is that all?”

“No, other problem is that nothing is ever done as it's said. So many times has someone told me to do something, explained it in length, and then when I did it, it was wrong because they expected something else. Even with my hiring, I was only here for a temp job while you looked for someone to fill the spot permanently. But now you've got her, and I'm still here. Then you said you'd reduce my hours so I'd only be coming in 3 days a week, but that never happened. Hell, first you said I'd be paid one thing, then I actually get paid less.”

“To be fair, you weren't qualified for that job title, therefore we hired you at a lower title to do the same work for less.”

“Yeah, but that's another thing that points to this job just being a frustratingly overcomplicated mess. Look at my resume. I'm qualified to do this, I've had similar enough experiences before. But when I applied, I spent an hour and a half being coached by my boss to get previous job experiences to match, word for word, to what your job posting called for. Stupid, little things, like not saying I 'checked out customers' when I was a cashier because it sounds like I was hitting on them; and saying 'experience using a mechanical adding machine' instead of saying cash register. I had to alter the minutest of details and wordings just to get this job. I spent more time carefully rewording my application, after I was already selected mind you, than I did learning what I was going to be doing, all so my bosses wouldn't get in trouble with you guys for hiring someone who wasn't qualified for the $1.00 pay difference between job titles. And the thing is, I'm not really qualified, not for this. I can input data, organize, deal with customers or technology and anything else that the job posting said, but what the posting never said, and what I've never had experience with, was this level of total BS. And because of a well meaning superior stretching my resume to fill a needlessly specific yet woefully under descriptive job requirement list, I'm suddenly in a job where I have no idea what I'm doing and am expected to do it anyway. It's like I'm living my middle school nightmares about the workforce where I ended up in a job I couldn't do and if I screwed up it would be a negative mark against future employment opportunities and also I forgot to wear pants.

The workforce, how I see it. Did I mention this blog was also created by a child?

I mean, this is supposed to be a college. Teachers are trying to actually get some stuff actually done, and students are trying to get an actual education, but it's made increasingly difficult by your ever mounting pile of pointless, stupid, inane, petty BS.”

There was silence in the office. My superior shuffled the papers, staring at them hard, and eventually let out a long sigh.

“Well, Harry, I'm sorry, but there's only so much I can do. Perhaps my... superior could address your concerns more completely.”

“Wow, that sounded... sinister...” I began, though before I could finish, he had stood from his desk, leapt to the door at the side of his office, the door I had somehow failed to notice until now, and rapped gently on its wooden frame. He was responded by a light gurgling from the other side of the door.

“Sir, I hate to disturb you, but we have another dissenter. He seems quite perturbed by the workings here. Shall we invite him in for a look at the... bigger picture?”

He must have received a nod of assent, because without further sound from the thing past the doorway, he turned and bade me enter. Against my better judgment, I slowly made my way to the door frame and peeked within, and found myself confronted with a great and colossal being that defied all reason and spat upon the notion of sanity itself. It looked upon me with ancient eyes, and all I could feel was dread; the dying warmth of the last day of summer, the bitter tears of an old friend's departure, the painful droplets of rain ruining an otherwise perfect day. There were so many details about the monstrosity that it could only truly be described as indescribable; it's face had fangs, yet also mandibles, yet also tentacles; it's limbs were hideously bulbous yet acutely lithe; its breath was sickly sweet yet nauseatingly bitter; its skin was of some tone that I was certain my eyes were not able to see and no language was able to name; it had so many countless eyes and yet when I stared deeply, uncontrollably, I could see only the one. It's craggy, eldritch visage was nothing short of Lovecraftian.

Editor's note: And internet audiences really respond to that one horror writer you don't really know much about other than that giant squid guy. Also, you don't have an editor.

It spoke with a tongue that lashed and slathered, and while its language was alien to my ears, the words echoed inside my mind with startling clarity.

“Speak, insignificant one. Voice your concerns that I may answer with mocking and laughter.”

“I... I don't understand why you make this job so difficult. It should be easy, it should just be light filing, and organizing, and occasionally answering simple questions to bewildered freshmen. Why is there so much complications to this simple job?”

“You lack the capacity to truly understand. This is a question I cannot answer in full.”

“Then answer in terms I can understand.”

“Very well. I, I and my kind, we do not subside ourselves on physical food; our forms require much more, nourishing delicacies. Frustration, panic, fear, dread. These emotions to us are the most filling bread, the sweetest wine.”

“Then, you're torturing us on purpose?”

“That is correct.”

“But why this college, why these people, why here?”

“Again you do not understand. This campus is not our only source of food. The entire world is rife with our secret presence. This college is but one of many, of thousands, of myriads of places where we exist; slowing things down, mucking things up, complicating processes and perplexing workers the whole world over, and feeding. Always feeding.”

“So here, and in other colleges?”

“Yes.”

“And in courts and legal proceedings?”

“Yes.”

“And governments?”

“And Hollywood?”

“Especially Hollywood!”

pic:

It makes so much sense!

“No!” I cried, “This can't be allowed to continue! I have the knowledge now, and that compels me to act. I can tell the others, I can make everyone see what you're truly doing to them!”

