The Rage Diaries

Would you like to know what the public wants?

So the NYT ran a story today, "When MovieGoers Vote With Their Feet," in which Galaxy Theaters CEO Frank Rimkus says, "We are trying to understand what the public wants. And Galaxy does not yet have a handle on it."

I include the photo that accompanied the story because it has two things in it I don't want from the movies: remakes and boors who confuse the public movie theatre with their private living room.

Amusingly enough, the last movie theatre I went to did feel like someone's living room: Central Cinema, which is a few miles from my house, lives inside an old mortuary and relies on scavenged couches for seating. And the other way in which it felt like a living room: all the inhabitants were as mannerly and considerate of each other as they'd be of their own friends and family. It helped that there were maybe 30 people in the room, so there was noplace to hide if you were a jackass.

So here's what I want as a member of the movie-going public, in general:

The things I think about in the car on the way to work ...

... occasionally make it to Teevee. I did a little Oscar post-mortem in the form of a helpful suggestion for next year.

At long last, Lloyd

And two years after I wrote, "Jake was the ur-Lloyd Dobler (another iconic 1980s teen movie character women my age all supposedly swoon for), with the near-stalking-as-form-of-courtship and the dreamy, intense ardor for the girl.," the WaPo agrees and runs a follow-up piece, "What I Did For Lloyd." (Feb 14, 06)

Myself, I got twitterpated over Mark "Hard Harry" Hunter of Pump Up the Volume. But all you Lloyd-lovers, today's your day to swoon.

Irrelevancy with advertisers may not be such a bad thing

[A]ccepting the advertisers' coveting of the 18-49 demographic jumps over the question of "Why?" What's so special about these guys that they find themselves in this enviable position? Why is this age group accorded such unilateral consideration, to the near exclusion of everyone else?

Conventional wisdom suggests the 18-49 demographic is coveted because its members are hip, cool and trendy, or aspire to be, which makes them ready targets for advertisers who, with the help of their products, promise that that's what you'll be.

[...]

[A] selected demographic becomes "the only people who count," skewing all mass entertainment their way. The networks' job, through appealing programming, is to bring these "most coveted" to one place. The advertisers' job, through seductive button-pushing, is to reel them in.

Problems, however, exist. Beyond the question of whether the most coveted have substantial money to buy things with, there's the question of whether they retain an interest in watching television at all.

[...]

There's clearly trouble there. Yet advertisers continue to pour money into the medium as though TV is still the hottest show in town. Not that television's totally "gone fishin'." People still watch it. But are they members of the most coveted demographic? Or are they — just a thought here — their parents?

It's almost impossible to get anyone to revisit conventional wisdom, but maybe it's time advertisers took a deep, relaxing breath and a careful second look. It's possible they're coveting a demographic that's strapped for cash and not watching much television. And ignoring one, with cash, that is.

-- "Are 18-49 Year-Olds Really Worth the Wooing?" LAT, Dec 19, 05

A Christmas Story ... Or Ten

My gleeful contempt for holiday playlist staple "The Christmas Shoes" is well-documented. I have inflicted my family's habit of watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on my long-suffering spouse. And you know the Schmichaels household is in the habit of compiling awful holiday playlists. In the habit of SENDING them, no. Compiling them, yes. See 2003's effort and the unreleased 2004 effort, which I like to think of as the holiday album analogue to "Extraordinary Machine."

In short, I am as fascinated by holiday media as I am by ... well, any other media. I have my favorites listed below. Please tell me yours in the comments! I want to know my weakness for made-for-tv movies is shared by others.

Updating my TiVo wishlist as you read this ...

I swear, I had no idea William Gibson's short story "New Rose Hotel" was a movie. With Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe, even!

You can read the story, but I totally recommend picking up his short story collection Burning Chrome. "New Rose Hotel" isn't one of my favorites in the collection -- I prefer "Hinterlands" and "Burning Chrome" -- but if you're all, "So what is this whole cy-ber-punk thing?" ... this is a handy way to dip a toe in without making the investment of reading a whole novel.

Of imperialist nostalgia and HIV

Owing to circumstance both too complicated and too stupid to go into right now, I spend last night's rush hour driving into San Francisco to pick up the husband from work.

The movie sucked but I loved the in-jokes

The traditional benefits of entertainment were the pleasures of the experience. For that, you had to see the movie, read the book or hear the CD. These were — and are — powerful pleasures, powerful enough to make entertainment a multibillion-dollar industry. But as society has grown more complex and the information we can know has grown exponentially, knowingness — the idea of being in the know and of having the expertise to navigate through the haystacks of available information to find the needles — has come to provide an arguably more satisfying form of gratification. That's why the knowingness industry, including the Internet, seems more vital than the entertainment industry. Google is the new metaphor for fulfillment.

[...]

Conventional entertainments like movies face a terrible double-whammy — lifies supersede them and knowingness makes seeing them irrelevant.

-- "Movies Just Don't Matter," LAT, July 31, 05

I will admit, when I read this piece, I was expecting some reference to the practice of embedding older cultural references in new cultural contributions, a la The Simpsons, any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld or Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, or in comics by Alan Moore, Grant Morrison or Neal Gaiman (which have spawned volumes of annotations to explain the references). I had also noticed a lot of you-have-to-know-the-reference-to-get-the-joke business in Stella, so I've been chewing on cultural literacy again. (Yes, again: check out earlier posts here and here)

Instead, Neal Gabler argues that the cultural artifact (i.e. movie) is pretty much a little totem for the bigger activity: reaffirming our understanding of the larger community. I'm not sure I buy this just yet -- I think the knowingness kick is pretty specific to a small group of people who probably would have been like this back in the day when it took 'zines and almanacs and library trips to satisfy the info jones.

Rendered helpless by the adorable

So we went to see March of the Penguins on Saturday night, and it was everything I could have hoped for, penguin-wise. I'll take a dozen birds, please. They can waddle around my living room all day, honking indignantly, smelling of herring and scaring the cats. I wasn't planning on getting my security deposit back anyway.

Be warned: there's a lot of penguin mortality in this movie. And thanks to the (possibly excessive) anthropomorphization of the birds, there is a moment where you're watching an otherwise adorable seal munching on a formerly adorable penguin (not so cute once it's masticated), and you're all, "Brain! Confused! Formerly fond of seals! Now wondering! If clubbing is good idea after all!" What was kind of funny about this moment was that a week ago, I was watching National Geographic's Killer Whales: Wolves of the Sea, and I had been feeling quite sorry for the little antipodean seals when the orcas were snapping them up like Cheetos.

Stop confusing me, documentarians! Less anthropomorphizing, more pointing out that predators perform a useful role in keeping populations at a sustainable level. And that everything's got to eat. There's nothing inherently immoral about a seal going after its preferred prey; I don't like it when the story tells me otherwise.

Hooker, line and sinker

So we went to see Sin City this weekend. As a comic adaptation, it's extremely successful; Robert Rodriguez managed to translate the visual language of the book into film. Since one of the strengths of Sin City as a comic was its distinctive look, it's a pleasure to see the aesthetic component of the book executed in a completely different medium.

Still, the point to this post is not "I got all geeked up over a comic-book movie," but rather that I came home from the movie and watched an episode of Deadwood, realized that in three hours of pop-culture consumption I had seen a grand total of maybe twenty-four women, only four of whom who weren't in the sex trade, and I am just HOOKERED OUT.