Boyhood, True Detective, and the Blurring of the Film/Television Divides

As recently as last year, the differences between cinema and television felt reasonably clear. Cinema told stories by a single creative voice or team, filmed in a relatively contained time span. Television told much larger stories by vastly (r)evolving sets of creators, spanning years and years. But 2014 may go down in history as the year those divisions became murkier than we ever thought possible, to the extent that divisions may not even exist in the near future. Two works are primarily responsible for this, The HBO show True Detective, which aired in the first three months of the year, and the Richard Linklater film Boyhood, which is in theaters now.

True Detective was aired on television, but it was really an eight-hour movie. It was written by one screenwriter, filmed by one director, starred movie stars, and has no plans to continue the stories of any of its characters. Boyhood is a three hour film, but it was created and filmed over the course of twelve years, watching its actors age in real time, and each year's worth of shooting script was created at that time, based on where the creators wanted the story to travel each year of their collaboration. All of these elements of both projects are either relatively rare and risky for their medium, or complete innovations that we've never seen before. Both projects were viewed as huge risks with potentially crazy business models. Both projects yielded amazing results that could change their industries for years and decades to come.

Boyhood is the year's best film thus far, and is a mortal lock to remain towards the top of that list. It's not simply about watching a person grow and evolve over the entirety of their adolescence, but really about watching what life is at its core. When I've described the film to people and urged them to see it, they've sometimes asked me what the point of it is. Ultimately, I think the point of the film for each individual viewer will be whatever that person thinks the point of life is. As you watch a life unfold, and seemingly random, unimportant days and conversations slowly shape a person into who he will be, it provokes a self-reflection of value and purpose. What is the point of it all? How and why am I who I am? What moments happened when I was eight, or ten, or thirteen, that fundamentally created the person I am now?

A lot of great cinema has provoked these questions before; that's nothing new in and of itself. But the method is. Boyhood is occasionally being compared to Michael Apted's Up documentaries, which set out to interview the same group of people every seven years to see how their lives and goals changed over time. But while those films did allow us to see the same people at seven-years old, fourteen-years old, and so on, we had to (initially) wait seven years and watch a different film to see each age. Boyhood is a (kind of) complete life experience in one sitting.

True Detective wasn't as thematically ambitious, but it's business model of having a continuing show where each season has no characters or settings in common with the previous one is pretty radical. Yes, American Horror Story beat True Detective to the punch in this regard by a little over a year, but the key difference is in how each show used this model. American Horror Story did so almost secretively, while True Detective shouted it from the rooftops. True Detective wanted you to know that each season was its own thing, and would not be continued. It wanted you to understand that it was able to sign on A-List movie stars because of its very ability to not require an actor to be locked in for several seasons. It wanted you to know that you didn't have to commit to some five-plus-season-long meandering vision, that this was an eight-week deal, so you needn't worry about getting attached to some saga that will take five years to answer any of your questions. Everything that American Horror Story did almost incidentally, True Detective heavily advertised as key reasons to tune in.

It needs to be pointed out that this is the exact opposite of how television financially banked on itself in the past. What made successful television over the last six decades was the assurance of relative perpetuity; the idea that something was being created which could then be counted on for stable financial gain over a very long period of time. Television had always been in the real estate business. The great television shows used to be like Stan Lee's manifesto for Marvel Comics: give only the illusion of change, while actually creating a status quo that can theoretically exist forever. Of course prestige shows have been hacking that model to death for years now. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and their ilk have thrived on actual change far more than any illusion of such, but the key continuance has been the show itself. We still tune in, year in and year out, to see where these characters will go, and the networks that control them know we will. But with True Detective, whether or not we tune in again next year doesn't have anything to do with seeing where any of it will go. It's gone. That story was told, and next year will be a different one. It's television officially turning into a cinematic business model: give people something they'll pay to see, and worry about the next source of income later.

So what does all this mean? What does it mean that one of the best television shows of the year gave us a singular eight-hour experience that won't be returned to, and that one of the year's best films gave us a decades-spanning experience that was created over the same span of time as it portrays? Well, it means a lot. For television, it means that the steady branding networks have depended on for success since the dawn of television might not be important anymore in the near future. It means that instead of trying to sell talented people on the idea of signing in to projects that they'll be chained to for years, those same creative people can now be sold on the idea of creating an eight hour movie, where their "vision" doesn't have to be burdened by the realities of how long an audience is willing to sit still in a theater. Why have top tier filmmakers historically never gone to television (with the occasional exceptions of a Martin Scorsese or David Fincher directing a pilot episode, and then scaling back to however hands off "executive producer" allows them to be)? Because why would they? That would just be signing up for creative stagnancy instead of the ability to follow their muse in any given year. But the True Detective model (as it will inevitably be called) will allow for that. It will allow for their muse to be followed, with a greater freedom of depth than a standard film run-time allows for. We've already seen it again now with Steven Soderbergh and Cinemax's The Knick, which he quickly filmed like a ten hour movie. This is about to start happening very frequently, and five years from now, it may be the new norm.

With Boyhood, the major miracle is in the green light. A lot of business models require funding and investment that won't be returned for more than ten years. Good scotch, for example. But film has never been one of those. Think about this in financial terms: someone ponied up millions of dollars for an art-house director to film the same core set of four people over the course of twelve years, and then release a three-hour film with no plot at the end of those dozen years. It required beginning with a six-year old, banking that this person will grow up in a vaguely normal way, stay heathy, stay interested, and basically that nothing will go wrong. Because, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to depend on a six-year old for, and to risk millions of dollars over. But… it worked (!). Boyhood is a hit. Audiences are melting over it. Critics are running out of laudatory adjectives. Personally, I haven't begged this many people to see a movie since probably The Social Network in 2010, when I spent months workshopping different ways to tell people over the age of forty that, "it's not really about Facebook." What began over twelve years ago as an asinine financial risk looks today like one of the best investments in creative vision that a Hollywood producer has ever doled out.

