The Model Needs Changing

I just read this article over at Slate.com titled Please Pirate My Sundance Film. In the article, Tim Wu writes about all of the anti-piracy measures that the Sundance Film Festival is using to prevent bootlegging of the films shown. However, Wu points out that the measures are mostly unnecessary since the more obscure the film, the less likely it is to be pirated. In fact, he could find no 2008 Sundance film on any BitTorrent search, nor could he find more than a scant few of the 2007 films.

Checking out his claim, I did a search for what had to have been the most notorious of last year’s films, Teeth. (See the trailer here.) This is the film about a teen girl with the mythical condition of vagina dentata. It seemed as if the film was doomed to never find distribution until it recently got picked up for theatrical release later this year. I couldn’t find one copy of Teeth anywhere.

Unfortunately, for every film like Teeth or even the sweet-but-kitschy Fido that gets a distribution deal, there are a number of well made and good films that will never be seen outside of the festival circuit, if at all. This leaves the filmmaker in a predicament: they want the film to be seen, but they also want to make back some of the exorbitant costs from the production.

As Wu points out in his article, “[Allowing piracy of your film] isn’t likely to happen. For that would mean accepting that your film isn’t going anywhere, and at Sundance that kind of pessimism is strictly verboten.”

Besides, if you let your flick get pirated over BitTorrent, you’d kill any chance of ever getting it distributed. I mean, if the film is already easily available for free, who’d pay to see it? Right?

Well, releasing a free version of the film over Torrent shares may not be as crazy as one would think. According to a report at Torrentfreak.com, author Paulo Coelho has pirated his books over Torrent sites and the result has been a huge increase in the sales of his books. While there is a huge difference between books and films, the article definitely shows that there could be gains for the feature filmmaker gutsy enough to leak their film onto the web.

In these times where the majors aren’t willing to take as many risks as they used to with independent film, maybe it’s time to change the model used to get a movie out into the pop culture. I personally would love to see someone try this and be successful with it.

What do you guys think? Feel free to comment and discuss.

One Last Note: According to Billboard.com, Radiohead's In Rainbows album is the top selling independent CD right now. You may remember when this was released months ago on the web for a "pay-what-you-feel-is-right" price. Their CD sales seem to not have taken a hit, eh?

Fingerpainting masterpieces

Once again, there is another case of some mother selling paintings done by her very young child and people paying sums of cash for them. This article, Toddler fools the art world into buying his tomato ketchup paintings, shows the child and his works.

Personally, I despise articles like these because right from the headline, the reader (who is most likely a casual art consumer at best) immediately takes it to be a full vilification of the art world. Apparently, art critics are just "too stupid" and "gullible" and can easily be fooled by mere "paint daubs."

Unfortunately, the majority of people feel intimidated by the modern art world. It sometimes makes no sense. Sometimes, it is too conceptual and leaves you feeling like you need some sort of decoder ring to understand it. When some article comes out about how a "toddler fool[ed] the art world" then we can all feel superior to this intimidating culture. We can laugh and pat ourselves on the back about how we would never buy canvas fingerpainted by someone who still shits his pants.

But here's the thing: I've looked at those pictures of this toddler's work. They're absolutely beautiful. The use of color and the raw energy in the marks captivate me. I don't care if the person who made it was 2 or 102, they still look amazing.

Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." And it's true. This kid is painting his paintings with the whole of his being. He doesn't care what anyone thinks of them or even if they're good enough. He's delighting himself in the act of painting and that's it. It's the purest form of artmaking there is. He's expressing himself purely through the colors onto the canvas. Sure, it may not look like some Thomas Kinkade piece of crap (Kinkade being a talented hack for people who think that art should be snow covered cottages), but it is a pure piece of expression.

The people mocking the art critics now may feel superior, but in my estimation, they didn't get it then and they sure as hell don't get it now. They just lack the ability to see the brilliance in front of them.

Music Video Product Placement

I'm currently in the development phase of a music video with a friend of mine and while brainstorming our approach, we looked to mainstream hip-hop videos for inspiration. While surfing YouTube, we came across the video for Fergie's Fergalicious single.

