films

essentials for worst director lists

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IMDb has a couple of popular "worst director" lists:

< The WORST Directors on planet Earth. A list by a REAL movie fan >

88 Hacks. Some of the worst working (unfortunately) directors

These emanate from Tinseltown nerds who follow current schlockmeisters very carefully (most mortals would be hard-pressed to name 100 directors period).
And while it's gratifying to see Zack Snyder (Watchmen) and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) getting their due, the validity of both lists is severely compromised by the absence of:

Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010, Relic, End of Days)

Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys, Flatliners, Batman and Robin, 8MM)

Fifteen years ago these bulletproof hacks would have topped any Hollywood worst list. You couldn't escape them. Happily, being prolific, inevitable and "made" is no assurance you won't be forgotten -- new juggernauts of awfulness will roll over you.

Afterthought: Complaining about the absence of Peter Berg from both lists would mean admitting that you actually saw Battleship.

pacific rimmed

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kaiju100plantain

Above are some of Pacific Rim's Kaiju monsters training to battle Earth's giant Jaeger robots before going through the undersea crack in spacetime.

OK, Pacific Rim is entertaining and stupid, as befits a director whose Spanish name translates as William O'Bull. An awe-inspiring melange of gigantism and cavernous spaces.

Was thinking about connections to Japan's Neon Genesis Evangelion:

Giant robots battle alien invaders.
Technicians anxiously watch videogame screens and fret about "sync ratios."
Flashbacks to early appearances of the monsters -- monsters menace small children.
World-weary commander with dark secrets.

But this is just an amiable popcorn movie so nothing really dark happens. The "good" robots don't actually contain biological components of bad aliens, Stringer Bell isn't using children to bring about the apocalypse and/or revive his dead wife, etc.

GIFs as cinema

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Have been describing animated GIFs as "ubiquitous mini-cinema" since before they were ubiquitous and now here's a post on whether they are "a type of cinema," written from a filmcrit POV.

You kind of have to laugh at the scholarly attention lavished on the "Picard vs Chunk" GIF but it's useful to apply film terminology such as the "180-degree rule" to GIFs (if for no other reason than it's a good way to learn about that concept):

Both [Bruce Conner's] A MOVIE and these animated gifs employ some common cinematic principles. The cuts create an eyeline match, which make it appear as though the characters are looking at one another, and obey the 180-degree rule (meaning that if you draw a straight line between their eyes, our perspective stays to one side of it).

Also considered is whether animated GIFs are video or photos:

In her recent Salon article, “Better Than Actual Porn!“, Tracy Clark-Flory ponders whether pornographic animated gifs are more like short videos or longer photographs. I’d argue that they exist on a spectrum between those two forms, capable of moving more toward one side or the other. The above Picard gifs are more like short videos. But the NYC subway gif and the dancing baby gif are arguably more like enhanced photos.

That's all fairly obvious but it's nice someone's trying to think beyond GIFs as throwaway culture and/or lifestyle trends. Around here we're mostly interested in the relation of GIFs to painting (abstract and otherwise), collage (surrealist and otherwise), and text (conceptual and otherwise) and also in taking GIFs beyond their ordinarily understood meaning as a vehicle for "Picard vs Chunk" jokes. Which is not to say those "meme" GIFs don't show up here occasionally.

how we buried the '70s

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From Holding Out For a Hero, a short book in blog form by Carl Neville about steroids, yuppies, Reaganism, and especially Schwarzenegger:

Westworld along with many of the Sci-Fi movies of the Seventies still partakes of a certain degree of technological utopianism, something which has evidently completely evaporated by the early eighties. Westworld still has all the trappings (as do its inferior sequel Futureworld, Donald Cammell's Demon Seed, Logans' Run. Thx 1138, A boy and his dog or Zardoz) of the future as Apollonian and post-scarcity, a techno-utopian Age of Aquarius ruled by benign and enlightened beings, though often of course this seeming paradise is built on a dirty secret which the Nietzschean central characters in their drive for truth must unmask while (to use the ugly and elitist contemporary expression) the "Sheeple" are content to unquestioningly consume and gratify their newly liberated desires. The out-and-out dystopian trend probably starts with George Miller's hugely influential Mad Max, set in a violent post peak-oil world in which civilization has collapsed and continued in the wildly successful sequel The Road Warrior from which almost all later dystopian cyberpunk/Sci-Fi takes its look.

