Literary Arrogance

Evening Finger Lickers! While lounging in the bath this afternoon, yes it was a very lazy day, I was reading the Times Book supplement and came across an article by David Baddiel about the Academy Awards. Regular Finger Lickers will know my feelings about the Oscars and so I don’t want to dwell on the subject in too much depth, however, I felt that this article deserved a mention.

I have no real feelings about Baddiel either way, I have never read one of his books and have never been a particular fan of his stand-up shows. However, I began the article with neither positive nor negative feelings towards the man. He begins his analysis of the proceedings discussing the swing in recent years from “good book, bad movie” to “good book, good movie.” He then continues to explain how significant it is that the three extremely sucessful films at this year’s Oscars Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and No Country for Old Men are extremely faithful reproductions of the original text. Going as far as suggesting that Cormac McCarthy’s book was so cinematic in nature that he alludes to McCarthy doing the Coens (love them Coens mmmhmm) job for them. His parting shot is to suggest these filmic adaptations provide a “literary experience” rather than a “cinematic experience” and here’s the passage that really annoyed me:

This is what I mean by a literary experience: you feel challenged, subverted, disturbed and a bit alienated by the movie. You don’t cry, or punch the air, or shout “you go, girlfriend” or think “cool” in response to a really big explosion. Thus it’s more like reading a post-modern novel than going to the cinema. And thus it has won a lot of awards.

What complete and utter literary arrogance, yes this film undoubtedly owes a good deal of its success to Cormac McCarthy’s original text. That I am not disputing. However, the utter arrogance, to suggest that the experience he describes is made up of facets only found in post-modern fiction. Indie film has been pushing the boundaries of mainstream cinema for decades by challenging, subverting, disturbing, and alienating its audience through alternative forms of storytelling. This mainstream success by a film with indie hallmarks is not solely due to its literary roots. It owes a great dept of gratitude to a huge number of indie films that have paved the way and acclimatised the mainstream audience to a different form of cinematic experience. The suggestion that this film owes its Oscar success to its ability to provide a literary experience is absurd, not only because it demonstrates dreadfully narrow thinking, but also because it highlights the author’s utter lack of knowledge about cinema.

K

Juno cool.

It is an undeniable fact Juno has been a smash hit indie success story. Indie is the new mainstream, or so we’re told by the mainstream. Indie is cool. Juno is cool. TV and Radio presenters are cool because they talk about Juno and play the Juno soundtrack on their cool shows. Diablo Cody is cool because she wrote Juno and Ellen page is the next big thing because she is Juno. Third rate film critics are cool because they dislike the mainstream and express the incontrovertible coolness of Juno. My Mum and Dad are cool because they have “heard of” (read a drab newspaper article about) Juno.

However, it isn’t with my Mum and Dad that I take umbrage. Their foe-indie-enthusiasm is passable. It is with the third rate film critics that jump on the indie bandwagon when they discover it is cool to do so, that give me “the rage”. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not a case of a indie film geek hating on an indie success story, far from it. I loved Juno I thought the flick was light hearted and refreshing. I was impressed with both Ellen Page and Michael Cera and I thought that stylistically the film was strong. Overall, I was most impressed by the writing and dialogue, Diablo Cody (cool name btw.) is obviously a talent. However, back to them critics.

James King is a classic example. For those of you who don’t know he’s the vacuous and generally shockingly poor BBC Radio 1 “Film Critic”. While I don’t always despise everything that comes out of the man’s mouth – he does talk about the right flicks but he goes into no real depth or detail – he’s normally shallow and generally terrible at his job 90% of the time. Again, this is not an I hate successful critics session, so please no hate mail saying I’m a frustrated film critic crying out for attention, because I’m not. I say good on the man for getting where he is with the diabolical analytical skills he possesses. However, he has, as would be expected, jumped fully and wholeheartedly on the indie cool Juno bandwagon by playing clips from the trailer and berating the mainstream films currently in the cinema. These are the guys normally plugging the latest Rocky bullshit sequel or some other shite. It genuinely makes me wanna vomit that these third rate critics get to trade off the success of a creative talent. I know it’s all good publicity for the flick but still… critics are parasites.

Juno btw, is really cool… go see it! Trends, don’t you just love ‘em!

That’s enough from me…

K

Give it away, give it away, give it away now!

