Like a Geek God #19: Beside the Point of Origin

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, origin stories, X-Men

Like a Geek God #19 by Mark Pursell

Beside the Point of Origin

Origin stories need to die a slow, painful, fiery death.

But first, a history lesson.

The modern era of superhero cinema began in 2000 with a long-awaited celluloid re-imagining of the X-Men franchise. This should have been a portent of great things to come: Bryan Singer’s foray into comic book action brimmed with mood, tension, and a fair approximation of the franchise’s psychological complexity (Halle Berry’s tone-deaf turn as Storm notwithstanding).

It took years and millions to finally get an X-Men movie project off the ground. No, really. Imagine that for a hot second. Imagine an executive/financial landscape in good ol’ Hollywood that viewed a superhero movie not as the nominally-expensive cash grab it currently represents but instead as a black hole investment, unlikely to reap much from its sowing. That was the landscape all through the ‘80s and ‘90s, a time when not only X-Men but Spider-Man and multiple other Marvel and DC properties languished in the most fiery of development hells. The story might have been different if Tim Burton’s unparalleled 1989 Batman had launched a film franchise that was both critically and commercially viable, but Burton’s own 1992 follow-up, Batman Returns, was largely misunderstood by viewers, and the subsequent movies (1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman and Robin, both barely more than odious) did little to instill hope among Hollywood suits that comic-book adaptations would result in desired profit margins.

However, against all odds, X-Men did eventually achieve liftoff, and did so with enough panache and box office returns that it not only set the stage for sequels of its own, but also a reinvigorated cinematic landscape where suddenly, superhero projects gathering dust in the slush pile turned into diamonds-in-the-rough, potential moneymakers desperately in need of a greenlight and a quick turnaround. In rapid succession, we got X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Blade franchise, all within a period of roughly three years. By the mid-Aughties, however, this sputtering pilot light of life among superhero cinema looked in danger of going out just as quickly as it had been lit. For every Hellboy, there was a Catwoman; for every Unbreakable, a Daredevil. Then, Christopher Nolan singlehandedly reoriented the genre with his dark, archetypal take on Batman’s origination, Batman Begins.

And with it, cast the immediate future of the superhero movie into a paradoxical pit of both financial viability and critical darkness.

Batman Begins isn’t responsible for superhero cinema’s fixation on the origin story. Every noteworthy hero film that came before it in the early Aughties was also an origin story of sorts, even X-Men. And standing alone, there was nothing particularly egregious about Nolan’s decision to tackle Bruce Wayne’s complicated past. It’s only when you consider the decade of superhero movies that has passed in the interim that you see how unforgivingly Begins’s success molded the movies that came after it. The contemporary cultural juggernaut known by the innocuous-sounding title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is thoroughly and utterly marred by this. 2008’s Iron Man also chose a “hero begins” route, recasting Tony Stark as a modern, motormouthed, military-industrial apologist. Iron Man is notable as the opening salvo in Hollywood’s MCU onslaught, beginning a decade-long project to release individual hero movies for all of the classic Avengers teammates and then, finally, a climactic film where they would all work together in a team (perhaps you’ve seen it? It was written and directed by a little-known auteur named Joss Whedon). It’s also notable because it’s one of the few movies in the MCU that is actually good, but that’s an argument for another time. Iron Man’s runaway success—again, very merited, given its high quality—gave birth to Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America: origin stories, one and all. Soon even non-franchise superhero tales, like Chronicle, went the “origin story” route. The origin story became such a fixture in the forefront of pop culture preoccupation that it bled into our TV shows (Bates Motel, Hannibal, Sherlock). Somewhere along the way, the idea of the origin story became entangled with the idea of the franchise reboot; less than a decade apart, we have two very different Spider-Man movies, both origin stories.

So what’s the problem? This panoply of origin stories has been financially viable for Marvel Studios, and critics have been suspiciously kind to the entries in the MCU, even the ones that are insignificant fluff at best (here’s looking at you, Thor).

Why should we be concerned? What’s got my little geek heart all aflame?

I think, somewhere along the line—because X-Men, Batman Begins, and Iron Man told origin stories that succeeded both critically and commercially—that the origin story came to be thought of as something that has an intrinsic cinematic value to moviegoers, that the archetype itself is some sort of lodestone that, if only picked up, yields magic. The truth, as should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look beyond the immediate surface of things, is that those movies, particularly X-Men and Iron Man, are extremely well-constructed. They succeed as movies first, origin stories second. The script and the direction don’t rely on the basic components of an origin story to do their work for them. The writers and actors and directors have fleshed out the characters, spent time creating opportunities for viewer investment at all possible moments, and made sure that their story works not just as a lackadaisical illumination of how X character got from Point A to Badass, but as a narrative experience in and of itself. Take, for example, the first Mad Max movie, which wasn’t even necessarily conceived as the beginning of a franchise but whose tale of a vengeance-seeking policeman was executed with such muscular vision and cinematic poise that it unintentionally birthed a franchise.

With each passing year and each new superhero origin story, however, it’s become clear that subsequent writers and directors can ape the general look and feel of an origin story but not the substance of its best examples. There’s also the matter of not really having to do much work when writing an origin story (theoretically) because they all follow a distinct pattern: hero has problem, hero gets power, hero has to figure power out. You can knock out an origin story screenplay without moving much beyond first-thought, and, as Hollywood has discovered, people will go in droves to see the resulting movie. From a financial standpoint, origin stories have become a no-brainer investment: minimum effort resulting in maxiumum profit. What this has created is an atmosphere of origin-obsessed superhero movies that have long ago abandoned complex, fresh storytelling in favor of the rote. This problem reached its apotheosis with 2013’s Man of Steel. We’ve actually seen a LOT of Superman in the last few decades (Lois and Clark, Smallville, Superman Returns), so it’s not exactly like we needed a brand-new reboot, but reboot it they did, and with as little narrative acumen as a direct-to-video knock-off.

Archetypal stories and figures move in glacier-like cycles through the attention span of pop culture. Slasher flicks gave way to torture porn gave way to found footage, to use horror as an example. Vampires gave way to zombies gave way to whatever monster will capture the zeitgeist of the popular imagination next. The obsession with the origin story is weirdly appropriate for the Information Age and the social media generation, where everyone is the star of their own Facebook reality show and builds their own “super” origin story out of their life narrative. We powerless mortals no longer identify with the hapless humans who help the superheroes: we see ourselves as the superheroes, misunderstood and put upon but ascending to a great destiny, while pop music assures us that we were “Born This Way”, that we’re a “Firework”, that we’re never less than “Fucking Perfect.” It’s the delusional opposite of Generation X disaffection, which at least had the virtue of cynicism. Who can say whether the Men with Suits have articulated this connection, but they perceive enough about the way social psychology works to know that the contemporary moviegoing audience spits out $$$ when certain buttons are pressed, and they press them with gusto. The good news is that the origin story is quickly turning into a fallow field, in need of crop rotation. There are only so many heroes to make movies about, only so many ways to depict a brave-but-reluctant soul’s rise to power. Now that everyone from Tony Stark to Peter Parker has had the murky origins of their heroism fracked and stripped of every possible vein of crude, superhero movies will eventually be forced to turn to other types of stories, new chapters, new problems. To be honest, this will probably be the death of the superhero boom; Millennials will care little for Captain America’s middle-aged struggle with morality because it doesn’t say anything to them about the movie of their lives, and the dollars will stop flowing in a Mississippi-like torrent to the glass eyries of Los Angeles. That’s good; it’s necessary. We need to let the superhero lie dormant for a while. It’s only out of a period of dormancy that a given archetype returns to cinema with vim and vigor. Think Batman 1989. Think X-Men 2000. I’m personally looking forward to ten years without capes and noble martyrdom. Maybe by 2020, I’ll be ready for some more.