I was greeted with nothing but laughter, much of it foreign and unrecognizable, but a small part of it human. I quickly realized this part was my superior, standing in the doorway still, laughing maniacally with the beast before me.

“You foolish whelp, there is nothing you can do. No one will believe you, and even someone did, we control everything. Any investigation would be put through bureaucratic hoops until it dissolved, any party who sought to confirm this would be met with frustrations upon frustrations, until nothing was left of their curiosity except lamentations and defeat. You are powerless against us.”

“Then I'll bring them here, to look directly upon you. No bureaucracy can stand against man's resolve when it sees these horrors with its own eyes!”

“Ah,” it countered, “How can you bring others here when your clearance to these offices has been revoked!”

“Wait, what?”

“Bwa-ha ha ha ha ha!” it laughed once more, it's languished cries of mirth filling the room and beyond until the very sound of it felt as if it must shake the earth to its core.

I am fired.

How John Carter Proves that Hollywood is Broken

Earlier this year, a new record was broken, one which will be extremely hard to break. The release of a particular movie ended the 76 years it spent in what's known as development hell, a long running period where a film is being worked on, but isn't completed or released. The film is based on a book which is this very year 100 years old, and has been influencing some of the most popular and enduring and in their own way influential movies, books, and television series for the last century. It was a long time coming, but the story that was a clear source of inspiration for Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, Superman, Farscape, Stargate, James Bond, and the single most money making movie ever made, Avatar, finally, finally, was released as a major film.

And nobody saw it.

John Carter, the movie adaptation of the book A Princess of Mars, hugely underperformed at the box office, and I am having an incredibly hard time understanding why.

Let me get this out of the way and say that I loved it. I loved the books; I waited 6 years for the movie to get made (and watched as the project got bounced across three directors and two studios just during the time I was paying attention); I have seen the movie 6 times and I left the theater unable to wait for the sequel, which is now sure to never come. I anticipated this movie so much that I was afraid, very afraid, that when it came out I would be hugely disappointed, and I currently am, but not for the reason I was afraid of. Frankly, it's for a reason that never crossed my mind, that it didn't do well (financially), and that there won't be more of it. And again, I just can't understand why.

Now when I say I don't understand, what I mean is that I just don't get it. There's several reasons why it didn't do well, and I know objectively why they ruined this movie (again, financially). I know the reasons, and while I don't get why the movie was so plagued with them, I can tell you this: this movie's failure is a living example of why Hollywood is so screwed up right now.

Hollywood people hated it before it was even made.

Part of the interesting thing of a movie having a 76 year legacy of not being made is that you can start to see a pattern here. And one huge pattern for John Carter is that in all this time, Hollywood was never quite willing to give it a decent chance. The very first attempt to make this movie was in the form of a cartoon adaptation, co-created by the original author, Edgar Rice Burroughs (then already world famous for his other character, Tarzan), and Bob Clampett, (a successful animator best known for the creation of Porky Pig). What was set to be the first ever full length animated film was a sci-fi epic that at first interested the studios, until they showed some way early test footage to a rural town test audience that reacted unenthusiastically. The plug was quickly pulled, which might have seemed a bad idea a few years later when the sci-fi epic Flash Gordon serials gained huge popularity immediately upon release, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (the film that would gain the title of first full length animated movie) was also hugely popular and won Academy Awards. John Carter, the project which was what both of those were before they were made, continued to wallow in development hell.

Fast forward to modern day, just before the movie came out, and there were already analysts predicting failure for this movie. The same second guessing that caused the property to miss out on the successes achieved by Snow White and Flash Gordon pervaded every iteration of this movie, until when it finally did come out, that second guessing was being printed and published for all to see, and judge the movie by, before anyone got a chance to even view it. And lo and behold when enough people in Hollywood started telling everybody that would listen, including (and especially) potential audiences that this movie was going to bomb, audiences avoided it, causing it to bomb.

And you know who was there to tell you all about it? Hollywood was. That's because...

When Hollywood decides it's right, it will never admit it was wrong.

It was decided this movie was going to bomb before it ever came out, and it was likewise agreed that it was a bomb before it was even out of the theater. Hollywood didn't give it half a chance to even generate good word of mouth after its admittedly weak opening weekend, because for every audience member trying to tell their friends, “hey, this was good, you should check it out”, there were two analysts saying “man, this movie is losing so much money it's not even funny, that probably means you shouldn't see it”. Disney waited a full two weeks from its release to announce to everybody that they lost a huge amount of money on it. It earned its own subheading on Wikipedia's page for the term “Box Office Bomb” within a month of being out. High ranking, important people at Disney are losing their jobs in shame, and the movie can still be seen in the major theaters.

We're not hearing about it's good, early critical reviews. We're not hearing about the Facebook petitions to give us a sequel. We're not hearing about how it has a higher user rating on MetaCritic than the money devouring Hunger Games. We're not hearing about how it broke the all time opening weekend record in Russia. Don't get me wrong, it's not doing well, but it's not doing as bad as is being reported. Hollywood told us all before it came out that this movie would bomb, and now that it's out, they're telling us just how bad it bombed.

