"But we're living in a time of extreme crisis almost nothing on TV or in the movies is designed to get us thinking about how to fix our problems. If anything, most of the stuff on TV is designed to jack up our anxiety level without offering any solutions except the short-term fixes of buying and eating -- witness the endless reality shows in which ordinary people slave away and scheme against each other for weeks on end for a 1 in 12 shot at a (pick one) modeling job/date with a non-deformed, non serial-killing person/chance to be shouted at by Donald Trump.

"Now that stuff is cynical and monstrous. It is my sincere hope that the people who are producing these programs will someday be tried and executed by war crimes tribunals at the Hague."

Matt Taibbi on The State of the Biz and Capitalism

Laura Bickford on the state of the major studios.
Insight: The current distribution model of major studios is simply not sustainable and can not successfully be applied to smaller budget films.
“The reason the studios aren’t doing these [smaller budget] movies isn’t because of taste, it’s because the economic model didn’t work for them. And right now they know they’re on their way down, too. The studios are facing what the music industry was facing. They know that they’re dinosaurs, they know that they’re bloated and they know that they’re going to be over. But they don’t know when and they don’t know what’s going to replace it. Nobody knows how to monetize the internet, nobody knows how monetize video on demand and other forms of that, which is the way of the future shared with the theatrical experience… But they just don’t know where their revenues are going to come from… If we can show them how to make money on smaller budget films they’d be doing it.” (from the LAFF panel via Indiewire

1.  The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience — they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie — for any movie — is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. "There's one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies," a producer said. "How else can you explain their survival?" An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture's release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can't quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies — not that they're having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they're getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for. (A number of the new movie executives come from TV.) These new executives don't necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theater. If for the last couple of years Hollywood couldn't seem to do anything right, it isn't that it was just a stretch of bad luck — it's the result of recent developments within the industry. And in all probability it will get worse, not better. There have been few recent American movies worth lining up for — last year there was chiefly The Black Stallion, and this year there is The Empire Strikes. The first was made under the aegis of Francis Ford Coppola; the second was financed by George Lucas, using his profits from Star Wars as a guarantee to obtain bank loans. One can say with fair confidence that neither The Black Stallion nor The Empire Strikes Back could have been made with such care for visual richness and imagination had they been done under studio control. Even small films on traditional subjects are difficult to get financed at a studio if there are no parts for stars in them; Peter Yates, the director of Breaking Away a graceful, unpredictable comedy that pleases and satisfies audiences took the project to one studio after another for almost six years before he could get the backing for it.

2.  There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. Heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications — the opportunity to associate with the world-famous. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the women, too; a new social, life beckons, and as they become social people with great names approach them as equals, and famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them they've heard from other studios and about ideas they have for movies. The conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they run have passed on these wonderful projects. The next day, they're on the phone raising hell with the studio bosses. Very soon, they're likely to be directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and company executives what projects should be developed. How bad is the judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven't grown up in a showbusiness milieu — they don't have the instincts or the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years. (Neither do most of the current studio bosses.) The corporate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned, have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no? Within a very short time, they are in fact, though not in title, running the studio. They turn up compliant executives who will settle for the title and not fight for the authority or for their own tastes if, in fact, they have any. The conglomerate heads find these compliant executives among lawyers and agents, among television executives, and in the lower echelons of the companies they've taken over. Generally, these executives reserve all their enthusiasm for movies that have made money; those are the only movies they like.  When a director or a writer talks to them and tries to suggest the kind of movie he has in mind by using a comparison, they may stare at him blankly. They are usually law school or business school graduates; they have no frame of reference. Worse, they have no shame about not knowing anything about movies.  From their point of view, such knowledge is not essential to their work.  Their talent is being able to anticipate their superiors' opinions; in meetings, they show a sixth sense for guessing what the most powerful person wants to hear. And if they ever guess wrong, they know how to shift gears without a tremor. So the movie companies wind up with top production executives whose interest in movies rarely extends beyond the selling possibilities; they could be selling neckties just as well as movies, except that they are drawn to glamour and power.

- Read the rest of the prohecy here.

When people say, 'Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,' my answer is… [laughs] 'Well, do you think I have worked hard all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?'" He refused to identify himself as a philosopher, historian, structuralist, or Marxist, maintaining that

"The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning".

In a similar vein, he preferred not to claim that he was presenting a coherent and timeless block of knowledge; he rather desired his books "to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area… I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers."

Reading the work of Foucault in this busy time of life helps to understand just exactly what it is I am doing in relation to what I started out doing. Amorphous yes and often not visibly structured, it is a way of moving to something that is yet to be defined if ever.

Consider the last part of Foucault's statement above; that he "writes for users not readers" and apply it to filmmaking, blogging, and so on. Has there been anything of use as a 'life tool' that you have seen in a film lately?

How about a blog?

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed the phenomenon of dumber is better. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." -A.S. Byatt

Wherever I go I am often asked “why are you so into films and books?” That’s not true. No one has asked me this in over ten years and I really don’t “go wherever”. But as a collector of sorts, I often scan my self-assembled Chinese shelves and run across books from my childhood that meant a great deal to me at the time, and as it sometimes happens, now too.

