I’m actually excited about going to the movies again

Intro

On 3/5/2011, you would think a guy of my ilk would be pretty excited about the fact that the NFL owners have not locked out the NFL players. Excited? No. Optimistic for the first time? Yes. Strangely enough, I am excited about the movies this morning. I was not excited about movies throughout the majority of 2010.

Folks, they never should have held the 83^rd Academy Awards ceremony. They should have canceled the Chicky-Super Bowl this year. Hollywood did not deserve any gold statues for what happened during 2010. The fact that they held the ceremony was travesty and miscarriage of justice.

What we should have done is round-up all the heads of each major studio, and all the major Hollywood producers, taken them out behind the woodshed and kicked them in the nuts 20 or 30 times each. That is what they deserved for last year’s cinematic output. It was a fucking lousy year for the movies. The movies of 2010 stank, by and large.

Better still, let’s get Adam Vinattieri to kick them in the nuts 30 or 40 times each. I’m talking about a full soccer-style kick too. After that, we’ll get Deacon Jones to stuff them all into a burlap sack and beat the sack with a baseball bat. Or we could stuff them in a food processor and then an industrial microwave oven…

Now it’s 2011

As I surf to movies.Yahoo.com and look up my favorite local theater, I am absolutely astounded to find a fairly exciting list of choices here. Two movies just opened up yesterday that are on my must-see list: Rango and The Adjustment Bureau. There are several other reasonable choices also.

Rango looks like the first brilliant 3d movie since How to Train Your Dragon, and I think it’s going to be considerably better than that. The animation art looks truly awesome. I have high hopes. This is basically western with anthropomorphized animals, with a Looney Tunes style of humor. The preview looked good. I hope it does not disappoint.

The Adjustment Bureau looks like the bright star on the horizon. This movie has a chance to windup on my short list of all-time favorites, if everything works out as it should. I was intrigued by what I saw in the preview, but more so by the NPR interview I heard last night on the drive home.

The Adjustment Bureau is a heavy existentialist and mystical piece, wrapped up in the look and feel of a modern Sci-Fi movie. The question is deep: can a man control his own fate, or is your destiny controlled by something else? Is the leaver controlling your destiny in your own hands, or are their unseen--but keenly felt--beings or forces in an unseen realm, pulling strings and punching buttons, making things turn out the way they see fit? If there are such shadowy figures manipulating your outcomes, is it possible for you to resist them, and re-set your course as you prefer it to go? Is it is wise thing to resist them, just because you don’t like what they are doing?

At its core, this is actually a sweet romance about a man and woman who really love each other, and want to be together. She’s a ‘dancer’ and he’s a politician. It’s difficult to determine which profession is more slimy, but the politicos don’t want their bright star muddied-up with this greazie girl. Forces conspire to push them apart. They resist.

It’s a good thing that the casting directors chose a pretty Pisces girl (Emily Blunt) to play the love interest. That’s one way to catch my attention. Pisces is on my 7^th House.

Folks, this is the kind of movie I really go for. Neptune is in Scorpio in my natal chart. I am part of a 14 year group of people who are attracted to and fascinated by strange, weird, unusual, mystical, macabre and bizarre subjects. The weirder and more paranormal it is, the more entertaining it is also. This is reflected in the music, art and fashion of our age cohort. We’re the guys who love Chariots of the Gods, UFO stuff, 2012 documentaries, the X-Files, Lost, and Unsolved Mysteries.

Uncle Broonmee

In spirit of the last paragraph, I should include the 3^rd interesting release of the week. If it weren’t enough that they opened two must-see movies this week, there is a third option in very limited release. It’s called Uncle Broonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. That is quite a mouthful.

Evidently this is a Philippine movie about man who is dying. He has decided to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside, away from the public. He’s a good man, and better than Al Davis. Didn’t I mention this subject recently?

