Mass-market movies rarely appeal to me. I’m drawn to stories that reveal a personal or distinctive voice. Production companies are interested in appealing to the broadest audiences and in-turn making the most money possible as soon as possible. They want the opposite: movies that appeal to the masses. Personal, distinctive or hard-to-category stories just don’t fly there.
People usually forget about or ignore independent, documentary and short films, even though the best stories are often compelling and memorable. They receive so little publicity that they lay or languish below America’s pop cultural radar. Well below it.
I was grateful a few years ago it dawned on me just what kind of eclectic selection I could have in movies if I simply visited my local library a couple time a week! While the feature-length movies are supposed to be organized by genre, after borrowers’ hands touch them they don’t stay so strictly organized. That makes it adventurous.
I’ve found several films that way, which I might not or flatly would not have noticed if I’d relied on a social media queue or searched for those, which my friends recommend.
I recently discovered Foreign Letters, which documents the childhood bond between two almost teenaged American immigrants. Their bond helped to insulate them from the cruelties that children can levy on one another. And it stuck with or sustained them into their adult lives. Most children know what it’s like to move to a strange place, be the new kid and have to carve out a new social life. The girls’ story is sweet, smart, perceptive and dramatic. Rare!
You just don’t find these stories at your local mall’s multiplex anymore!
While social media movie queues have their places, there is a pleasure, an old-school (or maybe just mid-20th century) pleasure in the randomness and adventure of watching what a grab bag give you. A grab bag approach to choosing movies is a fun and novel way to accidently find some of the best and most unappreciated films you might not have otherwise found. You could probably do this via Facebook or Flixster, but those media lack the hands-on and face-to-face satisfaction that I appreciate.
France submitted one of the most profitable and popular films, if not the most, in its recent history, Intouchables, as its entry in the Best Foreign Language film category for the Oscars. That’s great, and maybe problematic: it sparked controversy in the U.S. because its lead character, Driss, reflects to America’s most chronic persistent racial stereotypes. The New York Times wrote about and criticized it in the spring.
In America race is one of the hardest, most awkward, most personal and most prickly subjects to raise, much less confront. When I think about Intouchables, on one hand, I understand the nearly universal enthusiasm and delight in response to it, based on a true life story. It’s an exuberant tale that joins two of the least likely men, from two of the edges of society. On another hand, if you’re sensitized to and paying attention to them, you’ll soon find a few major stereotypes at play.
In the last 20 years, only a few Francophone films have dealt with race with forthright courage: Café au Lait, (1993) and La Haine (1995) (which translates literally as “hate”), both by Mathieu Kassovitz, who was called France’s own Spike Lee, when Lee was at the zenith of his polemical and popular works. Café au Lait is the story about a mixed-race 20-something woman who has a choice between two lovers: a white Jew or a black Muslim. La Haine looks at race from a neighborhood and economic point of view
In 2010 Le Nom des Gens came from France. It’s at least as exuberant as, but I believe more memorable and smarter than, Intouchables. And it contends with race, politics and religion in a deft, subtle, hilarious and sophisticated way. Unfortunately Intouchables doesn’t.
Omar Sy: I was a bit surprised to hear the criticism, because it’s a film that I believe in, I defend the film, and I would never be involved in a film that has racist overtones. It’s a French movie and it has to be read in the context of a French society. If you look at it with a different set of criteria you can come up with a different meaning.
In France, the banlieues (suburbs) is a completely different environment than what you have in the United States. It’s not as racially segmented. The people from the banlieues, be they from Hispanic origin or black origin, they’re in the same socio-economic slice. In America, [people of color] may have ancestry tied to slavery or immigration.
After I saw the film at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, I faced a fork in the road of discussing it. I could choose between leveling a critique or criticism. When people asked for my opinion or review of it, their interest in a conversation would rapidly dissipate if I raised my concerns about the stereotypes, and the bigotry that their presence implied.
(left to right) Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy
What’ll this bode for how well or how much better either country digs the other’s point of view on race, or recognizing it? At the least (and maybe least useful) it reminds us, yet once more, of how much farther each country has to venture in order to shed our connection of everything in life to color and features (or the denial of that as a social reality).
Talking about is a part of the power of a provocative movie. Isn’t it the movies that leave us with blank minds and nothing to say that are the problems?
