I was here in New York, working and trolling Twitter for a virtual Con experience. Then, each night, when Kellvin, Mayimbe and El Guapo started tweeting pics of famous people I wasn’t meeting, I’d come to my apartment, cry and take in some entertainment.
Not a bunch of you suggested things through last week’s column or at my e-mail for such things: HeyDa7e@gmail.com, but I can understand. Change is scary and this is a weird weekly post. We’ll all settle into it together.
“6 Things With Da7e” is a simple premise – Each week, I will highlight six pop-culture things usually directly tied to the movie industry and/.or the geektastic process of enjoying films outside the theater. Whenever possible, I will try to include one thing you need money to participate in and at least one thing that is free.
I’ll be scouring the internet and reaching out to my blogging allies to come up with interesting “things” and trying to pick up on the undercurrent of discussions if I can. Best of all, I’m open to suggestion: E-mail me at HeyDa7e@gmail.com with the things you can’t just let lie (lay?), and if they’re interesting, I’ll bring them around.
#6 - [JJ Abrams/Joss Whedon Panel]
I like to provide something free each week, which usually means YouTube or music.
I’ve been watching a lot of the camera-recorded panels from Comic Con. I figure those schmucks paid for tickets, stood in line, purposefully sat next to quiet people so they can film the panel, so it’s the very least I can do to invalidate the money they paid by suggesting you watch an entire panel for free.
All you have to do is put up with sub-par audio.
I have selected the Joss Whedon/JJ Abrams panel because it’s not a news making panel. You can read fantastic coverage from the Marvel panel, for instance, elsewhere on this site.
Not to mention that these two creative powerhouses are an interesting combination for a panel.
The shining light at the end of the year is Tron Legacy. Every new piece of news or footage coming our of the very well run PR campaign for the film has been something encouraging – it’s being shot in native 3D, Daft Punk has been working on the score since the project began, David Fincher and Pixar have consulted on the project, there’s a de-aged Jeff Bridges. All the previous news items have been precariously placed in the news cycle by Disney, managed in an astonishing way, even if the astonishing fact is just how drawn-out and controlled the whole thing is.
This year at Comic Con, the Tron marketing team had a high bar to clear, set by two previous years at the Con, including a few “winner of the Con '09” nods for their unveiling of a real Flynn’s Arcade and a light-cycle through a viral campaign. This year, Flynn’s received and expansion; the viral campaign for Tron has been running strong for over 52 weeks and treated Comic Con 2010 as a milestone – lots and lots of content payoff.
The brilliance of the Tron viral campaign has been it’s ability to keep fans on the hook in between bursts of official content from the film the campaign is promoting. They can almost be viewed as two separate entities. For me, they must: because I have no idea what’s going on with the ARG viral campaign, but know most everything that has to do with the movie. It’s not that I don’t want to discover scrambled light cycle concept art in the Alternate Reality Game, I just know there are other people who will find those tidbits embedded in cyberspace.
These are the fingerprints of 42 Entertainment, the same folks behind the Dark Knight Viral campaign. They have a unique (and high budget) view of viral content, but their campaigns also garner more interest amongst people who may not be fans of ARGs and Virals for films. Project the Bat Signal on the tallest buildings in New York and Chicago, on the other hand, and you increase awareness beyond the blogosphere. Other viral campaigns claiming to be ARG don’t benefit the fan community, they are just a way to seed marketing into an audience. 42 Entertainment has had trouble controlling large numbers of fans at past events (this coming from my first hand experience and from accounts), but they are striving for something when other films are happy with a count down and a red band web trailer.
42 Entertainment’s website isn’t as informative as I’d like it to be, but they do have 5 slogans they work by (http://www.42entertainment.com/see.html) and they all involve community. I’m sure building an End of the Line club in San Diego and hiring good looking actors to serve Coke Zero in Tron costumes was expensive, but building a world like Tron with an online community has the potential to build a loyal consumer base. If you’ve been knee-deep in viral marketing goodness for 2 years by the time the movie comes out, chances are the hangover could be cured by buying some Tron shoes, right? Or action figures? Hell, anything that looks like it was made by Evil Steve Jobs and glows blue!
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is a long-gestating Rob Zombie animated project that he started after filming The Devil’s Rejects and haltingly produced over three years. It’s an animated film that knows it’s roots, paying homage to Fritz the Cat to John K. (the cartoon genius behind Ren & Stimpy)…well…”homage” doesn’t feel like the right word, but only because this film is God awful.
I think Rob Zombie falls on the genius scale, just on the low-brow end, like, below Trey Parker and Matt Stone, maybe even with Flava Flav (dude has had a cultural impact via Public Enemy and the worst celebrity dating show, making him the lowest point on the genius scale - because you haven't done that much with your life...sadly).
When I was 13, White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” was listened to daily and to this day there has been a long-running joke amongst my friends that I bed ladies to a mix CD that is just “Superbeast” on loop. House of 1000 Corpses is a certain kind of twisted genius that is the good kind of bad and Devil’s Rejects is a claustrophobic horror experience in an age of SAW gross-out scares. AND, the animated hallucination sequence in Beavis and Butthead Do America (directed and drawn by Zombie, to his own music), is - and remains - fantastic.