One of those books was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

The book is the story of Harriet M. Welsch, an outgoing 11-year-old girl aspiring to be a writer and a spy. Harriet lives a privileged life on the the richer side of Manhattan, an Unamerican sense of classism she reflects on throughout the book. As practice for her future career, she observes others carefully and writes everything she thinks in a notebook, which of course gets her into big trouble when her friends and neighbors found out what she has written about them.

Harriet’s nurse -like I said Harriet’s folks are rich- is Catherine Golly whom Harriet wittingly refers to as ‘Ole Golly,’ a kind of a strange figure in the book. She encourages Harriet to write down all she observes (spies) in a notebook which leads to Harriet’s downfall. Later she is fired for taking Harriet to a movie with her fiance George Waldenstein without the parent’s permission. But Ole Golly is perhaps the most honest of all the characters in the book, more than Harriet even, when she writes something devastatngly profound to Harriet after the latter’s downfall:

Essentially Ole Golly tells her that “if anyone ever reads her notebook, you have to do two things, and you don't like either one of them. 1: You have to apologize. 2: You have to lie. Otherwise you are going to lose a friend".

That is a very adult lesson, one that is hard for grown-ups to swallow much less a child. After reading this, it struck me that this passage speaks to the world of blogging about creative efforts by your friends and neighbors, creating efforts with your friends and neighbors, and how the truth can get lost in opinions, loyalty, competition, and a sense of higher (or lower) values.

I felt Rourke should have won last night but industry insiders are fickle about your past resume and let's face it, Rourke's stunning work in the Wrestler does not erase some of the crap he was in until 'the fall.'

I hope he sustains it and does some good work from now on. I mean some of his choices before the slide would have made Klaus Kinski blanch.

The Ms. and I felt like this before, during, and after the academy awards. Could not seem to shake it.

Alot of wasted e-ink has been spurted on the DIY films of Swanberg, Bujawski, and others that came to be lumped like cold bacon grease under the moniker Mumblecore. I wondered why these films and webisodes were so painful to watch (more so than many other DIY filmed efforts) and I realized after, um, viewing hipster porn videos like Sugar Town and Honey Bunny that it all fell into place.

Juliet Tang in the San Francisco Guardian came to the same conclusions as well

I realized why altporn needs to paint itself as authentic. Smith puts it best when he says, "Without genuine subcultural attributes, it quickly becomes self parody." For porn that banks on its subcultural attributes, being perceived as inauthentic means dismissed as a joke. Of all forms of cinema, porn — with its skeletally thin plots, poverty of character development, and cheap production values — is most vulnerable to lampoon. For those who have ever watched porn, I am sure you know that embarrassed, cringey, oh-my-god-ew feeling of watching a particularly ludicrous moment in any scene. That feeling is magnified tenfold when watching a hipster porno that features stars discussing Sartre while wearing nothing but tube socks, such as in Honey Bunny.

Oh yea, here cums the money shot..

Because of the push to earn cash, altporn has become less concerned with representing certain aesthetics than it is with latching on to new trends and then marketing them to get more customers.

How Swanberg and his minions talked othewise intelligent people ( Noah Baumbach, et. al) into buying it is beyond me. Maybe they promised a certain actress would do triple penetration if "the story was properly served." Smells like Hollywood to me.

If you have never seen the documentary by the Mayles Brothers, Grey Gardens, about Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale  the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, you should. The two women lived together at Grey Gardens in squalor and almost total isolation. It is not hard at all to see the anguish of "the road not taken" beneath the 'reality' luridness. Over at This Recording, Contributing Editor Georgia Hardstark ruminates

As I write this I’m sitting in my little apartment, listening to the whoosh of the Hollywood freeway outside my window, perfectly content with not seeing or talking to anyone for the rest of the night, hell, probably for the rest of the week.  Happy being in the company of my Siamese cat with whom I share little conversations with, cringing every time the phone rings, hoping that I won’t have to turn another friend down so that I could stay tucked away in my little corner of the world.  They’ll stop bothering to call eventually.

Grey Gardens scared me, because I could see a bit of myself in Little Edie.  When the photos of her as a young girl, an intensely beautiful girl, panned across the screen, I found myself willing that Edie from the past to run away.  What could she have been, had she realized her own potential and asserted herself as that “staunch woman” she assured us she was, the one who didn’t weaken, “no matter what”?  But a lot of nerve I have, ruminating over someone’s lost future while I whittle away the last of my twenties at a desk job that sucks the very soul out of me - and a writing career that I’m sure would materialize, if I had the chutzpah to devote more of my precious free time to it.  Was Edie scared of the same things I am?

                          The Academy is retar- has some serious issues.

                                          The Country on the other hand, gets it right

Myth: Chimpanzees can recognize themselves in a mirror, and this "provides clear evidence of self-awareness in chimpanzees" (Griffin, 1978).

Fact: Jaynes addresses this in the Afterword in the 1990 and later editions of his book (p. 460):

"This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The chimpanzees in this experiment and the two-year old child learned a point-to-point relation between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is. Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed on the body without a mirror. The animal is not shown to be imagining himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting in any sense — all signs of a conscious life.