___________

Mark Pursell (Episode 75) is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Like a Geek God #18: Geeking Out on True Detective

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #18 by Mark Pursell

Geeking Out on True Detective

WARNING: contains mild spoilers through the end of Episode 7.

Here’s a facet of my geekdom that I haven’t really addressed yet on this blog: crime fiction.

Crime stories don’t usually come to mind when someone says the word “geek”, but there’s an entire subculture of crime fiction enthusiasts for whom the term “geek” is extremely apropos. It’s a more “grown up” sort of geekery, I suppose, in the sense that events are usually rooted in contemporary or historical reality, devoid of robots and/or magic. That doesn’t speak, however, to the level of investment that crime geeks sink into their favorite authors, movies, and television shows.

Of course, the crime tale is quite “done” at this point in the history of modern storytelling. Artists across the media spectrum have tackled the basic idea for well over a century, yielding results both transcendant and trite. However, over the last decade, the New Golden Age of Television—a charge of high-quality programming led by HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX—has created a safe harbor for talented writers to craft their crime tales with precision, as well as a canvas large enough to contain complexity. What is Breaking Bad if not a hyperrealist tragedy about the criminal underworld? Even shows that are more ostensibly procedural—The Fall, or Top of the Lake—elevate themselves through the quality of their writing and their characters, even though the standard “person dies, police investigate” plot engine is old hat. Cinema has fared similarly: in 2013 alone, you had movies like Prisoners, Spring Breakers, and Mud, all three of which showed that the crime story is not just alive, but thriving under the auspices of creative visionaries who have the freedom to tell stories the best way they know how.

Which makes the artistic achievement of HBO’s True Detective even more impressive. Detective hasn’t arisen in a genre vacuum, after all. But creator and sole writer Nic Pizzolato’s Shakespearean, years-spanning epic about two detectives’ hunt for an occultist ring of murderers in the deep Lousiana bayous puts one foot on the shoulder of other excellently-conceived murder mysteries and vaults over them with the ease of a gymnast.

The reasons why are multifold. The show’s limited run of eight episodes has given Pizzolato and director Cary Joji Fukunaga the space to do two very important things: let the story breathe, and end it satisfyingly before it overstays its welcome. True Detective is an anthology series, conceived to follow the pattern of American Horror Story; each new season will feature a differing cast and storyline. (The current story, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as the gridlocked detectives, will end next Sunday). This turns each season into what amounts to a miniseries or very long movie, ensuring that each new storyline will have to describe a finite arc. The big problem with serialized detective stories is that they have the potential to go on for too long, running out of gas long before the writers and the money behind the show are ready or able to let it end. The anthology format is a genius one for a crime show, and hopefully future installments of True Detective will derive as much power and focus from the format as this season has.

Because across its existing seven episodes, this flagship season of the show has not only set a bar for effective storytelling, but engaging, deeply visceral storytelling that aims to get at the uncomfortable psychological truths lurking under the veneer of civilization. Rustin Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Harrelson) can best be described as beleagured, not only by the horrific events and forces they find themselves thrown into conflict with but also by the larger problems of love, family, mortality, and “what it means to be a man/woman” that trouble us all. When their initial investigation of a ritualized murder pits them against a secret, diabolical cult, their search draws the darkness in their own lives to the surface, as if the horror they are attempting to illuminate calls, siren-like, to the unresolved and the unconscious in each of the men’s dysfunctional lives. (Cohle is a hyper-intelligent savant more than a little touched by obsession, compulsion, and the scars of undercover narcotics work; Hart paints himself into a familiar corner, drinking too hard and cheating on his wife, but the fury with which he erupts when he finds himself trapped by the consequences of his actions allow us to glimpse a person much more damaged than an adulterous cliché). The tag line of the show is “touch darkness and darkness touches you back”, and strangely enough, this serves as the most direct summation of the first season’s thematic gist.

McConaughey and Harrelson tackle these dour, hard men with a voracity. Once largely relegated to typecasting by their early famous roles and their distinct personalities, both actors have undertaken something of a career renaissance in the last few years. Serious, nuanced character work (Killer Joe and The Paperboy for McConaughey, Rampart and The Messenger for Harrelson) is apparently not beyond either of them. Far from it, in fact: both actors have increased their visibility and their reputation due to these performances, and one can’t help but see their tour de force work in True Detective as a further evolution. Or perhaps it’s the sheer delight of watching Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson scheme and think and fight together. When a friend told me that they were the two stars, I said, “Oh, I’ll watch that, I don’t even care what it’s about.” Case in point. Both men have always been charismatic on-screen, able to plumb the depths of both comedy and drama with ease, but something about their True Detective chemistry—complex and ever-shifting in the manner of all intense partnerships, comprised of respect, resentment, and shared trauma—heightens their individual and combined magnetism. Even in the early parts of the show, the detectives both look hungry, starved around the eyes, as tragically unable to extricate themselves from events as they are unable to shore themselves up under the “burdens” of love, fidelity, and human connection.

Pizzolatto has done that rare and enviable thing; he wrote all of True Detective himself, without employing a traditional writing staff. It may seem like a risky gambit for people who are invested in a traditional writing model for television, but the surety of Pizzolatto’s vision—his tight grasp on the puzzle pieces of his story and its fairly unique mythology (inspired by Robert Chambers’s seminal book The King in Yellow)—is strong evidence in favor of talented writers taking this approach more often. Maybe it’s only due to the limited number of episodes, but True Detective has a momentum and a laser-targeted focus that make it more compulsively watchable than even binge-bait like House of Cards or Orange is the New Black. One of the most compelling aspects of the writing is how Pizzolatto depicts the detectives’ case-working process. It’s refreshing to see Pizzolatto heavily emphasize two crucial aspects of actual detective work: pounding the pavement, and paperwork. The two halves of True Detective—in which Cohle and Hart investigate an initial murder in 1995 and pick back up on unresolved aspects of the case in 2012—make much out of both things. The two men spend long lonely stretches of road together, seeking out leads, often coming up empty-handed or with a piece of the puzzle they don’t know what to do with yet. They spend time and energy (on-screen!) discussing the acquisition of tax records, title transfers, and old case files; there’s a compelling scene where Hart, attempting to dig up old information, is led by a clerk to a room full of haphazard file boxes. No database, no digitization, nothing to do but roll up one’s sleeves and start sorting through the mess. Pizzolatto doesn’t linger on this part of detective work long enough to bore us, but he holds it up for us with enough obvious intent that his point becomes clear. This isn’t a flashy Hollywood thriller where profiling and a nod towards actual investigative work results in a shocking revelation and a prerequisite, climactic chase scene. It’s one of the few detective stories that don’t make the detective or his process into something romantic. Between the unglamorous stylization of detective work and the destructive personal consequences Cohle and Hart both face as a result of their involvement with the case, Pizzolatto’s point-of-view seems to be more in line with the Southern gothic noir feeling of the overall show: that detectives are cursed half-men, consigned by destiny to fight evil in the shadows and fated, by dint of that battle, to lose everything, even themselves. It’s a bleak point-of-view, but it reverberates more viscerally with an audience than a glossy, cardboard-cutout detective who breezes through a case with barely a scratch or a setback.