I don't know if the "Boyhood model" will become a thing quite as obviously as the True Detective model will. Even though it took television roughly seventy years to figure this out, it's already clear how and why the True Detective model will quickly become the new norm. The future for projects like Boyhood is much hazier. The financial risk of fronting money for something that can't earn a dime for over a decade will never become un-risky. Banking on actors--a profession where people notoriously don't stay sane and normal for long periods of time--to dependably create something over years and years without courting disaster might not ever become a common-place thing. But the business lesson of Boyhood doesn't have to be in creating a new norm--just a new possibility. That's what great art does; it keeps breaking through with new possibility.

Song of the Day: James Brown - Down and Out In New York City (1973)

The biggest change in my taste over the last five years is undoubtedly how much more soul/blues/jazz/rap I listen to now, or for lack of a better term, black music. I had always liked soul, with Otis Redding and Sam & Dave having been amongst my favorites since my early-20s, but I hadn't fully gotten into James Brown until more recently. Sure, I owned Live at the Apollo and a hits compilation, because those are mandatory if you love pop music, but I didn't start fully immersing myself into his catalogue until the last few years, and now I just can't get enough. He's absolutely my all-time favorite African-American artist now, and I've amassed a pretty substantial collection of his music. To be fair, a lot of Brown's music is startlingly similar. He basically had three phases of his career: the early soul years, the years from about '65-'70 when he pretty much invented the future trajectory of black music, and then everything since, which mostly held to the formula. But Brown is one of those artists for which digging through the stacks and dustbins of his recorded output will always yield a lot of rewards, because he recorded so much material, and maintained such a consistently high standard of quality. 

Down and Out in New York City is my favorite Brown discovery of the last few years, a song so good that I still can't fathom why it appears on so few of his Best Of compilations. It was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Black Caesar in 1973, which was one of a handful of hugely successful Blaxploitation soundtracks from that era (with Shaft and Superfly being the two most notable). It actually sounds somewhat dissimilar from a lot of Brown's other work at the time, probably because he didn't write this song (a major rarity for him), and it's more of a pure soul song for the era. But Brown still adds just enough funk to make it clearly his own, and the result is stunning. That someone can release a four disc box set of his best work, and this song didn't even make the cut, will forever amaze me. For those of you hearing it for the first time, I hope it blows your mind just as much as it did mine.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 21, 2014

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Song of the Day: The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (1971)

Yesterday was Pete Townshend's birthday, and there were a million Facebook tributes to him, so here's one more.

The Who were the first non-contemporary-to-myself musical artist that I truly obsessed over, and they were my favorite artist ever for a solid 3-4 years before my Springsteen love went into overdrive. They were definitely the first artist that I accumulated 10 or more CDs by (a statement that now describes MANY artists). I loved how they kept reinventing themselves and pushing what they were, from the early days of mod/punk/garage/ "maximum R&B" to the rock operas to virtually inventing classic rock, Townshend could never artistically sit still. 

I don't know if Who's Next is my favorite version of the band anymore, but it certainly was for a long time, and nothing represents that better than the epic album closer, Won't Get Fooled Again. Most of my favorite songs always have a moment where the music and the aural experience becomes truly transcendent to me, and I think this is the song that first made me realize that was something I look for. The long synth solo that builds to an explosion of drums at the 7:30 mark, which then culminates with rock and roll's greatest ever scream at the 7:45 mark, is about as orgasmic as rock music can get. It doesn't mean as much to me now as it did when I was 16 (when rock music was still the only place I could look to for orgasms) but it's still damn great.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 20, 2014

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Song of the Day: The Kinks - Powerman (1970)

I recently re-watched Wes Anderson's wonderful The Darjeeling Limited (which, for my money, is his second best film after The Royal Tenenbaums), and I was reminded how well Anderson uses three different songs from the 1970 Kinks album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround in the film. The sequences using these Kinks songs each feature slow motion movement of the characters, no dialogue or diegetic sound, and showcase the three most important moments in the film. Anderson has used pop songs like this in several of his films, and occasionally takes criticism for being too hipster in the doing, but the sequences almost always work for me. 

Powerman is the best of the three Kinks songs he uses here, and it soundtracks the film's iconic moment where the three Whitman brothers literally (and figuratively) shed their father's baggage (seen at the 3:23 moment of the included video). That this song wasn't a single, doesn't appear on Kinks' Best Of compilations, and isn't likely to be heard on the radio is apropos. Somehow, the Kinks just never quite made it in America, where they're almost regarded as a three-hit-wonder (with You Really Got Me, Lola, and Come Dancing being the three "hits"). But in England, they were probably the fourth biggest band of the 60's, and virtually everything they released from 1964-1971 is outstanding. The conventional wisdom suggests they were "too English" to make it in America, and that's a shame. They recorded dozens and dozens of songs this good during their peak, and they're all worth checking out. Powerman is nothing more than an effective example of what they did all the time.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 19, 2014

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Song of the Day: Nancy Sinatra - You Only Live Twice (1967)

It's funny sometimes how songs that you've loved for a long time can take on entirely new meanings when placed in a different context. You Only Live Twice was the title song from the fifth James Bond film, released in 1967, and it has been my favorite Bond song for as long as I can remember. I love the epic string intro, the vocal and lyric, and the Japanese musical elements that echo the film's settings. I also love the way it was sampled in the great Robbie Williams song "Millennium."

But then came the end of Mad Men season 5, with this song playing over the final montage that closed out the season (which, for my money, has been the show's best season). I can't recall a more perfect choice of music being paired with visuals and thematics. As each of the show's main characters settles into their new status quos, Nancy Sinatra's beautiful voice makes us question whether these are the lives they're living for themselves, or the ones for their dreams. And then there's Don Draper's great ambiguous look before the fade to black. Ever since that moment, this song has been elevated in my mind into one of the best pure pop songs of the 60's.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 18, 2014

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The Great Scenes: The Last of the Mohicans and What Perfect Filmmaking Looks Like

This is the last nine minutes of the 1992 Michael Mann adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, and it's as good an answer as any to the question of why I think film is the greatest art form. At 1:07 of this clip, the music starts, and at 1:24, the last word is spoken. The eight minutes after that is the most exciting, seductive, and breathtaking filmmaking you will ever see. 