So, this impass at a movie theater, and between countries and cultures, presents an opportunity to discuss how race, too often discussed in divisive and agonizing ways in the US and “never” officially in France, is understood in a hit film. I regret that as seldom as these opportunities come, it is just as rare when any of us handles them as smoothly as most of us say we want.
When’s the last time you watched or even thought about the movie The Princess Bride (1987)? It’s smart, funny, and whimsical, and the plot and pacing hinge on a book. It’s the old-fashioned notion of an elder reading to a child, in this case it’s a grandfather reading a bedtime story to his headstrong grandson. The story, a fairy tale, rouses him and that memorable movie reminds us of the transportive power of reading.
In the midst of August, and with an imminent return to classrooms, students gird themselves for the rigors of classes and reading. As usual, in terms of this, students feel torn between watching a movie, a passive escape, and reading a book, an active engagement. With that in-mind I wondered how movies portray reading and books in positive ways.
In a world where Netflix, videogames, Facebook and twitter prevail, books and literature command ever less of our attention. Some folks just don’t “get” books, and, of course, if your family or friends don’t make a habit of reading near or with you, that could explain it.
What if your friends or neighbors think an interest in books is a sell-out or uppity trait? Freedom Writers (2007) gives us a rousing and rare take on that problem. A white teacher comes from a suburb into a harrowing neighborhood in Long Beach, CA wearing pearls, and tries to persuade her students to read. For some communities and people the pleasures of reading are far from their work-a-day struggles. But an assignment to read “Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl” reaches and touches them; some of them see their poor, urban plight reflected in Anne’s ordeal.
Reading isn’t cool to everyone; they’re not used to using or appreciating their imaginations, at least not in that way. That’s a crisis that some research points to: NEA Reading at Risk. Folks are concentrating on surviving, paying rent and the simple pursuit of a safe and stable life.
Well, what if you can’t read? That is a problem. A crisis. To the presumably “average” and basically educated American that disability is absurd. We can “all” read. But what if you couldn’t, at least not fluidly or with self-confidence? Stanley & Iris (1989) provides a poignant and sometimes pointed wake-up call for the skill, which we who can often take for granted.
A disparate and less sentimental but bittersweet story about a consequence of illiteracy. What if a book granted you a power, a connection to, or a feeling of gratification that something else just couldn’t do or would be a poor imitation of? The Reader (2008) is a compelling and profound tale, whether read or watched, about a teenager in post-war Germany who reads some of the classics to a beautiful, but disturbed older woman, with a troubled war-time past, in exchange for sex. He reads to her, and then she has sex with him. The act of reading has a pivotal and turbulent effect on the young man that stunts his growth as a man in subtle, profound and unforeseeable ways. All of this happens because he reads to her? Yip.
What do you get out of movies that are about but not necessarily adapted from books: each story is a portal to an adventure, to a different world, or a foreign but surprisingly similar one, that engages you in ways that a movie probably can’t in all of two hours.
Movies about thinkers rarely become money trees. Movies are about entertainment, appealing to the masses, and making money, not teaching. It is nice though to see the occasional one that tips its hat to the hero who reads, thinks, and uses his or her wit as a weapon instead of just brawn.
On August 1st the British Film Institute published its 2012 decennial list of the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time. Well, any time another list is published film enthusiasts feel compelled or impelled to discuss, dispute or outright attack it.
One problem is that the most publicized lists serve a general audience. If you don’t fit that, then you’re left out. That’s where my appetite, which Netflix calls cerebral, falls. Any of those lists ignores or omits revered and beloved titles and does so for reasons that are just as often arbitrary as they are educated or elucidating. Roger Ebert explains this later in an excerpt. What’s more, few of them make an effort to include minorities’ stories.
Alred HItchcock’s “Vertigo” replaces Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” as the best film ever made!
If you’re an ambitious viewer, and far choosier than most, you set an ambitious, even daunting standard for your movie experience. You probably want to see innovation and risk-taking in the storytelling – excellence. Few, very few films satisfy that mixture of standards. The chronic problem or crisis with these lists is the very diverse bevy of memorable movies they leave out. From a sentimental point of view people like to see themselves represented, as when Dale Carnegie told his readers of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” that a person’s name is their favorite thing to hear.
