Film Studies

Jan182006

A Little Hollywood Rambling

So, I’ve just discovered that Leonard Maltin has a Web site. (Of course he does, everyone has a Web site these days. Andy Warhol was wrong about the fifteen-minutes-of-fame thing; he should’ve said,”in the future, everyone will have a Web site.”) I’m not terribly confident in Maltin’s powers as a film critic — he strikes me as a bit too much of an enthusiast to be really objective, and a bit too nice a guy to be really harsh in his judgments when necessary — but he definitely knows his stuff when it comes to film history and the workings of the business, and I enjoy his frequent contributions to DVDs of classic movies and animation. I haven’t had the time to really explore his site yet, but I did spot an interesting comment right on the front page, which I’d like to share:

[2005 has] been an eventful year for Hollywood, to put it mildly. Audiences stayed away from some of the most vaunted would-be summer blockbusters, then seemed to get into the habit of staying away even when better movies came along this fall. Top studio executives have admitted that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

 

How do you get people back into the habit of moviegoing when you’ve let them down again and again… when you charge an exorbitant ticket price in spite of the fact that people can see the same movie three or four months later for a fraction of that fee for a DVD rental or a video-on-demand download?

 

More importantly, how do you convince a younger generation that movies aren’t always about escape from reality… that you can have a memorable, meaningful experience watching a film that’s challenging or provocative?

 

I don’t pretend to have foolproof answers to these rhetorical questions. All I know is this: until Hollywood learns to respect its audience instead of insulting or pandering to it, the situation isn’t likely to change.

 

I know this, too: there’s an old saying, “There’s nothing wrong with the business that good movies can’t cure.” Technology and cultural shifts may have eroded some of the certainty in that maxim, but it’s still a good place to start.

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Jan172006

Larry Miller: The People’s Censor?

A couple of things came up in the comment-area discussion on my previous entry that inspired me to go back and re-read the Tribune‘s coverage of this whole Brokeback Mountain mess. For the record, let’s take note of something from the Trib‘s very first article about the cancellation:

In an interview with KCPW-FM reporter Jonathan Brown, which was taped Thursday afternoon and aired Friday, Miller said booking a movie like “Brokeback Mountain” was a business decision.
“It’s something that I have to let the market speak to some degree,” Miller told Brown. “I don’t think I’m qualified to be the community censor.”

 

However, Brown said Friday that Miller was unaware of the storyline of “Brokeback Mountain” – about two Wyoming cowboys who maintain a hidden romance for two decades – until Brown described it to him Thursday, less than two hours before the schedule change was announced.

So Larry doesn’t think he’s qualified to be the community censor… until he hears that the movie is about fags. Then suddenly, for reasons that still remain unexplained, he acquires whatever qualification one needs to assume the role he just said he wouldn’t take. Interesting. I think we can all safely guess at what that qualification happens to be; it begins with an “h” and ends with “phobia.”

I think Bugs Bunny said it best: what a maroon.

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Jan172006

Miller’s Folly

Sometimes it’s not easy, living in Utah.

My home state is scenically beautiful, it has an interesting history and a pleasantly varied climate, and for a relatively small city, Salt Lake actually boasts a disproportionately (and surprisingly) large number of cultural amenities. But the rest of the world never seems to talk about these things. No, when you hear about Utah in the national press or popular culture, it’s always something to do with polygamy or green Jello or the eccentricities of the predominant local faith. Or it’s something ugly and embarassing like the current flap over Larry H. Miller yanking the acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain from the schedule of his Megaplex theaters because it was too gay for his tastes.

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Jan032006

2005 Media Wrap-up

It was back to the grind for me this morning. Fortunately, it hasn’t been too grindy as of yet; everyone around my office seems to be taking their own sweet time to start up the assembly line again, which is fine by me. It’s a funny thing — even though it’s been years since I last worked at the movie theater, whenever I have an extended period of time off my body clock always seems to revert to the hours I used to keep as a projectionist. This means that during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I started staying up until 2 AM and sleeping until 10. Which means that I only managed about four-and-a-half hours of sleep last night, and I’m probably not going to be much good as a proofreader today.

Slow workday or not, I am rather bummed that my holiday vacation is already over. I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish during that time, and I only managed to do about five percent of them. C’est la vie, I suppose, but it’s frustrating to look back on some eleven days of free time — the most precious commodity our overscheduled society currently enjoys — and not have much to show for it. At least I managed to finish Stephen King’s gargantuan magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, which, as I now recall, was one of my goals for the year.