Most (though definitely not all) good films have quality story, dialogue, and acting. Those are all important, but not the keys to great cinema. None of those are what sets cinema apart. After all, theater has each of those as well. What great cinema does is control the exact visual and sonic sensation you experience while still letting you experience it on your own terms. Three things combine to do that, and more than anything, they're what come together to create the art of filmmaking: editing, photography, and sound. Never have those three artistic elements been better used in unison than in these eight minutes.

The stunning score creates the tempo and the editing drives it. The location photography transports us to one of the most beautiful settings imaginable (taking place in upstate New York but filmed in North Carolina), but balances that setting with the savagery of the capacity for humans to inflict pain on one another. Everything Michael Mann and his team accomplish here is about absolute precision. The duration of the shots, the angles and distances of the camera, the use of filming death from above and leaps into the abyss from below, the subtle and occasional deployment of slow-motion, the way the driving nature of the music takes a break during the deaths around five and six minutes in before kicking back into full gear for the next action piece… It's all masterly composition in the most literal sense.

Every moment is an exercise in total control over what Mann wants us to see and hear, but what we think and feel comes from us. There's no exposition or explanation in anything that happens, it's all just pure action. It's the film version of shoot first, answer questions never. Mann has a gift of lingering in his direction where he tends to hold shots on characters in transitional moments for longer than other directors, and it allows the audience more of an opportunity to get in the heads of the characters. But these shots are usually devoid of dialogue, which ensures that the character's head is the only place we can go. Mann's films are almost never silent; music is far too important to him as a tool to dictate emotion, pacing, and mood. But his films are never overly talky, either. His characters are always given breathing room for the viewer to feel their situation without being talked to death about it.

Over the last 20 years, Daniel Day Lewis has become more of a star character actor, and retreated from really being a movie star. He disappears into his roles so much that we no longer know what he looks like in "normal" life. I don't know that this is ever what he looked like normally, even in 1992, but it is a wonderful anomaly in his career how much he allowed himself to be a visual star in this film, and how much Mann took advantage. Daniel Day Lewis isn't likely who people think about as a sexy, masculine, lead actor, but that's what he gives in this role. His screen presence is commanding, but not via the voice that he's used so well in his career. His physical presence just soaks up the screen.

Whenever I find myself questioned about why I believe filmmaking is the most potent art form (sometimes even questioned by myself), it's scenes like this that I go back to. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people collaborated to bring these eight minutes into existence, but we got the best out of each of them. It's that ability for the many parts and collaborators to create the greatest of all wholes that ensures filmmaking is the greatest of all arts.

Song of the Day Archive

The Bangles - Hazy Shade of Winter (1987)
Beck - Loser (1994, sort of)
Blind Faith - Had to Cry Today (1969)
Blur - This Is a Low (1994)
James Brown - Down and Out In New York City (1973)
Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye (1994)
The Jim Carroll Band - People Who Died (1980)
Neko Case - Man (2013)
Johnny Cash - The Man Who Couldn't Cry (1994)
Cat Power - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (2000)
The Clash - Armagideon Time (1979)
Coldplay - Life In Technicolor (2008)
Counting Crows - Mr. Jones (1994)
Steve Earle - I Feel Alright (1996)
The Faces - Maybe I'm Amazed (1971)
The Faces - Cindy Incidentally (1973)
Peter Gabriel - I Don't Remember (1980)
Green Day - Welcome to Paradise (1994)
Hall & Oates - You Make My Dreams (1981)
John Hiatt - Have a Little Faith In Me (1987)
INXS - The Strangest Party (These Are the Times) (1994)
Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American (2001)
The Kinks - Powerman (1970)
Kiss - Black Diamond (1974)
Fela Kuti - Lady (1972)
Live - Iris (1994)
Paul McCartney - Jenny Wren (2005)
Mickey & Sylvia - Love Is Strange (1956)
Nas - Represent (1994)
The National - This Is the Last Time (2013)
Nine Inch Nails - Hurt (1994)
Nirvana - About a Girl (Unplugged, 1994)
Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (1994)
Oasis - Columbia (1994)
Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information (1974)
Pearl Jam - Not For You (1994)
Liz Phair - Supernova (1994)
Iggy Pop - Candy (1990)
Portishead - Mysterons (1994)
Prince - 17 Days (1984)
Martha Reeves & The Vandellas - Nowhere to Run (1965)
R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth? (1994)
The Rolling Stones - Sweet Virginia (1972)
The Rolling Stones - Saint Of Me (1997)
Sam & Dave - I Thank You (1968)
Gil Scott-Heron - Ain't No New Thing (1972)
Seal - Kiss From a Rose (1994)
Nancy Sinatra - You Only Live Twice (1967)
Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun (1994)
Spoon - Got Nuffin (2010)
Bruce Springsteen - No Surrender (1984)
Rod Stewart - Man of Constant Sorrow (1969)
Stone Temple Pilots - Interstate Love Song (1994)
The Stooges - Down On the Street (1970)
Otis Taylor - Ten Million Slaves (2002)
Timbaland - The Way I Are (2007)
TV On The Radio - Second Song (2011)
Uncle Tupelo - Life Worth Livin' (1990)
Weezer - In the Garage (1994)
Weezer - Tired of Sex (1996)
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (1971)
Wilco - I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002)
Peter Wolf - Nothing But the Wheel (2002)
Stevie Wonder - Uptight (Everything's Alright) (1965)

Song of the Day: Peter Wolf - Nothing But the Wheel (2002)

Peter Wolf first came to fame as the singer of the J. Geils Band, but he's reinvented himself over the last 15ish years as a roots-rocking singer songwriter, and it's been a nice development. He reached his post Geils peak with his 2002 album, Sleepless, which is a strong contender for greatest album ever released by a pop artist over 50. This song features great backing vocals by Mick Jagger.

