jamais mister griffith!

Just wanted to point out to everybody that a long piece of writing isn't necessary (though appreciated) when talking about your movies. You can kick off the discussion any way you like.

Reuben (Discotarantula here) once described Night of the Hunger as an anomaly in the history of film. He meant that it does not belong to a film movement, or to any sort of historical progression in film; it seems to have become a film in spite of history, and in spite of its own troublesome birth (Reuben, please accept my apologies for this paraphrase, and please please weigh in in the comments and correct/put more eloquently what you meant!) I think he had to study the history of its production in an early film class in college.

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When I consider the last three or four years of my life, there has been no darker omen than the word “restructuring.” In 2009, my entire office was laid off due to “restructuring.” In 2010, at a different job, I got screwed out of a week's worth of paid vacation time because of “restructuring.” Presently, “restructuring” is holding back several years of freelance invoices, with no end in site. Always the same bad news; always the same trusty euphemism.

“Restructuring” is a useful word because it implies creativity. It's expansive and optimistic. It denies the victim of its crime, and implies some New-Agey rebirth once the dust of real labor relations settle. Suddenly my boss is a magical innovator, and I look like a dick if I begin to critique the semantics. And who are the authors of this phoney creativity? Usually, they're the people marked by two other familiar euphemisms: “the job creators,” “the creative class.” People who make abject greed seem like scrappy innovation. People who make money by moving money. The armchair pioneers of expanding markets.

To my grandparents, these people may have been robber barons, but now they're often revered as artists. When Steve Jobs died, my own left-leaning wall of Facebook friends was filled to the brim with lamentations and tributes. What did everyone like so much about this guy? I can't figure it out – the logic seems to be that “cancer sucks, Macbooks rule and Buddhists seem somehow benevolent.” Yoda was a Buddhist, right?


(The current face of heroism - iconoclastic, technocratic, solipsistic, authoritarian, humanitarian)

The question for me is why? Why do I know what Mark Zuckerberg's wedding looked like? Why are lesbian orgies a mouse click away, while basic job security remains a pipe dream? Why do these paradoxes feel so normal?

I sense that Adam Curtis thinks about these questions as well. In The Century of the Self, he even begins to answer some of them. Tracing a peculiar path beginning with Sigmund Freud's nephew (Edward Bernays) and ending with Clinton/Blair-era “centrism,” he marks several changes in ideas about social progress – as people become less concerned with social justice and more concerned with freedom and individuality. Underlying this is a preoccupation with desire. Technological advances and unprecedented post-war prosperity lead to new desires, these desires lead to new demands on the part of the people and, ultimately, conservative free market ideologues become amazingly adept at satiating them.
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This is the post to make reservations for next week.
Tues, June 5th
Thurs, June 7th
Fri, June 8th
Sat, June 9th
Sun, Jun 10th

I've removed all the doubles as far as I can tell, so here is the final list. It is 599 films long, spanning from 1912 to 2011.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArB7_BqS1qCzdE53cWdvYVpsbVUycEpLLWhzeGxUMFE#gid=0

And by final list, I mean... final list. There is no elimination round. I hope you're as dually happy and upset with the list as I am. This is our canon.

I originally set out this second time to make a game that everyone would be pleased with, and then Dan pretty much told me just do what I want, and we can change it if needed. Which was really good advice.

And what I want isn't a "to watch" list. I already have one of those. And it's every movie that's ever been made that didn't involve Brett Ratner. I wanted discussion. It's part of why I let the last canon exercise fall by the wayside. I wasn't interested in winning, losing, etc anymore. I was interested in discussion, and there wasn't any being had.

For me, a canon, these days, is no longer the old religious definition of a series of must read texts. It's a living thing. It's a form of dialogue for finding what's special, what's sacred, what's revolutionary, etc. And that's what I want.

So the list is unimportant to me, in many ways. But it's a jumping off point for what I want to do, whether or not you participate will obviously be up to you.

If you are interested, we will be holding discussions about the movies selected 5 days per week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). People will be able to sign up a week in advance for what slot they would like. That will give people a couple days to see the movie if they haven't and want to or rewatch it if they'd like. Then we will have threads to discuss each film, and if something fruitful comes up, perhaps people can get together and write something, and we can start publishing it on the web somewhere.

If not, that's fine as well.

So post here if you would like to sign up for Tuesday, May 29th; Thursday, May 31st; Friday, June 1st; Saturday, June 2nd; or Sunday, June 3rd.

Post the movie you want to discuss and the date you want to discuss it. 2 per day, first come first serve.

They can.

Otherwise, I'm removing those movies, and the new canon exercise will begin early next week some time.

Can someone try contacting kneadforspeed and sadboyq and seeing if they still want to participate?