Still, it's not hard to blame a lot of audiences for not going on account of they had no idea what it was about. That's because...

Hollywood has no clue what to do with a good idea.

Here's the deal. I talked up at the top about how ridiculously influential the book the movie was based on is. If you read it yourself, you can right away start picking out major things that have become more famous in other media that found their origin in this series. Some of them are huge (like almost all of the non-environmentalist parts of Avatar), and some of them are much more subtle (the word Jedi is derived from similar words in Burroughs' Martian language). But beyond just the influence of this book, think about the successes of the things influenced by it. Dune revolutionized science fiction. Superman is easily the most widely recognized superhero in the world. Star Wars can't be even mentioned without making a million dollars. Avatar made all the money, rocketing up the box office despite being three hours of blue cat people trying to save nature, all of which are things that would normally turn audiences off on their own. But what made people go see Avatar were all the other parts, parts which were taken from John Carter. Indeed, some of the most successful and memorable aspects of all of these things were the parts inspired directly by John Carter. And the movie that we got out of it, while it had some updating and “fleshing out”, was overall a very faithful adaptation, putting on the screen an incredibly accurate depiction of the world that inspired countless others.

And then the advertising crew took a look at that world, threw their hands in the air, and said, “We have no idea what to do with this.” Where a preview could have told us how old the property was, or how inspirational it has been to the things that most audiences love, or given us any real indication of what the movie was about, or even told us at some point that this movie takes place on Mars, they instead decided to be as vague about the plot and location as possible, and show us only the most fleeting, nondescript, and typical seeming footage of the action and special effects that they could find. The title of the book, A Princess of Mars, dropped the Princess so as to please all the males who just couldn't take Princess Leia seriously, and dropped the Mars to satisfy any women who still had lingering doubts about this whole sci-fi genre. In the end, they went with the name of the human character as the title, telling no one anything about the move other than that Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't show that much creativity when naming his characters (he spent all that creativity on creating whole planets and alien races and histories from thin air).

The title change is just one part of a whole different problem, namely that...

Hollywood wants to fix what's not broken.

Again, take a look at the provided (and let me assure you, only partial) list of things the original book inspired. Think of the minds that were influenced by this work, and used that influence to make themselves famous with their own stories. You don't inspire that many people and projects of that high a creative caliber and that long lasting an appeal by being a terrible story teller. And while Burroughs had his weaknesses in the character development (and occasionally naming) department, he was by no means a terrible story teller. The covers of his books describe him (quite accurately, in my opinion) as the greatest adventure writer of all time. Ray Bradbury described him as “the most influential writer, bar none, of our century”. You have to understand how much influence Burroughs as a writer had on the genre of sci-fi that was still quite young at the time of his writing, and recognize the influence that he still holds, even if a lot of audiences don't realize he's the one who originated it. Jules Verne and H.G. Welles get all the credit for creating the genre of science fiction itself, but it was Burroughs' works, primarily with the John Carter of Mars series, that really created what we know now as sci-fi. This man's pedigree in storytelling is nearly unsurpassed, to the point that he has two cities in America named after his fictional characters, and when Hollywood got a hold of his magnum opus, it still decided that they had to tweak it.

I definitely enjoyed the movie, but I have to say, it's not my new favorite movie like it was hoping (and like it would be if it was just a little more faithful). Understanding that because of the time period it was written in (and the first person narrative, which led to focusing almost entirely on one character), there was some updating that had to be done, but considering that most stories that are nearing 10 years start to show their date, needing only a little character development and maybe a little more feminine empowerment after a century is quite an impressive feat. What the work didn't need was a dead family back story. The book was the ultimate fun time thrill ride, about a dude who was just generally awesome running around on an alien planet fighting monsters to save the princess, and doing so in the most fun, creative, and genuinely engaging way possible. It was just about the last story that needed a heaping helping of tragedy, angst and general Jason Bourniness. This section of the story remained thankfully small, but it was still there, and it took up enough screen time (at the expense of the romantic development of the main characters) that it fundamentally changed the genre of the story, from Romance (set in a sci-fi adventure) to a Drama (a journey of self discovery set in a sci-fi adventure). This subplot doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the pulpy fun of the movie, and more importantly, it doesn't mesh with the ludicrously amazing movie we could have had if it had remained entirely within the tone of the book.

Why does Hollywood feel the need to shoehorn moodiness where it doesn't belong? It's simple, really...

Hollywood has killed good action movies.

You may have noticed a growing distinction between your typical summer blockbuster action movie and the more subtle, nuanced dramas often found in arthouse theaters. Compare Transformers 3 with, oh say, Blue Valentine. Now I didn't see either, so I can't really say much about the quality of the movies themselves, just that based on the previews I had absolutely no interest in either. What I can say is that Blue Valentine had phenomenal reviews, was nominated for an Academy Award, and has an 88% at Rotten Tomatoes. It didn't do badly in the box office, making a decent 12 times its own budget, so it got away with a nice profit to boot. Transformers on the other hand, has a 35% at Rotten Tomatoes, was nominated in nearly every Razzie category, and has one of the most unintentionally (or quite possibly intentionally) hilarious Wikipedia entries I've ever seen. It also made over $300 million in the US alone, and was at the time one of only 10 movies in history to make over a billion dollars, making significantly more than either of the two Transformers movies preceding it. Like it or not, this kind of money generating ability cannot be ignored by Hollywood, and obviously isn't being ignored, as there is already a Transformers 4 being worked on (reported to be, I kid you not, a reboot of the series, though still done by the same people.)

