What does this mean to people who aren’t film snobs? It’s hard to say. As their name might imply, New Yorker Films seemed to handle the kinds of movies seldom seen outside big cities. I was amused by the vintage quote from founder Dan Talbot about the demographic for his company’s films: “They’re meant for a small, elite audience. … This is an audience that generally knows at least one foreign language, that has done a certain amount of traveling, that is probably interested in wine and foreign cars and that is fed up with all the junk that comes out of the West Coast.” That’s a very baby-boomerish, “Annie Hall”-era definition of cool, which for better or worse got overthrown once the slackers came of age.

I had to go online to find out which titles New Yorker Films actually distributed theatrically. I think the only ones I’ve heard of AND seen are “Chan Is Missing”, a dull but probably-cool-for-its-time early-80s indie film, and Werner Herzog’s acclaimed “Aguirre: The Wrath of God”, a sort of 16th-century “Apocalypse Now” about Spanish conquistadors, played by German actors speaking German. In the 2000′s they became the US distributors of some older French films I’d seen as a student: “Pickpocket”, “A Man Escaped” and “La Jetee”. To judge by their IMDB listing, they mainly handled foreign films and documentaries.

On a not-unrelated note, another Indiewire article talks about the difficulty that independent films are now having in finding a commercial life beyond the film festival circuit:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/fest_shuffle_what_does_it_mean/

I guess the lesson to all of this is that indie filmmakers are on their own now and have to make their own grassroots efforts to find an audience – there’s not really an alternative or arthouse “scene” of like-minded people to support their work.

Wired has an interview with “Watchmen” writer Alan Moore…
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_moore_qa?currentPage=all

…and a four-page interview with “Watchmen” artist Dave Gibbons:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-03/ff_gibbons_qa?currentPage=1

Alan Moore has become famous for his aversion to barbers comic book movies. His righteous anger towards Hollywood, and American culture in general, is a frequent feature of his interviews, although his moral authority in these interviews is generally deflated by their tendency to include a picture of the guy.

The Wired interview catches him in a slightly better mood, in which he consciously chooses not to rehash things he’s said elsewhere. His lament over the influence that “Watchmen” had on the comics industry makes interesting reading. He also make an interesting claim about American superheroes – that their appeal lies in the fact that, like America, they always have the upper hand in any military conflict.

It’s a clever interpretation, but to quote Iron Man, I respectfully disagree. Like many foreign observers, Moore seems convinced that all Americans are in love with power, dominance, and exploitation, and that expensive Hollywood action spectaculars made by a subset of Angelenos provide a complete and universal expression of the American mind.

But jocks and macho guys aren’t the core superhero audience. Sports heroes, cops, cowboys, soldiers, federal agents, SUV-driving CEOs … those are the heroes that appeal to the culture Moore intends to indict.

It’s the un-macho guys who dig superheroes, for two reasons. One is that superheroes are generally outcasts from society – a physical freak, or some nebbishy nobody with a “secret identity”. This is not a new observation.

The other reason – which I haven’t heard suggested as often – is that superheroes, like geeks, tend to have a very strange and specific skill, and not necessarily of the kind that makes one popular on the playground. And the superheroes who do possess physical might tend to be disfigured or handicapped by it in some way. While I’m not really a comics fan – I know superheroes mainly from film and TV – I humbly suggest that characters like Spiderman, Rogue, Professor X, Daredevil, Aquaman, Abe Sapien, and three of the Fantastic Four fall well outside of the lunkhead demographic Moore seems to associate with traditional superheroes.

If I have any issue with the traditional superhero as an icon, it’s for almost totally the opposite reason Moore does. I think that superhero stories pander not to the Budweiser crowd, but to a crowd that is overly fixated on the idea of being outcasts, spending too much of their adult lives picking at the scabs of childhood and high school. I’ve noticed some recent superhero stories struggling to have it both ways – needlessly crippling their central characters so that a self-pitying nerd audience won’t lose their ability to identify with them, while still trying to satisfy the power fantasies that are the whole point of superheroes in the first place.