There is something sick in the film industry. We all know this. From an average DVD-buying consumer to the indie filmmaking community to the academics in their ivory towers to the disgruntled industry insiders, we all know that the rot set in a long time ago. Whether you’re a film school grad trying to get a break or a filmmaker trying to get funding or a consumer standing in the cinema with only four choices on the menu – film is hard, way too hard. Now, I’m not here to get into a discussion about the film industry creating an impenetrable bubble for those of us who are trying to get in, what I am here to talk about is giving your film away for free.

Much of this blog is fueled by the likes of Lance Weiler and Arin Crumley who are actually doing this kinda stuff in practice. My inspiration for writing this blog was the incredibly brief treatment of the “give your art away” discussion in this months Filmmaker Magazine. Arin and Susan gave another interview about their experiences in the world of self-distribution a while ago and during the course of that interview he said something way more interesting than anything Filmmaker published. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here folks, brace yourselves, that it would have been more beneficial for them to have had their movie already up on YouTube while they were doing the festival tour. It is this issue that I believe is so much more important than anything else surrounding the self distribution debate.

We’re are being constantly bombarded by people telling us not to blow our creative and commercial load too soon, excuse the analogy, but we are. For example, in a meeting earlier this month about a web tv project I have ties with, a University lecturer made a point that completely threw me. She said that you need to hold off as long as possible, launch all your content at once and hit the students with a high impact marketing campaign to ensure that they watch. What? Now, while everything else she said was brilliant and useful and insightful this just made no sense to me. Where’s the longtail? Where’s the viral tasty morsels that all those media snacking YouTube junkies wanna stuff down their faces?!?! This is old world thinking people surely it would be better to launch the site with basic content and release regular episodes to encourage stickiness? What I’m trying to say is that giving it all away in one big dollop of flash video is surely not the way forward. Arin and Susan have the right idea, give it away for free, get a sticky following, so to speak, and release the goods themselves when you’re most high-profile to your given audience. So in the case of indie film you need the viral video episodes and the film online. You’re not losing anything by giving it away, you’re not diminishing your selling power with distributors you’re gaining more ammunition to prove that this film has an audience and if you snap it up now there’s a theatrical life for this film just as much as there’s an online life.

The industry and us as filmmakers need to stop thinking of our films as precious and start whoring. How can we get people to view this flick? How can we create a revenue stream from that viewing method? How can we get our video blogs onto every video sharing site on the Internet? And how can we get the film itself onto as may of those sites too!?! Now, I’m not saying there aren’t obstacles to this – upload limits in terms of size and film length as well as average viewer attention span etc. but seriously if you play this right folks you can get that regular viewing audience that are interested enough to watch the whole film online and you can prove to the web 2.0 industries that it is viable for them to sponsor your flick and in turn the film industry must surely pay notice.

I’ve said enough… but check out the following links for further information and some inspiration.

From Here to Awesome – A alternative discovery distribution film festival.
Arincrumley.com – Arin’s personal site, loads of blogage and self-distribution info.
Tube Mogul – Distribute your video to a plethora of online sites.

K

No Community For Old Media

I visited the cinema the other day, to watch No Country For Old Men. After the film, everyone I was with had an opinion on what was seen, good and bad, we spoke our words and they beamed across to each others ears, then evaporated into thin air. We then walked off to the car and each went home. How dull.

Was that it? I was thinking. I wanted to leave a comment, for the next person to find. There was no-where for me to do that.

• No number to text,
• No Kiosk to give my thumbs up or down,
• No video booth to leave a rant,
• No community cafe led by a local fanboy of the director to join in a discussion.

Sure the indie art house cinemas, have actor and director post feature discussions. But I wasn’t at one of those. I was in a multi screen complex. Where 10s of thousands of pounds exchange hands and thousands of people filter through every week… and I know these cinemas have a production line mentality, but they’re also fighting the backlash of DVD sales, illegal downloads, and online screenings. Shouldn’t they be embracing the current (forget the new) technology? Rather than putting their hands over their eyes and thinking no-one will notice.

I can’t help but think that cinemas are slow to catch on. Their visitors are used to communicating instantly and hearing, reading, seeing opinions from everyone else before them.

I don’t think it’s enough for any form of media to just deliver anymore… whether that’s books, music, films or stage shows.

How hard would it be to impliment just half of the things I’ve mentioned above? Not much I’m guessing. Maybe one day hey? Until then, there’s definitely no community for old media.

Mark

(Orginally posted by me on Mediasnackers.com, but cross posted here, due to its topic and relavance)