This reminds me of when I was studying film history as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, and the question that I often heard while I waited in line at the dining hall of my dorm: “what’s your favorite film?” It irked me; after a while I came to hate it because, as with any “what’s your favorite…?” question, it forces you to make unjust and absurd choices. Those are also what make lists like the BFI’s decennial one.
There are so many genres and styles of movies that are made by many different kinds of peoples from cultures as different as they themselves are and who see the world in a bevy of ways, some of which Westerners don’t easily understand. Any of these lists can accommodate only a few titles. Fans are bound to feel their favorites films, and in-turn themselves, are left out. This harkens to Mr. Carnegie’s observation.
We rely on (hopefully) highly literate people, the critics who write about and discuss movies, and who have studied its history. Their experiences and studies have prepared them to write about and discuss movies effectively. One of them, Roger Ebert, takes pleasure in slamming most best- and worse-of lists, including the BFI’s decennial one.
Mr. Ebert, who earned the first Pulitzer Prize for film criticism in 1975, has an iconoclastic point of view about best- and worst-of lists, which he described in Roger Ebert’s Journal from April 2012: “For years they had value only in the minds of feature editors fretting that their movie critics had too much free time.”
“All lists of the ‘greatest’ movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese’s favorites, or Herzog’s? …The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors,” he wrote in Roger Ebert’s Journal in July 2009.
Best of lists are valuable up to a point. If you didn’t study film history, and have little time or energy to follow movies news or new releases, then maybe you want a nudge, that is some guidance. While it’s amusing to read or even peruse the BFI’s latest decennial list the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, or another list, you the viewer still have to decide for yourself.
For most movie-goers summer movies emphasize escapism and distractions from that which Pablo Picasso called the dust of everyday life. But, while many viewers want a break, film snobs like a diet of movies that defies the tradition of escapism and grand distractions.
When summer arrives I know that need to await a film festival or wait until the fall, when the “important” movies come. I’m peculiar in this tweeted world, where Facebook is a verb: I believe that patience is a virtue, and vital. Still, I hate that wait.
Are you the kind of movie-goer who is hungry for stories that defy the tradition of escapism and grand distractions; those smart ones that take risks and push viewers beyond their comfort zones? Summer’s not your season; you already knew that.
The first idea: hold your nose up, and abstain from the summer of escapism and distractions that serve the masses. So, you’ll await the “important” movies in the fall. That’ll test your patience; that’s a long wait! That’s a bad idea. It won’t work.
The second idea: in summer 2012, the movie theaters won’t be empty of substance. “The Dark Knight Rises” promises to provide a smart and sophisticated plot. And then “Brave,” provides a story of what the Spice Girls called Girl Power; the girl must defy traditions and authorities as she discovers her strengths and herself. Another one, “Beasts of Southern Wild” provides a story that Imdb describes thusly, “faced with her father’s fading health and environmental changes that release an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy leaves her Delta-community home in search of her mother. ” And “Safety Not Guaranteed” tells the story that Imdb describes as “three magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified ad seeking a companion for time travel.” These stories themselves might hold you over until September when the substance enters theaters.
YouTube is a haven for a democratic media market, where independence and risky ideas could be shown, and where producers of color can shine. Still, why are so few doing so? For sure, YouTube is a place where independent voices can be recognized.
Some production companies that make content for YouTube have A-List Hollywood connections and budgets; some others want to, and list almost enough above-the-line crew to resemble that; still others have ambitions that are independent and riskier.
Until a generation ago, aspiring media makers went to film schools for formal training. Some people called them the film school generation.
I discovered the draw of professional-grade YouTube videos when I spontaneously clicked on “FunEmployed” from Wong Fu Productions, in Pasadena, CA.
Now, a shining few make their livings and their dreams come true on YouTube, and make it seem easy! YouTube, all of seven-years-old is the best known place to “broadcast yourself.” That’s their tagline. The latest New York Times feature, “On YouTube, Amateur is the New Pro,” about YouTube’s growth, indicates that a few are making big money, while others who find inspiration in them, are trying to make sense of it and make enough to live on their own creativity and ingenuity.