At 2:51 into the video, there is gratuitous technology usage, as is typical. The multitude of dancers all take a listen to the song they're dancing to on an MP3 player that opens to reveal a small set of speakers. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the device is held in pure commercial fashion.



Since when did music videos start having product placement? It's literally a commercial within a commercial.

It's not like the label needed the cash to make the video (although you can tell that the budget for it must have been huge). What's happening is that advertising is getting so pervasive that ads are selling adspace in their own ads!

Sigh. I guess it's just all part of the machine to keep people buying crap they don't need. And more importantly, to keep people buying crap that they'll annoy me with on the el trains.

The End of Blockbuster?!

I just came across this post about the coming end of Blockbuster.

For the past 8 years, I've been boycotting Blockbuster due to their censoring of movies before and after production. Finding an unaltered version of Last Tango in Paris or even Terror Firmer was impossible. Even worse was Hollywood execs changing films in production to fit the moralistic nature of the company's leaders.

Finally, thanks to the power of Netflix, Blockbuster is on the way out and I, for one, am glad to see it go.

It's official: I freaking hate Michael Bay.

So I had the unfortunate experience of watching The Island the other night. This makes for the third pile of garbage I've seen from Michael Bay; the other two being Transformers and Armageddon.

The thing that really pisses me off about Bay's movies is that everything happens so fast, there's so much spectacle of chases and fights and explosions and sfx, that people watch this tripe and think it's gold, never realizing that they just ate a huge plate of steaming fuck. Second to that is Bay's complete neglect to take his movies into any area where the situations or issues posed could get into any deep contemplation. Of course, who can talk about issues when there's a helicopter/car chase to be had?

Let's take The Island, for example. A huge population of people cloned and grown ultimately for perfect organ replacements for their DNA-original masters. They've no idea about their purpose. They're told a lie about a worldwide contamination and if they're lucky, they win a lottery to go to "the island": the only contamination-free zone on Earth to help repopulate the world. In reality winning the lottery means certain death as they're to be carved up for transplantation.

Yes, farming clones as organ replacements is wrong since the clones have a consciousness and sentience, but that's not an argument that many would counter. It's easy to be on the side of the happy little clones and their cutesy innocence. We can all agree on this and pat ourselves on the back for being humanitarians.

The thing that Bay brings up and skirts around is with Scarlett Johansson's character. Her original has recently suffered a horrible car wreck and has 48 hours to live unless she gets the transplants from her clone. Although she knows that her original is dying, she does nothing and doesn't even seem to care about the fact. Even after speaking via videophone with her original's very young child, she never contemplates her purpose for being: keeping her original alive.

I'm not saying that Scarlett's character should've sacrificed herself or not. I'm saying that you had a delicious ethical issue here and instead of ever devoting any time to it, we get another helicopter chase, some running from mercenaries, and a campy scene where the lead mercenary judges the owner of the cloning company as an unethical man. (A mercenary who saw nothing wrong with firing automatic weapons and bombs in crowded civilian areas, mind you.) Bay dropped the ball.

Add to that all of Bay's awkward expositions, needless secondary characters bloating the runtime to more than 2 hours, and an almost fetishistic love for all things military, and you have a celluloid shit sandwich. You get the equivalent of the teenager who thinks he's all grown up: able to recognize the complexities of adult life, but unable to deal or address any of them.

There is no spotlight in collaboration.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the benefit of seeing Electric Six in concert with opening bands We Are the Fury and The Gore Gore Girls. It was a great show and Electric Six were absolutely amazing (one of the best acts I've seen all year!).

However, the Gore Gore Girls didn't put on that great a show and it was for one simple reason: The failure to share the limelight. During the performance, in most of the songs, the singer also played lead guitar. The other guitarist was also more than capable of playing lead, but for some reason, only played lead on two songs.

The singer was wearing herself out trying to do everything and in the end, it just got embarrassing to watch. On the one instrumental where the 2nd guitarist actually played lead, the singer actually got up on one of the monitor speakers and danced around, stealing the spotlight from the lead performer. It became a boring ordeal of "Look at me! Look at me!" The indulgence grew tiresome and I was glad when it was over.