By the time of the third Spiderman movie, I found it hard to belive that a character who spends so much time risking his life and engaging in physical combat should still be so gawky and maladroit and lacking in confidence. Anyone who can climb walls and leap between buildings should be a much, much better dancer.

Worse, look at Hiro on “Heroes”. Here’s a character who is clearly identified as a fan, who sees everything in terms of references to Spock and Spiderman and so on. Despite everything he’s seen and done, he still remains a naive, comic-relief fanboy, an observer rather than a participant. Notice how desperate the writers are to avoid letting him be a full-fledged superhero in the same world as the other superheroes – they banish him to Africa and ancient Japan, they take away his powers, they regress his mind to the level of an 8-year-old. Anything to stop him from growing up and joining the other adults, and thus abandoning the audience whose viewpoint he is supposed to represent. Claire the teenaged cheerleader has matured more than he has.

That’s the paradox of superheroes. For the sake of the core audience, they must always be wallflowers. They must never overcome the obstacles that bar them from inclusion in mainstream society, because they appeal to the feeling that acceptance and status are forever out of reach.

Stick that in your beard, Mr. Moore.
 

Nonetheless, this caught my eye. “Snark”, by the film critic David Denby, apparently argues that the no-standards world of the Internet has made it cool to be an asshole.

Personally, I wouldn’t blame the Internet. It’s been cool to be an asshole since at least 1990. Somehow my generation latched onto the immature high school attitude that it’s always smarter to hate things, and that only the lame or gullible ever actually like something (unless it celebrates hatred and being an asshole). And so the gossipers – people who only know how to talk and complain – have been attacking actual achievers ever since.

People who make fun of movies, music and TV are not superior to people who actually know how to make a movie, form a band, or produce a TV show. People who hate our political system, but have never so much as volunteered for anything, are not superior to those who successfully campaign to get themselves elected to high office.

It’s easy to complain, but actions speak louder than words … at least to people who aren’t assholes.

This was a 20-volume CD box set that I bought at House of Guitars several years ago, for about $60 if I remember right. When it comes to punk, I’m a “fan” only in the older sense of generally liking it (rather than the modern sense of needing to have an encyclopedic knowledge, and to wield that knowledge over the unworthy). But when I saw this CD set, I did the mental math and realized that I would be getting a lot of entertainment for my money, so I bought it and listened to some of it. Only in the past few weeks, however, did I finally make the effort to listen to the whole damn thing from start to finish.

“The Entire History of Punk” is neither entire (there’s a huge UK bias in the choice of songs – the Dead Kennedys are about the only Yanks on here, though oddly there are two cover versions of The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”) nor a history (there’s no attempt to establish a timeline of the genre, or even provide dates for each song in the booklet). Perhaps it should have been called “As Much of the History of Punk As We Could Afford the Rights To”.

Some of the bands on here I’ve heard of. Many more I haven’t. Some of the songs on here I know are considered classics. A lot of the others are, I’m sure, much lower on the food chain, and were included because they were cheap and/or to fill out the collection. In fact, I definitely get the sense that the compilers were struggling a bit to fill 20 CDs, since they’ve included punk cover versions of non-punk songs like “Help”, the “Monkees” theme, “Be My Baby”, “I Fought The Law” and even “C– On Feel the Noize”, and the 20th disc sounds to my ears like a lot of oddball rockabilly, rather than punk per se.

Still, there are about 300 songs here. That’s a hell of a lot of atonal screaming and guitar-strangling, and there are only so many ways to express Brit-punk’s three basic messages:

But there are some gems buried in this collection, so if you ever want to get in touch with the angry, spotty, pasty-white, Thatcher-baiting working-class yobbo inside us all – or if you just haven’t had enough caffeine – you could do worse than to seek out these songs:

“I Hate People” (Anti Nowhere League) – disc 1, track 3
If you liked “I Hate You”, the song being played on the punk’s boom box in “Star Trek IV”, then you’ll love “I Hate People”, since in many respects it’s the same damn song.
Punk message: 3