That’s not a terribly good segueway into my annual recap of the previous year’s media consumption, but it’s the best I’m probably going to manage today. As I said, I’m running on only about four-and-a-half hours of sleep…

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Jan012006

Random Observations on the Cusp of the New Year

You know, for all the build-up the holiday season receives, it certainly always seems to end on an abrupt note. Think about it — for weeks and weeks and weeks, people are decorating, shopping, cooking, and otherwise preparing, and then, come New Year’s Eve, it all ends in just a matter of seconds. The clock strikes twelve, the ball drops, somebody kisses Dick Clark, and it’s all over with. If you’re lucky enough to be at a good party, the festivities may continue for a couple of hours, but that’s just inertia and wishful thinking, right? The genuine propulsive energy of the season all evaporates at midnight and, come first light, the tinsel looks as outdated as muttonchop sideburns. I don’t know about you guys out there in the InternetLand, but the end of the holidays strikes me as a huge anti-climax.

Not that I’m especially bummed to see the holiday season end this year. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve had a hard time catching the Christmas Spirit this year. Even though I sound like a colossal grinch for saying so, it really is a relief to have it finished for another eleven months. Still… I will miss the lights. I always do when the Christmas season ends. I love driving around and seeing all the houses and trees and lampposts wrapped and illuminated by strands of red, blue, and green bulbs. It makes everything seem… quaint. And it makes me a little sad when those lights aren’t there anymore. There’s always a few die-hards, of course, who leave their lights burning until March or April, but the overall effect will be drastically diminished by tomorrow night. Sigh…

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Nov192005

A Movie Producer, Slasher Flicks, and a Good Friendship

The news is over a week old now, but I’d still like to acknowledge the recent death of Moustapha Akkad. He was the producer of the Halloween movies, the man who made certain that “the boogeyman,” Michael Myers, kept coming back time and time again, long after the character’s creator had moved on to other projects and the series itself had become something of a joke. Some would say that’s nothing worthy of commemorating — heaven knows I’ve done plenty of my own grumbling about endless strings of sequels that diminish the strengths and reputations of their original films with each new entry in the series — but if it wasn’t for Akkad’s periodic trips back to Myers’ well, I very possibly would not have met one of my best friends.

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Nov152005

Bob McCabe’s Canon of Comedy Films

You may recall a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about John Scalzi’s canon of the 50 most significant science-fiction films, which he compiled for his new book, The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. It turns out that three other Rough Guide movie books have just been released along with Scalzi’s, covering the comedy, horror, and gangster genres, and each of them has its own canon section. Scalzi suggests turning them into the same kind of meme that his list of sci-fi movies became, starting with The Comedy Canon from Bob McCabe’s Rough Guide to Comedy Movies. The drill is similar to last time: you’re supposed to bold the titles you’ve seen and put an asterisk next to the ones you own on DVD or VHS. So, without further ado, here’s my list:

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Oct312005

Bennion’s Top Ten Halloween Movies

I love this time of the year, with its mildly warm afternoons and crisp, dark nights (what my buddy Cheno calls “jacket weather”). I love the colors of the harvest: yellows, golds, oranges and browns, colors that evoke a pleasant childhood in the 1970s. I love the rattle of dried cornstalks, now more often store-bought than standing in the fields, and the smell of woodsmoke rising from chimneys (sadly, that’s one I don’t notice so much anymore; wood-burning fireplaces are fading into history, I guess). I love the way the autumn sunlight slants across the lawns in great amber patches like the dimming embers of the summer just ended. And I love Halloween.

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Oct192005

Scalzi’s Canon of Science Fiction Films

John Scalzi of Whatever fame has just added another title to his growing list of published works, a non-fiction volume called The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. I haven’t seen the book yet, but it sounds like a pretty thorough overview of the genre, including information on the origins and history of science fiction movies as well as lots of other stuff that fans should find interesting. However, as Scazi himself noted the other day, the part of the book that people will find most interesting is The Canon:

…the 50 science fiction films [he] deemed to be the most significant in the history of film. Note that “most significant” does not mean “best” or “most popular” or even “most influential.” Some of the films may be all three of these, but not all of them are — indeed, some films in The Canon aren’t objectively very good, weren’t blockbusters and may not have influenced other filmmakers to any significant degree. Be that as it may, [Scalzi] think[s] they matter — in one way or another, they are uniquely representative of some aspect of the science fiction film experience.

John helpfully listed said Canon in the entry I’ve quoted. Not surprisingly, given the way the blogosphere feeds on its own young, some ambitious blogger immediately transformed the list into one of those memes where you bold the titles you’ve seen. Not being one to miss out on a good meme, let’s take a look at how of these movies I can cross off the list:

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