He has a number of very strange supernatural visitors. The closer he gets to death, the closer he gets to the other side. The more contact he makes with those on the other side, the more he learns about his past incarnations, and accumulates hints about his next incarnation.

Wow… sounds pretty damn weird, macabre, paranormal and entertaining. I want to see this one for sure. As Spock would say: “Facinating!”

But wait! There’s more!

As if it weren’t enough that there are three must-see movies opening this week, there is still more! I Am Number Four has been getting pretty good word of mouth inside my circle of friends and associates. Those who have seen it have praised it as a good adventure.

I’ve been building an interest in this movie all week long. It also helps that this movie features an absolutely ravishing (and I mean ravishing) Pisces female named Teresa Palma. You want to talk about a knock-out bombshell… Believe me, she puts about 850 foot-pounds of torque on my crankshaft. One of the interesting things about Teresa is that she was born on 2/26/1986; just 2 weeks, or 14 days, away from my theoretical max birthday of 3/12/1986. This is close enough to give Teresa a very impressive set of scores. Believe me, I’m feeling that synastry.

But wait! There’s more!

As you all know by now, Liam Neeson opened a new mystery/thriller a week or two ago called Unknown. We can describe it as a drama about identity theft on a whole different level. Of course, it helps that he has a stunning Cancer woman named Diane Kruger in that movie. I don’t mention it often, but Cancer and Virgo are very good together. We don’t have particularly good scores, but I admire her anyhow.

The general forecast for 2011

I spent a good part of last week hauling down some 63 movie previews from trailers.apple.com. If you own the pro copy of Quicktime, you can export these .Mov files as .Mp4 files. There is no transcoding, it’s just a different meta-wrapper. Once these files are in the .MP4 package, I like to drop them on a USB2 memory stick, formatted in Fat32, inside a directory called “VIDEO”. I can then plug that memory stick into my PS3, and watch all the previews I want on the big screen.

There are many other ways to do it, but this is how I like to do it. The speed of the flash memory means instant starts and instant stops. It’s very cool.

Looking at these 63 previews suggests that it is going to be a very interesting year indeed.

Surprisingly enough, it looks like they have done a re-origin and reboot on Marvel’s Thor, and it looks like it just might turn out to be entertaining after all. I sure hope so. The information about Captain America is currently too sketchy to determine whether this might be good or bad. It looks like they are playing it close to the comic book origin. No reboot here. That’s all I can tell you right now.

Kill the Irishman is actually based on a completely outrageous true-crime mobster story. I’ve seen several documentaries on this epoch of Cleveland history, and it’s truly a case where truth is stranger than fiction. If they do that story well, it could turn out to be one of the all-time mobster classics.

The Bleeding looks like the next hilarious grindhouse comedy. I am convinced that they didn’t have a serious bone in their bodies as they made this movie. This is camp stuff, and played for laughs. I loved Planet Terror, John Carpenter’s Vampires, and Black Dynamite. Machete disappointed me, but I hope this one won’t.

I am deeply worried that Green Lantern won’t turn out well, but still, I hold out some hope. It looks like they have spent quite a bit of money on special effects, and they won’t dumb down the Sci-Fi journey’s of the Green Lantern Corp. Still, I worry that this will be the next Fantastic Four. That one didn’t come together or work out well.

These are just a few of the movies that have caught my attention. There are many others.

There's no there there.

Is it just me or is Hollywood misfiring on all cylanders? I cannot remember such a barren year in the history of movie making. I have never had such a short list of favorite movies in any year I can remember. In the year 2010, I can only give qualified endorsements to the following movies:

1. Splice
2. Shutter Island
3. How to Train Your Dragon
4. Iron Man 2
5. The Wolfman

That list gets weaker as we go down the list. I have not seen Unstoppable yet, and I have high hopes for that one. Perhaps Unstoppable will become the 6th movie on my list for 2010.

