Day: June 23, 2008

Disney/Pixar’s WALL*E is a robot love story, yes, but also — as I reported a while back — a message movie about the lunacy of destroying our planet with fossil-fuel pollutants and whatnot, as well one that points the finger at the evil agents of this destruction. In an article up today, CHUD’s Devin Faraci, who’s seen the film, has described these bad apples as “corporations, out-of control branding, insidious advertising and rampant consumerism.”

And yet writer/director Andrew Stanton, oddly, recently downplayed the ecological theme during the film’s recent press junket. Faraci has also confessed to being “fascinated by the disconnect between the film’s ecological and anti-consumerism messages and the huge merchandising push to sell plastic toys and other crapola.”
Here’s what Faraci has written today:
“The most I do is recycle, and sometimes I’m even pretty bad at that,” Stanton said at the WALL*E press junket when asked about the ecological and political themes of the film. And he wanted to make sure that the assembled journalists didn’t think he was smuggling a subversive message into his kid’s movie. “I don’t have a political bent….I don’t have an ecological message to push.”
And yet, Faraci says, “the environmental and political themes of this movie are well beyond subtext and are so blatant that you’d expect to see the WALL*E character being used in conservation ads and for the life-size animatronic WALL*E built to promote the film to show up at environmentally-themed events. Instead Stanton and Pixar are all but disavowing these obvious, in-your-face messages and pushing WALL*E as a simple robot love story.
“Pixar’s always been good about staying on message. Go back to all the publicity for Cars and you will see every single person involved with that movie spinning the same tale about John Lasseter‘s family and their cars and blah blah. The White House can’t get their p.r. spin together as well as Pixar does.

“That ‘on message’ aspect is part of what makes Pixar a successful company. They understand that they’re building their own myth right now. They understand that having a narrative behind the scenes helps make everything more sellable. And it helps draw attention away from elements they’d rather not focus on and highlight the elements they do want to have spotlighted; in this case to not talk so much about the environment and to bring it back to young robots in love (a message all the participants at the press day were on point for except John Ratzenberger, who seemed to claim global warming didn’t exist).
Stanton, says Faraci, was not completely dismissing any positive environmental themes. “I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view….it’s certainly a good citizen way to be,” he said in the most half-hearted support for environmentalism possible.
“Stanton’s measured, middle-of-the-road language clarifies to me just what the heck is going on here: someone in Pixar decided that leaning on the environmental angle would possibly scare off certain segments of the ticket buying public.”

An incendiary comment by McCain adviser Charlie Black in a just-published Fortune interview states that (a) the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an “unfortunate event” but McCain’s “knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief, and it helped us”; and (b) “so would another terrorist attack on U.S. soil…certainly it would be a big advantage to him.”
I suspect that righties like Black are talking about another shocking event in the wings because they’re picking up whiffs of an upcoming military confrontation between Israel and Iran sometime before the November election, and they’re looking to set the stage before it happens. Hardcore Cheney neocons would not only be okay with a military blowup in the Middle East sometime in the early to mid fall because they believe, as Black stated, it would help their side and their agenda. I’ll bet they’re also rooting for it. An Obama victory will obviously mean the end of a “window of opportunity” as far as a decisive strike against Iran is concerned, so it’s soon or never. The Israelis will make the first move, and that’ll be the flash point.
Consider the implications of the following three items:
(1) Last Saturday’s report in the Independent that Israel “has mounted a major long-range military air exercise — involving more than 100 F15 and F16 fighters — as a rehearsal for a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, American officials have indicated.”
(2) A recent article by New American Foundation’s Steve Clemons that included the following statement: “I’m not saying that war or conflict with Iran is imminent. In fact, I don’t think America, even under Bush, will strike Iran first — but I do think that there is an increasing chance of a trigger event driving a fast escalation of higher and higher consequence military options. This trigger could be a mistaken signal, a ship collision, an event engineered by the Israelis, or by the IRGC Al Quds force, or by some other splinter terrorist operation wanting to exploit regional tensions and the current fragility of affairs.”
(3) An op-ed written by former German foreign minister and Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer on Friday, 5.30.08, in The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, with this headline: “As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon.”
Here’s the nub of it:
“Anyone following the press in Israel during the [recent 60th anniversary of Israel] celebrations and listening closely to what was said in Jerusalem did not have to be a prophet to understand that matters are coming to a head. Consider the following:
“First, ‘stop the appeasement!’ is a demand raised across the political spectrum in Israel – and what is meant is the nuclear threat emanating from Iran.
“Second, while Israel celebrated, Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted as saying that a life-and-death military confrontation was a distinct possibility.
“Third, the outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force declared that the air force was capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect the country’s security. The destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility last year, and the lack of any international reaction to it, were viewed as an example for the coming action against Iran.
“Fourth, the Israeli wish list for US arms deliveries, discussed with the American president, focused mainly on the improvement of the attack capabilities and precision of the Israeli Air Force.
“Fifth, diplomatic initiatives and UN sanctions when it comes to Iran are seen as hopelessly ineffective.
“And sixth, with the approaching end of the Bush presidency and uncertainty about his successor’s policy, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is seen as potentially closing.
“The last two factors carry special weight. While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.”