But as with the politics and biases of traditional media productions, it’s harder if you’re note white. Prof. Aymar Christian, at Northwestern University, has a blog provides a list of programs by creators of color, particularly Latinos and blacks. Each is a long list. But there are complications. First, he deems few of them to be worth watching, and second, few of the teams that produce the series have recent or new content. Truly, several of the series or short films are at least 18-months-old.
Some of the successes are “Awkward Black Girl,” and “Fly Guys,” but these programs provide a narrow range of images similar to that, which viewers find in the traditional media.
YouTube is one of the proven, least costly and most accessible distribution channels. Some people also use Vimeo and DailyMotion. YouTube also incubates talent and inspires the next generation. A question remains. A pivotal one: why aren’t there more creators of color, those who take risks? A change in technology and distribution methods does not mean increased ethnic diversity in the videos.
Asians are represented. With Wong Fu Productions, Ryan Higa and KevJumba, at least one slice of that tremendously diverse group is covered. Wong Fu has nearly 200-million views, and more than 1-million subscribers. And Mr. Higa more than 1-billion views and more than 5-million subscribers.
What about other, browner minorities’ stories? A harsh economic reality, in regard to programming for small or niche audiences, according to Prof. Christian, is that “there’s not much money in web media generally, and even less for content geared toward minority audiences.” With ever more productions, viewers’ standards raise the bar to a similarly demanding level. If you’re a minority producer, good won’t cut it. Your work has to be great, as often as possible.
But Prof. Christian says, “most of the inequalities we see in traditional media are replicated online, particularly with regard to race. From film students to advertising executives, most people in the industry are white” and men. ”Still,” he says, “there’s a great diversity in production. …Black audiences have Issa Rae” the woman behind ‘Awkward Black Girl’ “and Al Thompson. Latinos have the creators of ‘East WillyB.’ And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” In the end, in terms of durability and critical acclaim, entertainment history has proven that distinctiveness wins out. If you think about it, ethnic diversity is one side of that complex artistic prism.
Another question pops up, though, when you remember that most of the videos on YouTube seem to come from amateur producers who just have too much time on their hands. The title of that New York Times feature story clearly emphasizes amateurs.
Furthermore, according to that same story, “with or without Hollywood, it’s getting tougher to break through to YouTube stardom and become the next Phil DeFranco. …Perhaps inevitably, the weird originality gets harder to maintain as new aspirants try to replicate what is already popular.”
One YouTube producer and star, Matt Sloan, made a related point on the “Director’s Cut” program from Wisconsin Public Television in 2010. He is a co-creator of and actor in the “Chad Vader” series from Blame Society Productions. “I think a lot of people think that you have to make something that appeals to the masses. That’s not true; you have to make something that appeals to yourself. It’s gonna be unexpected, personal and interesting to watch,” Sloan said.
That idea is not news unless, of course, you’re young enough that…it is. As is often the case, youth rules.
I regret that, after having contacted the people at Wong Fu Productions, Blame Society Productions and Sweet Irony Productions (begun by Jaleel White), none responded in time to press publish.
When I saw news that, as of 2013, movie theaters will completely phase out film projectors and rely on digital formats and projection instead, that raised a question in my mind: what is the state of film preservation? Specifically, I wondered about minority-made movies.
Almost every immigrant or non-Anglo-American (i.e., non-white) community who found themselves stereotyped or lampooned or both, in American films eventually made their own film stories. When Hollywood ignored the African-, Chinese-, Native-, or Hispanic-American communities, those folks took stands and put their own stories on film.
The voices, points of view and sensibilities that come, speak from and show lives on America’s cultural margins probably sit on the bottom of the list for preservation. The youngest, millennial generations are used to thinking in digital formats, and no longer of analog ones. With DVDs and other digital media formats most of America forgets that most movies are made from a fragile format: film stock. At least the first 80 years of film, from 1898, were shot on that. How many master copies of movies have been properly preserved to serve our cultural and national memories?
If they – the movies – are outta sight, or mind or both, they might be outta luck; they might be stuck at the back of the line as a last priority.
As the PBS American Masters’ documentary, “Hollywood Chinese,” shows the Chinese-American community can look to Anna May Wong’s movies, from the early 1900s. She was our first Chinese-American star, and she starred in some of the earliest films about Chinese-Americans. If they haven’t yet, will any of her movies, such as “The Daughter of Shanghai” be preserved?