Folks, it is December. That is the 12th month of the year. We have roughly 24 days left to go. Hollywood doesn't have much time to convince me of anything. There is a very high probability that I am going to finish 2010 with just 5 or 6 movies on my qualified endorsement list. That is less than 1 qualified endorsement deal every two (2) months.

As Vince Lombardi would say "What the hell's going on out there?!?!?!"

I'll tell you what's going on... Left to their own devices, this present generation of artists of Hollywood would make endless freak shows about their drug addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, and mental health problems. They would characterize these freak shows as stories about characters and emotion.

Snared in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and unwilling to lose money on an endless parade of Broke Back Mountain clones, the B-School boys at the top of the studio high command are ordering one remake after another. Suddenly everything is a remake. Almost nothing is even slightly original.

Consider Faster. Faster is an incredibly basic revenge plot. I have seen 100 like it, and that is an understatement. I can't name the movie, but I am pretty sure that I saw this exact script before, and I am sure it was done with Steve McQueen.

Faster isn't the only one. By now, you should know that Hollywood has re-made True Grit and The Mechanic! Everything is a fucking remake. They make no bones about it. It's explicit in the titles. There isn't even a pretense of originality.

Even in a case where they are pretending to be original, they are not. Consider The Town. The Town got considerable good press when it came out. It has one of the highest ratings of the year according to RottenTomatoes.com. Dude! This one of the least original plots I have ever seen.

The Town is an incredibly basic story about a guy from the wrong side of the tracks who falls in with his childhood buddies as they launch a criminal enterprise. He lives on the wrong side of the law until his bad profession brings him into contact with little miss wonderful. She's perfect. She is full of all the goodness and middle-class virtue we hope for in a wife/mother/mate. The rest of the story is a drama about the guy trying to break free from his past and move forward into a clean future with his lady love. He is redeemed by love.

How many times have you seen this story before? I have personally seen 20 movies like this. You many have seen more. There is not even the slightest shred of originality in this plot line. Some of the style and content may be a bit different, but as much as things change, they stay the same. It's a tale as old as time.

Even th Wolfman, which I liked in it's theatrical form, is an explicit remake.

Folks, as far as I am concerned Splice is the best picture of 2010. It is the only movie original I have seen this year, with the possible exception of Inception, which I was not crazy about.

This Film has not Been Rated

I just finished watching a documentary I got from Netflix just a few moments ago. In all honesty, I thought it was entertaining, humorous as hell, but frustrating.

The movie is essentially a political screed by a collection of Gay, Lesbian and somewhat aberrant film makers against the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America. These are the men and women who slap the ratings on the movies (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17). I was amazed to learn the MPAA dwells at 15503 Ventura Blvd in Encino. I am just a little North of 21000 Ventura. They are roughly 10 miles south east of my current position.

Essentially, these aberrant film makers have talked themselves into the following mythological belief system:

1. NC17 movies do not make money
2. Applying the NC17 tag gets you thrown out of Walmart and Blockbuster
3. Ergo applying the NC17 tag is censorship
4. 80% of the time, the NC17 tag is applied to a movie for homosexual sexual content, not violence
5. The tag is capricious in general

Jack Valenti, the late boss man and founder of the MPAA, has an interesting counter argument which was given very short shrift by these documentary film makers.

1. If you make an art movie rubbing the audiences' collective nose in aberrant behavior, you have just made a movie that very few people want to see.
2. Ergo your market is small to nothing to begin with.
3. Many of these movies are independently made with no support or marketing from the 6 major studios (Paramount, Universal, Fox, Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers). Ergo, nobody ever hears about these movies anyhow.
4. You can apply any rating you like to the film, or not submit for a rating at all. It will make little difference to your financial outcome. The movie is destined to be a market failure when you chose your topic.

The rest of the movie constitutes an attempt to avoid dealing with the substance of Valenti's case. A variety of 'artists' parade across the screen complaining of wrongs that have been done to them, and wonderful movies financially sunk by the ratings system. What I saw here was a massive state of denial.