For more of the theories of Julian Jaynes, go here.

Best Pic and Best Bento. Period.

Going to watch this on a biz trip to Chicagooo. (the film is "Judex")

 Can't quiet recall what movie this still is from, but her look pretty much says it all.

This is a pic from a feminist artist (again I forget the name) but it struck me that even as she hurtles toward her death in a lake of fire, she has her eyes firmly, dreamily fixed on the camera. Reality TV indeed.

Thom Andersen's 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself is not out on DVD yet but you can check out this clip of how houses in LA have been portrayed on film. Funny how the light, hillside emptiness seems to add to the cliche that LA is indeed a vacuous place for props of evil antagonist.

Note the final scene in the clip from Lethal Weapon. For those of us on the flat lands, it's what we sometimes secretly, ashamedly pray for.

It has been stewing in my brain lately that literature-my first love- and film- a close second- are beginning to lose their power, for lack of a better word, in my life. The writer at N + 1, commenting on Roberto Bolano's new novel 2666 seems to lean his horse shoe right against the stake

In Bolaño, literature is a helpless, undignified, and not especially pleasant compulsion, like smoking. At one point you started and now you can't stop; it's become a habit and an identity. Nothing is so consistent across Bolaño's work as the suspicion that literature is chiefly bullshit, rationalizing the misery, delusions, and/or narcissism of various careerists, flakes, and losers. Yet Bolaño somehow also treats literature as his and his characters' sole excuse for existing. This basic Bolaño aporia—literature is all that matters, literature doesn't matter at all—can be a glib paradox for others. He seems to have meant it sincerely, even desperately, something one would feel without knowing the first thing about his life.

Bolaño's incoherence—books mean everything and nothing; the writer is hero and jerk—has come to seem one of the few plausible literary attitudes these days. Considered simply as a job, writing is erratically paid but with flexible hours: potentially not so bad, especially with the hedge funds laying everybody off. But as a vocation? Look around, and all you see is literature and publishing faltering in tandem. People read less and less; worse yet, they're right to. It's clear that, besides the occasional small or large check, most writers—ourselves included—write out of vanity and compulsion. One believes in being a writer more, it seems, than in writing. What is it, again, you once had to say? And who, supposedly, wanted to hear it?

I know, I know there are still really talented artist producing work that hungry readers and film goers are eager to experience. And they will continue to until the cows come home. I'm just saying that for some of us the cows are just about to nod off.

Cold and wet around the Southland but it could be worse of course. LC will stay around the City of Angels wrapped in a parka juggling the despair of being with It's a wonderful life.

Ending wish/rally/blurt for 2008 is a mangled quote from Franz Kafka: "When it comes down to you or reality, bet on..reality."

Folks, have a wonderful Christmas, etc., etc.

As 2008 draws to a thankful close (and don't come back again!) some folks are musing aloud about the state of the business of filmed entertainment. Does 'reality' programming make good financial sense? Will Ponzi schemes (illegal and legal) affect Hollywood capital? How long will this internet youtube thing really last?

Questions like these not only keep Executives up at night but also the manufactuers of sleep aids in the black of healthy profits.

But I would rather light a candle than curse their darkness.

I propose-no matter how hard or worn-out the cliche is- that execs and creative personnel concentrate on damn good stories and writing from the get-go. Force-feed the kids if necessary, dammit. Otherwise, when you keep feeding people junk- I hesitate to use the word "food" here- matter' is more to the point- like the gems from "The Love Guru" below, then you are really just relying on the audience's desire to escape into a dark, smelly theater or a depressed, shuttered living room with a cheap flatscreen and regionless DVD as their only companions, as opposed to being genuinely entertained.

Rajneesh: [answering cell phone] This is Chip from Dell Computers...

Guru Pitka: If your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your Uncle Jack off an elephant?

Jacques Grande: Don't look at me with that tone of voice or I will punch you in the shirt!

Guru Pitka: Give me a pound. Lock it down. Break the pickle. Tickle, Tickle!

Not a very good business model.

If you were to mention the name Harvey Milk to a high school classs in Chicago, IL., probably 2 in 10 might know who he is. The numbers might go up however, as the new bio-pic starring Sean Penn and directed by Gus Van Zant is maybe (?) opening wide in the coming weeks. So in honor of Mr. Milk,  here is very personal appreciation by an actor friend here in LA who shall remain annonymous. He caught the WGA screening last week

OK, I just got home from a screening of MILK at the WGA. WHAT AN AMAZING FUCKING MOVIE (yes, I have had some wine, but I would have told you the same thing if I could have emailed you right after seeing it) I know you will see it, but my goal is for my family to see it. There was a reception after, and I said this to Dan Jinks (producer) and Dustin Lance Black (writer) - Gus Van Sant wasn't there : ( 

Apparently not. Highest grossing cotton-candy by a fem director ever.

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had
twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of
l’entre deux guerres -
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind
of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better
of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or
the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so
each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what
there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already
been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom
one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover
what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now,
under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither
gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not
our business.

–T. S. Eliot
East Coker
Four Quartets