“Fuck Religion, Fuck Politics, Fuck the Lot of You” (Chaotic Discord) – disc 4, track 13
The title is also its principal lyric, repeatedly shouted in a slurred, garbled manner. Not the kind of song you can dance to, but its message is timeless.
Punk message: 3

“Soldier Soldier” (Spizz) – disc 5, track 2
Sometimes it’s hard to be sure whether a song is catchy despite, or because of, its annoyingness.
Punk message: 2

“(I’m In Love With) Margaret Thatcher” (Notsensibles) – disc 5, track 3
Mags, I don’t think these lads are being entirely sincere. They’re just toying with you so they can break your heart.
Punk message: 1

“If The Kids Are United” (Sham 69) – disc 5, track 5
A “Tubthumping”-like song about the power of positive thinking and mutual understanding. What the hell is it doing in this collection?
Punk message: None of the above

“Rowche Rumble” (The Fall) – disc 6, track 6
Punk rock meets video-game music, and gets bizzay. I wonder if a “Rowche Rumble” is anything like a “Borstal Breakout”, since there are two versions of that song in this collection as well.
Punk message: 3

“Dick Barton” (Frankie & The Flames) – disc 9, track 24
“If a WWII-era British pulp hero was reinvented as a 1970s TV action hero, this would be his theme song.” That was the jokey blurb I was going to write for this one, but then I looked up “Dick Barton” on Wikipedia and discovered that this is, in fact, just about accurate. Another fun song that seems wildly out of place here.
Punk message: None of the above

“Anarchy In The UK” (The Sex Pistols) – disc 13, track 1
This is it. The masterpiece. The “Citizen Kane”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Best of Both Worlds, Parts 1 and 2″ of punk rock.
Punk message: 1, 2, 3

“I Believe In Anarchy” – (The Exploited) – disc 13, track 5
The trick to editing any kind of anthology is to avoid putting similar items too close to each other, so it’s odd that they put this song on the same disc as “Anarchy In The UK”, but it holds its own.
Punk message: 3

“Who Killed ET? (I Killed The Fucker)” (Chaotic Discord) – disc 15, track 10
Thatcher? The Queen? Paper tigers. Fight the real enemy!
Punk message: 3

But they save the best for nearly last …

“My Way” (Sid Vicious) – disc 19, track 2
Best song ever. Before I heard this notorious cover version of the Sinatra classic, I assumed it was a Shatneresque musical butchery. I was wrong. Sid’s “My Way” is to Sinatra’s version as Daniel Craig is to Pierce Brosnan. If you’ve never heard it, imagine a drunk person violently puking during the end credits of early-80s Doctor Who … but even better.
Punk message: 3

I just want to burn the now-smelly clothes I was wearing all weekend (though in reality I will probably wash some and discard others).

Next I have to start sorting and discarding – since that step got skipped by necessity.

I’m wearing a T-shirt instead of my usual bundled-up winter attire as I write this – either because my new apartment now has less empty space to heat, or because my overworked body is just radiating heat energy. Or both.

The three years I spent in my old apartment were eventful to say the least. I’m relieved to see the end of 2008, but in my mind I had to finish this move before I could truly start living in 2009.

Recently I’ve come across a few additional reasons to kiss the past goodbye. One is that VHS is now officially dead. Just over ten years ago we were still editing on VHS (S-VHS, actually) at RIT, and having to explain, to anyone who received copies, that you would have to set your player to Mono so that the two student-produced audio channels would mix properly and become audible. The low-tech grubbiness of VHS seems to symbolize all the qualities that Gen X-ers consider “authentic”, so it’s perhaps fitting that it should finally fade away.

Another is that Cineforum has closed. What is Cineforum, you ask? Well, every time I visited Toronto, I would see these handmade, ‘zine-style flyers posted all over the city announcing the latest movie screening at Cineforum. One time it was “The Wizard of Oz” played in sync with the Pink Floyd album that supposedly went well with it. Another time – at least twice, actually – it was a program of “uncensored” cartoon shorts from the Looney Tunes era. Or it would be a marathon of old horror movies on Halloween. I was so intrigued by these fliers that in my latest movie, for a scene set in a Toronto video store, I decorated the location with fake Cineforum fliers in an attempt to add convincing detail.