Above all, though, True Detective strikes a particularly American nerve. Much like the Swedish novel/film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Detective takes on an institutionalized problem within the culture and society of its setting and addresses that problem head-on through the conceit of a detective story. This is a storyteller’s trick; we all tend to wrap up a vague point or observation we wish to make inside something exciting and consumable, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Dragon Tattoo directly addressed the misogynist abuses within the Swedish government and upper echelon; True Detective does the same, but because its focus is America (and not just any America, but the Deep South), one can’t avoid the entanglement of organized religion with sex and power. It’s a bit surprising there hasn’t been a wave of attack pieces about the show, since it depicts evangelistic Louisiana politicians as secret rapists and ritual murderers. It’s a broad shot that somehow also manages to strike a bullseye. For several years now, Americans have faced the consequences of moneyed religious interests attempting to subjugate or obliterate the rights and freedoms of various subcultures and minorities, particularly women. The headscratching battle over reproductive health and the religious right’s froth-laden obsession with outlawing abortion is a thinly-veiled attempt by powerful men to exercise control over female sexuality, often by prioritizing the health of the unborn child over the health and safety of the pregnant woman. One can’t help but imagine Pizzolatto taking in the political climate about this issue in this country over the last five years—Republican politicians scheming, trying to pass clandestine and medieval legislation, publicly insulting women who speak up against them—and seeing in his story an opportunity to reflect or comment on this systemic, endemic problem. True Detective is ultimately the story of two damaged men battling the exploitative male hierarchy for the fate of every disenfranchised woman and child in the bayous. What could be more feminist, more truly American, than that?

___________

Like a Geek God #17: Agents of SHIELD Mid-Season Report Card

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #17 by Mark Pursell

Agents of SHIELD Mid-Season Report Card

The thing you need to know before we starting talking about Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD is this: I love Joss Whedon.

No, listen. I’m a hardcore Whedonite. I first fell in love with Joss Whedon’s storytelling vision because of his short-lived but iconic science fiction series Firefly and its concluding movie, Serenity. In quick order, I revisited Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a piece of pop culture zeitgeist that I had missed when it was happening, and in 2009, I followed Whedon’s new sci-fi show, Dollhouse, with weekly devotion. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so appealing about Whedon’s approach to storytelling, an approach that he instills in his writing staff. Is it the complex characters? The thorny moral and philosophical questions? The epic, labyrinthine mythology and worldbuilding? The snappy repartee that often recalls the verbal sparring of classic Hollywood films rather than the witless rhetorical slapfights of our Information Age? The answer, of course, is that it’s the synthesis of all these elements which draws in viewers and keeps them engaged. I was disappointed when FOX decided to cancel Dollhouse after only two short seasons, forestalling any chance that Whedon and his team had to capitalize on the various ideas the show set in motion. But then, a glimmer of exciting news: in the wake of Whedon’s success writing and directing The Avengers—which has the distinction of being hands-down the best movie in the cinematic Marvel canon, second only to the first Iron Man—he would be developing a TV series for ABC that focused on fan-favorite character Agent Coulson and his team of SHIELD operatives, i.e. mortal but highly-trained specialists working for an American shadow agency whose ostensible purpose is to protect the unprepared human race from exposure to alien and otherwise otherworldly phenomena. It’s essentially Men in Black with an NSA twist (more on that later). Whedon brought his brother Jed and Jed’s wife, Maurissa Tancharoen—both of whom wrote for Dollhouse and acted as showrunners—to take the lead on SHIELD. I admit that while I was excited for the show, I also had my doubts. One, it was going to be on ABC, and history has shown us that network TV is hardly the place for Joss Whedon and his writers to stretch their wings and accomplish great storytelling without interference (just Google the production histories of Firefly and Dollhouse over at FOX). Second, Whedon himself wasn’t going to be writing any of the episodes or acting as showrunner. Still, I was interested to see what they could accomplish.

We are now just past the halfway point of SHIELD’s first season run. Time to take stock, see where we are, and just how things are going. SPOILERS AHOY!

The Characters

It wouldn’t be a Joss Whedon show without a loveable, idiosyncratic cast. The SHIELD ensemble, operating as a self-contained special unit from their airplane base, is a large part of the show’s charm. Ming Na and Brett Dalton started out a bit stolid as the team’s resident ass-kicking jarheads, but subsequent episodes have revealed more facets of their characters, particularly the mysterious Agent May (Na).

And, in a genius bit of plotting, these two warrior types—who often find themselves at odds with the tech-and-science team members as well as their enigmatic leader, Agent Coulson—bond over their bloody pasts and martial natures and form a sexual connection that the show handles with remarkable subtlety for a network. A mawkish romantic storyline would have dealt a major blow to the show’s machinery, but somebody in the writing room rightly adhered to a higher instinct.

Another engaging pair is the science team of Fitz and Simmons, played with chatterboxy verve by British actors Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge, respectively.

The dynamic between these two characters form part of the show’s comic relief. It’s a traditional Whedonesque gambit to have the show’s most hyperintelligent character(s) fill the role of the jester (see Fran Kranz’s portrayal of programmer Topher in Dollhouse), and it works to great effect here, mostly because of the actors’ presence and chemistry.

Chloe Bennet’s Skye is the everyman, an off-the-grid outsider and self-reliant hacker who becomes entangled in SHIELD’s business and eventually becomes part of the team despite her lack of training or vetting by the agency, a controversial decision that the show continues to mill for plot grist. Bennet is a doe-eyed Hollywood type in the vein of a would-be “it girl” and visually doesn’t quite fit the profile of a 99%, anti-Big Brother hacker living out of her van (in fact, all the actors are too pretty for realism, but hey, it’s ABC), but the young actress makes up for that with admirable comic timing and a believable streak of impulsive, street-smart rebelliousness.

Then of course, there’s Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson himself. This show largely came about because of Coulson’s popularity as a character and the fan outcry when he was brutally killed in The Avengers (Joss Whedon is like George R.R. Martin; he’s not afraid to kill your favorite characters to drive home the peril of a given situation), and Gregg is a force to be reckoned with as the show’s anchor and leader. He is wry, kind, and empathetic, but also frightening, with a sense of barely contained lethality lurking under his self-effacement, and his moral inflexibility regarding SHIELD (he believes in what they do and reacts angrily to Skye’s criticisms of government overreach) seems destined to take his character down emotional roads that are going to be unpleasant at best. In fact, in one of SHIELD’s most recent episodes to date, and its strongest so far in its run, Agent Coulson is metaphorically brought to his knees by this very question.

The Plot

Because SHIELD is doing a 22-episode run on a major network, the writers seem to have adapted an episodic model rather than a serial model, meaning that for the most part, each episode has a “problem of the week” that is largely dealt with and resolved by the end of the episode. I personally find this kind of television boring and pointless; I’m a big story arc, serial kind of guy. Fortunately, SHIELD does have an intriguing mythology and story arc at work; they just tend to develop it periodically rather than episode to episode (though seemingly unrelated one-off plots have, as the show progresses, come back to factor into the larger picture). It’s when the show takes on its central storyline that it really shines, mostly epitomized (to return to character for a second) by the excellent performance of Ruth Negga as Raina, the “girl in the flower dress” who essentially serves as the series’ main/most visible villainess. Raina is a manipulative, shadowy figure; her big-eyed, soft-spoken nature conceals a cruel and unforgiving intelligence. Throughout the first season, she is seen working towards the development of workable, biologically-stable super solders on the orders of an unknown, unseen figure referred to only as the Clairvoyant. The Clairvoyant’s attempt to create his/her own supersoldiers, and SHIELD’s efforts to forestall him/her, are the main plot thrust of the season. Raina and the Clairvoyant are chilling, fascinating antagonists, and the show works best when our SHIELD heroes are thrown into conflict with them. There’s also a slow-burning subplot regarding the actual identity of Skye, who we learned at the season’s halfway point was discovered as the sole, infant survivor of a massacre in which multiple SHIELD agents died, ostensibly trying to protect her. Every effort was then made to reinsert the child into society (the foster system) with no trace or clue to her actual heritage or origins; ostensibly, these revelations will play out in dramatic fashion, possibly with the Clairvoyant revealing the truth (or the partial truth) to Skye in an attempt to pull her away from SHIELD and join forces with him/her.