Hey if you guys want your movies on the list, you need to post a list or update your list with the dates by Wed 11:59 central, ok?

myglock_yrface
kneadforspeed
murdermystery
sadboyq

mine might be longer than a week's worth, since i didn't get around to participating in the last one. we'll see!

nausicaa of the valley of the wind doesn't hold up nearly as well as i thought it would. maybe it's unfair to hold this against it, due to the era it was created in, but a lot of the animation looked pretty cheap and unconvincing. tons of scenes involving really beautiful hand-painted backdrops with clunky, poorly moving characters standing on top of them. adding to the feeling of cheapness are lots of zooms and pans and tilts across still backdrop paintings, giving it a ham-handed feeling of all those historical documentaries where they try to make a painting "visually compelling" (as if it isn't already?) by panning from one side to another. the last quarter of the movie is still fairly fantastic, though. feels like they funneled almost the entirety of the budget into this area, as the problems of static backgrounds and weird zooms and clunky movement all but disappear, and the narrative starts to turn into something more cohesive and less episodic. wonder if my preference for the last chunk of the movie also had to do with the fact that nausicaa changes costume, and no longer wears that insane short skirt long boot combo that often resulted in uncomfortably icky pantie shots (except she doesn't even appear to be wearing underwear? so it just looks like an invitation to stare at her bare animated ass while she's supposed to be in the middle of some dramatic action scene?).

the avengers feels quite a bit like a movie with no personality. joss whedon is a person with a mostly particular feel to just about everything he is involved in. but this movie, enjoyable though it occasionally is, felt like hackwork. other than a few moments that tinge with whedon flavor, it could have been written by anyone. the dialogue, for the most part, is un-embarrassing by superhero movie standards, but neither does it have the ring of whedon's quippy, "aren't these people exhausted from being clever all the time" trademark. rdj comes closest, though in this movie he has finally pushed his smug rapid patter tony stark to a point that even i, as an rdj apologist, have trouble defending. chris evans' turn as captain america, mind-blowingly, is easily my favorite performance in the film. his character doesn't have much of an arc, but he slides into the delivery and body of the character in a way none of the others quite manage, giving a concreteness to a character that is perhaps the second most ridiculous after thor. (ruffalo is decent, but a bit too tic-y). the movie's strength comes in the final two set pieces, in which whedon, for the most part, balances several different action scenes going on at once and cuts between them smoothly with a nice flowing rhythm. the fact of this is astonishing, as much of the early action choreography is murky and full of shaky insert shots that obscure what is even going on.

safe somehow ended up being my favorite of the three movies i've seen this week. it still doesn't quite work, but statham's charisma, for me at least, can carry a picture quite a long ways if there's not much else standing in the way. the precocious child is more flattened and dull than the similarly aged character of fresh in boaz yakin's only actually good movie, though as a bigger, less nuanced version of that movie's ideas about the way atrocities can turn developing children into sociopaths, it does an okay job of being not completely embarrassing. compared to the ten minutes i was able to watch of prince of persia, it seems in the last couple years yakin has also managed to find a better sense of action filmmaking. while still occasionally murky and a bit too heavy on the camera shake, for the most part it is fluid enough to not be boring. i don't know, i feel like movies that are above-average but not in a striking way, just in a way where with a few more nudges you would get to something pretty good, are the hardest to write about. the characters all speak their native languages! that's a kind of cool trend i've seen emerging lately, where hollywood trusts their audience enough to not be too lazy to read subtitles, so it's okay for chinese dudes who live in nyc to speak mandarin among themselves.

cabin in the woods is a lot more whedon-y, and perhaps as a result i liked it a fair bit better. it has a distinctive personality, and it has an idea that shines through even when the movie falls a bit too sharply into plain old mean-spiritedness. makes me glad buffy and angel were on network television and not hbo or something, as i get the feeling whedon and goddard have a nasty streak that might have gone just a bit too far if they didn't have censors to hold them back. but the strongest parts reminded me of buffy's season six, in the way it takes tropes (this time general horror movie tropes, rather than the tropes a show had spent five previous seasons creating for itself) and twists them in self-reflexive ways question the audience about their motivations and feelings towards characters and the world they are created in. it isn't just funny, but sad, and fatalistic in a way that doesn't seem boring or unearned.

the raid: redemption starts off pretty incredible, but blows its aesthetic load fairly early and the rest of the film is content to spend its time on fight scenes that escalate in running time without adding anything new. reminded me of the time i was at a friend's house for one of the annual wrestlemania competitions. after a few quick and entertaining enough fights, it got to the main headline event, which lasted something like half an hour of two guys hitting each other, one having a clear advantage, then the other turning the tides, then finally the whoever emerged victorious. the earlier matches functioned as shorter, more lively variations on the eventual slog/slugfest of the finale. the raid is like that. before this movie, i don't think i had ever seen an action movie that had scenes of gunplay and scenes of martial arts where i preferred the stuff with guns. generally i find gun choreography much more difficult to pull off, because the finality of being shot makes it difficult to create any back and forth tension that doesn't involve dudes shooting and missing each other all the time. but this film had exciting, dynamic use of gunplay with ideas i had never seen before. the martial arts was occasionally well-choreographed, but the two main sequences recycle so much that the interest is lost. the lack of emphasis on character development and dull narrative was refreshing, even though i think they could have gone even further with it.

Still waiting on...

myglock_yrface
kneadforspeed
murdermystery
beforetheflood
sadboyq