The forthcoming “extended cut” DVD of Terrence Malick‘s The New World will run 172 minutes, or just shy of three hours. The press release says this will amount to “more than 30 minutes of never-before-seen footage.” That’s only if you’re comparing it to the 135-minute version that New Line gave a semi-wide release to after the initial 150 minute version, which was seen (or so I recall) in a limited big-city release. So the extended cut will actually include 22 minutes of never-before-seen footage…right? (The IMDB lists another 125-minute version that played at the Mar del Plata film festival.) The 172-minute DVD will be released on 10.14.

John Anderson has written a 6.22 N.Y. Times piece about Cecilia Miniucchi‘s Expired, an “anti-romantic comedy” starring Samantha Morton and Jason Patric “as erotically charged, thoroughly incompatible parking enforcers working the mean streets of Santa Monica.” It’s also a film that, prior to Anderson’s article, has been having difficulty getting attention.

Samantha Morton, Jason Patric in Cecilia Miniuccchi’s

I never got around to seeing it at Sundance, Cannes or the local AFI Fest. (Sue me.) And for screening-conflict reasons I decided not to catch the one press screening I had a shot at, which happened yesterday evening. (The other one happened on May 13th, when I was in France.) Expired opened last Friday (6.20) in New York and will have its LA debut four days from now — on Friday, 6.27.
Anderson says the film “has already defied expectations” because “it’s being given a theatrical release in an atmosphere in which serious, personal filmmaking is being produced independently and exiled to the furthest margins of the marketplace. Not coincidentally, the root causes of all this are central to the film.”
√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’We are living in a very transitional moment right now,’ Miniucchi says, ‘in terms of what to do with quality films. The common denominator among distributors is fear, the reason being the internet. You don’t need to have a face anymore. Kids interact without ever meeting. They have sex without ever meeting.'”

I don’t know which of these Malibu surfer-brawl videos, taken yesterday, happened first — clip #1 or clip #2. But any beating up of paparazzi by anyone is a good thing as long as no one gets killed or crippled. Black eyes are good, bruises are good, broken cameras are good, missing teeth are good…all of it.

Paparazzi are pigs in the gutter — the scumbucket jackals of worldwide celebrity culture. The lowest of the low, covered in their own slime. They deserve every bad thing that happens to them except death or disfigurement or being turned into paraplegics.
The fighting was about a dog-pack of twelve photographers trailing Matthew McConaughey to a cliff-shrouded Malibu beach he’d visited in order to surf and sunbathe. Matthew McConaughey! A group of surfers attacked the paparazzi in quick little skirmishes — giving one guy a broken nose, breaking another’s camera, pushing the same onto some rocks, etc.