Notice a difference there? Hollywood has taken the summer tent pole action movie and decided “why bother with any kind of semblance of quality when you can simply throw random crap on the screen, and when it's huge enough, and expensive enough, and explosive enough, everyone will go see it”. And this strategy has been rewarded greatly by audiences worldwide.

And keep in mind, I didn't see, nor want to see, either of these movies. I'm honestly not one to believe a movie is good by either the awards it received or the records it broke in the box office. But Hollywood had decided that there's a distinction between the two, either it will be a low circulation indie darling, or it will be a crap goldmine. Either it's art or entertainment. And this distinction has been picked up and ran with by everyone, audiences included. The constant fight over R ratings vs. PG-13 ratings boils down to this idea, that either it's made for a larger audience and thus is a soulless cinematic turd, or it has artistic integrity and will be a much loved, if low on box office returns masterpiece. They act like these are our only two options, and huge masses of the audiences have decided to agree. They reward the crappiest of crappy with all the money in their pockets, and it seems to be tied exclusively to how much time was devoted to ridiculous special effects in the preview. I really kind of feel that Hollywood has trained audiences to behave like this, creating a Pavlovian response of great excitement when shown mediocre film with huge budgets. They've been taking psychological shortcuts in trying to entice the masses to go to movies, by making exclusively sequels and remakes of easily recognizable properties, by streamlining the budgets to accommodate the most cutting edge special effects and just enough for a passable script, and speaking as much as they can in the only global language, explosions. Audiences eat it up, because this seems to be 80% of the entertainment they give us. They've taught audiences to expect terrible dialogue and gaping plot holes if they want some decent action, and that if they want some intellectual stimulation, they need to pack up and go to the Angelika.

But there's another effect of this distinction between quality movies and entertaining movies.

Hollywood has killed fun movies.

Now it gets worse. I saw Transformers 1 and 2. Yes the second was terrible, and yes the first was only fair to middling. But even while Michael Bay was aggressively attacking my intelligence, I still managed to have a good time. The main reason was that I saw the movies with friends and family, and it did deliver on some explosive goodness and robot fights, and everybody was having a good time together. When a movie promotes a fun atmosphere for audiences to go and have a good time with friends at, it's amazing how fun the experience can be, even when the movie itself is objectively terrible. The whole group I went with to see Revenge of the Fallen had a good time, even if none of us now will admit to liking the movie itself.

But this is no excuse for anyone legitimately trying to make a good movie to scrimp on qualities outside of simply being a fun popcorn romp. When you're working on what you want to be a good script, you want to put as much distance as you can between yourself and Robots vs. Explosions: the Movie. How do you do that?

You make it less fun, is what you do. Crap movies got popular because they still managed to be fun, and somehow because of this, fun has become equated with crap. Now, if you want your movie to be taken seriously in just about any conceivable way, it can't be fun at all. To get an idea of what happens when film makers try to actually make smart action movies, just take a look at the career of Christopher Nolan. Yes, his movies are good; yes, they make a pretty good amount of money and still manage to be critically acclaimed; but have you noticed another similarity they almost all share? At least one love interest isn't making it out alive. The only movie where the main character doesn't have a dead wife or girlfriend is Insomniac, the main movie in Nolan's career I never hear anyone talking about; for all the rest, there will be a dead woman (and the grief her death causes) as a central plot point for the movie. Twice in the case of The Prestige.

This applies to any movie that wants to be taken seriously, whether they succeed at that or not. You want a spy movie that isn't just Roger Moore death quips? Tadaa, you've got Jason Bourne, his shaky camera, dead girlfriend, and everything. You want your Ray Harryhausen mythology monster movies updated for modern times? Poof, toss in a dead family and you've got yourself Clash of the Titans. You want to watch some blue cat people save their jungle planet? Well you've gotta sit through Sam Worthington watching his brother's corpse go through the crematorium first.

You want to see a noble Civil War veteran spend 2 hours saving an alien princess and fighting wicked cool Martian creatures? Well you've got some tragic backstory to wade through first. I'll readily admit, they didn't do half bad of a job creating a version of the John Carter character who had trouble letting himself become invested in a cause because the last time he had, his wife and child had been burned alive in their home. But did they have to? They opted to use the tale to tell us about much of an atrocity war is, and while that's a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, I also firmly believe that A Princess of Mars is the wrong place and time to be telling us that. If you wanted a story that explained just how bad conditions were in Victorian Era orphanages, you'd read Oliver Twist, not Peter Pan. But because they wanted to adapt John Carter and also make a movie that had heart, soul, and quality, the only way they could do that was to add some tragedy, and lose some fun. Enough of the rest of the movie was fun enough to actually overcome this in my opinion, but I'd have rather it just wasn't there and that they'd instead focused on the budding romance between the two lead characters.

