Deckard as Bogart

I confess, I have not seen all five versions of Blade Runner [1982] contained in the five-dvd "Ultimate Collector's Edition" issued in December 2007 for the noir-fi's 25th anniversary. Let's see, there's the original theatrical release, the original international release, the director's cut released in 1992, the new "final cut," and, exclusive to this set, a "workprint" cut. Me, I want the replica of Deckard's briefcase which houses the set.

This came to mind because of a discussion with my friend and colleague, Curtis Matthews, on twitter yesterday. He asked whether I consider the director's cut of Blade Runner a sequel, which I don't, but it's a good question. The versions of Blade Runner are dramatically different, especially with respect to the voiceover by Deckard [Harrison Ford] and the happy ending with Deckard and Rachel [Sean Young]. Both were included in the original theatrical release, and while the final romantic escape felt a bit disingenuous, I prefer the versions of the film which include at least some of Deckard's voiceover. Our film fiend/friend Wes Wise chimed in that he found the director's cut felt empty without the voiceover, and I think he has a point. The voiceover is one of the strongest links between Blade Runner and the classic films noir of the 1940s and 1950s, Deckard as world-weary, anti-hero detective. Deckard as Bogart.

best sequel ever

I’m not sure exactly how I ended up with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II [1974] in my dvd player, probably when the “Coppola Restoration” discs were released last September, I placed it on my Netflix queue and here it was. This digital restoration is eye-popping in its clarity, the areas of the image in shadow have come to life once more, and the full palate of Gordon Willis’ extraordinary cinematography and Technicolor’s three-strip dye transfer processing is truly mind-blowing.

As for the unavoidable comparisons with The Godfather [1972], Part II only exists and makes sense in relation to the first film, but evaluated side by side is clearly the greater achievement. Film scholar David Bordwell perhaps explained it best in 1979 when he wrote, “we might consider The Godfather as a classical narrative film and The Godfather Part II as more of an art film.” The first couple of times the narrative moves back and forth between Vito Corleone’s life as a young immigrant and his son Michael’s rise to power half a century later, titles orient us to the time and place, but soon the slow dissolves separating these stories connected by the first film make sense and feel right. Vito’s story was adapted from Mario Puzo’s novel by Coppola and the novelist, while Coppola wrote the 1950s story arc, before Apocalypse Now [1979] robbed him of the ability to tell a coherent story.

The performances in Part II are as awesome and sobering as the images and story, and the film’s elements come together in an epilogue as devastating as any ever filmed. The third film, released in 1990, was understandably irresistable to make, but we should do ourselves the favor of pretending it doesn’t exist except as an unrelated, better-than-average mob flick. However, to think that between the first and second Godfather films, Coppola made The Conversation [1974] with Gene Hackman, well it just doesn’t hardly matter what he made before or since. Where’s my Netflix queue?

Jon Stewart's trickle up economics

This is a good interview anyway, with two of my favorite anchors, Jon Stewart and Gwen Ifill. But in passing, Stewart proposed an economic recovery plan that would save the banks and erase consumer debt, the proverbial two birds with one stone:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=216987&title=gwen-ifill

trailer trash talk

I'm preparing to run a focus group or two this spring on movie trailers, basic research designed to collect some evidence for subsequent work. One seemingly widely shared feeling about trailers is that, with all the economic pressure placed on opening weekend grosses, trailers often tell us too much about the movies they advertise, giving away plot developments and gags best experienced while watching the movie itself. Basically, the folks marketing the movie don't care whether they impoverish the experience of actually watching it, as long as people buy tickets. I'm also interested in the meteoric rise of trailers online, how that might be different than seeing them on television or in theaters. Have the new "red band" trailers for R-rated movies made any difference in what movies people see or why? Open to suggestions here, let me know what you think, thanks.

awards season in full swing

The ensemble cast award at last night's Screen Actors Guild ceremony went to Slumdog Millionaire, which also won the Producers Guild of America top feature award the night before, and a Best Picture nomination for the upcoming Academy Awards. Does anyone outside of the industry care?