Neville's blog/book reviews other pop culture tropes through the lens of this paragraph from his intro:

Neoliberalism may have heralded a rebirth in America, seen it rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the 70s, but this is a baptism in steroids, cocaine (and cocaine money) egotism, debt, cheap oil (and Arab oil money funnelled through American banks) deregulation and offshoring. In what sense are the questions of the Seventies, the environmental and social concerns, the Limits to Growth posed by the 1977 Club of Rome reports, actually addressed and solved by Neoliberalism, and to what degree are they simply ignored, held at bay in an essentially infantile thirty-year fantasy of growth and restructuring, that collapses along with the housing bubble of the late 00s? It seems that the financial crises along with numerous jobless recoveries have left us faced with the same set of problems that Neoliberalism was assumed to have permanently solved. The end of class struggle, the move away from manufacturing to services in the "core" economies (there is much talk at the moment of needing to "rebalance" the economy) the end of boom and bust.

Neville keeps coming back to Schwarzenegger as symbol of this inflated denial of the '70s critiques. A key text is 1977's Stay Hungry (a fascinating film, worth looking up):

Stay Hungry's vision is one of a compact between old money and the less nihilistic, more disciplined elements of the hippie/freak revolution. What it also offers is the sobering truth that generational conflicts, rejection of authority and struggles for independence and "new spaces" are often merely cyclical conflicts within capitalism, moments of rupture when the struggle for succession takes on a de-territorializing or anti-oedipal aspect that doesn’t offer any kind of definitive break with the past, but simply seeks to reconstitute old practices on new ground and in new guises.

Stay Hungry tells you that the entrepreneur, this fabled figure, the apotheosis of mankind for the Austrians, the Atlas upon whose shoulders all lesser men stand for the Randians, is not a heroic or titanic figure, not a Nietzschean self-creator, but a slumming, peevish child of privilege whose revolt consists in rejecting the family business and instead using daddy’s money and influence to do some cool shit of his own.

You start off with the Flat Earth News, a whole new business model and a bunch of wacky friends, but all the same you end up with Foxxcon.

In this passage Neville conflates the Jeff Bridges character (child of privilege) with his role model in the film (the bodybuilding, violin-playing reluctant ubermensch played by Schwarzenegger).

Afterthought: A Boy and His Dog, based on a Harlan Ellison story, had as its setting a Mad Max-like desert wasteland but there was still a society living well (if freakishly) in caves underground. Even Max had civil society, with a police force. Road Warrior was the one to really jettison all trappings of advanced civilization and imagine humans living the Hobbesian life in a vast junkyard. This is the image the current Galt-fantasists invoked when they saw images from Hurricane Katrina on TV.

Update, May 2018: Neville's blog was published by Zero Books under the less interesting but apparently copyright-safe title No More Heroes. The blog disappeared for a while but when I checked this month I noticed it was back online.

recent fiction about harvey weinstein

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Salon has a quasi-article today by Daniel D'Addario purporting to summarize a Deadline interview with film producer Harvey Weinstein. D'Addario writes:

Weinstein further notes that he regrets that the P.T. Anderson film The Master will lose money, and notes that he should have been "a devil’s advocate instead of a cheerleader" — meaning he ought to have taken a firmer hand in controlling the cut and marketing of the movie.

In the interview, Weinstein says nothing about the "cut" of The Master, controlling it or otherwise. He says "I probably could have marketed it better" and "maybe I could have come up with a different campaign."