In either case though, the movie came out, it was pretty great, even where it could have been better, and it sadly did pretty bad in the box office. This happens, and even if its failure was the fault of forces beyond its control, it just boils down to an occasional regrettable lack of audience support. It's not like this spells doom for other potentially great movies, right?

Right?!

Wrong.

Hollywood is going to take entirely the wrong lesson from this.

This movie failing means without a doubt other movies like it will not get made, and I'm not just talking about the John Carter sequels that would have been amazing. I mean any movie for a decent amount of time afterward that is in any way similar to John Carter is going to get shot down. If it takes place on Mars; if it's an action film with a love interest who's a princess; if it features a strange tribal alien supporting cast; if it's got Andrew Stanton as the director. Hollywood is going to be taking a long, hard look at any scripts coming its way and if it sees anything that can be construed as a vague similarity, they're going to be very iffy. Hollywood is likely going to be wary of all things science fiction for a while. There's likely movies that have already been canceled because John Carter failed.

This has happened before. Speed Racer came out 4 years ago. It was awesome, but it did badly for reasons I cannot begin to comprehend. Regardless of what those reasons were, Hollywood decided it was because the movie was a family friendly action flick, and made a mad rush to cancel or overhaul any projects they had that fit that description. A Captain Marvel movie was scrapped, and a Johnny Quest remake was canceled.

They do the same thing when a movie does well. When Iron Man became an unexpectedly huge hit, they tried to catch lightning in a bottle once more by recreating superficial similarities in other movies. One of the next major superhero movies to come along was Green Lantern, which featured a character who was brave, noble, and responsible, so much so that he was deemed worthy to be entrusted with an extremely powerful weapon. But because Iron Man did so well telling the story of an immature, irresponsible jerk becoming a better person, by golly, Green Lantern was going to tell the same story. Iron Man's success couldn't have been because of Robert Downy Jr.'s irascible charm or because the character's growth made complete sense in presenting a situation where he logically would reach maturity and at the same time come into a new and untold level of power which he no doubt would have misused earlier, but thankfully doesn't now on account of his own inner changes. No, it's successes were obviously because irresponsible characters combined with super powers is fun to watch, therefore it stands to reason that Green Lantern would be successful if they did the exact same thing with it. And when Green Lantern failed, they figured it couldn't be because the character's arc of being given a mega weapon and suddenly, inexplicably becoming a better, smarter, more caring person made little to no sense, or because the interpretation was painfully inaccurate to the original comics. No, Hollywood decided that it failed because any DC character who wasn't Superman or Batman wasn't going to make any money at all, and promptly responded by reiterating their stance of never making a Wonder Woman, Flash, or Justice League movie.

Hollywood has this uncanny ability to take exactly the worst lesson from a failure or success possible, partially because they refuse to see their own mistake and firmly believe that there is no factor for a movie's success or failure other than audience demand. With John Carter, they're not going to take into consideration any of the many failings they made with the movie. They're not going to reason that it failed because the name was neutered to the point of ineffectively explaining its premise, or because the advertisements were infuriatingly vague, or because they just had to add a tragic backstory where there was absolutely no call for one. They're not even going to look at the fact that it made decent money and that it's the colossal budget that made it so hard to break even. They're going to look at the lack of profit and somehow surmise that audiences don't want sci-fi action epics with likable characters.

And then they're going to order a cancellation on everything like it.

And this is why we're so screwed.

The Quest for the Ultimate Something

I've been thinking a lot recently on the topic of ultimate somethings; that is the ultimate movie, book, song, video game, etc. How would one decide what parameters constituted the ultimate, how would you go about making one, and why aren't more people currently devoted to actually making any. As I devoted much of this thought into the first question, it became obvious that a clear definition of what made an ultimate anything was the first point that had to be addressed. After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that this concept is inextricable from what is known in many circled as the “Desert Island Dilemma”.

The “Desert Island Dilemma” is the age old hypothetical, “if you were trapped on a desert island and could only bring one _____ with you, what _____ would it be?” Now, typically the answer to this question reveals what of any ____ is the individual answerer's personal favorite, or at least the ____ they would never get sick of. But if the question is tweaked slightly, the answer becomes more revealing. If the question were changed to “if you were trapped on a desert island with 5 strangers, and could only bring one ____ for all of you, what ____ would it be?”

Now the meaning behind whatever answer is given is completely different. If it's only yourself that you are considering, then the answer could be anything. You might bring a guilty pleasure, or something that has great meaning to yourself but not to anyone else, or you might even go with a joke answer. But when taking into consideration 5 other people that you now have to live and deal with, presumably forever, your decision is going to change hugely. You have to weigh more carefully longevity, variety, and general quality in order to make the right choice, and keep that in mind, because in this situation there totally are right and wrong answers. You have to understand that if you are in charge of the single song to be played on the island iPod on repeat ad nauseum, and if you pick “Yellow Submarine” or “Who Let the Dogs Out” or just anything from the 90's, so help me God, you will be the first one we eat.

