 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |||||
July 29, 2004
The embargo wars continue…
Disney has been anxiously pressuring everyone into sticking to their Friday release day embargo across the country, but leave it to Disney-bashing, Miramax-loving Roger Friedman to break embargo after getting lots of talent access at Monday night's NYC premiere. Besides doing a light review, he also tried to spin the story behind The Village as some right-wing, anti-F9/11 Disney conspiracy.
I have seen the film and will review on Friday. But I must say that The Village is the most thoughtful of Shyamalan's films, asking the audience to really think for the first time... not just about an anticipated surprise ending, but about the idea of the film. Interestingly, it is the least religious of all of Shyamalan's films (including the early product like Stay Awake that people pretend never happened), a factor which often seems overlooked. This guy makes movies about the role of the deity in our lives. What he learned with Wide Awake was to hide the habit and collar… too on-the-nose for popular appeal.
And by Wednesday, the AP had released its review… the trades on Thursday… etc.
Meanwhile, in San Diego, Paramount trusted the web heads with a screening of Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow and saw embargo broken before the weekend was over by one site. Yesterday, AICN chimed in. It may be that the studio is okay with this since the reviews are positive. Maybe not. But until I get a call from someone saying, "review if positive, hold if negative" or "review at will," I have to assume that there was an embargo break. And, with it, a little less trust and another excuse to ban the web when the stakes involve non-geek product.
Of course, not even an airtight embargo could contain the stench of She Hate Me, a misfire remarkable enough to replace Girl 6 as the worst work ever from Spike Lee. In fact, it is such a worthless film that it puts one in mind of the aging Woody Allen, the work of a man who was once razor sharp losing all but the coarsest of his skills.
The film is ostensibly about an ambitious young man getting caught in a web of corporate deceit finding himself financing the continuation of his high-end life by donating sperm to lesbian couples, albeit the old fashioned way. See… he is black and his penis is big and even lesbian women can't keep their eyes off the magic penis. No, I'm not kidding. That is the kind of movie this is.
I know less than nothing about Spike Lee's personal life and I hope to keep it that way. But you get the uneasy feeling watching this movie that, like Woody Allen, this movie is some sort of weird wish fulfillment for the writer/director. There is something deeply disturbing to me about a movie that engages in more objectification than insight when trying for controversy.
Lee has missed the mark before, but never quite as wildly as this time. Responses to Bamboozled were all over the place, but no one can deny that there wasn't an interesting discussion somewhere in the film that was worth having. I still don't know why Summer of Sam was a movie that needed to be made, but there are elements and ideas in it that are compelling. But outside of cataloging a wide array of beautiful women in various degrees of undress, I can find nary a thought or moment of note in the entirety of She Hate Me… including the name, which makes absolutely no sense in the context of the film.
The array of cameos is impressive… in that Lee got them. But they are the kind of cameos that disturb you as an audience member because you feel sorry for the actor/celebrity. Jim Brown wants to be Delroy Lindo… but he's not. The great Lonette McKee is stuck as The Shrew. John Turturro seems to have brought his mob sunglasses from Sugartime along and, once on the set, was forced to improvise. Woody Harrelson is a wig joke while Ellen Barkin is a former sex queen joke and Monica Bellucci is abused worse with her role here than her character was in Irreversible.
While I admire Lee's long willingness to try new film and video formats in his work, somehow experimentation has turned into incompetence here. The film looks terrible. The small number of effects that exist are repeated as though the audience won't notice the exact same image used more than once (including a comedy egg with Monica Bellucci's smiling face on it well before her character is even introduced into the film.)
The overall result is one of those movies that sometimes gets into Sundance and leaves you wondering whether the festival was really that desperate to have Brian Dennehy in attendance. If anyone but Spike Lee's name was on this, it would have a hard time getting into a gay and lesbian festival, much less Sundance. And God knows, theatrical release would be out of the question.
I'll be rooting for Spike to recover. He did after Girl 6. I've never watched that film again since suffering through it in a theater… a peek here or there on cable. That's about it. I prefer to think of Lee as a filmmaker with something to say. Or maybe he's just a celebrity now.