The Theme

At the heart of the show, there is a debate, embodied by Agent Coulson (the establishment) and Skye (the anti-establishment) about the nature of surveillance and the power of government force. Coulson insists repeatedly that the vast human population is unprepared to deal with the truth about alien artifacts and the highly-advanced science that comes with it, that what SHIELD does keeps people safe, out of danger. Skye argues that the concealment of life-and-world-changing information harms humanity more than it helps it, and that SHIELD’s sweeping, shadowy authority is dangerous and highly problematic (even as she becomes more and more invested in helping them against their enemies). It’s a conversation that is extremely relevant in the Information Age, in the age of Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, NSA overreach, phone tapping, and the like. The question of “what are we being protected from? And who are you to protect us from it?” has never been more in the forefront of American minds, and the show smartly capitalizes on that. Actually, I wish they would capitalize on it more—it can best be described as a “background” element—but I imagine that it’s also hard to tackle those conversation directly without becoming preachy.

SHIELD has been on a bit of a winter hiatus, but it returns with a string of new episodes this Tuesday. Is it a great show? At the moment, no. Is it a show with great potential that it sometimes realizes? Absolutely. My hope, as the writers push towards the May finale, is that the filler episodes fall by the wayside and they devote more time to the main story arc and the mythology of the show, and that they don’t shy away from storylines that ask hard questions about technology, government, surveillance, information, and the price of evolutionary advancement. In a fictional universe populated by aliens, monsters, and supermen, these are very human, very relevant concerns.

___________

Like a Geek God #16: That Old Disney Magic

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Disney, Film, Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #16 by Mark Pursell

That Old Disney Magic

I had no intention of ever seeing Frozen.

Now, please understand. I’m a Disneyphile. I have a deep, permanent affection for the fairy-tale musicals of the Disney Renaissance, not to mention the Golden Age classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. I want nothing more than for Disney to make movies that capture that same magical spirit you find in The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. But having seen and intensely disliked 2010’s Tangled, a milquetoast Rapunzel riff, I didn’t have a lot of confidence that Disney possessed the talent and the wherewithal to make another great fairy-tale musical. I was also predisposed to dislike Frozen because it represents the final, meat-machine incarnation of a “Snow Queen” adaptation that had been in and out of development hell at Disney for twenty-plus years. As a huge fan of the original Hans Christian Andersen story, I was dismayed to find that the long-rumored “Snow Queen” movie would finally see the light of day not as a darkly-beautiful, epic handdrawn film, but as a computer-animated romp bearing only the slightest relation to the source material. However, when Frozen came out, several friends (both online and in “real” life) urged me to see it, claiming that it hearkened back to the very movies, like Mermaid and Beast, that made me a Disney/animation geek in the first place.

Suffice to say I should have trusted my own instincts. It’s difficult to decide what aspect of Frozen is the most obnoxious. Is it the contrived, nonsensical plot? Is it the shameless aping of Wicked, in which a nascent Snow Queen is stylized as a “misunderstood” villainess, complete with a “screw you guys, I’mma be me!” midway-point ballad that comes off as such a desperate “Defying Gravity” copycat you feel embarrassed for the songwriters? (They even hired Idina Menzel to voice the character. I mean, come on).

Frozen’s lackluster storytelling isn’t an isolated problem, though. Animated movies in general are in a bit of a rut these days.

Look, I’m a lifelong animation geek. Not just anime, which certainly has a large and very specific geek subculture of its own, but all animation. American, Japanese, 2D, 3D, whatever. There’s something magical about animation that live-action doesn’t quite capture. Purely from a visual standpoint, you can achieve effects of color, stylization, special effects and more that might fall flat or be less effective in live action. Animation is, in some senses, a storybook or a painting come to life.

From an animation standpoint, I’ve been lucky enough to grow up and exist during two distinct Golden Ages. As I mentioned above, I grew up during the Disney Renaissance of the ‘90s. Then I was a teenager and young adult during the Aughties when Pixar’s visual mastery and storytelling panache exceeded that of its parent company. This was also a time when Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki was accomplishing his greatest work (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away).

Something peculiar has happened in the last several years, however. I hesitate to say that animated storytelling has lost its “nobility of purpose,” but I can’t think of any other way to put it. DreamWorks and studios of its ilk ushered in a new and different era with Shrek and its descendents, a flotilla of pandering pablum that translates fart jokes into dollar signs with the ease of Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold. Disney itself—torn in an existential crisis between the fairy-tale musicals that lifted them from the shadows of the ‘70s/‘80s and the creative success of their one-time vassal, Pixar—abandoned the class and taste that put them back on the map in favor of crude, unfunny fare such as Chicken Little and Bolt.

Even Pixar itself, after spending the late ‘90s and most of the Aughties in the enviable position of being the arbiter of good taste in animated filmmaking, has begun sinking itself into unnecessary sequels and middle-America politicking (I’m looking at you, Cars). The 2010s have seen Disney attempting to once again “recapture” their brand-name magic by releasing computer-animated fairy-tale musicals like Tangled and Frozen; from a box-office standpoint, it’s been a successful move, but the movies themselves are such insubstantial, ill-conceived imitations of Disney’s own former triumphs that one can hardly imagine them standing any test of time.

In short, the pendulum, as it will tend to do, has swung in an addlepated direction for about a decade or fifteen years, as far as animation is concerned. In Disney’s first Golden Age, animation elevated itself in the eyes of the public as something not just for silly shorts and the amusement of children but as an artistic medium capable of magic, beauty, and wonder.

Public opinion swung the other way in the ‘70s and ‘80s (perhaps partially due to some less-than-successful filmmaking ventures on Disney’s part), only for Disney to shake the dust off and recapture their former glory during the Renaissance of the ‘90s. Yes, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast had funny moments, but they were first and foremost great movies, with characters you cared about and moments you wanted to relive over and over.

It’s no accident or surprise that Beauty and the Beast became the first animated movie to ever be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year. Disney wasn’t making cartoons. They were making movies that happened to be animated. It’s a similar mindset to what makes Pixar’s seminal works so captivating and so classic. It’s a mindset largely absent from the animated movies of the current era.

Of course, it’s not all bad. After a string of unremarkable releases (even fairy-tale adventure Brave suffered from behind-the-scenes drama and misguided promotion), Pixar is set to release Inside Out in 2015, a highly-conceptual movie about the emotions inside the mind of a little girl. Cartoon Saloon, the Irish studio behind 2009’s flawless The Secret of Kells (possibly the best animated movie of the last several years, to this writer’s mind), will follow up the success of that movie in 2014 with new feature Song of the Sea. As for Disney? One can only assume that the success of Tangled and Frozen will result in more computer-animated fairy tales with silly plots and slangy one-word titles filling our theaters at regular intervals. Here’s hoping that there’s a visionary or two waiting in the wings to inject those ventures with the kind of verve and magic that made Disney the indomitable franchise it is today. Anything less is just coasting.

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Like a Geek God #15: The Legend of Korra Season Two (A Post Mortem)

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God, Television

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The Legend of Korra

Like a Geek God #15 by Mark Pursell

The Legend of Korra Season Two: A Post Mortem

Sequels can be tricky. Many times, the attempt to preserve the spirit of the original object while also striking out in a new direction leads to one of two extemes: transcendance, or catastrophic failure. Aliens, The Godfather: Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Road Warrior capitalized on their progenitors and catapulted their franchises to greater heights of artistic achievement.

On the other hand, we have…The Matrix Reloaded, Jaws 2, Basic Instinct 2, and any number of direct-to-video Disney follow-ups.

It’s hard to say why there’s rarely a middle ground for sequels. Maybe it’s due to the fact that—unless an intellectual property (IP) is conceived with sequels in mind—the existence of a sequel only comes about because the original IP has been commercially successful. This sometimes coincides with critical acclaim and sometimes doesn’t, and it’s hard to say which is the worse offender: a bad sequel to a bad movie that was, despite its badness, financially viable, or a bad sequel to a good or even great movie that squanders exciting storytelling opportunities and tarnishes the franchise/IP’s name.