The point is, something can be considered an ultimate anything if you know in your heart that it's a safe bet to bring to the island you will be spending an eternity on with 5 other people. For instance, if you're bringing a video game, Mario Kart is a pretty safe bet, or maybe even Mario Party (and remember, if you bring Sonic Shuffle, we will eat you.) But this is only if there's multiple controllers. Say there's only one, what then? You might go with GoldenEye, but what if not everyone is into first person shooters? There's any of the Final Fantasy games, but not everyone will have the patience for an RPG. There's Ocarina of Time, but what if not everyone can make it through the Shadow Temple? The problem with trying to choose the ultimate for any group of people you don't know is the inherent variety of likes and dislikes that can't be avoided in any large enough group. This is why the ultimate can only apply within a certain level of specification.

I'll be fair with the desert island. You're still picking for yourself and 5 others, they're still strangers, but I will let you know the genre that best fits the group as a whole. Now we're in the realm where it's possible to have an ultimate of something that can truly please everyone. If we're still talking video games, say they all like 2d platformers: suddenly the choice becomes a whole lot easier. There's the Metroid games, Sonic 2, Crash Bandicoot. But stop to think here. Are any of these games really, truly, the ultimate 2d platformer? Does it take several hours to beat them, or only a few? Do the gameplay, music, and environments have very much variety, or is it the same thing over and over again? These are the kinds of questions that have to be asked, and when you go ahead and ask them, how many 2d sidescrolling platformers are there out there that qualify as ultimates? Looking at everything that has to qualify, all the variants we need to satisfy, I can really only think of Yoshi's Island, possibly the first true ultimate platformer.

What about movies? Say we boil it down to sci-fi (or don't, frankly this one covers enough territory to satisfy most people), there's the ever faithful Star Wars. Over the course of the first trilogy, it covers general tropes such as good vs. evil, love triangles, daddy issues, and redemption; on the sci-fi end, it covers aliens, robots, sci-fi machines, and interplanetary travel. Of the major science fiction areas, the only major one left untouched is time travel, but even Star Wars can't have it all. The reason it scores so well on the “ultimate test” is because it truly set out to be the greatest adventure tale ever told. They seriously studied the general genre of adventure throughout all of its forms, and across generations of storytelling, and they built a formula out of it that laid out the major events that take place within most stories and where they take place, and then it adhered to that formula in creating its own sequence of events. It set out to cover as much ground as it could, and it covered it, resulting in a cultural phenomenon that has defined multiple generations; it achieved the status of being an ultimate movie.

There are others out there, but I continue to ask, why aren't there more? Why don't more people take a look at the tropes of a genre and put them together to make the greatest example of that genre? Part of it is that it's just plain difficult, and part of it is that it's nearly impossible to cram as much is needed into one thing. With video games this isn't always a problem, but to a degree it's there. Yoshi's Island is cartoonish enough that you can have jungle levels, ice levels, and lava filled castles all within the same world. You couldn't necessarily do that within the same game if you wanted to also make it realistic. With movies, there's the length to take into consideration. Star Wars does well, but keep in mind it's three movies, not just one. On a desert island, that's inadmissable. You could have the Death Star Trench Run, the “I love you,” “I know” scene, or the ewok celebration, but not all three. Star Wars biggest flaw in being considered an ultimate movie is that none of the three movies alone are truly ultimates; they only are if taken as a whole.

This is not to say it can't be done, even if it isn't easy. Most things that are hard to do are distinctly worth it. This is why I beg, I implore all of you artists out there, please, make us some ultimates. If I get trapped on a desert island with 5 people who like time travel, the closest thing I have is Back to the Future, and that involves way more mom on son crushes than I am comfortable with watching over and over again forever. Eventually, we will all be stranded on these desert islands, and if we don't have anything good to bring with us and get stuck with watching Avatar forever because it was statistically speaking the most all pleasing movie we could think of, we'll be sorry. We'll all be sorry.

Why do I Keep Watching?

I’m going to go ahead and preface this by saying that when it comes to movies and TV, I’m a special kind of snob. I watch what I like, and I like what I feel is “good”, high quality entertainment based on a personal rhetoric of critique. This rhetoric can be very different from most critics and most audiences, but it encompasses the things I enjoy and appreciate; I rarely will admit to liking a “bad” movie, as I almost only enjoy movies I feel are “good”, even when that is vastly disagreed upon by almost everyone else. With that out of the way, let’s continue.

One trend in cinema and television that I am growing restlessly tired of is shortcuts. In what once was a market where capitalism demanded making good movies to achieve audience support, filmmakers have been looking for, and finding, easier ways to get to all that cash. Like professional athletes turning to drugs to enhance their performance, audiences are falling victim to the effects of cinematic steroids. Here I am going to list some of the most insidious examples.