I was lucky enough to see Peter Wolf at a small venue in Ann Arbor, the Ark, just last week, and it was a truly wonderful show. It was one of those shows where the entire history of music just seemed to flow out of the narrative, with country, soul, rock, blues, jazz, and everything else all taking their turns to shine. In-between the songs Wolf told fun stories about his 45 year history in pop music, with Jagger, Merle Haggard, Dylan, Johnny Cash, Neko Case, Shelby Lynn, and several others taking key parts of the narrative. And that's what music ought to be to someone like Wolf- this ever flowing thing that keeps rewriting it's own story.

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 17, 2014

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Song of the Day: John Hiatt - Have a Little Faith in Me (1987)

Okay, here's a new thing I'm gonna try: a Song of the Day, every day. Each day, I'll pick something that I've either discovered recently, been listening to recently, is relevant at the moment for some particular reason, or just feel like discussing, and I'll write a few sentences paragraphs about it as well as posting the Youtube video. 

First up, a great artist I've recently gotten into named John Hiatt, who's first album actually came out 40 years ago. He's perhaps best known for other artists covering his songs, such as "Riding With the King," which became the title track of an album by Eric Clapton and B.B. King, or "Thing Called Love," which became a huge hit for Bonnie Raitt in 1989. But his most covered song is actually this one, "Have a Little Faith in Me." It's a great song to represent Hiatt for several reasons, but first and foremost, it's just damn well written. Great melody, lyric, and performance, not too flashy, doesn't try to be cool or commercial… just a guy making the music he loves, in the only way he knows how. It's also from his best album, 1987's Bring the Family, which was recorded with some amazing help--Ry Cooder on guitar, Nick Lowe on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums. I've been listening to Hiatt a lot lately, so some more of his stuff will probably turn up here in the next few weeks. 

This was originally written and posted on Facebook on May 16, 2014

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The Great Scenes: City Slickers and the Best & Worst Days of Your Life

I first saw City Slickers when it came out, and I was either 10 or 11-years old. It's probably the first non-children's movie I ever recall seeing in theaters. It's also the first film that ever made me think about life, and actually ask questions about real things. It's possible this revelation could have happened with any film, but I'm lucky it was with such a great one. City Slickers is a silly comedy in a lot of respects, but the film is filled with moments of such startling emotional truth that they stay with you forever. I've found myself constantly going back to the film throughout my life, as each new phase of myself finds new lessons within the movie and new ways to feel about what it has to say. I just re-watched it a few weeks ago, for probably the first time in five years, and more and more as I get older, this is the single scene that resonates with me the most. In terms of filmmaking, it's nothing special. But simply as a written scene, it has some of the best dialogue ever. It's three minutes that, to me, inform on the totality of the male emotional spectrum.

Here's the set-up: Mitch (Billy Crystal), Phil (Daniel Stern), and Ed (Bruno Kirby) are all around 40-years old and experiencing major mid-life crises. Mitch is a pessimist who keeps dwelling on how much he hates every aspect of his life. Phil hates his wife, cheated on her with a twenty-year old that works for him, and is about to go through a messy divorce. Ed is a super-macho adventurer who is constantly testing the limits of his own manliness, and just got married to a model fifteen years younger than him. So to get away from their lives, they go to New Mexico for two weeks to take part in a real cattle drive.

Now watch the scene:

Even though the three main characters are all pretty standard archetypes (one hates being his age, one hates his home life, and one hates just about everything), the way they talk about the best and worst moments of their lives is nothing short of incredible emotional truth. Each answer feels perfectly true to each character, perfectly true to what real life answers men might/would give, and perfectly true to what it feels like to wrestle with the responsibilities of male adulthood.

Each of the Best Day answers the three characters give involves their father. For Mitch, it's a shared bonding experience with his father, for Phil, it's a moment where his father was visibly proud of him, and for Ed, it's a moment where he stood up to his father. Each of these different elements of father/son dynamics speaks to the set of expectations we have on ourselves as we relate to our parents. What special memories do we share with them? When did we most fulfill our expectations for ourselves and their expectations for us? Is fulfilling those expectations important, or is forging off on our own what's actually important to us?

Not only does each answer involve the character's relationships with their dads, but also involves the character's relationship with the passage of time. Phil hates his wife and hates everything about his existence, so his best day is the last time he doesn't remember feeling that way. It was a day before the onset of that feeling existed, when he thought he'd made it. For Mitch, who looks at the pessimistic side of everything, his best day was a day when everything seemed better than it could have been. He saw his first baseball game in color. The grass was so green. It was an occasion where he couldn't figure out how to be pessimistic, maybe the only one of his life. And for Ed, it was the moment he felt like he became an adult. It was, he believes, the most transitional day of his life, and a transition that he's proud of how he handled. It's a moment that's defined his idea of manhood ever since.

Each of their worst days involves the aspect of themselves they're most insecure with. Mitch knows he looks at the worst of everything, so his worst day is a day where the only possible conclusion he could see was breast cancer. It ended up fine, so Ed argues that it was a good day. But that's not how Mitch thinks. Things don't end up good, they just end up slightly less terrible. Because Phil's best day was the day he felt like a grown-up that had made it and his father was proud, his worst day was the proof that none of that could actually bring happiness: "Every day since is a tie," because every day since has been proof that happiness is not a status quo that sustains itself. Phil feels like his whole life is a failure, so how can one day be worse than any other? Better to just count them all. Ed's best and worst day were the same day because it was the moment he left childhood and became an adult. It's a struggle he's been reconciling for his whole life; how to be his age and be a man, but still seek out the childhood that he left behind too prematurely.

Six questions, six answers, six moments of perfect emotional honesty.