Television has to deal with this, too. There’s hardly any data for television shows that attempt to be sequels. Spin-offs are more common, and though they can hardly be referred to as sequels in the most accurate sense, conventional television wisdom holds that a spin-off series is an equally-risky bet that rarely pans out well (here’s looking at you, Joey and Golden Palace and Joanie Loves Chachi and The Lone Gunmen). Fortunately, geek television culture is littered with spin-off success stories. Angel and Torchwood, though you may argue the finer points of their worth, extemporized from their source material (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who, respectively) with enough elan to distinguish themselves and establish their own fan bases.

So, the question of a sequel series to Nickolodeon’s hot-property Avatar: The Last Airbender wasn’t necessarily a foregone conclusion on the side of the negative. Actually, it seemed like both a good idea and a novel one. Airbender is one of the most cohesive and satisfying storytelling experiences in modern serialized television, though often overlooked because of its animated nature and its youthful target audience. Creators and lead writers Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko proved again and again during the series’ original run that they were worldbuilders, screenwriters, and showrunners of not only competence but complexity. Though Airbender as a series ended with that most rare of commodities—a satisfying finale—its universe was ripe for further exploration. When Nickoloden announced The Legend of Korra, a sequel series set seventy years after the events of Airbender and starring the next incarnation of the Avatar—a belligerent teenage girl named Korra—Airbender fans across the globe rejoiced.

With the Airbender IP in place and DiMartino and Konietzko once again taking the reins, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Korra would live up to, possibly even surpass, the original series. Early press made much of the fact that the creators had asked for and been given a smaller number of episodes per season to write, allowing them to discard stand-alone episodes and subplots in favor of telling a serialized story arc with precision, focus, and momentum. A dream come true, especially for those of us (*raises hand*) who rant regularly and with passion about how the network standard of twenty-two episodes per season is an enemy to great art, whether it is comedy or epic fantasy.

And things started well enough last year when Korra’s first season aired. The discrete nations of the Airbender world, depicted in the original series as being in the infancy of an industrial revolution, coalesce in Korra to a Gotham analogue called Republic City where the different strata of the Airbender world gather in one place, with the result that—as in most melting-pot metropolises across our actual history—the clash of cultures has led both to advancement (Republic City is essentially a steampunk Shanghai, with zeppelins and metalbending police officers) and antagonism. When the show opens, the mix of elementally-powered benders and “normal”, non-bending people has led to a wave of anti-bending sentiment among Republic City’s ungifted and disenfranchised populace. This idea is embodied by first season villain Amon, leader of an anti-bending organization (the Equalists) and a revolutionary firebrand with, naturally, more than equality on his mind. It’s a relevant, contemporary tableau. Then you have Korra herself: she’s an admirably flawed character, tough and empathetic but headstrong and impatient. She makes an effective contrast to the first series’ Aang, whose airbender serenity, cheerfulness, and insight into human nature is offset by occasional arrogance, reluctance to “grow up”, and fear of his own destiny.

Unfortunately, the very storytelling element that Korra’s shorter season run was supposed to enhance—plotting—emerged as the show’s weakest aspect, against all expectation and logic.

A strong initial salvo of episodes degenerated into a tired love triangle (can we just put love triangles away for a few decades? Bella and her monsters, Katniss and her male damsels-in-distress…leave it alone, please). Then, bizarrely, the show seemed to change its mind about the identity of masked villain Amon, having seemed to set up “his” identity as supporting character Asami and then, in the eleventh hour, pawning the villain’s role off on a previously-unseen/unknown character in whom the audience had no interest or investment. Then the plot was all neatly wrapped up, even though the creators had already been guaranteed a second season (and later signed a deal for three more seasons). They then announced that they had decided to dispense with the overall serialized arc of Airbender and that each season of Korra would feature a discrete arc. Oooookay. Buh?

Whatever floundering marred the end of Korra’s first season continued (and how) with his year’s second season run. The overall conceit of the season was a focus on the spirit world (a running worldbuilding element in the Avatar universe) and the origins of the Avatar’s singular ability to manipulate, or “bend”, all four of the primal elements. However, the first six or seven episodes of Season Two frittered away screentime on a too-obviously-villainous waterbending leader and his engineering of a civil war among the Southern Water Tribe. By the time the season got around to its main point in the “Beginnings” two-parter, this writer’s disinterest had reached eye-rolling proportions. Did we learn nothing from The Phantom Menace? Bureacratic and political machinations can certainly be interesting, but you have to know your brand. I mean, it’s Star Wars, it’s Airbender, it’s high fantasy adventure. This isn’t fucking House of Cards. I suppose it might be different if the political intrigue was written well, but it wasn’t. It was mostly a hash of first-thought “revelations” and betrayals which could have been tossed out completely, being beside the point as they are. The back half of the season was somewhat stronger because the focus shifted to the spirit world and Korra’s relationship with it, ending with a *SPOILER* intriguing development that saw a reentry of the spirits into human society and Korra’s loss of ability to connect with the spirits of her Avatar predecessors. However, even these more exciting story elements suffered from the kind of logical inconsistencies and unforegrounded developments that rarely plagued Airbender. (It should be noted that DiMartino, who co-wrote every episode of Korra’s first season with Konietzko, wrote only a handful of episodes for Season Two; Konietzko wrote none at all).

Why the faltering quality? If I had to spitball, I’d say it has to do (and it usually does, when things like this happen) with the creators and showrunners. DiMartino and Konietzko wrote all twelve episodes of Season One by themselves; while I normally advocate for this kind of writing set up, to avoid a “too many cooks in the kitchen” lurch in quality and tone from episode to episode, they seem to have grown fatigued by the end of the Season One run, a supposition further supported by Konietzko’s lack of writing credits in S2 and DiMartino’s limited participation. For all of Korra’s interesting and complex ideas, and the fantastic, wide universe of Airbender to explore, these guys seem tired of their own show.

In the end, Korra is a rare exception to the general sequel rule. It isn’t devastatingly awful so far, but it doesn’t really live up to Airbender, much less expand on it successfully. It’s possible that, having flushed some unsteadiness from their pipes, DiMartino and Konietzko will find their feet with the in-development third season. Time will tell. At least Korra is better than the live-action Airbender movie (a cinematic abortion for which M. Night Shyamalan should be jailed). And if you’re an Airbender fan, like me, and Korra frustrates you by not capitalizing on its potential brilliance, revisit some of your favorite episodes and story arcs from the original series. After all: we’ll always have Aang.

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Like a Geek God #14: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

08 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Like a Geek God #14 by Mark Pursell

Geeking Out About Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

A large part of our shared cultural experience every December centers on holiday-themed movies. From A Miracle on 34th Street to A Muppet Christmas Carol, Christmas has provided filmmakers with both material and motivation for decades. Generally speaking, though, Christmas movies tend to conform to two very specific criteria: most are American in origin (even Love Actually, set in England, tends to feel like an American person’s fantasy of the motherland rather than something genuinely British), and most tend to fall on the treacly side of the spectrum. There is something about Christmas that brings out the sentimentality in storytellers. Movies like Gremlins, which uses Christmas as a context for comedy/horror, or A Christmas Story, which fixes a cynical and blackly funny eye on Rockwell-esque Christmas nostalgia, tend to be the exceptions rather than the rule. As a result, there are a lot of Christmas-themed or Christmas-related movies from foreign countries and with sentiments that aren’t exactly traditionally warmhearted that go unnoticed despite their merits.

One such movie that came to my attention last year is the very strange but very excellent Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, currently streaming on Netflix Instant Play.