"What Have We Got To Lose?": Probably the oldest and easiest trick in the book is to simply put so little effort into something that the slightest gain results in inexplicable profit. The Scary, Epic, Date, Dance, and Disaster Movies are proof of that. Why hire writers when all you need is other scripts, scissors and hot glue? Why hire actors when all you need is people dragged off the street who maybe look like famous people when you squint. Epic Movie was, economically speaking, a huge success because of its $80 million gain over a comparatively low budget. The very fact that there are more on the way, means this trickery is working.

"Look At Me! Look At Me! Look At Me!": A snappily edited trailer can go a long way into making something not funny look funny:

Some folks just don’t rely on being low spenders. Despite the fact that they actually spent money and effort, they still ended up with nothing but crap, and now they have to sell it. How do you do that? With the trailer, and any other alluring aspects that come out before the film does. Case in point, Year One. With that trailer and that cast, there was no way it couldn’t be hilarious. Yet there I was in the audience, wondering how so many funny people got together and couldn’t think of anything funnier than ample use of the word foreskin. It didn’t take long for people to realize just how bad it was, as it dropped off the charts by the end of its first weekend. But the opening made enough money to be considered a financial success. What put it in that category was the fact that they spent far more time and effort making enough funny bits to look good in a preview, than trying to make a good film. Between casting and trailers, and any other non on screen choices that will trick people into thinking something will be good long enough to make them pay for it, one can still make a success out of the snakiest of oil.

Also, remember this still works on a week by week basis. The revival of “V” has contained a dream sequence almost every episode, the entirety of which manages to be incorporated into every next week preview.

You left your gun in my promo material.

"Indie Darling":

Tricking people with a stunning trailer for a bad film is still strictly small fries, though. The end result will be a good opening weekend with little else; to get a good long run requires tricking people on a larger scale to think something is good even after they’ve seen enough to know otherwise. How to do this? Enter the hipsters. As someone who’s taken three High School art classes, I’ve had firsthand experience with people who think Juno is a legitimate film. Few social groups are easier to trick into liking something ridiculous than hipsters. Anything with the words Indie in it originates from somebody who knows this, and is determined to make money off of them. But what really takes the cake is the career of Wes Anderson. I’ll be the first to admit that the trailer for Life Aquatic looked hilarious. And now that I’m older, wiser, and not trying to impress my art class friends, I’ll also be the first to say the actual movie was very much not hilarious. Wes Anderson, the kind of jokes you’re not supposed to laugh at, who I’m certain has blank parts in his scripts that he convinces his producers are jokes only smart people can see, managed to make a preview that appeared like it was a mainstream, laugh out loud comedy. After the opening weekend crowds realized it wasn’t, there was always the ever reliable hipsters there to back it up for the rest of its theatrical run. Clever, Mr. Anderson, very clever indeed. But when it comes to long running, career spanning trickery, there is truly only one master.

"Looks Can Kill": J. J. Abrams is a genius. An evil genius. For starters, he is the man who made Cloverfield. Cloverfield can be called many things; “good” and “a movie” are not among them. Having taken a camcorder and ran around New York on any given Friday night for an hour and a half, he released it into theatres and told people that if they look hard enough, there might be a monster in there. People didn’t go to see it because it was a good movie, because it wasn’t a real movie. They saw it because of the huge network of viral marketing, and the countless unanswered questions that would all be explained in the film itself. There was more effort put into the advertising; there was more plot put into the advertising. But people ate it up, and still are; just check out the buzz surrounding his newest trailer, Super 8. Basically it’s Cloverfield 2 except with a different blur for a monster, and a different group of presumably attractive teenagers. And also because the Cloverfield 2 is its own thing.

But on the subject of unanswered questions, how can we overlook Lost. He made another claim, slightly less incredulous than saying Cloverfield was a real movie, that Lost was real sci-fi. But it got people watching. And kept them watching for 6 years. Pretty much the best thing to get and keep people watching (that is allowable on network television) is curiosity. Lost had curiosity in spades, and refusing to answer any question asked along the way really just lead to even more curiosity. It filmed in Hawaii, thus winning over all the crowds who would otherwise be watching the Travel Channel on any given Wednesday night. Several main characters (like Kate and Sawyer) were played by former models, and it doesn’t take 12 seasons of America’s Next Top Model to tell you why folks tune in to watch those people. And when all else fails, there was always the good old fashioned soap opera storylines. This is in fact a show where the decision to change the course of history via nuclear proliferation fused with time travel on who was in love with who at the time (a status which changed about 15 times in that episode). When using this conglomerate method of storytelling, it didn’t really matter what actual plot events happened, as nothing actually happened on Lost. This wasn’t plot, this was formula and trickery and every aesthetic choice possible made with the goal of getting people to watch week after week, and never question until it was all over. For 6 years. In perspective, the popularity of Lost outlasted the reign of presidents and the existence of certain countries, despite every episode consisting of attractive people moping in Hawaii, and occasionally some goes out to murder a teenage girl or pregnant woman. Because J.J. Abrams really, really hates pregnant women.

Honestly, audiences, if we keep letting ourselves get bamboozled like this, we deserve it by this point.