I often wonder what the rough drafts of scenes like this looked like. How many different possible answers to these six questions did the screenwriter cycle through and abandon before settling on the perfect six? What was the first version of Mitch's best day? Did all three best days always involve their fathers, or was that a commonality that only manifested in later revisions? Could the screenwriter initially not think of a good second answer for Ed, so he finally went with the "same day" answer that actually works perfectly, or was it always like that?

I also wonder where in the writing process scenes like this emerge. Did this scene just get written naturally as part of the high concept set-up for the movie? Like, of course three middle-age friends on a cattle drive would end up talking about their successes and failures in life? Or was it actually the opposite order of events, that the screenwriter wanted to write a scene like this--three middle-aged men being emotionally naked and discussing the best and worst days of their lives--and constructed a large story around which a conversation like this would seem natural? Does writing a scene like this help create for the writer who these characters were, or were they already fully formed enough that this scene was easy to write?

Great film moments always make me want to discuss them with their creators. Sometimes it's the choice of music to accompany a scene; sometimes it's the pacing or the use of specific camera angles and shot distances; sometimes it's the editing. With this scene, none of those formalistic elements of cinema are used in notable ways, but they didn't need to be. Formalism draws attention to itself, and this scene doesn't deserve to have our brains diverted from what's being said. With this scene, I'd just like to pick the writer's brain and ask him to recount every detail he could possibly remember. No scene in film history has ever provoked me to reflect more on the ups and downs of life.

Get On Up: A Better Music Biopic Than Ray and Walk the Line

Get On Up, the James Brown biopic in theaters now, begins in a way that really surprised me. It starts off with two scenes that take place out of chronology and out of context. The first is in the 1980's, and involves an older, pudgier James Brown terrorizing people with a shotgun because someone used his bathroom. The second takes place at the height of the Vietnam war, when Brown goes overseas to play for the troops and a military officer tries to tell him his set can only go for 25 minutes. Brown does not handle it well. Neither of these scenes end up mattering much to the narrative of the film, and neither is returned to in the ensuing two plus hours. So why start the movie like this? Well, to be frank, James Brown was kind of an asshole, kind of crazy, and a legendary egomaniac that constantly referred to himself in the third person. One of the things that makes Get On Up so great is that it wastes no time showing us this side of Brown, before it even bothers to show us a side of him that we'll like. It's an effort to start things out on an even playing field. The movie knows it's about to spend over two hours making Brown look good and important, and it knows the audience knows that as well. And Brown WAS good and important, of that there is no doubt. But James Brown was also a shit in a lot of ways, and the movie wants you to know that it knows that, so it begins by telling you. It was a good move.

When Ray came out in 2004, it launched the current era of the music biopic, of which it, Walk the Line, and now Get On Up are the three most notable. Ray and Walk the Line were huge hits, and Get On up hasn't garnered nearly as much attention. Ray and Walk the Line starred movie stars that won Oscars for their roles, and Get On Up is unlikely to follow that. All three films are about legendary figures within the history of 20th century pop music, and it's a no-win game to try and argue which is the most important. But Get On Up does the best job of explaining why it's subject is important and also does the best job of making the audience feel it.

As James Brown, Chadwick Boseman is a revelation. He played Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42 last year, and was good in that, but the lingering memory of that film is that it was a Jackie Robinson movie in which Robinson wasn't given much to do. The movie almost used him as a prop, so Boseman didn't have the chance to show what he could do. Here he does, and does he ever. Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix were incredibly lauded for their performances as Ray Charles and Johnny Cash for two things that didn't totally matter in retrospect. With Foxx, it was all about the physical transformation. You actually lost the realization that you weren't watching Ray Charles. And with Phoenix, the big deal is that he did his own singing. "Sure," the film was saying, "Jamie Foxx may have LOOKED like Ray Charles, but Joaquin Phoenix actually SOUNDS like Johnny Cash!" Right, but… who cares? Was Walk the Line a better film because Phoenix sang his own songs? No, actually it wasn't. It ended up being a Johnny Cash movie without ever hearing Johnny Cash's voice, which was kind of a major oversight.

But the real problem with Walk the Line wasn't that it didn't feature Cash's voice, it's that it wasn't about Cash at all. Walk the Line was a love story in which the man just happened to be a star musician/drug addict. It wasn't a movie about why Johnny Cash was important to music, but rather about why June Carter was important to Johnny Cash. And Ray wasn't really about anything except a talented person overcoming blindness and heroin to continue harnessing his talent. Neither film answered the fundamental question of "Why are we making a movie about this person?" (Well, unless the answer to that question is that someone important in Hollywood thought it could make money.)

Get On Up does, in spades. My boss is a huge James Brown fan, and a few days before Get On Up hit theaters I asked him if he was excited for it. "I don't know," he said. "Once I saw it was PG-13, I was kind of out. James Brown did not live a PG-13 life." That's true, he didn't. But it doesn't require the full power of an "R" rating to portray why Brown was a dick. Pg-13 can still get you there. Yes, it's glossed over in parts. The film only shows Brown hitting his wife once, and cheating on her once. We only see him disrespect his band a few times. But really, how much of that stuff do you need to see to get the message that it was habitual? Get On Up gives you every side of Brown, it just doesn't give them all equal share. And that's okay, because it DOES answer the question of why someone made a movie about James Brown. It is impossible to walk away from this film without understanding how and why James Brown changed music forever. It does that in several ways. First of all, the music largely speaks for itself. All of Brown's best songs are here, and the movie doesn't try anything foolish like having someone else sing them. Boseman may be lip-syncing, but good god almighty does he have James Brown's moves. Brown was arguably the greatest showman in pop music history, and Boseman gives it to us. His music broke barriers in every sort of way, from energy, to tempo, to color barriers, to social relevance. We see his music making white people dance, and we see it bringing comfort to the black community on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Much of the film focuses on Brown's long friendship and working relationship with Bobby Byrd, who first helped Brown get started and spent decades as his band leader. There's a great moment in the film, after the two are no longer partners and it's become clear that Byrd is Brown's subordinate, where someone asks Byrd how he deals with it. "One day you just realize that you're not the one meant to be on the front of that stage," Byrd says. Bobby Byrd knew that he was both blessed and cursed to be working with one of the most naturally gifted people to ever record music. It was a constant reminder of what abilities he didn't have himself, but also a constant reminder that few people are ever lucky enough to watch someone that good, day in and day out. I re-watched the great Mozart film, Amadeus, a month or so ago, and the relationship between Mozart and Salieri in that film is sort of the opposite of Brown and Byrd. Amadeus is all about how Salieri simply can't deal with the existence of someone like Mozart, who just naturally has more talent than everyone else. Bobby Byrd could deal with James Brown because he knew he was lucky to deal with him.