Rare Exports is difficult to synopsize without ruining it for first-time viewers. Described as a “horror/fantasy”, the movie follows a father and son who become drawn into the mysteries surrounding the origins of Santa Claus, a quest that eventually locks them in battle with an ancient, malevolent entity that has been sleeping under the mountain near their village for centuries. That all sounds a bit “B-movie”, but what’s most remarkable about Rare Exports is that despite how it sounds on paper, it’s a legitimately entertaining and well-crafted movie. Filmmaker Jalmari Helander weaves Santa Claus lore together with elements from the legends of Krampus to create a hybrid mythos of his own, with enough complexity and quality worldbuilding to hit any geek’s buttons just right. Interestingly enough, Rare Exports is also a touching story of a father and son struggling to connect, their interpersonal problems thrown into relief by the danger they encounter. To say more would be to ruin the pleasure of discovering it for yourself, if you haven’t seen it. It’s the perfect holiday movie for the geek in all of us. Check it out.

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Like a Geek God #13: Geeking Out: Orphan Black

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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Like a Geek God #13 by Mark Pursell

Geeking Out: Orphan Black

I’m a sucker for well-done serialized storytelling, i.e. TV shows that have a continuous, over-arching story rather than successive stand-alone episodes. It’s the cinematic equivalent of reading a novel, with everything broken into chapters, and much more running time to delve into the complexities of plot and character than a traditional movie. (Indeed, we are in, or maybe nearing the end of, a new Golden Age of TV spurred by HBO and AMC where creative storytellers have been given the money and the free rein to craft some of the most profound serialized storytelling experiences in history: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and so on). So I followed my traditional modus operandi when starting a new show that I know has a good chance of getting me addicted: I laid in a few bottles of wine, set aside an entire evening when I didn’t have to be up early the next morning, and pressed play on Orphan Black. The show originally aired this past spring but I only heard about ita few months ago, when there was an outcry from the fanbase because of lead actress Tatiana Maslany’s Emmy-nomination snub.

A few friends whose taste I trust urged me to watch the show, which they described to me as a science- fiction drama about cloning.

To say that Orphan Black’s concept is fresh and interesting is an understatement; to say that its approach is both unusual and highly effective is even more so. The revelation that main character Sarah Manning (Maslany), a young drifter and con artist, is one of several identical clones doesn’t come until the beginning of the third episode. In another show—an American network show, for example— we would have launched into the clone mystery almost immediately, with no breath or space allowed to develop the characters and foster investment in them. Instead, creators and writers Graeme Manson and John Fawcett spend the first two 43-minute episodes slowly introducing us to Sarah, the other characters around her, and the disturbing mystery of show’s initial scene: Sarah, waiting on a platform, observes a woman who looks identical to her step in front of a train and die.

Shaken, but opportunistic as always, Sarah makes off with the dead woman’s personal belongings before authorities arrive on the scene. Sheassumes the dead woman’s personality (her name: Elizabeth Childs), less concerned with their seeming identical appearance than the possibility that she may be able to access and make off with Beth’s money, thus enabling Sarah to achieve her primary goal: starting a new life somewhere for herself, her best friend and foster brother, Felix, and her young daughter, Kira. Of course, as Sarah impersonates Beth and becomes more entangled in her life, and as the uncomfortable implications about their identicality become impossible to ignore, darker forces gather around the edges of the conflict, waiting for the right moment to strike. Joining forces with two other clones— suburban wife Alison and graduate student Cosima, who reveal their true nature to Sarah and beseech her help in uncovering the truth behind their existence—Sarah is thrown into conflict with not only the police, a cultish scientist, and a fringe religious group, but also her family, as her foster mother Siobhan (an always excellent Maria Doyle Kennedy) seeks both to understand Sarah’s dilemma and shield Sarah’s daughter Kira from any danger. More often than not, the writers handle these competing elements deftly.

They occasionally leaven the tension with some “impersonation schtick” where theclones have to pretend to be one another, but this mostly (and fortunately) disappears after the midway point. The only time things seem to get out of hand is in the last few episodes, where some logical inconsistencies and confusing factual glosses kicked me out of the narrative a little. But by the last shot of the finale, a revelation you’ve been halfway expecting the entire time plays out, leaving Sarah bereft and more desperate than ever.

In a way, Orphan Black reminds me of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. It deals with many of the same issues regarding biotechnology and identity, as well as affording its lead actress the opportunity to show off her chameleonic abilities by slipping into multiple roles. But where Eliza Dushku’s Echo sufficed by being different facets of Eliza Dushku—each personality was her, essentially, but with an overlay—Tatiana Maslany faces the much stranger task of portraying multiple, very different people, with different tics and personalities. And perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of Orphan Black is watching this ingenious young actress tackle this (these) demanding role(s) with the confidence and panache of a seasoned veteran. Maslany vanishes inside the different clone personae: she is recognizable but also wholly distinct depending on which clone she is portraying, down to the physical way she holds herself, the way she draws breath.

In one crucial scene, where we are supposed to think we are seeing Sarah but it is really another clone in disguise, I knew immediately that it was not the Sarah character—despite the hair and clothes, despite the fact that the scene opens with Maslany sitting stationary—because of how she was sitting. It’s that subtle, and that striking.

The outcry about her lack of nomination for a lead acting Emmy is well-founded. What’s most notable about Orphan Black in the end, though, is the way it hops genres, changing its spots with the same ease as Tatiana Maslany changes her semblance. It’s a science fiction thriller, but it’s also a police procedural, a domestic drama, a commentary on medical ethics, etc., jumping from one to the other and, in an understated way, lampooning each without becoming overtly satirical or parodic. It’s that rare show that has its cake and eats it, too, succeeding at this kind of line-straddling where others that attempt it—Girls, American Horror Story—lose their footing and fall into the crevices between satire and SRS BZNS TV, never to recover. It’s not a perfect show, but—and this is how I define quality or greatness in anything artistic—it transcends the flaws that it does have. Season 2 starts this coming spring. Bring it on.

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Mark Pursell is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Like a Geek God #12: Geek Bulletin (Star Wars Episode VII)

17 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God, Star Wars

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Like a Geek God #12 by Mark Pursell

Geek Bulletin: Star Wars Episode VII

Pertinent details regarding the development of Star Wars Episode VII have been thin on the ground. Academy Award-winner and Star Wars scholar and lecturer Michael Arndt was announced as the screenwriter early in the process, as his treatment for a new set of movies in the Star Wars universe was part of Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm and its attendant properties in October 2012. Not long after, Disney announced J.J. Abrams had been selected for directorial responsibilities. And…for a long time, that was kind of it.

J.J. Abrams

Until now. After a year of relative silence on the Episode VII development front, details emerged in late October that Arndt and his script had been set aside in favor of a script by Abrams himself, with an assist from Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan. This was confirmed in an official announcement on starwars.com on October 24 and again on November 7 (along with an official release date of December 18, 2015, with shooting slated to begin this coming spring at Pinewood Studios in England).

Questions arose immediately. As a lauded screenwriter whose movies (Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3) are very much tapped into our present cultural moment, and also as a nigh-professional Star Wars geek, Michael Arndt seemed a perfect choice to shape a new generation of Star Wars stories. His exit, after a seemingly peaceful year of development work, nonplussed many. What’s telling is how quickly the powers-that-be behind Episode VII attempted to forestall any negative spitballing by the armchair quarterbacks of the blogosphere (such as yours truly). The starwars.com official announcement on October 24 contained a pleasantly vague statement from producer Kathleen Kennedy, in which she praised Arndt for “bringing us to this point.” Then, Abrams, speaking with deadline.com on November 7, said that the change had to do with the “time frame” and getting them “where we need to be and when we needed to be”, implying that bringing in Lawrence Kasdan was going to make this possible.

How also pleasantly vague. (I won’t link you to the unsubstantiated rumors from over the summer about Abrams being unhappy with Arndt’s script. Oh wait, I guess I just did).

