the chutry experiment

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July 31, 2006

Mystery at Mansfield Manor

When I was given the opportunity to check out Mystery at Mansfield Manor, an online interactive murder mystery movie, I couldn't resist. While I have somewhat limited experience with role-playing games, I've long been intrigued by the possibilities for interactive cinema, and Mystery, released online by a Canadian company, S.R. Entertainment, offered an intriguing narrative, a murder mystery involving the ancient patriarch of a massive family-owned oil business, making the game "a combination of Clue and a choose your own adventure," as the interactive movie's writer, Rory Scherer describes it. There's quite a bit to like about Mystery, which is an ambitious, entertaining experience, but after viewing the movie (if that's the right phrase), I still have questions about what constitutes interactivity and a truly interactive cinema.

The "mystery" of the film is established in a ten-minute introduction, in which we are introduced to Detective Frank Mitchell who is soon to retire from the police force when he gets a call instructing him to investigate the murder of Colin Mansfield, Sr, the elderly oil baron who has invited several guests for dinner to explain alterations to his will. Among the guests, Colin Sr's alcoholic son (Colin Jr), his leftist daughter, his mistress, his lawyer, a Senator seeking his financial support, Colin Jr's wife, and 2-3 employees who work in the mansion. Most of the guests seem to have some incentive to murder Colin Sr, and the object of the game is to play detective, sift through the clues, and (of course) solve the case. While the plot clearly recalls classic murder mysteries, the father's oil profits, the daughter's environmentalism, and the Senator's soliciting campaign contributions give Mystery at least some degree of timeliness.

Mystery is worth checking out for a number of reasons. The decision to distribute the film online is itself intriguing. Rather than release the film on CD, Scherer chose to make the film available online at a cost of $4.95 for unlimited viewing for 72 hours. This is one of many possible avenues for self-distribution, of course, and I hope that Mystery can inspire similar relatively low-cost DIY projects. As Scott Colbourne, a Globe and Mail reviewer points out, the production values are quite impressive for what is essentially a micro-budget film. The use lighting and shadows in the mansion evokes classic detective films (of course the film takes place during a storm that cuts off the electricity, allowing the cinematographer to play with candlelight in several shots), and given that most of the action takes place inside the mansion, the film uses space relatively well. Mystery is also a relatively extended viewing experience, keeping me engrossed for the three or so hours it took to solve the mystery and to watch some of the alternative paths I didn't chose. The game loads relatively quickly and requires nothing more than a Flash Player, making it accessible on most computers or game systems. The game also has a relatively simple and intuitive interface, although like Andrew Ogier, I found the "Evaluation Stage," where you determine which of the suspects is lying to be somewhat confusing at first, in part because I wasn't prepared for what was expected of me as a detective.

This is where some of my questions about interactive cinema begin to form. I recognize that by the most basic definition, I am interacting with the film's narrative. I could choose to interview each of the suspects in any order I chose and could repeat the interviews and made other decisions about the order in which I watched many of the segments. But as I participated in solving the mystery, I still felt like a passive subject who was merely involved in bringing the narrative to a foregone conclusion and not actively creating something new in relationship with the previously recorded material. Perhaps this is a fine point, but as I made my evaluations of the characters, of the misunderstood environmentalist; the spoiled, alcoholic son; the corrupt Senator; and other characters, I couldn't help but become conscious of my own biases and assumptions and how they might be feeding my interpretation of the film and of my role as a detective. An interactive cinema that is more attentive to why we make these decisions would, I believe, be a useful tool for thining about how we as viewers interpret the world, how we "read" films and other information.

No matter what, Mystery and Mansfield Manor is worth checking out, I hope that it can be used as a reference point for some of the ongoing conversations we've been having this summer about movie and videogame criticism.

Posted by chuck at 2:41 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Scanner, Scoop, and Sketches

Somewhat unintentionally, I caught three movies this weekend, Richard Linklater's stylishly trippy take on PK Dick, A Scanner Darkly, Sidney Pollock's interesting if too deferential doc, Sketches of Frank Gehry, and Woody Allen's dull "Thin Man" update, Scoop. I'll try to write longer entries about them later (especially Scanner and Sketches, which both deserve further discussion), but for now a few quick comments.

A Scanner Darkly: I'd been looking forward to Linklater's film for a long time, and the discussion of the film at CultureSpace describes much of what I liked about it, although my experience of the film was much different than Michael's for reasons I can't describe without giving away a major plot point. Linklater's use of rotoscope animation works well for the subject matter: the highly addictive Substance D used by Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), James (Robert Downey, Jr), and Ernie (Woody Harrelson). Some of the best scenes feature Officer Fred (also Reeves) and Hank wearing scramble suits designed to conceal their identities by "scrambling" thousands of different identities that continuously morph and shift. As a commentary on surveillance and corporate power, Linklater's film may not be adding anything new, but the disorienting effect of the animation makes for a powerful cinematic experience.

Sketches of Frank Gehry: While watching Sidney Pollock's documentary about Gehry (essentially a series of recorded conversations), I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the film, in part because Pollock and Gehry rarely venture into any sort of interpretation of Gehry's architecture. While I can admire the creativity of structures such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the postmodern playfulness of the Gehry House in Santa Monica, I most appreciated the skeptical take on Gehry's work raised by Hal Foster (an art historian whose work I admire), in part because Foster raised some specific questions about how people inhabit and use buildings, with Foster specifically raising the point that the Guggenheim building might overwhelm the art it holds. Much of the rest of the film seemed dominated by Pollock's preoccupations with artistic success and creativity

Scoop: I probably wouldn't have seen Woody Allen's latest yarn under normal circumstances, but because I was with a larger group, I hoped for something like a playful, contemporary take on the Thin Man films described in AO Scott's review, but Allen's one-liners have lost their sharpness, and Scarlet Johansson's bubble-headed college journalist simply wasn't that interesting although Allen's camera clearly relished lingering over Johansson in her wet bathing suit. I deeply enjoyed many of Allen's low-key detective comedies (I'm rather fond of Manhattan Murder Mystery in particular), but Scoop simply seemed lazy and sloppy to me.

Posted by chuck at 11:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 27, 2006

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday, Thursday Edition

I'm a day late to the "Reading for Pleasure Wednesday" meme suggested by Dr. Crazy and also seen at George's place, but because I've only briefly mentioned two of my summer reading books, I thought I'd mention them again. My picks risk bending Dr. Crazy's rules to some extent because I originally picked up both of them for their unique approach to documentary, a subject that's important for my research interests, but both books also have proven meaningful to me in ways that ultimately have little to do with my scholarship. Plus, it's a really cool idea and many of the books suggested by other bloggers will now find their way to my reading for pleasure list.

The first is Joe Sacco's 1995 graphic novel "documentary," Palestine , which seeks to represent the Israel-Palestine conflict from the perspective of the Palestinians, a perspective we rarely see in the US media. I read Palestine about a month ago, well before Israel and Hezbollah began fighting again, but Sacco's intelligent, insightful attempt to represent a myriad of Palestinian experiences is truly illuminating (as is Edward Said's thoughtful foreword).

Also worth checking out: Margaret Sartor's Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s,, a compliation of diary entries Sartor wrote as a teenager while growing up in Louisiana I first learned about through Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. My initial attraction to the book grew out of my interest in memoir, autobiography, and popular culture, but the book grew into a more pleasurable reading experience, one that benefits from Sartor's careful crafting of these journals into a larger narrative (and one that seemed to comment on my own experiences of growing up in another part of the south about a decade later). Both books are relatively quick reads, especially Sartor's, which I read in a couple of afternoons.