But alas, I never actually went to any Cineforum screening, as my weekend schedule never seemed to coincide with the screenings being advertised. I did at least walk past the building once, on my way to something else in the city (it seemed to just be somebody’s house with a neon “Cineforum” sign in the window), but that’s as close as I ever came. I always vowed that on my next trip up north I would check it out. Now I never will. Cineforum, curated by some dude named Reg Hartt, seemed to be the kind of quirky public venue for old or obscure movies that used to mean a lot before DVDs and torrents made this stuff easier to find. Yes, you can get the films themselves more easily, but there was something about gathering in a funky hole-in-the-wall with other die-hards that I will miss. Oh well.

This year has so far fit that pattern – sort of. We’ve had a lot of snow over the last few weeks, culminating in a wallop this past week. But then it thawed, and in fact today was so warm that I had to take my jacket off when walking outside.

Still making progress on the apartment(s). The old place is getting emptier and emptier, even if the new space is starting to clutter a bit. The end is in sight, though…

So Nolan’s epic is a good film and a popular film. But is it the best film of the year? Cinemablend.com blogger Josh Tyler thinks so, and in this excitable post he argues that critics and Oscar voters must award their highest end-of-year hosannahs to TDK, and if they don’t, it will prove once and forever that they are totally out of it:

After pointing out that people are increasingly getting their news and opinions from the internet rather than traditional media, Tyler warns that critics who choose anything other than TDK as the year’s best film are digging their own grave:

Jim Emerson, a blogger/critic and a pal of Roger Ebert, had his own thoughts on Tyler’s post. I didn’t entirely follow Emerson’s train of thought (he gets a little sidetracked by discussing fellow critic Manohla Dargis). But clearly he objects to Tyler’s hyperbole and bullying tone, and also to the idea that critics must conform to the mood of the public in order to do their job.

I came across all this when visiting Roger Ebert’s website, which links to Emerson’s post. It’s perhaps worth noting that Ebert thought there were so many great films this year that he couldn’t even narrow it down to a top 10. His top 20 list includes TDK and “Iron Man”, as it happens, as well as Pixar’s “WALL*E”, the indie drama “Rachel Getting Married” (which I liked a lot) and several films about which I’ve heard great or good things (including “W.”, “Milk”, “Synedoche, New York” and “Slumdog Millionaire”) as well as several that hold little interest to me at all. The fact that Ebert then felt the need to make another list just of the year’s best foreign films (including the vampire movie “Let the Right One In”) suggests that 2008 was quite a good year for quality movies, despite what Tyler suggests.

There are larger issues here than whether TDK is the best movie of the year, or even whether the sequel to a reboot of a 20-year-old movie franchise based on a 70-year-old comic book really does herald a bold new direction for cinema.

One is the issue of whether newspaper critics – or indeed, newspapers – are still ‘relevant’. In the old-media days, the power of “name” critics like Siskel and Ebert, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, etc. was that they were tastemakers who took it upon themselves to educate the public in the qualities that made a film good or bad. Thanks to the rise of bloggers and websites, and the wider availability of obscure movies via DVD, people are now much more willing to decide for themselves what they like, and don’t necessarily need big-city critics telling them what to think. But the older model of film criticism helped champion a number of films and filmmakers who might otherwise have been neglected (Kael’s reviews, in particular, had a big hand in promoting the 1960s/70s generation of breakthrough directors), and it would be a shame if such critics completely lost their influence.

Another issue raised here is what type of cinematic storytelling deserves to be ‘championed’ by the cultural gatekeepers. Tyler clearly stands firmly on the side of geek culture and against dramas – he feels no need to argue exactly why “Star Wars” should have defeated “Annie Hall” at the Oscars, and regards the championing of less popular films as an “undeserved indie-film agenda“. This is the flipside of the snobbery I encountered in film school, where only foreign and independent films were held to be of any worth, while even the best sci-fi was looked down upon.