Swearing and You

Recently, I read a report that I found very interesting:

"Teens are more likely to drop casual expletives, or "fillers" than the generation before them. Timothy Jay, author of Why We Curse and Cursing in America, estimates that the average teen uses roughly 80 to 90 swear words a day."

Now, I for one am appalled. But of course, it's not necessarily in the way you might think. You see, swearing used to mean something; it used to be a special way to express yourself. Back in the good old days, to swear was to briefly express a fit of passion about a subject, and the words you used, as well as how often, made other people see you in different ways. If someone went around swearing all the time, they were typically the average 1950's big bully who beat up on little guys and rode around in a convertible until some joker on a skateboard steered them into a pile of manure. Someone who never swore was either the goody two shoes or the honorable religious man who was above such things. But those in between, who swore occasionally, but not profusely, were the handsome, debonair, dashing yet roguish guys who all the girls wanted. But even so, it was just the right kind of swearing. It wasn't anything outlandish or vile; in fact the basis upon which a swear word was chosen was its placement in the sentence. It had to not just get the point of passion across, but also had to sound good doing so. Today's swear words don’t sound good, they just sound vile, and when used so often they sound lazy, as if the speaker really doesn't have that big a vocabulary and must revert to certain words that they remember best. Like a kid who can only describe objects as "things", only replacing "things" with "shoot" or "fudge" (well, you get what I mean.)

Think of historic moments in swearing. Rhett Butler's memorable and beloved "Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!" Rat in Wind In The Willows saying, "Toad, you ass." Mark Twain's various swears and remarks on swearing which would be too numerous to count. Benjamin Franklin's parable of the Man and his Jackass used to explain the inherent flaws of the requirement to own property to vote. Even God's Biblical prophet referred to what the people were selling for sacrifices as "mere refuse", essentially saying they were selling crap.

Compare to modern man's accounts of swearing. Rap songs like "Shake That ____" and "Back That ___ Up". The replacement of Give a Damn with Give a Sh__. Steve Martin's string of the F-word 19 times in a minute in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; historic but undignified. South Park's goal at breaking the record for number of times the F-word could be used in a single 30 minute episode. The steady progression from "Gee" to "Stinks" to "Sucks" to "Blows". Even Tina Fey's remark during the last presidential campaign, declaring "B__ch is the new Black". Well, okay, that last one had alliteration and is kind of funny, but it still does not have the same dignified manner of swearing that Clark Gable and talking animals retained. If you can dress a rat in a suit and still seem classy when it swears in a kid's book, then modern swearing can be pulled off correctly.

It seems that today the most popular words are F___, Sh__, and B__ch, the three which I consider the most offensive and least attractive aurally. Sh__ and B__ch sound garish and jarring, they contain very sharp and biting sounds in them and offend the ears as much as the mind. F___ is simply overused, and beyond the nasty definition it actually has, is more or less an adjective for when you're too lazy to come up with a real one. The worst of all offenses is when the two of the three are combined, such as "That F___ing Sh__," or "That F___ing B__ch," or "That F___ing B__ch talk Sh__." Such words and strings of words are foul sounding and undignified, adding no personal passion in the statement and only striving to be as sharp, jarring and offensive as possible, the verbal equivalent of a Beastie Boys song. I for one am sick and tired, and outraged at going around to school and public places and having my ears assailed with such travesties of the English language. Where are the good swear words, like "Damn", "Jackass", and "B_____d", words that preserve a sense of personal interest, innovation in language, and maintain an affront to the subject's reputation, not their ears. I call for reform in the way we as a generation curse, I call for integrity in swearing!

Introductions

Hello, and good evening. You don't know me, but I like to write things. I'd like to start by saying what I typically write about, but let's face it, there is no typical thing I write about. If I'm going to write about something, the basic rule is that it's odd enough to stand out from the rest of the things floating around in my head. I've written about sirens on motorcycles, I've written about Willaim Shakespeare in High School, one time I rewrote Pride and Prejudice with nanobots (and I did it before there were zombies). The inspiration for things I write about is also just as varied, and makes even less sense (although it often has some subconsious reflection on Don Quixote, which you might have noticed from my blog title if you watched as much Wishbone as I did growing up). I've gotten ideas from things like graffiti, to grocery store visits, to the prospect of training attack rats to jump off the brim of my hat. I am completely serious here.

The point is I like to write, and I like to write about lots of different, and often strange, things. I've written dramatically and comedically (between you and me, I prefer the comedic, though my best is probably somewhere in between.) Now I've been looking around for a while, and I've noticed that there are some very interesting people, with very interesting things to say, and that some of these people express these things in blogs. And a couple years now of admiring the things other people said, I suddenly thought to myself, "Hey, I think I'm interesting. And I think the things I say are interesting. So what should I do?" And after scratching out the idea of training an army of psychic apes, I decided to start a blog.

So, here we are. Blog time. I'm not always going to be entirely sure what to say here, but I generally am able to come up with something to say, albiet at last minute some times. If I can say so myself, they're usually pretty good. Like this one. This here is pretty good, although not as good as what I'm going to write. What I'm going to write is going to be so great, you won't be able to believe it. Just wait. You'll see. You'll all see.