Posted by chuck at 1:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Thursday Morning Film Notes

Just wanted to put up a couple of pointers to some film articles that I don't want to lose. I'm working on a couple of other projects right now, so I won't be able to write in detail about them. First, the news from indieWire that Jesus Camp, the documentary about an evangelical camp for kids, will be distributed by Magnolia Pictures, which plans a marketing campaign designed to attract both evangelicals and the typically "liberal" documentary and art house audiences. After seeing the film at Silverdocs and admiring it quite a bit, I'll be curious to see how wider audiences respond to the film. Of course my take on the film is somewhat unusual in that I read the film less as a commentary on the politics of evangelical culture--which is certainly a major concern in Jesus Camp--and more as a fascinating exploration of how children learn to inhabit their world.

Somewhat unrelated to Jesus Camp: the trailer to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, which looks visually stunning and appears to be a thoughtful exploration of many of the desires associated with time travel, particularly the desires for power and immortality, with the film's narrative spanning from Spain's exploration of the Americas in 1500 well into the future. I'm really looking forward to seeing this one.

Finally, GreenCine Daily has been running a cool series of "summertime questions" for various filmmakers, cinephiles, and film bloggers, most recently Susan Gerhard. I'm enjoying both the questions and the responses quite a bit and really like the format (sort of like a one question interview), which fits the film blog format very well.

Posted by chuck at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 26, 2006

Blue Velvet Festival in Wilmington

Just a quick entry to mention the Blue Velvet Festival, which is taking place in Wilmington, NC, on July 28, from 6-midnight. The exhibit features "a merging of media for all David Lynch freaks and Blue Velvet fans for this exhibition of wacked out art," and it's sponsored by the folks who run the Cucalorus Film Festival, which I'm looking forward to checking out in November. Trying to get some work done on an academic essay so blogging may be sporadic for the next few days.

Posted by chuck at 1:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2006

Facebook Communities

Patricia J. Williams' Nation article on online communities, "The 600 Faces of Eve" (subscription only) looks like it might be a useful resource for my planned freshman composition course focusing on new media topics. Williams rather quickly moves past the questions of sexual predation to address what she calls the "invisible hands" that guide the activity of these social networks. Williams notes that when you create a MySpace profile, you are encouraged to "choose" interests that reflect your personality, which in her read isn't an entirely benign activity:

You proceed by filling out themed questionnaires and following links and pursuing guided suggestions. If you choose a Paris Hilton-themed path, you might be asked how often you go shopping. If you choose hip-hop, you're asked to "fess up to the acts of a true thug."

Of course she's right to point out that Rupert Murdoch's ownership of MySpace raises important questions about what kinds of information MySpace participants post about themselves in a public space (and to what extent that information is subject to data mining), but in my experience, these quizzes are often treated with at least some ironic distance, a point that Williams acknowledges when she describes the practice of trying on different identities within MySpace. Not sure I have much to add for now, but Williams' essay looks like something that might be useful for starting a conversation about the relationship between social networks and constructions of identity.

Posted by chuck at 5:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

David Lowery's Some Analog Lines

Because I learned about David Lowery's Some Analog Lines soon after I arrived in F'ville (and before I had internet service at home), I almost forgot to mention it here. Lowery's Some Analog Lines is a playful but philosophical meditation on the materiality of cinema and the ways in which digital video remediates film. In thinking about these issues, Lowery not only theorizes the production process but also offers a theory of spectatorship that explores how the processes of production shape our reception of a film. Lowery explores this process in part through an observation that a number of Cineaste reviewers have expressed a "preference" for claymation over digital animation, with Lowery speculating that this preference derives in part from the materiality of claymation and the awareness that an animator such as Lowery might have moved the clay object hundreds, if not thousands, of times in order to render the illusion (?) of motion. The film explores this concept of handmade films even further, describing the construction of a wooden bookshelf next to his computer, a shelf that seems to morph into a strip of film, in part through the magic of animation.

While I can't provide a full description of Some Analog Lines, I think it's a profoundly insightful short film and well worth checking out. It's also in competition in the SXSWclick "Popularity Contest," so once you've seen the film, please consider voting for it as well.

Posted by chuck at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Iraq Uploaded: The War Network TV Won't Show You.

Just a follow-up to yesterday's post on the various forms of amateur war footage, specifically my initial curiosity about MTV's Iraq Uploaded. I caught the MTV half-hour special report, Iraq Uploaded this morning primarily because I was curious to see how the show would frame the role of the soldiers' video in documenting the war. The MTV report begins by citing the military policy of permitting soldiers to upload video footage of their war experiences in contrast to blogs and websites, which are monitored for "security content," as this TPM Cafe review points out. The implication is that the soldiers' videos offer "unfiltered" access to the soldiers' experiences of the war. As MTV reporter Gideon Yago describes it, "from the hilarious, to the sublime, to the gruesome and the terrifying, these are anonymous, unspun visions of Iraq in their raw, stark reality." But the MTV report doesn't address the implications of this policy, what it means that the military is allowing this footage to appear online, and that is, by far, the more crucial question.

I think the answer to this question is hiding in plain sight in Yago's interview with a 20-year old consumer of Iraq War videos. While the interviewee acknowledged that the violence in the videos deterred him from joining the Marines, it's clear that the videos produced an explicit sense of identification with the soldiers and with the excitement and adrenaline of the war. It's also worth noting that this "unfiltered" perspective on the war is consciously contrasted with the coverage of the war by the major TV networks. While it's certainly fair to be critical of the networks' decision not to show the coffins of dead soldiers, for example, the implication that the soldiers' videos are providing access to a truth unavailable on the news needs to be interrogated more carefully.

At the same time, Iraq Uploaded is remarkably uncritical when it comes to comparing the US soldiers' videos with similar videos produced by the insurgents. There's a strange transition in which Yago interviews a wounded Iraq veteran who was hit in the chest by gunfire. The soldier was wearing a bulletproof vest and along with members of his unit managed to capture the insurgents who shot him. We then learn from a Homeland Security worker that the footage was taken by insurgents who ostensibly intended to use the video for "propaganda purposes," with the implication being that US soldiers' video footage serves a more complicated purpose, whether that's to depict the war to others back home or to help the sodleirs recover from the trauma of war. I'm not suggesting that the soldiers' videos don't serve those functions, of course, but the report failed to consider how Iraqi audiences might have more complicated uses for video footage of the war.

I didn't intend to spend so much time writing about this MTV report, but these discussions of amateur war footage have been on my mind quite a bit this week, in part because of the number of videos that have been posted to YouTube documenting the effects of the rockets and bombs falling on Israel and Lebanon, most recently in this Washington Post article by Sara Kehaulani Goo, which offers a nice overview of the debate about the issues at stake regarding the "citizen journalism" being practiced by YouTube users.

Posted by chuck at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 24, 2006

War Documentary Links

With the release of Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments, and MTV's Iraq Upoladed, as well as the number of YouTube videos and blog entries documenting the effects of bombings in Haifa and Beirut, questions about representing the war are gaining renewed attention over the last several days. I've been planning to write this entry (or something similar) for several days but haven't been able to get my thoughts together.

First, I found Ana Marie Cox's Time article on Iraq dcumentaries interesting as a framing device for thinking about how digital and online media have shaped the reception of the war, with Cox calling the Iraq War "the first YouTube War." Starting with a discussion of The War Tapes, which is being billed as the first documentary about the war filmed by soldiers fighting in it, Cox observes that the soldiers' videos offer a relatively grim depiction of the war. She then points to te number of videos posted by soldiers on YouTube and other video hosting services, observing that these videos offer "an even grimmer reality" as they attempt to make sense of the war. Cox's article pointed me to an MTV documentary, Iraq Uploaded that I missed the first time around (hopefully I'll catch it soon--the next scheduled screening is Tuesday at 10:30 AM). Cox argues that while many of these videos offer an "unvarnished" depiction of the war, they lack the context for interpreting the depicted events.