Take a couple of my favorite comedy geniuses, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Matt was on camera frequently complaining of wrongs done to him in the case of Orgasmo. He strenuously objected to the fact that it got an NC17. Orgasmo happens to be one of my favorite comedies. I happen to own it on DVD. I await the Blu-Ray release if there ever is one. I had no idea that it was rated NC17, but I am not surprised, and I don't care. Rather, I am surprised that Matt could be so indignant over this rating. Was not Orgasmo full of hardcore porn stars such as Juli Ashton, Chasey Lane, Shayla LaVeaux, Mellisa Hill, Yumiko, Jill Kelly, and Ron Jeremy? Was not the entire comedy subject the making of Porn movies? Are you really surprised you got an NC17? I am surprised you are surprised.

Another lesbian film maker complained that her film Big Boys Don't Cry was sanctioned for an elaborate lesbian cunnilingus scene in which the giver wipes the cum off of her mouth for the camera. The MPAA also objected to a brutal anal rape scene in the movie, which is both violent and excruciating. Jeezee... can you imagine the MPAA applying the NC17 tag for a little thing like a brutal anal rape scene? Actually, yes I can. I am surprised that you are surprised.

You get my jist? Do you see the tenor of their arguments?

One lesson this documentary taught me is the enormous disconnect between Hollywood Blvd and Main street. As I have ever known, Hollywood Blvd simply does not think or reason in a manner that is at all similar to Main Street USA.

However, the real lesson of this documentary is about human delusions, and the extent to which people go to avoid consciously recognizing unhappy truths. One of the anti-censorship voices in the movie belts out that most teens have seen more aberrant and hardcore sex on the Internet than their parents have ever seen. Yes this is true, but watch your argumentation there; you will be hoist on your own petard.

This argument is the most devastating of the several self-refuting arguments made during the course of this documentary. XXX rated material is supposed to be inaccessible to minors. A lot of weak controls are put in place to ensure they cannot access such materials. The need for a credit card is one such control. The rating system is another control. Laws requiring verification of age (with a credit card) are another. Somehow, they all get access anyhow. Nothing stops them.

Jack Valenti founded the MPAA the very year that Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin and I were all born. I think they would tell you the MPAA rating never stopped them from seeing an R movie when they were kids. Nothing stopped me. I saw a lot of R movies when I was 15-17. Dollars might, but ratings did not. The ratings don't stop anybody from seeing anything. I never even realized Orgasmo was NC17, I saw it anyway some 13 years ago.

So why then do NC17 movies fail financially? It is very simple: Valenti has reason in his case. These folks are just making aberrant movies for a statistically askew statistical minority. That isn't good marketing. You cannot expect to find a large market there. You may want a large market, but this is an unrealistic expectation at best.

So what does the human soul do when confronted with such pain? What do you do when nobody really wants to see the movie you desperately desire to make, and your work fails in the market? You enter into a state of denial. You make a boogyman scapegoat out of the MPAA and you blame them for your financial woes. The end. Very simple. This is very human.

So I am compiling my Best Movies of the Decade list

So for some reason, everybody seems to be publishing their Best Movies of the Decade List. This despite the fact that the decade will not be officially over for another year. Anyhow, I thought I would join the fray. My list currently contains about 70 movies, and it isn't quite ready. I will publish it when it is pruned and blossomed.

Just to prep you for the list, here are some of my criteria:

1. Art films need not apply
2. Emotional Meltdowns need not apply
3. Inspirational movies need not apply
4. Chick Flicks need not apply
5. Most Oscar winners are suspect
6. Heavy preference is given to Sci-Fi
7. Strong preference is given to animation
8. Horror is considered, but frowned upon
9. In short, this is a guy's list of entertaining movies.
10. I am not doing this to please he academy.
11. My objective is to compile a reliable list of good entertainment for guys like me.
12. I want any ordinary guy to be able to pick an item of this list, see, and be glad he did.