I would have posted this Mark Gill lecture yesterday except the place I was in didn’t have a.c., which caused me to feel listless and lethargic. I’m now sitting in my air-conditioned home and I still feel listless and lethargic. Nonetheless, Gill’s talk — delivered Saturday at the L.A. Film Festival’s Financing Conference — is worth digesting.
Gill is CEO of The Film Department. His lecture was called “Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling.” I got all this from a Gill posting that appeared in Indiewire at 11:30 yesterday morning. I’m going to run it in three succeeding posts with occasional HE commentary:
“It’s not so easy for the big boys anymore either,” Gill said early on. “The average cost of a major studio production is $70.8 million, and the average marketing budget in North America alone is $35.9 million. In other words, there’s an average of more than $100 million at risk every time they get up to bat. And if they’re going to lose $75 million or more, they know it by 2 p.m. Los Angeles time on opening day.”
HE response: The reason the average big-studio film costs $70.8 milllion is that 97% of the players who regularly slurp from the trough are in the game entirely for what they can monetarily get out of it, and not for what they can create that will enchant, thrill, enthrall or mesmerize at the cost of some risk on their part. No one will risk anything. Their champagne living costs are too high, and everyone wants to live as high on the hog as they can. But an artist who won’t pick up the paintbrush unless he’s paid first is obviously no artist at all.
“As the press has chronicled ad nauseum, the major studios have been forced largely to embrace the world of the tentpole movie–the big budget spectacle that tries to be for everyone. In market research terms, they call it the four-quadrant film, meaning it appeals to all four demographic quadrants of moviegoers: men and women, over and under 25. In economic terms, this means a movie that invariably costs more than $100 million, and on occasion more than $300 million.
“The amount of effort and cash devoted to these tentpoles — and the enormous rewards that follow when they work — has radically altered the focus of the big studios. And generally speaking, these films don’t have to be great to work. They have to be just good enough. It’s the last place in the movie business where the old habits still apply, where the phrase ‘execution dependent’ doesn’t matter so much.”
HE response: The people who’ve knowingly and intentionally made tentpole films that will be “good enough” and no more only that (one example being George Lucas complaining about costs on The Empire Strikes Back with the rationale that “it doesn’t have to be that good”) deserve to be sent to the hottest corners of hell and lashed to the lowest revolving spits.
“Hollywood has spent a lot of time and money making films that are at best mediocre and then hoping for marketing to save the day,” said Gill. “We can blame a good movie for this very bad habit. Jaws ushered in the era of wide-release marketing-driven movies. It lasted for more than 30 years. A lot of bad films got made under the theory that quality didn’t matter. But it’s not working like it used to.
“Here’s why: fooling the audience is getting harder for the major studios in the age of blackberries, instant messaging and cell phone texting. Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.
HE response: Yes!
“A tentpole movie has to be truly atrocious to be victimized by this. But for any movie smaller than a tentpole, the bar has been raised. Good isn’t good enough anymore. It used to be that a film with a nice performance, a cool look and a broken story could get through. Not any more. Unless you’re making a tentpole, your movie now has to be very good–in the eye of its intended audience.
“I may have liked Juno and The Bourne Identity. My female colleagues loved Sex in the City. And there was a big, happy audience for the last Halloween movie. In each case, the intended audience got what it wanted: a movie that satisfied them.
“We’re entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.”

“The sky may be falling, but in the end, it isn’t going to hit the ground. We will be left with a little breathing room. And the question will become: what will succeed in this much narrower space?
“I believe that a fair number of people — call them what’s left of the theatrical audience if you like — will always need to get out of the house: in part because they enjoy the benefits of a communal experience.
“Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop — by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folks who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words ‘theatrical necessity‘ will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close. But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone.
“Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet — or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.
“Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything — any movie, any TV show — at any time. And guess what? The best stuff won out. Hands down.”

Repeating: “We’re entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.”
Developing the riff: “I’ve had far too many fight-the-power wannabe filmmakers cheer this vision of the future, which they believe will usher out the bloated, soul-less big studio retreads and usher in a new democratic era of access to moviemaking fame and glory for all. Lots of people are drinking this Kool-Aid.
“Fifteen years ago, the Sundance Film Festival got 500 submissions. This year, they received 5,000. Virtually all of these are privately financed. There’s only one problem: most of the films are flat-out awful (trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years). Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here, and boy, does it suck.
“It’s not enough to have access to the moviemaking process. Talent matters more. Quality of emotional content is what matters, period. In a world with too many choices, companies are finally realizing they can’t risk the marketing money on most movies.
“Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year — generally with budgets under $10 million — maybe 100 of them got a U.S. theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.
“Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.”