MTV's article on Iraq Uploaded offers an interesting overview of the documentary, drawing explicit connections between the subjective camera of many of these digital videos and the first-person shooter video games that have become a widely discussed feature of contemporary culture (if only to blame the games for promoting violent behavior). In fact, Marine Scott Lyon reports that many soldiers rigged hands-free cameras so that they could shoot all the time, noting that one soldier's helmet camera "helped him catch more intense footage, because you don't have to stop and put the camera down. I just think it captures things people want to see." From what I can tell in teh article, it appears that many of the people viewing these videos are soldiers themselves, manyof whom are attempting to make sense of their experiences of the war, often weeks or months after they have returned from a tour over there.

There's also an article in The Economist about Iraq docs (thanks to GreenCine Daily for the tip), describing a second generation of Iraq documentaries focusing on the experiences of Iraqis living with the effects of war, many of which use cinema verite techniques, with the filmmakers working to make themselves invisble. The article argues that the "first generation" of Iraq documentaries, such as Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland focused primarily on the experiences of soldiers while more recently journalists and filmmakers have turned their attention to the experiences of Iraqi civilians. The article doesn't mention two very good early documentaries, Sinan Antoon's About Baghdad and Hayder Jaffar's The Dreams of Sparrows, but it's a good introduction to some of the more recent war documentaries to emerge.

Finally, I learned from George while we were chatting about this NYT article about "online war diaries." The article describes Galya Daube's jittery, first-person video as she rushed to her family's bomb shelter, with air raid sirens blaring loudly. There are a number of similar videos of Haifa residents hiding in bomb shelters, making phone calls to family members, and waiting for the bombings to subside. Similar footage has been posted by residents of Beirut, depicting their experiences of being bombed by the Israelis. But we also see footage such as this video taken on a trip to a Beirut McDonalds several days into the most recent fighting, with the video functioing in part as an archive for a city that has seen several sections completely demolished but also as a way of putting a more human face on the civilian victims of the violence (it also stands in stark contrast to this more recent video footage, which depicts downtown Beirut just over a week later, the city a virtual ghost town on a warm summer night).

Posted by chuck at 2:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Monday Morning Times Reads

The New York Times has two interesting articles about film production and promotion. First, Scott Kirsner's article on the increasing use of digital cameras in Hollywood films. Kirsner points out that many filmmakers, including Steven Speilberg and M. Night Shyamalan continue to insist that they'll only shoot on celluloid, and many cinematographers still prefer film when it comes to subtle lighting differences. But other filmmakers, including Michael Mann (Collateral and Miami Vice) claim to prefer the look of digital, while Dean Devlin, currently filming a World War I pic, notes that he was able to film "for nearly an hour during airborne dogfight sequences." Nothing particularly new here, but I'm interested in tracking the ongoing transition from celluloid to digital.

Also worth checking out: Alex Mindlin's article on film promotion and internet buzz. It's a relatively brief article outlining the research of assistant professor of marketing Yong Liu, who argues that "movies that generated many messages in a given week tended to have high box-office receipts the week after, and movies with much prerelease buzz did well over all." Liu reached these conclusions by looking at over 12,000 messages posted on the Yahoo movies dicussion boards. Perhaps Liu's most important point is that the content of the messages mattered less than the number of messages. I'll be curious to read Liu's article when it comes out, although I'm more interested in the specifics of "buzz" and the degree to which these online discussions function for audiences.

Posted by chuck at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 21, 2006

Manhattan, Kansas

During one of the final scenes of Tara Wray's observant autobiographical documentary, Manhattan, Kansas (IMDB), Tara's mother, Evie, seeking forgiveness for being an irresponsible parent or simply trying to understand herself, tells her daughter, "The past is over." Of course, as William Faulkner reminds us and as Wray's film illustrates, "The past isn't dead, it isn't even past." The scene, for me, underscores the ways in which Manhattan, Kansas offers a fresh and understated consideration of the concepts of family and home through its unblinking look at the strained relationship between Wray and her mother.

Manhattan, Kansas focuses on Tara's attempts to reconcile with her mother after rarely speaking to or seeing her for over six years. Raised exclusively by her mother (Tara reports that she never met her father until she was 21), Tara accepts her mother's eccentricities as normal, but gradually becomes estranged when her mother's eccentric behavior crosses a line and becomes increasingly erratic and potentially dangerous, with Evie threatening at one point to drive their car into a river, killing them both. Because Evie is never diagnosed with a psychological disorder, Tara notes that it remains difficult to describe or even understand their relationship. Is her mother an eccentric rebel whose behavior constitutes her best response to a confining status quo that included a strict Mormon upbringing? Or is she bi-polar or manic depressive and in need of medication? While these questions are never clearly answered by the film, they do underline the ways in which having a language for talking about a relationship (or a psychological ailment) can help us to understand it. And when Tara confesses from under the covers of her bed on her first night in Kansas, a kitten crawling on her shoulders, that she and her mother "had a semi-normal conversation," it illustrates that self-doubt one might have when dealing with a mentally ill parent.

As we learn early in the film, Tara and her mother have been estranged for several years, ever since Tara left her home in Manhattan, Kansas, to attend a study abroad program in Finland and eventually to settle in New York City, where she works at NYU. During an early monologue, Tara speculates that she often feels as if she should have been raised in Manhattan, New York, instead of the Kansas city of the same name (which often refers to itself as "The Little Apple" in a self-aware nod to the more famous city of the same name), that her small studio apartment in New York feels more like home than where she actually grew up, living in twenty or so apartments and houses over the first twenty years of her life. Tara's appraisal of the stability offered by her life in New York touches upon some questions I've been rethinking lately, both professionaly and personally, about the ways in which we define home (and perhaps, how our homes define us).

Central to this question of defining home is Evie's desire to locate the Geodetic Center of the United States, the point form which all measurements of the United States are taken, a virtually invisible site situated on a ranch near Hunter, Kansas. For Evie, the Geodetic Center represents an opportunity at reconciliation for herself and perhaps even a broader reconciliation with the US itself. While this reconciliation takes an unexpected turn I won't reveal here, I think it touches on the mother's eccentricties but also, potentially, her far less direct search for home. And while some of the scenes featuring Evie emphasize how her eccentricities and mental illness might negatively affect her daughter (Tara comments severl times that she felt like the parent in their relationship), scenes such as the visit to the Geodetic Center also illustrate Evie's often wry humor and her awareness of their complicated relationship, and it's important to note that during several key scenes, Tara and her mother are able to share laughs at the warped world around them.

Because of my interest in autobiographical documentary and the use of home video in documentary, I've been curious to see Manhattan, Kansas ever since I first heard about it over a year ago when it was still in production, and while Wray's film makes extensive use of brief home video clips and family photographs, it's Wray's ability to show how those images of family haunt the present that I found most compelling. While watching home movies with Evie's sisters, Tara remarks at the footage of her dressed in boy's clothing, her hair often cut like a boy's as well. Fascinated by this forgotten image of herself, Tara expresses wonder that she would have wanted to dress that way. Other photographs and home movie footage depict an apparently happy mother-daughter relationship, one that may or may not have reflected Tara and Evie's actual experience. There's even a nice self-conscious touch here when Tara's aunt comments in passing that watching home movies is "boring," allowing the aunt to admit for the film that perhaps that looking into the quotidian experiences of others isn't always exciting.

Like Scott Weinberg, I admired Wray's low-key, introspective approach to this material. Unlike many autobiographical documentaries, Wray is careful to question her own motives for turning her mother into a public figure, admitting at one point her guilt at potentially expoliting her mother for the sake of a documentary. But I also think that what Weinberg calls the "smallness" of Wray's story is quite deceptive in that Manhattan, Kansas is dealing with some big ideas, taking the "home movie" documentary genre and asking us to rethink our concepts of home and family in some fairly profound ways.

Manhattan, Kansas received an Audience Award at South by Southwest and will be playing here in the Carolinas in the Southern Circuit film series. It will be playing in New York as part of the Independents Night film series sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center on August 10.