Sigh…
READER OF THE DAY: TS NOT ELLIOT writes: "I find it a little hypocritical that someone who wants to paint video games as an inferior medium for storytelling and emotional investment would try to do so by saying that video games "exist only to supply the player with a virtual adventure." what are movies if not virtual adventures? example: I sat in the audience watching "The Bourne Supremacy" last Friday, totally enthralled by what was happening onscreen. I - along with everyone else in that theater - was living vicariously through Jason Bourne the entire time, kicking an assassin's ass with a rolled up magazine, dodging the cops in a train station, talking to my pursuers on the cell phone while watching them from across a rooftop without their knowledge. yes, video games are a virtual adventure, just as movies are, just as books are, just as graphic novels are, just as spoken stories are. the act of listening to a story, of being taken along on that ride, is a virtual adventure - regardless of the medium. and I don't think that the level of possible emotional investment hinges on whether or not you yourself are in control of the characters within that virtual adventure.
For thousands of years, people have been spending their time, money, and energy on media that connect with them in a real way. if we live in an era in which video games are connecting better with a large demographic than movies, I don't think that it's fair or accurate to blame that reality on the fact that video games let me push buttons to control what's happening and movies don't. the story, the characters - those are what matter. video games are not what they used to be. many are built around much more visceral and complex narratives than we would've thought feasible ten years ago. and many of them have accomplished this feat precisely by becoming more movie-like (examples: multiple in-game camera angles, the use of professional actors for voice work, and hundreds of minutes of cinematic cut scenes using both and built into the game in attempts to create a seamless transition from game-play to "passive" viewing and back again). in short, it's not right to treat the two media as being completely different entities. video games today owe a huge debt to movies. it's just that, in recent years, it's been entirely possible that video games (taken collectively) have been using the tools of movies more effectively than movies have been for the, say, 12-28 year-old demographic.
In addition, the idea that only "frankly unintellectual-leaning men" are: a) the only people who play video games, and b) the acid disintegrating our culture from the inside, are both absurd. I can't give you statistics to disprove the former, but as a student at the University of Chicago, I can tell you that people who retreat into video games often times do so precisely because they've spent so much time in the library or class or writing a term paper that they need a form of escape - the same reason that many watch movies. and in regard to the latter, during my three years and change here, I've encountered more "intellectuals" in person and more "intellectual" works than I care to think about. they are almost invariably the most boring, emotionally-dead people and texts I've ever seen. if being more intellectual will inject emotion back into movies and save our culture, then some studio should pick up Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" or Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil," adapt it for the screen, and see if pure intellectualism connects emotionally with an audience. if it does, and this developments constitutes the salvation of American culture, take an electric screwdriver to my skull like dude at the end of "Pi," because I don't want to be a part of it.
Look, I'm not saying that emotionally powerful movies can't be intelligent or profound - all I'm saying is that no amount of brainwork will make up for a lack of heart. and if videogames currently have more heart than movies, then that's not the fault of the audience.
And this came from DW NOT GRIFFITH: "I couldn't help but fire off this e-mail in reply to the anti-video game e-mailer "Not Smithers' Boss" from the column on July 27.I completely agree with this statement: "Problem is, video games are functional far more than they are artful" but I believe that this applies to the frequency of video games that use the interface to artful means more than the inherent qualities of the form itself.
Not Smithers' Boss continues to say: "they allow for only one mode of outcome: "You won!" or "You kick ass!". They court only aggressive button-pushing, rarely any kind of dangerous introspection. Even pop art like "The Bourne Supremacy" courts far more interesting personal emotion in the viewer than the most sophisticated video game, which exists only to supply the player with a virtual adventure."
While "good" video games (much like "good" movies) are few and far between, there are several games I could point to which, through their use of interactivity, call the player to examine the ethical and moral ramifications of their actions within the game world. I have, by playing some games, been forced to confront my own assumptions about the world in which I live (not the game world), question the ambiguous nature of good and evil, and become aware of emotional tendencies within myself that I was not previously aware of.
Video games are in their infancy as an art form and have yet to find their own "language" that best transmits the message from the medium. This coupled with monetary concerns for publishers is probably why the serious application of artistic intent has rarely been attempted in this format. Ironically, Not Smithers' Boss dismisses video games in the same way that the movies themselves were dismissed in their infancy.
Granted, most video games encourage only one type of thinking: violence solves all problems. But then, let's face it, this is the message you get from most major films. I would argue that, similar to games, most movies allow only one mode of outcome which is "They won!"