Look. We all know that developing a new entry in a high-profile, high-pressure franchise is no picnic. I’ve already written at length on this very blog about the troubled production histories of hot-property franchise installments. This kind of behind-the-scenes drama usually has to do with money. Executives fixate so desperately on the potential dollars to be earned that they attempt to reverse engineer a hit, working backwards from their desired box office revenue, with the result often ranging anywhere from muddled to unwatchable. Which is why Disney’s hiring of someone like Michael Arndt to write Episode VII—a man who is a proven storyteller of grit and substance and who has an emotional investment in the franchise—was a good move, and a positive sign that the people holding the purse strings in this situation had their hearts in the right place, that the intention was, after all, to make a good movie.

Michael Arndt, with hardware.

But now, a year after an initial treatment from Ardnt was already in place, a year in which a full script was produced and presented, Abrams and Kasdan are starting from scratch?

Not all is right in Whoville. But I don’t think it’s a money problem. I think it’s a nostalgia problem.

Yes, The Empire Strikes Back fan in all of us got excited when we saw Lawrence Kasdan’s name attached to the screenplay. I mean, he’s half the reason that Empire is as good as it is (along with Irvin Kershner’s direction). He’s also written some other excellent screenplays over the years (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist).

Lawrence Kasdan on the set of Dreamcatcher

On the other hand, we haven’t seen much from him during the last twenty years, and what we have (Mumford, Dreamcatcher) has been less than stellar. One might view his suddenly prominent and powerful inclusion in the Episode VII creative team as a move of desperation on Abrams’s part, a potentially-misguided attempt to recreate the franchise’s past glory rather than fashioning a new, forward-thinking vision which recaptures the wonder and thrills of the original trilogy without being mired in the past.

Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Mark Hammill

Abrams’s decision to tap Kasdan as co-writer sniffs of nostalgia rather than an objective decision about the best and most-relevant creative vision for an Information Age Star Wars trilogy. And nostalgia has done nothing but lead Abrams down a rabbit hole of mediocrity for the last decade. Super 8, largely a paean of nostalgia to Abrams’s own childhood and to the ‘70s movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind that informed him, fizzles out rather badly in its third act; his Star Trek reboots, whose indisputable visual panache were arguably the reason he was selected to helm Episode VII, are not particularly memorable or well-crafted.

Who knows how it will come out in the end? We are two full years away from seeing Episode VII in its entirety (if it sticks to its current production schedule). That’s a lot of time. And it’s not like Abrams or Kasdan are completely untalented. One would hope that, given the challenge of crafting a new entry in the most popular film franchise of all time, they would square their shoulders, dig deep, and show the world what they are truly, creatively capable of. But shakeups like this after such a long period of development are rarely a positive sign. I feel a disturbance in the…well, you know.

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Like a Geek God #11: Finding Our Footage

03 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

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Cannibal Holocaust, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project

Like a Geek God #11 by Mark Pursell

Finding Our Footage

Part of what makes movies so delightful, so transporting, is the fantasy of it all. Even darkly-realistic, psychologically-complex movies are constructed, and no matter how engaged we are by them, there is always, at some level, the slight, smiling recognition that everything playing out before us is mummery: love and violence and awe and despair contained safely in the celluloid. However, there are some types of movies that play fast and loose with this basic compact of visual fiction. Documentaries lay claim to the “nonfiction” side of moviemaking (though some are more journalistic, and have more integrity, than others); mockumentaries use a cinéma vérité format for very much un-verite material, an approach that works wonders for satire and comedy. However, there is another subgenre at work, too, a subgenre which has been around for decades but which has risen to a new prominence (for good or ill) in the last fifteen years: the found footage movie.

For the most part, found footage movies swim in the horror school. There is something about the concept—here is mysterious footage, presented without editing, of something that really happened—that lends itself to horror. One of the earliest examples is the infamous 1980 gorefest Cannibal Holocaust, which revolves around horrific footage recovered from a team of researchers who vanish while studying the indigenous tribes of the Amazon.

Like Nicholas Cage vehicle 8mm or Mark Danielewski’s found-footage novel House of Leaves, the footage in Cannibal Holocaust is itself framed by an outer story of characters who endeavor to verify the footage’s authenticity or suppress its release.

As a subset of horror filmmaking, though, found footage truly came into its own with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

Blair_Witch_Project

Witch dispensed with any narrative layering or framing devices, other than a title card which briefly, disturbingly states that what you are about to see is footage recovered from the Maryland woods, footage belonging to three young filmmakers who disappeared in said woods while filming a documentary about a malevolent local legend. The movie then plays out in what feels like unedited form–the camera angles sweep sickeningly up and down, shadows become pregnant with threat, and the forest’s eerie silence is punctuated only by strange, hair-raising crunches and cackles in the dark. As the beleagured trio’s desperation grows, their cries of terror become more resigned, their breathing labored and shallow as a fox driven before hounds. Indeed, a found footage approach stripped away much of what usually dilutes the power of an effective horror movie, such as overweening or manipulative background music and a sense of visual style over substance. It worked like gangbusters; The Blair Witch Project was wildly successful and, to this writer’s mind, deserving of recognition as one of the most deeply terrifying movies ever made.

Not that a movie must adopt a found footage approach to be scary, but the forced minimalism of it was a lesson that many took to heart, with the result that other found footage horrors soon began to appear, some more effective than others. The most notable successor to Blair Witch’s level of quality is 2007’s Paranormal Activity, which traded the Maryland woods for a suburban home and a folkloric witch for an (equally unseen) demonic interloper. The merits of the format, mostly evinced by these two movies almost a decade apart, helped create an atmosphere where found footage or elements of it could be used effectively in other genres besides horror, such as science fiction (Cloverfield in 2008, parts of 2011’s Super 8) and superhero action (2012’s Chronicle).

Found footage has its limits, of course. No matter how hard you try or how you creative you get, it is still a “gimmick” format at its core, and the thorny problem of creating narrative justification for “why is someone filming this right now? why would they still be holding a camera?” does not have infinite solutions. It’s important, though, to recognize how found footage has come into its own as a genre and a narrative method, because I think it points to positive developments on the horizon regarding how movies are made. We live in an age where exponentially-advancing technology has given us the ability to create art in our homes. We can make records in our bedroom, we can film YouTube shorts in our kitchen. For filmmakers, the ability to make actual full-length movies of quality—on a shoestring budget, with limited resources—increases with each passing month, each passing day. To this writer, what this (potentially) signals is the advent of a new DIY ethos, a hands-on, no-frills approach to emotionally-direct filmmaking that recalls the gritty genius of the ’70s. In a cinematic environment bloated with mediocre superhero flicks and inane, unfunny comedies, a filmmaker who can cut to the heart of what thrills people, or moves them, or makes them laugh, a filmmaker who can do this independent of big budgets and pointlessly overpaid stars and fatigue-inducing digital mayhem, is a filmmaker whose star will be hung undoubtedly high in the sky of the coming creative decades.

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Like a Geek God #10: A Dreadful Double Feature Triple Threat

27 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

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Alien, Alred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Donnie Darko, John Carpenter, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Mulholland Drive, Ridley Scott, The Birds, The Thing

Like a Geek God #10 by Mark Pursell

A Dreadful Double Feature Triple Threat

Halloween in the Information Age always sees a glut of “favorite scary movie” lists clogging up your feeds and repeating the same recommendations over and over again. The thing is, if you’re a horror geek or a fan of scary movies in any way, you already know and love classic, foundational horror flicks like The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Halloween, The Exorcist, Carrie, and more. You’ll also see plenty of lists from self-righteous horror geeks, directing you to their favorite under-the-radar splatterfest gems (many of which are meritorious only because of a certain flair for cringeworthy gore and not because of strong storytelling or atmospherics). The truth is that, somewhere in the divide between the standards and the schlock, any number of deeply frightening films often get lost or overlooked as horror movies, even if they are famous or have followings for other reasons.