Thing is, all Rob Zombie’s ideas seem like they’d be much more fun if I was a 13 year old again and didn’t care about execution.
I got to read Rob Zombie’s script for a Crow sequel once. It’s called The Crow: 2037 and it’s a sci-fi revenge story that includes a surprising amount of elements that showed up in House of 1000 Corpses. The first time I saw House, I got to the scene where the girl in the bunny costume falls into an underground pool filled with Ghouls for seemingly no reason. Imagine my surprise when the Crow fell through a hole in a graveyard and ended up in a pool full of Ghouls. Oh, and there is a giant henchman who wears a tattered bunny costume.
That’s the problem with Rob Zombie: Great ideas, poor follow through. This is how we keep getting duped into supporting his Halloween movies. The ideas on display show promise, then the follow-through is botched.
El Superbeasto is a great example. An adult animated comedy that includes naked women, animated sex and zombie Nazis sounds fun. The designs of the characters, like several non-speaking backgrounds populating the monster world, are interesting. Then, after the opening title sequence modeled on classic animation sequences, the characters open their mouths and proceed to ruin everything good about the design and concept with foul-mouthed jokes tailored, like most of Zombie’s products in retrospect, to 13 year old boys.
I’ve been a Zombie supporter in the past, but now I’m thinking his strategy is to keep making these films until culture as a whole gets desensitized enough to open up the R rating to thirteen year olds. On the day that happens, Rob Zombie will be poised to become the James Cameron of things involving the word “Satan.”
This flick is on Netflix Watch Instantly and I challenge anyone to find something redeeming about its story, dialogue or overall right to exist.
Have no idea what “Life In A Day” was? Quick, press release, remind them!
On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera. You can film the ordinary -- a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match, or the extraordinary -- a baby’s first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage.
Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void and One Day in September, will then edit the most compelling footage into a feature documentary film, to be executive-produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind films like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise, Blade Runner and Robin Hood. LG Electronics is supporting "Life in a Day" as a key part of its long-standing "Life’s Good" campaign and to support the creation of quality online content that can be shared and enjoyed by all.
Did I participate? No, I did not.
As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone that did participate. It would have mostly been me napping through the morning, then I went to a birthday BBQ where I talked to people I half-knew about what their jobs were. Then I told them what my job was, then we discussed how we feel guilty for feeling old, since we’re not old, but we’re not feeling young anymore and no one is impressed by things we do, because we’re expected to be contributing to society at this point.
I guess what I’m getting at here is that my interest is already stacked against “Life In A Day,” because I don’t think it will be reality, but narrative through juxtaposition and I don’t think filmmaking and crowd-source filmmaking are the same talent set.
Life In A Day’s submission period is still going on, if you happened to film your day on Saturday (and if you were at Comic Con, don’t submit, because there’s that Comic Con documentary filming this year too, and how many movies about Comic Con will anyone care about in one year?). The film will debut at Sundance 2011 as the most co-directed film of all time.
#2 - [/Film Let One Through The Fence – Criticism/Bloggers/Fanboys]
I’ll do my best to keep this brief, but I want to respond to something New York Press film critic Armond White said on the /Filmcast After Dark (I do listen to other podcasts, this one was just especially provocative).
As you can imagine, the nature of a column where I recommend seemingly random things has me doing a lot of thinking about the line between criticism and being a shill, which is a label Mr. White plunked on Roger Ebert:
I do think it is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. Because of the wide and far reach of television, he became an example of what a film critic does for too many people. And what he did simply was not criticism. It was simply blather. And it was a kind of purposefully dishonest enthusiasm for product, not real criticism at all…I think he does NOT have the training. I think he simply had the position. I think he does NOT have the training. I’VE got the training. And frankly, I don’t care how that sounds, but the fact is, I’ve got the training. I’m a pedigreed film critic. I’ve studied it. I know it. And I know many other people who’ve studied it as well, studied it seriously. Ebert just simply happened to have the job. And he’s had the job for a long time. He does not have the foundation. He simply got the job. And if you’ve ever seen any of his shows, and ever watched his shows on at least a two-week basis, then you surely saw how he would review, let’s say, eight movies a week and every week liked probably six of them. And that is just simply inherently dishonest. That’s what’s called being a shill. And it’s a tragic thing that that became the example of what a film critic does for too many people. Often he wasn’t practicing criticism at all. Often he would point out gaffes or mistakes in continuity. That’s not criticism. That’s really a pea-brained kind of fan gibberish.
I think Armond White is lost here in the blogosphere, on podcasts, maybe even lost as part of the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes. I think Armond White holds film criticism like a Platonic Ideal, that is: what we’d imagine film criticism is at it’s core – NOT how it’s manifested in the everyday world.
When aliens land on Earth, hundreds of years after the human race finally discovers a way to kill ourselves off without making some huge deal about it, and those aliens begin to resurrect our culture based on it’s remnants: Armond White believes that his reviews will be an accurate reflection of any given film’s contribution to cinema as an art form. He says if he were going frame-by-frame through Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he could explain Michael Bay’s brilliance, and maybe he could. He’s certainly had the training, we’re told.