I don’t understand where this divisiveness comes from, this need to have one’s own tastes dominate the entire culture. I don’t understand why either genre films or dramas have to be championed at the other’s expense. In fact, the filmmakers I admire most are the ones who have managed to straddle that divide – Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, Darren Aronofsky, Danny Boyle, Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg have all been able to make unique, personal, memorable films while appealing to sci-fi/horror fans and highbrow film buffs alike.

I also have to admit that I haven’t fully bought into the “Dark Knight” hype. I thought it was quite good – it was a lean, mean, solid thriller, well-directed, with a great cast – but I don’t really see why it’s being hailed as the greatest movie ever made. I thought it took itself a tad seriously for a movie about a guy dressed as a rodent fighting a guy dressed as a clown. And that unbending earnestness made the various absurdities (How is the Joker able to just waltz uninvited into the hideout of the city’s worst criminals? Why doesn’t Harvey Dent’s left eye dry out? Why does Batman talk like that?) much more glaring.

Tyler’s comparison to the original “Star Wars” also loses me a bit – “Star Wars” changed the culture in 1977 because it was heroic and hopeful, whereas “The Dark Knight” simply reinforces our current cynicism. Armond White, one of the film’s few detractors, homed in on this point in his review:

Despite his alarmist, eggheady tone (no more dignified than Tyler’s fannish rant), I think White is onto something: It’s always considered manipulative to make an audience feel good, but it’s never considered manipulative to make them feel bad, because that’s more ‘real’ for some reason. Perhaps this – coupled with the unfortunate fact that one of the lead actors accidentally martyred himself – is the real reason why people who only like action movies are declaring this the greatest masterpiece in film history.

But as a filmmaker and film buff, I think all this debate is healthy. We keep getting told that audiences have irrevocably changed – that they have shorter attention spans, expect entertainment to be interactive rather than passive, get their news from comedy shows rather than reporters, and download music instead of buying it. So I’m glad that movies – new movies – can still inspire passion and enthrall people, whether it’s “The Dark Knight” or “Man on Wire” or “Repo! The Genetic Opera”. Movie critics might not be relevant, but movies are.

Still, going through old stuff has so far jolted some good memories. I found some papers from RIT film school: some notes from a class on the history of British animation (a surprisingly boring class – I am throwing these AWAY) and some ‘zine-like flyers for the weekend film screenings that my classmate Josh Slates used to put on. And in my book collection, I found my collection of Mississippi Press’s film-director “Interviews” books, including “Quentin Tarantino: Interviews”.

It made me remember Gen-X hipster film-geek attitude in the 90s and realize how drastically things have changed since then. In the 90s, it seemed like everyone wanted to be an artist. Indie film, indie rock, literature, and modern art all seemed important. There was a rebellion against the blandness of mainstream culture, and a desire for new, edgy, original voices. Culture was something you experienced in art galleries and coffeehouses and classrooms and arthouse movie theaters – real places with real people – not hunched over a computer or watching a Netflix DVD in private solitude.

That spirit has now ended, for reasons both good and bad. Part of it is that our generation has now taken over the mainstream, so that every advertisement, TV comedy, reality show, etc. is straining to be edgy and irreverent and sarcastic, to the point where I wish it was still allowable to have real emotions, to be sincere and non-ironic once in a while.

Digital technology has also been a factor. Obscure movies that used to be available only by searching for out-of-print VHS’s and laserdiscs in libraries, oddball video stores or eBay have now had definitive DVD restorations with commentary and extras. And if there’s anything you still can’t find, there’s probably an easily downloadable bootleg somewhere.

Thanks to the Internet, nothing is that obscure anymore. I can read daily newspapers from all over the world. If there’s a quote or in-joke I can’t place, I just do a Google search. If I hear my (younger) coworkers talk about something I’m not hip to, I just rev up Wikipedia and get an instant crash course.