Posted by chuck at 12:06 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 20, 2006

Austin in October

Just found out that I've been accepted to the Flow Conference 2006, organized by the editors of Flow, the online critical forum dedeicated to TV and media culture. I'll be on the "Participatory Political Cultures" roundtable and am very much looking forward to the conference, in part because many of the scheduled roundtables intersect with work that I find interesting.

I mention this news here mostly because I'm guessing that one or two of my readers may be planning to attend, and I'd enjoy meeting up at the conference. Also, if you have suggestions for places to go (restaurants, bars, whatever) when I'm in Austin, the weekend of October 26-29, I'd welcome those, too (especially if those suggestions will help me to dodge all the families in town for Parents Weekend at the university).

Posted by chuck at 9:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Why I Don't Watch DVDs Anymore

Interesting Wall Street Journal article by Matt Phillips arguing that Netflix may be altering people's DVD habits, noting that the constant availability of Netflix DVDs may actually be leading to DVDs sitting on people's shleves (or in their queues) for weeks or months without being watched. As Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University, describes it, it's "a paradox of abundance," something that I've experienced over the last year as I've uncomfortably tried to adjust to using Netflix rather than renting movies from an independently-owned video store.

To be fair, I'm still watching a lot of movies, but for whatever reason, that is happening less often on DVD. I've found that when I rented from video stores, it was much easier to gauge what kind of film I'd like to see, and the late fees, even if they were relatively minimal, were punitive enough to motivate me to watch and return movies quickly. I'll be curious to see how that changes now that I'm in F'ville and have less access to the art house and indie movie scenes in Atlanta and DC, but so far, I've been ambivalent about using the video service.

Among other notable observations, Phillips points to an experiment described by Daniel Read, George Lowenstein, and Shobana Kalyanaraman, in which subjects were asked to choose from a list of 24 movies what they'd like to rent. When choosing movies to watch immediately, subjects were more likely to choose "low-brow" action or comedy films, but when asked what movies they'd like to see in the future, many subjects would choose "high-brow" films (I need to read the full article to find out how "low-brow" and "high-brow" were defined). To some extent, these results do reflect my current Netflix practice, with my Netflix queue ambitiously loaded with films I ought to see or TV series (namely The Time Tunnel) that I need to watch for my research. But potential access to these films and TV shows makes it easier to delay seeing them, and many of the DVDs that do make it to my apartment collect dust for weeks and occasionally months (I think my personal record is having a DVD collect dust for three months before I gave up and returned it).

The WSJ is a pretty good overview of the topic, and it has the added bonus of a quote from Girish on his Netflix habits.

Posted by chuck at 1:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 19, 2006

Pirates and Snakes and Critics

I've been thinking about A.O. Scott's New York Times article on the disparity between the tastes of film reviewers and film audiences, a distinction measurable in part by the box office success of The DaVinci Code and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, both of which were critically panned. Scott is picking up on a topic of much discussion in blogworld this summer, perhaps most notably in Andrew Horbal's Blogcritics essay, which also stands as a review of Philip Lopate's anthology of American film criticism since the silent era. Scott's essay has remained on my radar in part because it relies so heavily on an opposition between the "elite" professional reviewer and the "populist" film fan who celebrates the experience of going to the movies.

It's worth noting that Scott's reading of the disparity between the taste film reviewers and the average filmgoer is probably overstated. Pointing to the critics' grades for Pirates, Scott points out that Metacritics averages critics' grades at 52 (now 53) while Rotton Tomatoes averages out at 54, reading these scores as critics giving the film an F, even with "grade inflation." In fact, a quick glance at Metacritics' explanation of their scoring system would place Pirates' grade closer to C-level (pardon the truly awful pun). Further, while Scott acknowledges that box office success does not contradict "negative critical judgment," he doesn't extend the same logic to the average moviegoer. While Pirates has been filling theaters and selling popcorn, sheets, towels, and action figures, its IMDB users' grade is a relatively average 7.5 on a 10-point scale, hardly the territory of The Godfather or Citizen Kane, to name two IMDB faves.

I think Scott is right to note that film reviewers are sometimes precariously placed (or place themselves) between a Hollywood studio system that warrants suspicion and a "populist" desire among audiences to particpate in the "happy communal experience" of experiencing the latest summer blockbuster the weekend it debuts, but I also wonder if Scott is too quick to dismiss the pleasures of this form of participation. While I will admit to a degree of art house and indie snobbishness, I readily and enthusiastically participate in a smaller-scale version of this "happy communal experience" when I've attended the debuts of An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11 or movie events such as Silverdocs or even MoveOn.org sponsored screenings of the latest Robert Greenwald doc. Scott argues that studios "spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade you that the opening of a movie is a public event, a cultural experience you will want to be part of." As my comments suggest, audiences have already accepted that movie openings are public events, something to be shared communally, which means that studios are doing something else when they spend those promotional dollars (in fact, I'd argue that Scott gets rather dangerously close to asserting that filmgoers are cultural dupes fooled into seeing a film because of a few flashy previews).

So, I think it's worth thinking more carefully about what precisely is being "bought" when moviegoers pay to see a film on opening night. To be fair, I do think that studio marketing efforts are far from benign, and to a great extent, these marketing efforts are designed to persuade audiences to commodify these public events, the "happy communal experiences" described by Scott. I don't think that makes someone who buys a Pirates t-shirt or DVD a cultural dupe. Instead, I would be interested in thinking about what kinds of public, communal experiences are being "sold" when we participate in these blockbuster events.

The elephant in the screening room that Scott fails to mention is Snakes on a Plane, and while not everything that's happened this summer can be tied back to Samuel L. Jackson, I think that the Snakes phenomenon is perhpas the best recent illustration of what I'm thinking about. While New Line has rather cleverly redirected its marketing campaign for Snakes, it has tapped into the alienation from the studio system that many audience memebers have felt recently, allowing film fans to feel like participants in the making of the film rather than mere passive viewers, a sensibility reflected in the Snakes parodies and trailer mashups that are already cropping up on YouTube (including this great send-up not only of Snakes but Bono of U2 as well). And I think that's an important part of the film, whether it's a "good" film or not. In fact, it's worth noting that New Line has decided not to screen Snakes for critics, taking the film "directly to audiences" and avioding the risk of negative reviews. In this sense, rather than reviewing films such as Pirates or Snakes or even An Inconvenient Truth as discrete objects that begin and end when the projector starts and stops, a film review methodology that takes into account these supplemental materials is what is needed.

Update: Check out Alex's response to my entry. Alex points out that audience members generally arrive at theaters with a set of expectations that may vary from film to film (and may be as minimal as central air conditioning (which was certainly an incentive for me last summer when I lived in DC) or the lesser expectations associated with sequels.

Related: The cinetrix mentions a Film Comment editorial by Gavin Smith that addresses the ongoing conversation about professional and amateur film critics (I can't find the actual editorial--maybe I'm missing something, but I was up awfully late last night).

Also related and just a little lame: Kevin Smith takes on the critics, booting Scott Foundas and David Poland out of critics' screenings of Clerks 2. Poland apparently inspired Smith's wrath because of an off-hand comment about the writer-director's calves he made six years ago. In the comments to Poland's entry, there is a good discussion of the ways in which blogs and gossip websites have made these kinds of scandals more public. But Smith's concern about the getting good buzz for Clerks 2 smells mildly desperate to me.

Update to End All Updates: Peet's not-so-subtle commentary on evaluative film criticism desrves the final word around here.

Posted by chuck at 11:44 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

July 18, 2006

Introducing MediaCommons

As many of my readers will know, Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Planned Obsolescence has been working with the Institute for the Future of the Book on the possibilities for and implications of electronic scholarly publishing, including the potential for new modes of peer review and possibilities for interaction among scholars and texts. After some discussion, they have devised a draft proposal of a "scholarly network" in which media studies scholars can "write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween." This scholarly netwrok, MediaCommons, looks like a promising resource for media studies scholarship, and I hope other academic bloggers will particpate in this scholarly network.