As for black images and representation, before the icon of the 1980s and 90s, Spike Lee, came aboard and rocked the boat of American cinema, Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams were America’s first, gutsiest and most productive black filmmakers. If they haven’t yet been, will Micheaux’s “The Homesteader,” “The Exile,” or “Body and Soul” be preserved?
Well, about one-year-ago, Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of the Film & Television Archive at UCLA, wrote a blog entry about the status of preserving some independent black films. There he acknowledges that “both Burnett’s ‘Killer of Sheep’ (1977) and Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991)were named by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry of American film treasures.”
That’s a beginning. But will a film that’s deemed a treasure be preserved?
Of course and unfortunately, some of those films that were made by and for peoples on America’s margins haven’t been preserved; and the same goes for all of America’s earliest movies; history and preservation were incidental considerations. Afterthoughts. Above all, most people probably agree that most movies serve as mere entertainment, distractions from a day’s work or trouble.
You can assume that those minority-made movies, which of which have been lost, are simply victims of bigotry. But those often poorly made movies were treated as most second-rate or B-movies were. Bigotry wasn’t at the center of the subject. Their prints became damaged, outright mangled or lost. The filmmakers’ goals were to make realistic and constructive images and stories of the communities they knew; neither artistry or history were priorities. Certainly not posterity or preservation.
Hollywood has made it clear or at least implicit to many Americans that accurate and constructive portrayals of its communities of color were not priorities. They were incidental. Given how sparse those are in America’s movie history, how rare, and how important to a whole image of American history, their preservation needs to be considered a priority other than incidental.
Recently a great friend asked me about “The Artist,” the French- and Belgian-made film from 2011, which earned the lastest Academy Award for Best Picture. Another friend asked me about “A Separation,” from Iran, also from 2011.
Those conversations reminded me about how much I appreciate other foreign films: “Walk on Water,” from 2004, and “The Holy Land,” from 2001. Both of them are from Israel.
More and more often North American movies rely on other countries’ moneys for success. If you read movie critics’ columns often enough you know how often American movies depend on foreign rights and revenues in order to be make films, and in-turn profits.
The Artist Poster on the Tube from Annie Mole
I was reminded about films, like those mentioned above, that beg to be recommended to friends. After having answered one friend’s question about “The Artist,” which I’ve not yet seen, I recommended those Israeli films.
And, yet foreign films seems to strike Americans as strange or out-of the way; literally foreign. More so than necessary.
Why do so many American movie-goers flock to American-made titles, while also whining about a decline in their quality, value and ingenuity?
A common complaint about foreign movies is having to deal with subtitles.
Maybe there’s a snob factor, or an assumption that foreign film fans are a club, and you have to pay dues?
Hey. When you run out of American films you want to watch why not turn to the best ones from France, Israel, the United Kingdom or elsewhere?
Harvey Weinstein, the legendary man behind The Weinstein Company, and Miramax before that, is talking about his film “Bully” being itself bullied by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). That’s America’s largely anonymous movie rating organization.
The crisis: bullying in itself is even more barbaric and cruel in our social media epoch than it used to be. It devastates youngsters in their formative years. For a myriad of complicated reasons schools seem disinclined to punish the bullies.
This film aggressively exposes the crisis, and the filmmakers aren’t timid with the profanity that the children use. The politico-artistic problem: the MPAA disputes how appropriate the profanity in the film is, and in-turn gave “Bully” an R rating. Historically subtlety is not their friend. The vital subtlety is about why the use of the “F-word” in different contexts, and stories, for different reasons can have different meanings.
In the interest of fairness, I am opining without yet having seen the film. But concerns about the rating associations’ usefulness have persisted at a low hum for years.
This specific dispute has made headlines from Los Angeles, which is often conflated with Hollywood, to the world.
Here’s one argument more potent and memorable than Mr. Phillips’ words: this 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated.”
Before the MPAA came, movies were censored by the Motion Picture Production Code, aka the Hays Code, which reigned from 1930 through 1967. And, then, in 1968, two years after its birth, the Association established and offered basic sense ratings. But that basic sense got lost when it came to films being judged beyond the MPAA’s provincial standards.
Why do so many Americans still heed our movie ratings system?
Why should or would a nation-wide standard reign when every region, and state in-general has and abides by its own sensibilities?