70 over a decade produces and average of about 7 per year if you count the year 2000 (which you should not). When you stop to think about it, that really isn't very much entertainment for guys like me. An average of 7 movies per year leaves us high and dry for good entertainment much of the year. No wonder we watch so much football.

The Great Depression II will be good for Hollywood

In Hollywood, there has always been a huge battle between the artists and the entertainment companies. It is almost like the struggle between pitchers and batters in baseball, or offense and defense in football. This is the entire warp and woof of the game, from an insiders perspective.

Entertainment companies are run by businessmen. They want to make money. The best way to do that is to give the people what they want from a movie: Entertainment. Declinations from this stance are punishable by low profits and bad losses.

By the way, I should mention that the definition of hit has nothing to do with what the critics, the people, or the Oscars say about a film. A hit is defined as a 15% rate of internal studio return, within 12 calendar months, after all costs and payouts have been made. 15% pure cream makes a movie a hit. If you make this rate of return within 12 calendar months, you made a hit. It does not matter how the film is ultimately remembered or what people said about it. It made money. It was a hit.

Artists are manic, depressive, schizophrenic people with sexual and substance abuse problems. They are also extremely narcissistic. They think there can be nothing more important, or timely, or provocative, or artistic than stories about their personal problems. They think personal confessions are the stuff of art. Artists like money, but they like to tell their own personal stories about heroine addiction and homosexuality and life with AIDS much more.

Entertainment companies realize that grueling, punishing, depressing stories about actors and writers with heroine addiction, homosexual issues and AIDS related illnesses have zero commercial value at the box office. That's right, I said zero commercial value. When you toss in the manic, depressive, bipolar schizophrenia behavior, the screenplay really gets ugly beyond ugly.

These movies very seldom make a 15% rate of internal studio return within 12 months. Most of them loose money. 75% of the people in the United States of America have no interest buying a $10 ticket for a film about an actor who peddles his ass on the streets of West Hollywood whilst awaiting his break, only to become addicted to smack and infected with HIV. 50% of the people wouldn't watch that movie if you showed it to them for free. 25% wouldn't watch if you offered them free chicken and biscuts along with a free ticket.

Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent 20 such screenplays from being written each and every year. Go down to West Hollywood and stop at any Starbucks for a cup of coffee. You will see three guys, each with an Apple MacBook, writing just such a screenplay right now. I assure you, these three guys are each convinced that they are writing the most important literary work in the past 20 years. They know they are way beyond cool. They will all be shocked when doors get slammed in their faces. The corporate studios just can't recognize great art, or so they say.

Now how does this connect with the Great Depression II? Movies did well during the Great Depression I. It turns out that Hollywood is surging right now, but not everybody is doing equally well. It is said that Paramount may well fold in the year 2009. They are going to release just 18 new films this year. In the glory days, they tried to have 1 film ready to launch every single week. Not so now.

Everybody is keenly aware of Paramount's problems. The other four major studios are watching Paramount's dilemmas very closely. They know many of the material weaknesses in the Paramount system are evident in their own systems as well. They know they could suffer collapse unless they rid themselves of the problems Paramount is suffering from.

What are these problems? You might call it the Labor-Accord of the 1960s. I'm not talking about Unions or pay or benefits. I am talking about the balance of Art vs. Entertainment. You see, ever since the 1960s, there has been a clear understanding that goes a little something like this.

Artists have to work on a certain number of blockbuster A-pics each year for their respective studios. These are movies designed from jump street to make money. Hopefully they all make money. Some profits from these successful blockbusters are used to finance a limited number of art movies which the artists basically control. This is where you get strange movies like the ones made by Fox Searchlight, or Disney's Miramax. These movies contain a lot of drug addiction, insanity and homosexuality. Everybody understands that very few of these art films ever turn a profit. If you don't work on the blockbusters, you don't get to do an art film. If your blockbuster doesn't make money, you don't get to do a movie about your psychological train-wreck. You don't get any pudding until you finish your meat.