Charlie Rose hosted an interesting conversation Friday with A. O. Scott and David Denby about the Oscar noms and movies generally, and in another day or so it should be online at www.charlierose.com. In the meantime, David Carr wrote an amusing column about the year-end glut of good movies in a generally mediocre year, and the frustrations of trying to watch movies with, you know, movie audiences.

Finally, for those of us with neither the time nor the money to spend the past week and a half in Park City, Utah, here are this year's Sundance winners:

Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Documentary We Live in Public
Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Dramatic Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary Rough Aunties
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic The Maid (La Nana)
Audience Award: U.S. Documentary The Cove
Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic Push
World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary Afghan Star
World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic An Education
Directing Award: U.S. Documentary El General, director Natalia Almada
Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic Sin Nombre, written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary Afghan Star, directed by Havana Marking
World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi, Paper Heart
World Cinema Screenwriting Award Guy Hibbert, Five Minutes of Heaven
U.S. Documentary Editing Award Sergio
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award Burma VJ
Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary The September Issue, cinematographer Bob Richman
Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic Sin Nombre, cinematographer Adriano Goldman
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary Big River Man, director/cinematographer John Maringouin
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic An Education, cinematographer John De Borman
World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Originality Louise-Michel
World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Documentary Tibet in Song
World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Acting Catalina Saavedra, The Maid (La Nana)
Special Jury Prize: U.S. Documentary Good Hair
Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence Humpday
Special Jury Prize for Acting Mo'Nique, Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire

The week that was

The inauguration was moving, in spite of a few minor glitches: there should have been some indication that most of the crowd was hearing a recording of YoYo Ma and Itzhak Perlman as they played; and, more importantly, the re-do of the swearing in should have been on television, if only to keep the right-wing nuts from having one more hook upon which to hang their suspicions. Speaking of right-wing nuts, Rush Limbaugh had to express the hope that President Obama's economic recovery plan fails on ideological grounds. As the "loyal opposition" expresses concern over the amount of deficit spending the President is requesting, I can't help but wonder why they didn't raise similar concerns as George W. Bush turned a budget surplus into the largest deficit in history. Why was it ok to spend money we didn't have to fight the war in Iraq, but not to prevent even more foreclosures and unemployment here at home? One of the great strengths of our nation and culture is that we are pragmatic enough to put common sense ahead of ideology. I know Rush has to be angry and outrageous to keep his listeners, but at what point are his words unpatriotic?

President Obama on screen

An unusual collaboration between The New York Times' two first-string film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, produced an insightful and timely essay on Friday about the development of male African-American personae on the big and small screens over the past fifty years: "Barack Obama's victory in November demonstrated, to the surprise of many Americans and much of the world, that we were ready to see a black man as president. Of course, we had seen several black presidents already, not in the real White House but in the virtual America of movies and television." Dargis and Scott connect the dots which link Sidney Poitier, blaxploitation, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington, among others, and point out that Dennis Haybert's president on 24 may have not just suggested Barack Obama was in our near future, but helped make it so.

Which side are you on?

An interesting, provocative question, asked most pointedly by musician Billy Bragg in the 1980s referring to class struggle in the context of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

But I heard it again in a graduate seminar this week, in a very different context. My background is in humanities-based film studies, but I'm in an empirical, social scientific Mass Communications program at Texas Tech, so this has involved a lot of getting with the program. The most difficult transition for me is to A.P.A. style (M.L.A. is better, Chicago is my favorite); A.P.A. does not use first names of authors or capitalize most words in book titles.

The big dichotomy in the social sciences generally, and in Mass Comm especially, is between quantitative and qualititative research methods. The clearest way to think about the difference is that quantitative research translates data into numbers so it can be analyzed statistically. The question posed in class this week was whether content analysis is a qualitative or quantitative method.

The consensus is quantitative, and certainly, most content analyses I've read include statistical data analysis. But here's my point: the coding of content in order to make it quantitative is a qualitative process.