The focus on media studies scholarship makes a lot of sense (and I'd say that even if I wasn't a media studies scholar), in part because scholars in that field often explore in their research the very technologies that this network will use. And as KF points out, electronic publishing can be valuable for media studies scholars who need "to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about" (something I've discovered in my writing on new media).

I think I'm most enthusiastic about this project, however, because it focuses on the possibilities of allowing academics to write for audiences of non-academics and strives to use the network model to connect scholars who might otherwise read each other in isolation. As Kathleen points out,

Most universities provide fairly structured definitions of the academic’s role, both as part of the institution’s mission and as informing the criteria under which faculty are hired and reviewed: the academic’s function is to conduct and communicate the products of research through publication, to disseminate knowledge through teaching, and to perform various kinds of service to communities ranging from the institution to the professional society to the wider public. Traditional modes of scholarly life tend to make these goals appear discrete, and they often take place in three very different discursive registers. Despite often being defined as a public good, in fact, much academic discourse remains inaccessible and impenetrable to the publics it seeks to serve.

My initial enthusiasm for blogging grew out of a desire to write for audiences wider than my academic colleagues, and I think this is one of many arenas where MediaCommons can provide a valuable service. In addition to writing for this wider audience, I have met a number of media studies scholars, filmmakers, and other friends, and my thinking about film and media has been shaped by our conversations.

Be sure to read Kathleen's full post about the goals for MediaCommons, available at both Planned Obsolescence and the Institute for the Future of the Book blogs. This looks like an incredibly cool idea, and I look forward to particpating and hope others will as well.

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July 17, 2006

Anticipating Snakes

In her Salon article on the Snakes on a Plane hype, Aemilia Scott manages to name-drop both Chuck Klosterman and Theodor Adorno in the space of just a couple of paragraphs, criticizing both Klosterman's "prefab populism" thesis and Adorno's "culture industry" thesis as inadequate explanations for the enthusiasm for Snakes on a Plane, basing her argument in part on the film's unusually specific title and on the studio's decision to tap into the blogosphere as a massive focus group, reading both as illustrating the ways in which Snakes exposes the artifice of Hollywood film production.

Like Scott, I've argued that there's nothing new about testing films on audiences (whether through test screenings or reading blogs), leaving me relatively unconvinced by Klosterman's argument that Snakes on a Plane will usher in a new era of prefab populism. Scott also notes that the film likely was not conceived as a "ready-made cult classic," that it was likely originally imagined as a standard-fare summer action pic (she called it a "PG-13 snoozer," while I called it a "PG-13 yawner"). In this context, I find Scott's reading to be relatively convincing. The audience enthusiasm for the trailer has less to do with "honest" cult directors such as John Waters and more to do with our boredom with Bruckheimer-style blockbusters (although given Pirates' boffo box office, we're obviously not that bored). This positioning is implied in Snakes' playful trailer, which offers the film as an alternative to the pirates, Pixar, and superheroes who've been dominating the megaplex. So, yeah, arguably, part of the film's appeal is the film's tacit acknowledgement "that the industry itself doesn't believe in its own magic."

However, Scott misreads Adorno in order to dismiss the relevance of his critique of what he calls "the culture industry," using Adorno's pessimism to stand in for all cultural critics. Building on the false assumption that Adorno believed that exposing the artifice of the culture industry would lead to "riots" against the status quo, Scott argues that "Americans don't just love the culture industry; they fetishize it. But Americans are also savvier than most theoreticians believe. The lamest and most transparent attempts of the culture industry to deceive us are defeated not by outright rejection, but by assimilation." I don't think this exposure of the artifice is all that unusual. In fact, DVD commentary tracks, blooper tracks, and making-of videos constantly call attention to the ways in which films are constructed. In fact, it's not unreasonable to argue that sites such as Box Office Mojo and strategy games such as Hollywood Mogul have also contributed to our knowledge o fthis artifice. But I think her more explicit argument, that cultural critics believe all audience members to be passive dupes, is probably the most insidious one. Quite a bit of cultural studies scholarship in recent years has sought to investigate how audiences use poular culture in a variety of ways, including ways that are remarkably resistant to the initial attempts at "deception," a concept she never quite defines clearly (who is deceived by Hollywood? what is the nature of this deception?).

I'm still not convinced that Snakes on a Plane represents anything more than a remarkably savvy, if accidental, marketing coup by the folks at New Line, but I continue be interested in the promotion of the film and the online discussions of this promotion (which are pretty much inseparable at this point).

Salon article via stark ranting by way of Shakespeare's Sister. Cross-posted at Dr. Mabuse.

Update: Via the Cult News Network, a report that New Line will be skipping press screenings for Snakes on a Plane so that they can take the film "directly to the fans" (which seems to assume that critics aren't also, potentially, fans). The decision to release the film to "select theaters" before opening widely seems pretty savvy, though, as internet/blog buzz will be far more important in promoting this film than two thumbs up from Ebert and Roeper.

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July 16, 2006

Sunday Afternoon Links

A few unrelated articles and random observations from the Barnes and Noble cafe:

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an article reporting on college and university coaches asking (or in some cases requiring) athletes to take down or modify their Facebook and MySpace pages. There's nothing terribly unusual here: coaches are worried that the reuptation of their universities will be damaged by depictions of athletes engaging in underage drinking, to name one example. But the article might be useful in my media studies-themed composition classes this fall, especially in its treatment of the questions regarding public-private divide raised by these sites.
• John Anderson's New York Times article, which asks why documentaries primarily support a "liberal" or "left" politics. For the most part, the article seems to resuscitate stereotypes of liberalism and conservatism, but I also think it's worth asking how Anderson is defining "liberal" political documentaries, especially when film festival director Jim Hubbard identifies 19 of the top 20 docs as "liberal." While the numbers at Box Office Mojo would likely reinforce this claim, theatrical box office is a relatively misleading way of measuring the popularity of documentary films (especially given that docs often play at festivals, churches, cultural centers, and other places where tickets aren't necessarily sold).
• Finally, I happened to notice that multiple copies of John Linder and Neal Boortz's book promoting the flat tax (no, I'm not gonna link to it) were sorted on a "fiction" table here at Barnes & Noble. I've been trying to figure out if that's a quietly rebellious editorial commentary on the part of a B&N staffer, but it seems appropriate.

I didn't make it out to a movie theater this weekend (still waiting for A Scanner Darkly to get to F'ville, which should be happening soon, but have been watching Chris Marker's Grin Without a Cat off and on all weekend, which I've been wanting to see for a really long time.

Update: Just wanted to add a pointer to this LA Times interview with Kevin Smith promoting Clerks 2. I happened to catch the original Clerks at precisely the right time, when I was working as a cashier at a Very Big Box DIY store. Reading the article, I also realize that I'm almost exactly the same age as Kevin Smith, and as a result, I shared many of the concerns articulated by Randal and Dante, the two clerks in the original film. In addition to promoting Clerks 2, Mark Olsen's article addresses and challenges Smith's reputation as a "lazy" filmmaker and discusses his ability to connect with his enthusiastic fan base. It also mentions that Smith worked with Richard Kelly on the graphic novel series written to accompany Kelly's latest film, Southland Tales.

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July 15, 2006

Cable TV and Me

For now, a quick pointer to Steven Johnson on The Daily Show (thanks to JBJ at The Salt-Box), promoting Everything Bad is Good For You, in which he argues that TV and video games are actually making us smarter. I briefly discussed Johnson's book a few months ago when I was reflecting on my own television-watching habits and have been revisiting some of his ideas recently because I have cable television for the first time since the spring of 1998. I don't want to rehash those arguments here, and it would be unwise to generalize about cable television from the very limited sample of cable programs I've watched since installing cable (itself a concession to living in a smaller city with fewer art house screens), although cable news has been as bad or worse than I'd been led to believe.