What Bobby Byrd realized, that James Brown was the one meant to be at the front of that stage, is what Get On Up spends two hours showing us. One of Brown's many nicknames was Mr. Dynamite, and Get On Up doesn't merely tell us that, but shows us why. We hear how great Brown's music is, but we also see how powerfully he delivered it to the people. Both aspects are crucial to understanding Brown. And yet, Get On Up still has the audacity to leave us with parts of Brown that we don't understand. The director, Tate Taylor, who played it so safe with The Help, actually treads murky waters here. The film ends on notes that suggest Brown didn't even really understand himself. Ultimately, that's a key element of what makes a great biopic--complexity. We need to see people fail to fully appreciate when they succeed. Get On Up gives us so much of Brown's failings, such that the movie is really bookended with him at his worst. The movie gives us that bitter taste at both the beginning and the end because it knows we can take it. And the reason the movie knows we can take the worst of James Brown is because it so effectively shows us why the best of James Brown was worth it.

Life Itself: The Year's Best Documentary

I wrote a long piece last year about Roger Ebert the day after he died, about how he affected my life, about why he was such a beloved film critic, and why he mattered to people. After watching the new documentary about him, Life Itself, I realized I didn't even know the half of it.

Life Itself was directed by Steve James, who also made Hoop Dreams, which is undoubtedly one of the ten most beloved documentaries ever. But no one loved Hoop Dreams more than Roger Ebert, and he championed it ceaselessly. That film gained a life partially on the back of his efforts. A lot of people know Hoop Dreams for it's notorious Oscar snub in the 1994 documentary race, and the reason people know that is likely because of how much noise Ebert made over it. That's something that I realized happened a lot over the course of this documentary: Ebert championing things to the extent that he gave them life. Several directors are in the film, most notably Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. They all talk about how one of their first big breaks was when Roger wrote a glowing review of one of their early films. Time has obviously shown Roger was right. Herzog and Scorsese are two of the best directors of their generation. Scorsese specifically tells a story about how Roger saved his life. In the early 80's, when Scorsese's cocaine addiction was at its peak, he was mostly out of work, incapable of getting funding for the movies he wanted to make, worried that there simply wasn't an audience for his art, and not caring about the consequences of his drug addiction. It was at that time that Ebert (and Siskel) organized a tribute to Scorsese at the then-fledgling Toronto International Film Festival, and it helped Scorsese turn his life around. Ebert had a way of doing that--making great artists feel like their art truly mattered to people.

And that's kind of the point with Roger. The reason he could make great artists feel like their work mattered to people is because he brought their work TO the people. A term that often gets thrown around about critics in general (of any discipline) is "tastemaker." It's a term that describes the ability of certain influential people to help define the tastes of large audiences. There is possibly no one in history that term applies to more than Roger. Ebert was not an academic critic. He didn't write to scholarly audiences studying film for PHDs (so they could go on to teach future PHD students). Ebert firmly believed that film had the capacity--more so than any other artistic discipline--to make a difference in people's lives, and the best way for that to happen was to make sure that the people were being informed on what films to see. Ebert helped bring smart cinema--art films--into the general public. He didn't write in exclusionary ways. Some might say he dumbed himself down, and I'm sure that's true in certain respects. But I think the better description would be to say that he smarted up his audience. We were all smarter for having Roger's taste and knowledge permeate our lives.

Life Itself does many things, and foremost what it does is call to question the meaning of film, art, and life. What are we here for? What gives our lives meaning? Ebert is frank in saying that the role of film critic for The Sun Times was not something he sought out, it fell ass-backwards into his lap. But within a year, he was the only major American film critic calling Bonnie and Clyde a masterpiece, while Bosley Crowther at the New York Times was calling it a blight on American cinema. It's not just that we know who was right 45 years later; we knew who was right later that year, when Bonnie and Cyde connected with young movie-goers like few films ever had. Ebert wrote that the film took place in the 1930's, but that's merely because it had to take place sometime. "It was made now, and it's about us," he famously wrote. That was in 1967, when America desperately needed anti-heroes. But those sentiments are still true. Life Itself is a film about someone who lived publicly from 1967-2013, when he died. But it came out now, and it's about us.

There's a bit in the film when a former editor mentions that Ebert could knock out a great review in 30 minutes, because he was such a natural writer. I've challenged myself to the same standard here; I started typing this at 11:26pm, with the mandate of posting it before midnight. I have no idea if I'm the natural writer that Roger is, but I'd like to believe that I have some ability. But what was so good about Roger's writing was his ability connect with people on fundamental levels, just like this film does.

It's not simply a film about someone who wrote about the movies, it's a film about someone who loved life so much that he felt perpetually compelled to watch every sort of life imaginable. The film even opens with a quote where Roger describes that very phenomenon. He talks about how we are all the stars of our own lives, and our own lives are the only ones we can really experience, but what the movies do is allow us the brief ability to experience other lives. That's a thing of value. It's a thing of great power. And Roger Ebert dedicated his life to making the general public aware of when that power was being harnessed in the best ways.