The digital revolution has been wonderful, but in some ways it’s made our brains a little lazier. There’s something about having to do real research and cross-referencing, and experiencing the look and feel and smell of a genuine old book that preserves the spirit of a past age. By comparison, there’s something Orwellian about the way that websites you once relied on can go dead or get revised beyond recognition. People also seem less willing to really read and listen to an argument they don’t already agree with, and find it easier to retaliate with misspelled, flaming posts, or just stick to sites and chatrooms where they can be assured of interacting only with people whose views and tastes are identical to their own. There’s more information, but less curiosity.

The rise of fanboy culture deserves a huge amount of the blame for this. Re-reading “Quentin Tarantino: Interviews” took me back to the heady mid-90s, when film geeks still wanted to see (and make) something new and different that challenged you, made you think, and broke the rules. Fanboy culture, by contrast, expects the rules to be obeyed at all costs – if you don’t, you’re “betraying the fans”.

That’s why every event movie nowadays is a rehash of something the core audience already knows (a novel, comic book or old TV show) and will judge solely on its resemblance to the source material, not on its own merits as a film. (The first trailer for the “Watchmen” movie, for example, gives an uninitiated audience no indication at all of what the movie might be about, and seems designed only to tell the fanbase “See? It’s just like the graphic novel! We’re not screwing it up!”) It’s unfortunate that for so many people, film exists solely to re-enact already-known stories from another medium.

Our culture used to be more grounded in the world we live in. Many older folks get alarmed by stuff like “Grand Theft Auto”, thinking that it glorifies and desensitizes kids to real-life violence, but I think the truth would alarm them even more – that today’s kids, unlike the bohemians of yesteryear, probably don’t make ANY connection between “real” life and the artificial worlds that they happily inhabit for hours. They see film, TV, etc. as self-contained entertainments, not as art forms with the power to transform your life.

I wouldn’t really want us to go back to the days when technology was cruder, and culture and information were more of a struggle to get your hands on. But it strikes me as odd that – in an age when access to knowledge, and the freedom to create and be heard, have never been greater – the public somehow seems more uptight, passive and consumer-ish than they were a decade ago.

The next few years are going to be weird, though. Things always come back in style 20 years later, usually because the people who grew up with that stuff are now adults. There have been a kajillion movies about the 60s and 70s, but very soon we’ll be staring down the 20th anniversary of the modern culture wars – of Mapplethorpe and “Do the Right Thing” and Dan Quayle and Nirvana and Rodney King and 2 Live Crew, and Sinead O’Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope, and so much else from a very dark and angry time, just as the present day is becoming equally uncertain.

I can scarcely imagine how all that grim stuff from my adolescence will cross-pollinate with the more cheerful, technophilic, Japan-influenced culture that millenials have come to embrace. Fasten your seat belt.

I used to hate winter, and would barricade myself indoors and under the covers as much as possible. But an adult life of physical inactivity, spent sitting in cubicles and hunching over computers, has made me crave bracing walks on a cold winter’s night, and even enjoy shoveling snow and brushing off my car.

Of course, winters have gotten a lot milder snow-wise, and by the time February rolls around I might be singing a different tune. But right now I’m happy.

In the 1990 comedy film “The Freshman”, a NYU film school freshman (Matthew Broderick) gets unwillingly caught up in the world of a gangster (Marlon Brando in a self-parodying role). Paul Benedict plays Broderick’s wacko film professor, Fleeber, who – upon hearing of Broderick’s woes – thinks the situation would make a good movie… hence that line.

Benedict was best known as the white neighbor on “The Jeffersons”, but I was more familiar with his roles in films such as “The Addams Family” and a now-forgotten made-for-TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “The Electric Grandmother”, and as a snooty editor of ‘The New Yorker’ cartoons in an episode of “Seinfeld”. His protruding face (apparently he had acromegaly) and odd voice made him memorable in comedy roles as slightly mad authority figures – perhaps the nearest American equivalent of Graham Chapman.

Goodbye, Fleeber.

I’ve also learned that Robert Prosky died. When I saw that name, I knew it was someone I’d heard of, but I wasn’t sure. Turns out he was the Grandpa Munster-esque horror host in “Gremlins 2″, and played similar Forrest Ackerman-esque pop-culture-grandpa characters in “Last Action Hero” and”Mrs. Doubtfire”.