That being said, it's difficult for me not to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of channels and television shows available at any given time, with the result that I often feel like I should be watching something else or at least watching two or three shows at once, which probably means I'll be getting TiVo soon. I've been trying to pay careful attention to how regular access to cable television changes my TV watching habits because even though I have cable and sometimes face the difficulty of choosing between 2 or 3 shows at a given time, I don't think I've been watching more television and I remain virtually incapable of watching TV without also doing something else (cooking, eating, reading, blog surfing, even exercising). But I'll still be curious to see how I learn to incorporate cable TV into the habits and practices of my daily life. More on this topic later, but I initially planned this entry as a quick link to the Johnson interview and his recent blog entry on Raymond Williams.

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July 14, 2006

Klosterman on Snakes

Taylor of The Devil in the Details referred to Chuck Klosterman's Esquire rant about New Line's attempt at "prefab populism" with this summer's zeitgeist pic, Snakes on a Plane., the film that has inspired more blog buzz than just about any film in recent memory (note: in addition to writing an insightful blog entry on Snakes, Taylor was also a student in one of my media studies classes). As Klosterman points out (and as many film bloggers will know), New Line actually reshot several scenes, incorporating more snake violence, some gratuitous nudity, and new dialogue ("I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"), apparently because bloggers thought all of the above would be cool. But whether New Line's reworking of Snakes constitutes anything new, much less the "prefab populism" Klosterman diagnoses is an open question.

Klosterman, who is certainly one of the more insightful popular culture critics working today, offers a much needed corrective to the Snakes hype, arguing that it "is like the Wikipedia version of a movie," with New Line tapping into the collective wisdom of the blogosphere in reworking a film that might otherwise have been a quickly forgotten Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, a typical PG-13 yawner that would bring in popcorn money for three weeks before really cashing in on video. He then compares New Line's pratcice of mining the blogosphere for plot suggestions to his experience working on struggling newspapers who used focus groups in a desperate attempt to recover lost readership, concluding that "when it comes to mass media, it's useless to ask people what they want; nobody knows what they want until they have it." For the most part, I think he's right about how the suggestions of focus groups can be misused. Listen too closely to focus groups and your film or TV show will try to be everything to everyone. Of course, studios have responded to focus groups or test screenings for some time, so that's nothing new; if anything, the blogosphere just makes it into an interesting gimmick, providing the film with some cheap buzz (and, yeah, I know I'm contributing to that buzz as we speak). In a sense, all Holywood films are "prefab" in the sense that studios cater to audience expectations.

The second question I have (and perhaps this is completely trivial) is whether the edits of Snakes can be understood as a kind of populism along the lines of Klosterman's other examples (The Beatles, The Godfather). If populism involves, at the very least as Klosterman puts it, an expression of "the shared sensibilities of large groups of otherwise unconnected people," or more precisely an expression of the common person against a larger elite, then perhaps Snakes on a Plane is doing something else. I think Snakes fits far more easily in the genre of cult film than into what he's describing as "prefab populism." If anything, the appeal of the added scenes relies at least in part on an insider's knowledge that lines of dailogue or film taglines were added because of the film's internet fandom. In other words, the online audience for Snakes might be read not as populist but as a pop savvy elite, with audiences congraulating themselves because they know all of the film's pop culture references (Taylor's discussion of the film's use of "injokes" articulates this point well). Klosterman makes a similar point when he concludes that "the only purpose of Snakes on a Plane is to make its audience feel smarter than what it's seeing. Which adds up, since that's part of the reason people like reading the Internet." In fact, this pop culture savvy is a big part of the appeal of filmmakers such as Kevin Smith, who frequently engages with his audience on his blog.

Whether the film will be a "good" cult film remains to be seen (and isn't really an issue for me because the marketing of the film has been interesting enough, although I will certainly see the film early in its run). I do think that the production and marketing of Snakes have tapped into the desires of bloggers to feel less alientaed from the Hollywood flms that seem increasingly calcultaed to appeal to the widest possible audience, but I'm also inclined to agree with Klosterman that this appeal is somewhat cyncial, or prefabricated, to use his phrase. What I'm suggesting here is that I don't think Snakes on a Plane will change how films are made in any measurable way (although we may see a few imitators) but that it may contribute to the ongoing changes in the ways in which films are marketed (which, come to think of it, may be the same thing).

Posted by chuck at 2:16 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 12, 2006

Movie Miscellany

In an effort to start exploring my new 'hood here in the Tar Heel State, I drove up to Raleigh last night to meet the local Drinking Liberally group, which meets at the Flying Saucer, one of the bars we visited when I was in Raleigh for the Convergences symposium a couple of years ago. The Drinking Liberally group was pretty cool, and we even won the evening's team trvia competition. But while I was there, I was tipped off to a number of local film and media events that are worth mentioning, if only so I'll have them for future reference.

While driving up to Raleigh, I happened to notice a billboard advertising the Ava Gardner Museum, which is actually located in Smithfield, about forty minutes north of F'ville because how could I resist missing a museum dedicated to the star of The Barefoot Contessa, The Killers, and The Night of the Iguana, among many other films and TV shows.

The Raleigh DLers also recommended other cool film events, including the First Friday events at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, which typically features a film screening of a classical Hollywood film, including in past months, On The Beach, starring the aforementioned Ms. Gardner, and for June, The Devil Bat, a Bela Lugosi flick featuring Lugosi as a mad scientist who creates a squad of electronic bats to get revenge on his former employers. The Lugosi screening was sponsored by a group called the AV Geeks. The group also suggested Kings, a bar that primarily features live music but also screens a documentary on the second Sunday of every month.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, Matthew at Defective Yeti will be on the radio show, The Works, tonight where he will be talking about a subject I think is pretty cool: movie blogs. Here's a direct link to the episode.

Update: This bit of trivia isn't really worth a separate entry, but I just learned via the Fayetteville Observer's daily N.C. trivia series that Carson McCullers wrote The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter here in Fayetteville, just a short walk from downtown in an apartment above the Cool Spring Tavern. According to the folks at Library of America, McCullers spent quite a bit of time here in Fayetteville.

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July 11, 2006

Just Lose It at Wal-Mart

I've been planning to watch the Wal-Mart videos Henry Jenkins mentioned a few days ago, but because I didn't have internet service at home until yesterday, I didn't really have a chance until now. Discussing the Wal-Mart videos, Jenkins argues that these amateur videomakers have posted videos that "celebrate the Wal-Mart shopping experience." Many of the videos posted on YouTube were shot illicitly using personal cameras brought into the store and often feature teenagers dancing to music played on radios found in the store's elctronics department. Others, such as the affectionate parody of Eminem's "Just Lose It," entail elaborate staging, often using props found in the store (or at least using a shopping cart as an improvised dolly). Jenkins also points to the "Wal-Mart Time" video, described by its creators as a "hardcore rap about everyones favorite super store."

In his reading of these videos, Jenkins notes that they all display "a kind of affection for the store as a public space which contrasts sharply with the anti-corporate messages one associates with the ad-buster or culture jammers movement." Because I've recently moved from DC to a much smaller city, I'm finding myself much more attentive to these questions of access to public space, and given that "Wal-Mart time" runs 24-7, it's one of the few public spaces available at any time, day or night, but I'm wondering whether these videos signal affection for Wal-Mart or whether they actually convey a degree of ironic distance (and I'll be the first to admit that the categories aren't mutually exclusive). In the "Wal-Mart Time" video, the teenage girls do make some pointed critiques of the store's practice of selling guns and its practice of selling cheaply-priced goods in bulk quantities. It also seems significant that these videos are produced illicitly, "under the watchful noses of Wal-mart's ever attentive and friendly welcomers," as Jenkins puts it. I'm not sure that my reading is vastly different than Jenkins, in that these videos do look quite a bit different than Robert Greenwald's more overtly anti-Wal-Mart documentary, but I am interested in how these videomakers are negotiating their relationship to Wal-Mart.