The only problem with this theory is that the blockbusters cost a ton of money, and they don't necessarily hit. When they fail, blockbusters loose a ton of money. Eddie Murphy's notorious Pluto Nash lost something like $90 million for Paramount. {This is an example of a worst case scenario.} The key point is that there are no sure-fire blockbusters. Some people in Hollywood say you need two good blockbusters just to cover the cost of one blockbuster failure. When you throw in the failures of the art films, you really start to encounter financial problems.

There were artists in Hollywood during the Great Depression I. They suffered the same insanity, drug addictions and homosexual issues current Hollywood artists do. There were also studio businessmen in Hollywood during the era of the Great Depression I. There was no Labor-Accord like the kind we have today. It was understood that money was too dear, failure too damaging, and studio-collapse too close to waste lots of capital on art films. The result was that very few art flicks got made during the Great Depression I. Thank God for that.

Rather, Hollywood constructed the Grindhouse system. A couple of film crews were formed at each major studio, and they were supposed to grind out 1 film every 2 weeks. Everybody had the same amount of time to write. Everybody had the same budget to shoot the pic. Some turned out. Some didn't. Any major actor under contract might shoot 10 or 15 movies per year. John Wayne did this during WWII. The objective was entertainment, always. The objective was to give the people a good show for their money, always. You were an entertainer, working for an entertainment company in those days, period. If you wanted to be an artist, you could get on a plane for Paris or Rome.

Most of the movies considered all-time classics were shot under this Grindhouse system. Casablanca was shot in this fashion. Casablanca is one of those films thought to be in top 5 all-time list.

Might this system return today? Might history repeat itself in Hollywood as the Great Depression II sets in?

Not exactly, but something like it is going to emerge. The model the Majors are studying very closely is Lion's Gate Entertainment. Lion's Gate has become little-big studio. It is the largest and most profitable of the minor studios in Hollywood, Pixar included. Right from its very inception, the guys driving the Lion's Gate project had a clear-cut objective of becoming a major studio. They didn't want to replace 1 of the big 5 studios, rather they wanted to become the 6th major studio. How do you do this?

Unless the studio execs can see a clear-cut path to profits, Lion's Gate will not finance a film. This means they make a lot of comic book films, action blockbusters, and horror movies. The objective is to give the people a good show for their money. The objective is to give the people what they want: Entertainment. If you work for Lion's Gate, you are a professional entertainer working for an entertainment company.

Lion's Gate is detested by the Hollywood art community. The members of SAG do not speak well of Lion's Gate. They are considered the ultimate corporate commercial studio in Hollywood. This means they don't finance art films. You don't see a lot of movies about heroine addiction, insanity and homosexuality coming from Lion's Gate. Despite their hard-hearted rejection of the art film, Lion's Gate is winning this game. They keep turning in one great winning season after another. SAG members often shake their heads in dismay that a studio can so brazenly disregard art and yet do so well financially.

If Paramount should fail, Lion's Gate will likely be the chief benefactor of this collapse. Lion's Gate will probably buy "I Love Lucy" and "Star Trek". Lion's gate will probably gain the Lion's share of the investor capital that Paramount once controlled. When the Hedge Funds return to the table, Lion's Gate will probably become the 5th major studio.

Moreover, the collapse of Paramount would send shock waves of fear through Warner Brothers, Universal and Fox. It is a copycat league. Teams emulate success and they anti-emulate failure. You can expect Warner, Universal and Fox to move away from their current systems {the Labor-Accord Paramount also practices} and move towards the model Lion's Gate manifests.

This would mean no finance for art films... At least from the major studios. This would mean artists would have to self-finance their movies about insanity, drug addiction and homosexuality. Most artists don't like that idea. They seem to be aware that they won't be able to punish society with very many films on this subject should these events come to pass.