The thing is that when you're taking part in any kind of collaborative artform, you cannot ever assume full credit for the work produced. You also cannot try to garner all the attention that the work gets.

In film, there's all this worry about who's the author of the piece. Oh, it's the screenwriter. Oh, it's the director. Oh, it's the producer. The truth is that the author is the group of people who made the piece. Change any member of that key crew and you're going to end up with a different film. Ingmar Bergman's films wouldn't be the same without Sven Nykvyst. The Coen Brothers make different movies if the script is from someone else.

Film is the most collaborative art. It is completely unfair for one person to ignore the hard work of everyone else and proclaim themselves the author of the film.

I've had the unfortunate experience of working in the past with people who come from this mindset of sole authorship. There were many creative disagreements and a constant struggle to keep the ideas flowing freely back and forth. Unfortunately, the project devolved into a horrible power struggle, the flow of ideas stopped and turned into either outright dictation or passive-aggressive mind-reading. In the end, the project was absolutely awful and an outright heartbreak for me, who was hoping for turning out a great product.

If you're going to work collaboratively, then you need to remember that the key idea is teamwork. You cannot do everything yourself, nor should you.

Photoshopping the flaws away

I was going to write this post a couple of days ago, but didn't get the time to plan out what I was going to say. However, today I saw an article in the Sun-Times about this very subject, so I'm weighing in.

There's been a lot of fervor lately over how Photoshop and photographic retouching are horrible practices that distort the reality of beauty and glamour and blah blah blah. These people are saying that beauty is some lie perpetuated by a dark, shadowy cabal in league with retouching artists.

Let's back off for a moment and look at the reality of the situation. Reality and Glamour are not the best of pals. Hell, the word glamour is the name of fairy-magic. Making something seem like more than it is. We put these models and celebrities on such high pedestals that their reality is that of glamour. No one wants to think of someone like Tyra Banks dropping kids off at soccer practice or Cate Blanchett scooping out a cat's litter box.

Yeah, Faith Hill may be an aging mother of three that leads a hard-working lifestyle and as such, doesn't look like a supermodel. But people have this idealistic idea of who Faith Hill is based on her music and public persona and so, when her image is put out to sell magazines, records, or whatever, she's going to be made to look like the goddess that people imagine. In this case, it's not the fashion world dictating what beauty is, they're dressing up a person in the expectations of the public who consumes these images. To put it simply, as Bill Maher once said, "Hollywood is your mirror."

Remember in the late 90's when some fashion designers tried to hype and use what they called, "ugly models?" We're talking bald women, odd shaped people, too skinny, etc. I don't know about you, but I didn't see a slew of bald, skinny chicks running amok through the city. To be honest, I don't believe that a small group of people could make the unattractive attractive, no matter how hard they tried. Attractiveness plays on certain triggers we have on an evolutionary level. Some guys may have a bald girl fetish, but most guys won't feel attracted to bald girls because a woman's hair is a sign of her health. Good health is attractive.

They reality of the matter is that throughout history, artists have always done what they could to portray their subjects in the most flattering possible way. Moles were just not painted. That spare tire wasn't scultped. Unfortunately, a camera mechanically records the light reflecting off of a subject. That means every mole, every flyaway hair, every inch of flab gets written in the emulsion for all time. It's up to the retouching process to bring out the "inner truth" of the shot, much like the painter may change a model's eyes to blue.

The Sun-Times article also talked about the harmful effect all of this evil retouching was having on teen girls who were undergoing fashionable eating disorders to look like idealized images. I find it reprehensible to place blame on retouchers. This is clearly a result of the public not having the tools to take a critical look at the media that aurrounds them daily. I mean, I've heard people calling reality shows "documentaries." To be ignorant of the retouching process is one thing, but even they most unknowing person has to realize that every photo is the result of a hair, makeup, and wardrobe team under the supervision of a professional photographer with professional lighting who is paid to use his expertise to make the subject look like a million bucks.

Retouching may be able to change reality, but it's only doing what so many artists have done for centuries and should come as no surprise.