I don’t care about how Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore reflects cinematic tropes active through the ages back at new audiences. I care if I have a good time watching it. That’s what my friends care about, and that’s what the people spending the money care about.
Armond White thinks that no one under 30 should be a film critic and no one under 40 should make a movie. Maybe that’s how long it takes you to absorb everything that’s been done and contribute something new to cinema. But that’s also an ideal, not a viable option: “Dear Mr. Executive, I’ve done my 30 years of reading, can I direct now?”
Ebert got the job, that much is true. Roger Ebert changed film criticism for the television age because he got the job – the job that forced him to use the over-simplified “thumb” method of rating.
Everyone who works for film blogs these days got the job, and that’s forcing criticism to change for the internet age. Blogs hire fanboys because they have to deal with a community of readers. They also hire fanboys because we’re willing to put in the hours based on our love of covering the world of movies and that passion currently fills the gaps in film theory that Armond White is sensing.
I don’t think aliens should use the blogosphere to judge cinema after we’re all dead and gone. We’re living on internet time, where there is only the present. It’s not being a shill, it’s knowing that you can’t tell your readers that all the movies in the theaters any given week are not worth their time because they don’t contribute the whole. Do that for a month and you’ve ceased serving your community and your boss.
Armond White has opinions I don’t agree with and he’s operating within a very narrow and sterile definition of film criticism. The twist is, we don’t have to get off his lawn, because he’s on ours.
#1 - [Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Vol. 6) and Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Comic Con Debut)]
This is where I recommend you read Brian O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim manga series before the movie comes out on August 13th.
I picked up Volume Six to make me feel better about not being at Comic Con, and it worked, but all too briefly. If you’re willing to drop the cash to buy all 6 volumes and digest them over as many days, I think that’s the ideal Scott Pilgrim experience.
I’m usually someone who avoids Manga, as I find the style alienating and simple. There’s still that little anti-Manga voice in the back of my head that calls the style cheap and wonders why I’m paying so much for an experience that is brief and often eliminates all subtlety with it’s bombastic style, stealing some joy from a re-read.
The Scott Pilgrim series cured me of all these Manga fears. The cast of mostly Canadian characters talk like people around me talk and deal with “real life issues” that are at least resonant to me. I’m guessing a lot of you who also grew up on video games and soul-crushing relationships will also find something to like here.
Especially the ending which had me slapping my forehead when the pieces fell together. Scott Pilgrim’s world is a difficult one to define, it’s part video game, part sci-fi, part RomCom and it isn’t until the final battle with Gideon, the evilest of exes that all the pieces click together and I felt my head was glowing…and I realized what that meant.
On the flip side of the coin, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, the movie adaptation directed by Edgar Wright, wisely had a huge presence at Comic Con that included the first screening of the film for the public and select journalists. The cast was there, Edgar Wright lead fans on a 20 minute walk through San Diego to the screening – it’s no surprise there isn’t a bad review to be found.
What’s most exciting to me about all the reviews coming out of the film is the burgeoning consensus that we’re actually seeing something new (in the Armond White sense) coming out of the Romantic Comedy genre, which is one of the stalest genres currently kicking out 4-5 movies a year.
It sounds like Edgar Wright has kept enough elements from the comic (like subtitles introducing places, voice over for thoughts) and enough video game elements (extra lives, enemies leaving coins) to take a stride forward in visual storytelling through extra information being displayed on screen. Zombieland’s use of “The Rules” that would appear on screen as the action transpired was the last exciting advancement in this type of information conveyance, and if Edgar Wright gets us closer to a Heads Up Display for films, I’ll be happy. I think the audience that grew up playing video games is ready for more information in each frame of their films, and it looks like we might have one coming down the pipeline that has a dense-enough plot to support this experiment.
And just in case you think I’m all up my own butt about all this, I also think it’s going to be a killer date movie. If you’re not psyched about it’s contribution to pop cinema, you should at least check it out as part of your ever-continuing attempts to get laid.
Week 2: gone. Got a great idea of something to cover? Shoot me an e-mail by clicking below.
If you've taken issue with what I've started, you can challenge me to explain or retract in the comments section here or at my Formspring account:
I'll be spending all week looking for new things and reading your responses.
COMING UP:
A recommendation! “Chopping Mall,” a 1986 horror film by Jim Wynorski. IMDB’s plot description is: ”Eight teenagers are trapped after hours in a high tech shopping mall and pursued by three murderous security robots out of control.” Boobies and killbots!
In the interest of providing content you can’t find elsewhere, I’m going to begin a short series of Fall Television Previews, since someone was nice enough to send me a bunch’o’scripts. Next week, I’ll be reviewing the pilot script for Fox’s new comedy “Traffic Light” written by Bob Fisher. My copy is dated January 21st, 2010. If you’re working on the project and don’t want me reviewing that draft, contact me soon. Otherwise, it is what it is.
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