The film doesn't move chronologically, but thematically. Each segment covers not a time of Roger's life, but an aspect. We see his alcoholism, his fight(s) with cancer, his relationship (and fights) with Gene Siskel, his championing of Cannes and Martin Scorsese, his television career, and his marriage to Chaz. Each part illuminates the power Roger had to see the best in things, to acknowledge the best in things, and to share the best in things with other people. To him, that was what gave life itself meaning. We are all the better for it.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and the Failures of a Certain Kind of Sequel

This clip is the opening scene from the first Sin City film, and what happens at about the 1:50 mark is the entire reason for the movie to have existed. Visually, we'd never seen anything like it before. It wasn't just that it looked like a comic book (literally; the visuals are lifted directly from the comic's panels), but that it looked like a hyper-stylized noir fever dream drawn straight from the subconscious of anyone that believes violence is capable of being romanticized in interesting ways. That's what Sin City was--a genre reduced to nothing but a collection of tropes; a connect-the-dots with no space between the dots.

When Frank Miller first created the Sin City comics in the early 1990's, they were an immediate sensation, both critically and commercially. But over the course of the decade, when Miller produced seven Sin City graphic novels, they were the subject of diminishing returns even though the returns didn't really diminish. The first story, The Hard Goodbye, was an immediate classic. Comics are a visual medium and here was a type of visual storytelling we'd never seen. The sequel, A Dame to Kill For (which the new film is adapted from), was just as good. As a story it was better than the first one, but visually it was the same, so the impact was a wash. Then the next five just were what they were. Only the last one, Hell and Back, was bad. But the other four are forgettable, just like the new film is.

What made both the first Sin City graphic novel AND the first Sin City film so good were the visual uniqueness of it. The story was cool, and I don't just say that because I can't find a more apt adjective. It was the epitome of cool. But cool is fleeting, and it always changes in a millisecond. Miller never changed Sin City at all from that first story. The stories were incredibly nihilistic, which grows wearisome very quickly. The visuals, which were so dazzling initially, lost their power to impress simply because they never changed. The visuals were all atmosphere, and atmosphere can't sustain interest by itself.

There's nothing really wrong with the new Sin City film. It's story isn't particularly weaker than the original, nor it's acting, pacing, or any other aspect. But nine years after the first film, it's visuals have lost the power to impress us, and that was really the entire point of the first film. It's like giving someone their first iPod in 2005, and watching how amazed they are by it, then giving them the exact same iPod again in 2014. They won't be impressed anymore because they'll expect something new. That's why there's nothing impressive about the new Sin City film--it's still that same '05 model.

If you follow entertainment news, you've likely read by now that the new film bombed at the box office this weekend, finishing in 8th place, and earning barely over six million dollars. That isn't just bad, it's abysmal. So why didn't audiences go? Sure, the reviews were bad, but this is the kind of movie that's supposed to be review-proof. People didn't go because you can't see the previews without knowing you're in for the exact same thing you got nine years ago, and what's the point? Sequels are almost always a cash grab, but the ones that actually grab a lot of cash are, for the most part, the ones that figure out what audiences liked in the first movie and then giving them that again. But therein lies the problem with the very nature of a Sin City sequel. What audiences liked about the first film was seeing noir visualized in a way we'd never seen before. Trying to give people that again only ensures its own impossibility.

Predicting the 2014 Oscar Winners

Here's my annual breakdown of the Oscar races and what I expect to win, written for Detroit's Metro Times blog:

http://blogs.metrotimes.com/media/predicting-2014-oscar-winners/


Enjoy!

Toronto International Film Festival '13 Diary

Here's the Toronto International Film Festival Diary I wrote for Detroit's Metro Times (It will be continually updated as more entries are completed):

Day 1: Heard It Through the Grapevine

Day 2: 13 Inches of Awesome

Day 3: Rock and Roll Can Save Your Life

Summer Writing: Game of Thrones & Cinetopia

Some writing I did over the summer for other sites:

First, I started a Game of Thrones Power Rankings column that I did a few test runs of for Metro Times, and I hope to continue it regularly for season 4.

Season 3, Episode 4: And Now His Watch Is Ended

Season 3, Episode 5: Kissed by Fire

Season 3, Episode 6: The Climb

And I also wrote a preview of Ann Arbor's Cinetopia International Film Festival for Annarbor.com, which you can see here:

Five Things to See at Cinetopia This Weekend

Roger and Me: A Personal Eulogy of Roger Ebert

Click HERE to read this post on Detroit's Metro Times. 

“Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.”

     -Roger Ebert, 2002

I first read those words in early 2006, during a particularly cold winter and a particularly cold time in my life. I had just graduated from college after a long series of changes to “the plan,” and the path to a life that I was interested in living still seemed painfully foggy. I had also just been the unwilling participant in a particularly painful break-up, and I was suddenly facing the prospect of weekends with no girlfriend and no college parties to go to. Though I didn’t know it yet (because I hadn’t actually seen the film yet), I was just as directionless—and just as non-waspy—as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. All I wanted was an adult to do something other than ask me about my future, to say something other than “plastics.”

Roger Ebert filled that void. During one of many evenings spent aimlessly wandering around Borders (RIP), I stumbled on the first volume of Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” books, and I can honestly say it changed my life.

I had always been a bit of a cineaste. Seeing Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in theaters as a 13-year old first opened the floodgates of my movie love, and before I knew it, I was probably the only 8^th-grader in Muncie, Indiana checking out old Scorsese and Kubrick movies from the local Hollywood Video. This love of film continued through high school, when I was dazzled by late-90’s masterpieces like Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, American Beauty, and Three Kings. But college nights and weekends simply presented too many temptations and distractions, and I went through a period of several years where I just didn’t see that many films. I eventually finished college with an English degree and the idea that I would be a rock critic, but I quickly realized that I just wasn’t very good at writing about the mechanics of music.

Finding Roger Ebert’s “The Great Movies” on the shelf at Borders that cold January day was the moment of clarity that I needed. I couldn’t believe how many of these films I’d never heard of, and I couldn’t wait to start watching them. As luck would have it, TCM was playing one of the movies, The Third Man, that night, and I loved that film so much that I eventually named my blog after it. My journey had begun, with Roger Ebert as the best tour guide I could ever imagine.