A series of studies examining sexual and violent content in movie trailers by Mary Beth Oliver, et al. illustrates my point. In 2002, the authors conducted extensive content analyses of movie trailers and found that "approximately 76% of the previews in their sample featured at least one act of aggression (with an average of 2.5 aggressive acts per minute), and that 56% of the previews featured at least one sexual scene (with an average of 1.5 sexual scenes per minute)" (p. 597).

This is interesting, useful information, the kind of empirical evidence of commonly believed generalizations in which social science can excel. But these numbers were based on carefully articulated definitions of aggressive and sexual content -- is a character holding a weapon an aggressive act, for instance?

Not only do these numbers require qualitative judgments in order to be collected in the first place, they require qualitative contextualization in order to create any meaningful conclusions. In a subsequent study, Oliver et al. wrote, "Given that movie trailers have only an abbreviated amount of time in which to overview the plot of a film and to pique viewers' interest, violent content may effectively function as a quick and unambiguous indicator that the film will contain dramatic conflict..." (p. 599).

I am new to the social sciences, but when asked whether I'm interested in doing quantitative or qualitative research, my defiant answer is that purely quantitative questions only exist in the world of mathematics and statistics.

* * *

Reference: Mary Beth Oliver, et al., "Sexual and Violent Imagery in Movie Previews: Effects on Viewers' Perceptions and Anticipated Enjoyment," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 51.4 (2007), 596-614.

24 more

I confess, I only got part of the way through the four-hour season premiere of FOX's 24. It would have been hard to believe when this show premiered in 2001 that it would have the legs to begin a seventh season, but then again, 2001 was an appropriate year to premiere a series about counterterrorism [life imitates art, again?].

I started watching it because of the real-time structure, and the producers have had the good sense to keep that, even when it has created credibility issues. Before 24, it was difficult to explain the concept of "real time" to students, now it's relatively easy. That's something.

What is hardest to take is Jack Bauer's constant sense of urgency, Kiefer Sutherland's earnest-o.d. is exhausting to watch, to the point of self-parody. Sure enough, season 7 begins with a congressional hearing at which Bauer admits to using torture against terrorist suspects, but has to be excused on national security grounds because there are more bad guys to catch and torture. It's as though Bauer is one part James Bond and one part Dick Cheney.

On the other hand, 24 gave us an African-American president before our current president-elect was on the national scene, and any show that gets Janeane Garofalo on weekly network tv can't be all bad.

Globes

There are many reasons to prefer the Golden Globe Awards over the Oscars, my personal favorite is the division of major categories into comedies/musicals on the one hand and dramas on the other, and the inclusion of movies and tv side by side. That the talent is seated at tables with drinks rather than the formal theater seating of most awards presentations often makes the Globes more fun to attend and to watch.

The evening's big winners were, most surprisingly, Slumdog Millionaire (best picture-drama, best director, best screenplay, and best score) and Kate Winslet (best actress for Revolutionary Road and best supporting actress for The Reader). Less surprising were multiple awards for 30 Rock and HBO's John Adams. The evening's comeback kid was Mickey Rourke, although the west coast feed didn't include The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky flipping Rourke the finger in jest. Least surprising award of the evening was Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight, and director Christopher Nolan rose to the occasion with a brief but eloquent acknowledgement.

I also got a kick out of seeing Marty Scorsese present the Cecil B. DeMille award to Steven Spielberg, but the clear favorites in front of the microphone were Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey, who told her internet haters to "suck it." As I wrote in a post last fall, "If nothing is sexier than wit, Tina Fey is a goddess."

Why isn't Warner Bros. on Twitter?

Online buzz has reached a deafening pitch in the studio dispute over Watchmen, as a scheduled hearing before Federal District Judge Gary A. Feess was postponed Friday at the request of lawyers for Warner Bros. Pictures and 20th Century Fox [see today's update in The New York Times].

Links to an open letter about the dispute from Watchmen producer Lloyd Levin on Drew McWeeny's Motion Captured blog on Thursday were posted hundreds of times in individual tweets. Given WB's presence on Facebook and MySpace, it is curious that they have not chosen to put their Twitter account to better use.

Meanwhile, fans of the extraordinary 1980s graphic novel seem relieved that the $130 million movie adaptation's scheduled release on March 6 may materialize on time.