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Bush Pilot

Remember that mysterious bulge on Bush's back during the first debate? Thanks to Google video, here's the real (and very funny) explanation (thanks to Alterman for the tip).

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July 8, 2006

The Devil Wears Prada

For whatever reasons, David Frankel's adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's novel, The Devil Wears Prada (IMDB), left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Like Mel, I found the casting of Anne Hathaway to be a creative choice, especially given Prada's ambivalent take on the Cinderella story, but my final reaction is probably closer to Stephanie Zacharek's review in Salon: it felt as if the film was teetering between fashion fantasy and fashion satire without ever satisfying either impulse.

Prada features Hathaway as Andy--a shortened version of Andrea--a wannabe journalist just graduated from Northwestern University who takes a position as an assistant to Miranda, the editor of Runway, an influencial magazine based on Vogue. Miranda, of course, is the devil named in the title, and she bosses her employees with a degree of self-absored ice-queenism reserved only for the very powerful. As we see in the opening scenes, in which Miranda ritually drops her coat on Andy's desk and repeatedly refers to Andy as "Emily," it's not that Miranda particularly dislikes her employees; she's simply oblivious to their existence unless they don't fulfill her expectations. As a satire of the cut-throat aspects of the fashion industry, the scenes with Streep work relatively well, but I think the film is far too cautious in satirizing the power relationships in place at Runway, a blindspot that, as A.O. Scott observes, probably has much to do with the power structures and reliance on underpaid assistants almost equally in place in Hollywod as in the world of fashion.

I think the film also falters in failing to give Andy much of a personality beyond her initial disdain for high fashion. We learn that Andy was an award-winning college journalist, but her passion for journalism wilts against Miranda's deconstruction of her during one of their initial meetings. Appraising Andy's appearance--including a blue cable-knit sweater and plaid skirt--Miranda explains with some disdain that the sweater's color (actually "cerulean") is in fact already chosen for Andy well in advance of her purchase of it. While I think the film does need to challenge Andy's somewhat self-congratulatory ideals, it offers her little authority or ground in fighting back against Miranda (perhaps, again, Hollywod can't take someone like Andy terribly seriously?). Once Andy takes on the role of Miranda's assistant, she adjusts relatively quickly, assuming the costume and manner of her colleagues, namely her co-assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt), whose deferential treatment of Miranda reflects that she has accepted the fact that "a million girls would kill for this job." But this Cinderella-style transformation was never fully convincing, in part because Andy was already so attractive before she stepped into the offices of Runway and in part, for me, because I liked the blue sweater that Miranda so maliciously deconstructs.

I haven't read Weisberger's novel, and several of the critics I read (Zachareck, Scott) have hinted that the film adaptation softens Miranda slightly, particularly in the scene described by Mel, in which Andy encounters Miranda in her bathrobe, without makeup, in the one moment in the film in which Miranda is not fully in control of the shiny surfaces that surround her. Scott mentions that Andy's alma mater is changed from Brown University to Northwestern, and I have to wonder how much her personality was changed as well. This lack of personality might also be attributed to the fact that her long-time friends existed not such much as characters but as types (her boyfriend the chef, the gay fashion consumer friend, etc). Perhaps, more than anything, I kept finding myself aware of the constraints of a mainstream Hollywood production as I watched Prada, particularly when it came to the film's inability to depict convincingly Andy, the intelligent, idealistic woman as anything more than a type.

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July 7, 2006

Cameo Performance

For my first visit to Fayetteville's art house theater, the Cameo Art House Theatre, I caught The Devil Wears Prada, appropriately enough, given the number of fashionistas who appear, however briefly, in the film. I'll have more to say about the film tomorrow, but because the neighboring coffeehouse, Rude Awakening, is about to close, I'll just say that the Cameo is a great little art house theater. Good projection, great sound, and comfortable seating, with a good beer and wine selection. I probably wouldn't have seen Prada in DC, and I can't say that I liked the film all that much (like Jerry Seinfeld, I think Streep's a little overrated), but I liked the theatrical experience itself quite a bit.

Posted by chuck at 11:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

New Media Studies and Freshman Composition

Inspired by a conversation with George, I've decided to use a "new media studies" theme in my freshman composition class this fall. I had originally planned to put together a course similar to my Fall 2004 "Rhetoric and Democracy" course, which focused on the various kinds of argument used during the presidential election, but because there is no central national election, such a course doesn't seem feasible in 2006. I'm still thinking about what such a course would look like and how it might serve Fayetteville State's student population, but given the number of important questions raised by new media, I think students could benefit from such a course.

I'm still debating about whether to require students to maintain blogs this time around for a variety of reasons. I do think it's important that students produce new media texts in a new media studies course, and blogs are becoming one of the more accessible versions of that kind of "democratized" new media production. When I taught the "Rhetoric and Democracy" course, blogs also made it easier for students to generate content for class discussion by linking to news articles or op-ed pieces on their blogs, a practice I found especially useful and informative when I taught the election-based course. But I've also found that when I don't have actual paper assignments to return to my students that I find it much more difficult to remember their names (and I'll have a lot of students this fall). I'm also becoming less patient with the role of being a default blog administrator for seventy-five or so students and am somewhat unsure about what kind of technological access students will have. I have obviously had good success with using blogs in the classroom in the past, but I'm also ready to try something different.

Also, because the course is the composition course focused on teaching the research paper, it may make more sense to look at significant debates about new media to provide contexts where students can write argumentative essays. Here, I'm thinking about the debates about the place of copyrighted material on YouTube, whether it's the "Lazy Sunday" clip from Saturday Night Live or fans filming themselves dancing to their favorite songs, to name one example. But I'd also like students to think about issues such as YouTube's popularity rankings and comments features and how those functions might affect how and what we watch, as well as pointing students to writers who are performing interesting interpretations of amatuer media, such as Henry Jenkins. And, of course, amateur media raises all sorts of questions about public and private boundaries that students need to consider, especially with many of them maintaining Facebook and MySpace pages, which often feature their names and contact information.

This is sort of a brainstorming post, and I'd be happy to hear your suggestions, but there seems to be at least some enthusiasm among my colleagues for this kind of composition course. I'm planning to keep some aspects of the course flexible under the assumption that as new media practices continue to evolve, so I'm a little cautious about imposing too many required readings at the beginning of the semester. Plus, I think that this flexibility may, in fact, provide one way of modelling some of the challenges of doing new media research.

Oh, while I'm thinking about it, I've been invited to join the group blog, Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, and so from now on, some of my posts may be cross-posted over there.

Update: Via Planned Obsolescence, Alan Liu's draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia. Like him, I've seen students increasingly rely on Wikipedia as a source, and I think it's worth discussing that practice with my students. I'm probably less inclined than most English or composition instructors to expect my students to spend time in the library stacks, but I do think it's important that students gain some self-consciousness about how they research and how they come to conclusions about what's reliable and what isn't.

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July 6, 2006

Raining on Ramsey Street

Checking out a new coffeehouse today. They charge for the wifi, but the cappuccinos aren't bad. Still adjusting to Fayetteville, but I wanted to mention a cool film series sponsored by the South Carolina Arts Commission called Southern Circuit, which sponsors screening of independent films all over the Carolinas and Virginia (and even Mississippi), mostly at colleges and universities. The 2006-07 schedule isn't listed yet, but last year's series looks impressive.

Also wanted to mention Category D, Chris Cagle's new film and media studies blog. Chris's most recent entry reminds me that I need to start thinking about this year's SCMS conference.