One of Roger’s favorite quotes is from Groucho Marx, who once said “I would never want to be a part of any club that would have me as a member.” It’s a funny idea, but perhaps the reason Roger loved it so much is because it couldn’t have been farther from his ethos. Roger Ebert wanted everyone to be a part of his club. No one has ever made the discussion of art feel more inclusive, more accessible, and downright friendlier than he did. That he was able to do this without ever dumbing down himself or his subject matter is a truly remarkable achievement.

While Roger was an academic in the most flattering sense of the term (it’s difficult to fathom anyone understanding or studying film more than he did), he never came across that way in his writing. To Roger, the point was never to speak only to other cineastes, but rather to help everyone become cineastes.  Roger wanted the conversation to have the widest reaches possible, to touch everyone. As he says in the quote at the top of this piece (taken from the introduction to “The Great Movies”), the best movies can “make us into better people.” Roger truly believed that (as do I), and that’s why he wanted everyone to have the opportunity to be so affected.

Roger’s conversational tone has been a great influence to my own writing, and reading his work over the years has taught me an incalculable amount of lessons in how to convey ideas clearly, effectively, and simply (though I still have some work to do on that last point). I clearly remember my first few weeks and months pouring over “The Great Movies,” and eventually it’s sequels. The anecdote from Omar Sharif that begins his Lawrence of Arabia piece—about how unlikely it was that the film would even get financed—still informs many of my ideas about the business of Hollywood. When Roger spoke of The Shawshank Redemption absorbing you to the extent that you lose the realization you’re watching a movie, I knew just what he was talking about. When he discussed the concept of real truth versus perceived truth in his JFK piece, he helped me realize that the latter can be just as important, even more so, than the former.

And reading Roger’s work might have been the first time I realized that simply stating what you like wasn’t breaking the rules. It seems obvious now. After all, isn’t stating what you like what a critic is always doing, at least to some extent? But nobody did it better than Roger, and nobody did it more passionately. Roger’s favorite movie scene was in Casablanca, when the singing Nazis are suddenly drowned out by Victor Laszlo leading the singing of the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise. For someone who believed that good movies could make us better people, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Roger was a sucker for people overcoming the odds to do the right thing.

But I am too, and good movies have definitely made me a better person; hopefully they still are. My thoughts on murder are inseparable from those of William Muny in Unforgiven—It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have. One of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day, is literally about learning how to become a better person. And The Third Man, the very first movie I ever watched on the recommendation of Roger Ebert, ends with its protagonist doing the right thing knowing it would cost him the girl, and yet he still goes after her at the end just to watch her walk away.

In recent years, I’ve found that I haven’t agreed with Roger’s taste as much as I used to. As his health continued to decline in the last few years, I felt that his taste was becoming a little less discerning, as though he was so thrilled to still be able to go to movies he just couldn’t bear to be as critical of them. But there’s an important lesson to be learned there, and it’s that no one has ever loved what he did more than Roger Ebert.

Here’s a painful truth to consider: Roger Ebert has probably seen more terrible movies than most of us have seen movies, period. When Michael Caine won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2000 for The Cider House Rules, he famously joked in his speech about how much crap he’s made. Well, Roger Ebert saw all of that crap. He saw all of everyone’s crap. He saw every latter-day Eddie Murphy movie AND every Katherine Heigl movie. He saw four Scary Movies, but the Movie Gods mercifully saved him from a fifth with just a few days to spare. And yet there was no one more excited for the next movie he’d see than Roger Ebert. Even after a long series of health setbacks robbed his ability to speak, Roger still looked forward to interacting with an audience.

I noticed this when I encountered Roger at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. He sat two rows in front of me for a surprisingly uncrowded interview with the heads of Sony Pictures Classics. Despite the fact that a handful of major directors (Jonathan Demme, Gus Van Sant, and Atom Egoyan off the top of my head) were in the room and chatting with people after the interview, I only wanted to meet Roger. I could tell he was having trouble moving, he seemed tired, and obviously he couldn’t speak, so I didn’t want to keep him. I didn’t bother him with talking about my writing, I didn’t give him a business card, and I didn’t even introduce myself. This wasn’t networking. It wasn’t about what Roger could do for me, but what he had already done for me. I simply told him that his writing has been very important to me, and I shook his hand.

But of course, that was an understatement. Roger Ebert has been so important to me that, like Bruce Springsteen, I no longer even like the informality of referring to them by their last names. I (falsely) feel like I know them too well for that. Just Roger will do nicely. And something Roger has always done is steadfastly called them “movies,” not “films.” Films sound stuffy, while movies sound enjoyable. Roger always thought movies were enjoyable. In my own writing, I’ve often struggled with this to the extent that sometimes in the same paragraph I switch back and forth between the two terms. Should they be films or movies? I’ve never really figured out an answer I’m satisfied with, but today at least, they’re movies.

When the news of Roger’s death hit Thursday afternoon, I immediately felt the need to honor him somehow in what I watched that night. Then I figured out what seemed like the perfect solution. Just a few days prior, I had checked out Gates of Heaven from the library, which was one of the 14 movies from Roger’s first volume of Great Movies that I hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. Ostensibly it’s a documentary about Pet Cemeteries, but really it’s a film about how people deal with death, so it felt like the perfect movie to watch as I celebrated the life of Roger Ebert in my own little way.

To my surprise, I didn’t really like it. The pacing was a little too glacial, the action a little too sedate, the interviews a little too meandering. But like I always do with a movie that Roger recommends, I read his review afterwards. And even though Gates of Heaven had disappointed me, Roger’s essay about it did not. Through his words, I understood what he saw in it, why he found it so interesting, so revelatory about the human condition. Tastes will never overlap all of the time, and the goal of the critic isn’t to get people to like everything (you think) they ought to. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help them understand the things they don’t like, and maybe even appreciate them. I’ve never learned more from disagreeing with someone than I have with Roger. And on the night that Roger Ebert died, he was still teaching me.