I wrote last time about the nature of fear, and how truly successful horror movies foster an unbearable sense of dread as opposed to jump scares and shock tactics. So, in that spirit, I present six must-see, truly scary movies for your Halloween viewing pleasure. These are all movies that only occasionally pop up on Halloween-themed “scariest movie” lists; they also do not self identify as horror (with the possible exception of The Thing) but are more truly terrifying than most movies that do. The movies in this list not only craft strong, complex stories with memorable characters, but also and most importantly create an atmosphere of tangible dread. Danger imbues every frame of these fine films. And, just for extra fun, they are paired together in ready-to-view double headers. You’re welcome.

Jaws and The Birds

Nature is rife with terrific and unstoppable forces that threaten our existence at every turn, but there is something so specifically disturbing about our fellow living creatures turning against us that bone-chilling tales about marauding animals are a media staple in genres ranging from adventure and drama to straight horror. Maybe our fascination with these stories stems from a sense of Biblical betrayal: Judeo-Christian philosophy describes “the dominion of man” over the earth and its other inhabitants, and as a race, we certainly seem to take that to heart. No wonder, then, that stories about our supposedly subservient and non-sentient cousins in the evolutionary chain rising up like avenging spirits make us clutch the blankets closer, look askance at the neighbor’s cat, refuse to go swimming. Of course, straightforward stories about wounded, unhinged, or otherwise marred animals acting out against humans because of exploitation or mistreatment inspire pathos instead of fear, but the movies where our bestial intelopers seem to embody a force much more terrible and destructive than simple animal behavior hint at something insatiable and apocalyptic that lurks just beneath the surface of the natural order.

Jaws and The Birds both embody this idea, and make use of surprisingly similar contexts—beleagured seaside towns, with one threat coming from the waves and the other from the wide blue. However, they elevate themselves beyond your typical “creature feature” by building complex human characters whose welfare we are made to care about long before the trouble really gets going. Jaws in particular folds its air of panic into a small-town human drama that accentuates the movie’s anxiety, pushing the plot and the characters into ever more reactionary places until, with a sense of inevitability that is the beating heart of all true horror, the three heroes—grim, resolved—put out to sea to face their nemesis. They carry with them the burden of not only having to find and defeat the great white threat, but also the knowledge that doing so will save their livelihoods and the existence of Amity.

The Birds is, of course, closer in tone to classic Hollywood with its chilly, Hitchcockian beauty, but what makes the avian threat equally as terrifying as the maw of a shark is its unexpectedness and uncertainty. A man-eating shark is not necessarily anomalous in the real world, but hundreds of birds inexplicably turning on us mammals creates fear because it is such a disruption of the “natural order”, a feeling which is only enhanced by Hitchcock’s (wise) decision not to address the reason behind this event. With a slyness that has only become apparent to me on repeated viewings, Hitchcock and the script imply a mix of factors which might, at least thematically or metaphorically, be the cause—the unwed Tippi Hedren’s sexual independence, perhaps, or the mysterious pair of lovebirds she takes to Bodega Bay as a flirtatious sally fired at Rod Taylor, and which the survivors (probably unwisely) take with them when making their final escape. The uncanny nature of the birds’ aggression mixed with this teasing lack of explanation create an atmosphere in which, like Jaws, the laws of nature seem to no longer apply, and the invisible structures we cling to to make sense of the world fall away from us, leaving us exposed and with no place to hide.

Alien and The Thing

Aggressive organisms from our own planet are one thing, but aggressive organisms from the uncharted bournes of outer space are another matter entirely. The universe beyond our fragile atmosphere is a Rorschach sort of canvas on which humanity has projected its capacity for wonder and terror since our infancy as a race. Small wonder, then, that some of our most hair-raising tales concern themselves with the nigh incomprehensible horrors that might one day come slithering out of the void.

Much has been made over the decades about Ridley Scott’s Alien—it is a seminal science fiction work—but I rarely see it described as a horror movie, or lauded as one. Which is odd, because that is essentially what it is. It’s not even really a creature feature—it has less in common with something like Jaws than it does with slasher flicks, the methodical slaying, one by one, of an isolated and fearful cast of characters. Much like Jaws, though, Alien builds its feeling of dread by keeping the titular aggressor out of sight as long as possible, allowing our imagintions—always more powerful than the most dazzling special effect—to work overtime and juice up our adrenaline and anxiety as the fiend’s nature is slowly, sickeningly revealed. (It’s worth noting that both Jaws and Alien employed this type of restraint not because of the initial intent of their respective directors, but because the special effects for both creatures were not as effective as desired, forcing both Spielberg and Scott to keep their monsters out of sight as long as possible). The DNA of Alien’s particular flavor of dread—the run-down blue-collar spaceship, evoking a grim lower-class future; the oral rape and violation metaphors, mixed with the sexual aspects of the xenomorph’s life cycle and design; the overwhelming hopelessness of pitting oneself against the whims of a powerful corporation, a particularly relevant thematic strand for today’s America—all of these things have been written about and analyzed. But perhaps the most chilling aspect of the movie is the xenomorph’s bloodthirsty aggression itself. Possible to explain away the behavior of a rogue shark; possible, even, to form thematic explanations for unnatural avian aggression (the encroachment of man, perhaps). The xenomorph’s predations, though, are as unfounded as they are nearly unstoppable. It seems to exist for no other reason, and to want nothing, other than to destroy life, and the movie leaves us dangling in desperation at that unexplainable fact. Faced with such unreasoning destruction, what is there to do but run?

The Thing, for its part, is not set in outer space but in an equally desolate, isolated setting: Antarctica (a nod, perhaps, to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”). It exchanges Alien’s mixed-gender cast of interstellar truckers for a gruff assortment of male scientists, headed up by a scruffy Kurt Russell, but much like Alien, the titular organism infiltrates the group by subterfuge—in the case of The Thing, the creature takes on the likeness of a dog, and by the time the scientists realize all is not well with Rover, it is practically too late. The Thing is largely the same “type” of movie as Alien, a series of suspenseful encounters that gradually escalate into pitched battle, but one element that distinguishes the Thing and makes it terrifying in its own right, and not just by default of its alienness, is its protean nature. It can shapeshift, yes, but it’s also the intermediate forms it takes in transition (which show off some amazing special effects and makeup work that, though dated, still dazzles almost twenty-five years later) that inspire in us human beings—fixed as we are in our forms—a deep and queasy unease. The idea of a living organism that seems to have no “true” shape, jumping from copy to copy like a macabre chameleon, is so anthithetical to our view of the world that we reject it outright, shrinking away from it with revulsion at its unnaturalness.

Donnie Darko and Mulholland Drive

Space, as a frontier, overwhelms with its vast and unknowable reaches. The frontier of our own minds, though—and the way that we build our relationships with time, with dream, and with memory—is no less mysterious and no less full of potential danger.

Donnie Darko presents at first as the simple tale of a troubled teen. But as the movie winds on and becomes more complicated, bringing in subtle flavors of science fiction and true horror, it turns out that Jake Gyllenhaal (a breakout performance in the title role) is right to push with adolescent rage and frustration at the boundaries of his cozened suburban life; his feeling that all is not quite right with the world, that there is a flaw in reality hovering just beyond his ability to define or grasp, turns out to be the only thing that can avert tragedy and bring him to his ultimate fate.

There is a similar sense of ultimate inevitability laced through David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, as Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring struggle to piece together an unsettling mystery, racing towards a revelation and an outcome that, we realize as the credits roll, was actually racing towards them all along with the inexorability of a freight train. In Mulholland Drive, though, it is not our heroines who sense the “wrongness” of their world, even as they struggle to piece together an unsettling mystery; it is the audience who senses this wrongness, a feeling that this version of reality is alternate, somehow, and when the final revelation plays out and our worst suspicions are confirmed, it makes our ability to understand time, dreams, and memory seem not only suspect but traitorous, that attempting to get a fix on ourselves in relation to the ever-flowing forces of time and the limitations of our own perception is a battle that can’t be won and, if pushed too far, can boomerang on us in strange, frightening, and ultimately fatal ways.

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