Meanwhile, GreenCine has an interview with Michael Winterbottom, director of The Road to Guantanamo, the compelling and important documentary about the Tipton Three, who were wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo for over two years. Citing Andrew O'Hehir's Salon article, David also speculates about why Winterbottom's film hasn't caught on in the United States. I think O'Hehir may be right that the film's potential audience may be concluding that the film is "too damn depressing," but I also wonder if the film isn't also being overshadowed by Al Gore's documentary. At any rate, David offers a spirited argument for why it is important to see the film and not to forget what happened in Guantanamo.

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July 5, 2006

Independence Day

As many readers may know, George Bush spent a significant part of the July 4th holiday here in Fayetteville at a rally at Fort Bragg. I celebrated my Independence Day by spending the afternoon with fifty other protestors, many of whom drove in from Raligh, Durham, Winston Salem, and other nearby places, with representatives from the local branch of Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War in attendance (including, coincidentally, the soldier who attended the DC premiere of Sir, No Sir! I attended a few weeks ago).

The experience of participating in a protest is something that I feel is important, even if I'm not sure why I find it important or valuable. I often feel self-conscious about getting involved in anti-war protests not because I am unsure of my position on the war in Iraq but because protesting often feels more like a representation of protest. But in many ways, I think it was one of the best ways I could have spent the Fourth of July, as it allowed me not only to join others in expressing my opposition to Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq but also because it did provide some sense of solidarity with others who share that opposition.

By the way, I'm still blogging exclusively from assorted coffeehouses in Fayetteville, but I should be fully connected to cyberspace by Sunday when my cable guy or gal shows up. I've decided to take the full plunge this year and get both cable internet and, for the first time since the late 1990s, cable TV. I've been amazed at how disconnected I feel without having internet service at home, but because I only have brief amounts of time for surfing, it's interesting to see what online activities I end up privileging when internet time is a limited resource (among other things, I spend far less time looking at sports news, which is probably a good thing).

Posted by chuck at 1:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2006

Click

In "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," Robin Wood identifies one of the most prominent aspects of "American capitalist ideology" as it is realized in Hollywood cinema, which he calls the "Rosebud Syndrome." According to Wood, films such as Citizen Kane suggest via narrative that "Money isn't everything; money corrupts; the poor are happier. A very convenient assumption for capitalist ideology: the more oppressed you are, the happier you are." Wood describes the Rosebud Syndrome and other aspects of American Capitalist Ideology as they are pushed to their absolute limit in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart rescued from despair only through the timely arrival of his guardian angel, Clarence. The recent Adam Sandler vehicle, Click (IMDB), directed by Frank Coraci and written by Bruce Almighty screenwriters Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe, is the Rosebud Syndrome writ large. And read aloud by James Earl Jones. In Dolby. But that's probably relatively obvious, even from the trailers for Click, which most readers will know features Sandler as Michael Newman (New-Man), a workaholic architect who manages to gain control of his life with a universal remote control that allows him to skip fast-forward, or pause his universe. But the magical remote comes with a high price: like a TiVo, as the remote control "learns" Michael's preferences, it begins to take control, fast forwarding through significant moments in Michael's life, with the remote interpreting Michael's ambitions at work as a preference for his career over his family.

Of course, if this rehashing of the classic opposition between work and family was all that Click had to offer, it wouldn't be an interesting or even terribly entertaining film, but I believe that Click is somewhat unexpectedly interesting and generally entertaining, if only because it depicts the further maturation of Sandler's slightly angry goofball screen persona. In particular, Click tapped into my interest in time-travel films, notably through its use of TiVo as a kind of time travel, allowing Michael to revisit past chapters of his life or to skip ahead through the stressful and boring moments of his life (and I'll be the first to admit that fast-forwarding through traffic would be awfully tempting). By turning Michael's life into something like a film, Click is able to unpack the logic of our media-saturated lives in surprisingly interesting ways. While being introduced to the remote by a mysterious Bed, Bath, and Beyond employee, Morty (Christopher Walken in full mad scientist gear), Michael learns that his life has a commentary track (provided by James Earl Jones, of course), and in a scene that recalled Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, Michael is even given the opportunity to experience both his conception and his birth. Even the casting, especially of Michael's parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner) and boss (David Hasselhoff), seems to suggest that Michael's life is deeply televisual.

At the same time, because of its adherence to this opposition between work and family Click also comes across as a film with a remarkably narrow imagination. Because the film really only offers two choices between the domestic and the workplace, it presents a relatively limited range of choices for Michael's life. If Michael truly has a universal remote, shouldn't he be able to change channels? It doesn't imagine other career paths that Michael might have followed, other than architecture, and it doesn't really address whether Michael's wife, Donna (Kate Beckinsale, whose major contribution to the film seemed to be wearing tight tanktops), ever had any career ambitions of her own. Even within the logic of Michael's world, the implication that Michael will only be successful and wealthy once he makes partner seems somewhat dubious, especially when he worries that the purchase of two bicycles will prove to be too expensive if he doesn't make partner. The film was also overwhelming laden with product plcements. Perhaps I've been spending too much time in the art house, but I've rarely encountered such extreme use of product placements, especially for Bed, Bath, and Beyond, where Michael first receives the remote (though to be fair, the joke on the "beyond" in the store's name was a nice touch).

I'll admit that I'm somewhat ambivalent about Click. Like Bruce Almighty, the film has some remarkably reigious overtones, with Sandler turning to the skies at one point for divine guidance. And the film's failure to imagine anything beyond the conflict between home and office left a little to be desired. But as a commentary on TiVo and time, Click is surprisingly compelling.

Update: While you're in the neighborhood, check out Caryn James' review, which depicts the underlying cyncism of a film such as Click. She explains that while the film's message is that Sandler's Micheal should slow down, but that "Nothing could be more bogus; as if anyone in Hollywood really wants to slow down. The true message -- wouldn't it be great to have that remote? -- shines through anyway. And it's not just the filmmakers who are in on the sham." Thanks to GreenCine for the link.

Posted by chuck at 1:44 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

American Messiah Screening

Just a quick note to my DC readers: Chris Hansen's The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah (IMDB) will be playing at Kensington, MD's Kensington Row Bookshop as a part of the Capital City Microcinema screening series. If you're in the neighborhood, I can certainly recommend Chris's film, which is a mockumentary about Brian B., who believes that he is a kind of local messiah. The film's deadpan humor evokes films such as Napoleon Dynamite and Waiting for Guffman, and Hansen will be there to answer questions about the film (which makes me really wish I could attend).

Posted by chuck at 1:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 2, 2006

Closed on Sundays

I've just learned that my former new favorite coffee house is closed on Sundays, which has left me feeling unnecessarily grumpy this afternoon. I still think the coffeehouse is a cool spot, but Sunday afternoons are usually when I'm most productive so I'm a little bummed that the place is closed. Add that to the fact that the local bank lists the temperature at 100 degrees and that I've had to join the ranks of car owners, and I'll admit that I'm going through a bit of culture shock today as I attempt to settle in here in F'ville.

That being said, I'm trying not to be too grumpy so I'l point to a couple of cool-looking North Carolina places and events and a new-to-me film blog that looks like a good read. Via the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, I've just learned that Margaret Sartor is giving a reading of Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing Up in the 1970s, which has been described as "a unique form of memoir written as a diary, evoking a teenage girl’s coming-of-age in the Deep South of the 1970s." The book is drawn from diaries that Sartor kept when she was a teenager and sounds like an interesting read. The reading will be held at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, which looks like a great bookstore.

Also, the film blog, Lost in Negative Space, looks very interesting, and I'd say that even if the author, Peter Gelderblom, hadn't linked t my blog. Peter is the founder of 24LiesASecond, another website I really like. I'll try to return to a normal posting schedule soon, but until I'm able to get internet service at home, it looks like I'll be blogging and blog-surfing somewhat more infrequently than I would like.

Posted by chuck at 5:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack