Solutions to Mediocrity

This could be seen as a response to responses to responses to Cameron Bailey's remarks calling for change or progress in the Canadian film industry or movies in general. Whenever I see the name Cameron Bailey, I don't first think of his impressive association with TIFF. Instead, personally, what leaps to mind is a hostile article he wrote about John Carpenter's Halloween attempting to roll back the clock to before the Village Voice gave it a good review and caused critics to re-think and give it proper praise. I may have sent him a letter at the time. I don't recall. Putting aside personalities and arriving somewhere near my point, whatever someone thinks of the premise or genre of Halloween it is objectively a well-directed film. In someone else's hands (which has happened many times over), the same premise would not be as engaging. In discussion of Cameron Bailey's article and subsequent arguments, there is the question of what is mediocrity? How does an industry (or more truthfully, individual filmmakers) get people stirred up about a new director, a writer, or a film/TV show? How do you coax them to be interested in a market that is overwhelmed with content? How do you get more diversity in front of and behind the camera, and is that what reduces mediocrity? Liz Braun recently published a blurb in the Toronto Sun (which I saw through one of the free subway papers) claiming the Oscars don't matter. This may or may not be true, but the explanation started with "Hollywood is a bastion of white male privilege." That's the level of thought. If anything, the Oscars are too willing to award people for "best choice of subject matter." Bret Easton Ellis argues on his podcast against the trend of ideology over aesthetic. As for content, where is the mischief? Most of my favourite films would likely wind up on someone else's guilty pleasures list. The best answer to the challenge of improving the quality of Canadian films and cinema in general is to reject the challenge entirely. Or Canadian "identity." That's another factor to reject. I may be nostalgic for SCTV, and even The Beachcombers but I don't expect every other person I pass in the streets of Toronto to have the same touchstones. In a cultural mosaic, or even generation gaps, one person's food can be another person's poison. There has to be a love of movies greater than a political impulse. Folks of my generation reveal their age with references to pop culture from the days when there were only a few channels and VHS was dawning. I saw damn near every movie in the theaters as a tween. And still found time to catch up on what was available on home video of one format or another. The movies I loved were not just a delivery device for social agendas and virtue signaling. Right now, the self-conscious filmmaker might ask whether he/she is making an "important" film. Ellen called The Dallas Buyers Club important. If had strong performances, but ultimately it adapts the true story of a bisexual man who catches AIDS into the story of a straight and homophobic man who catches AIDS, which arguably gives it more of a marketing hook. It's "important" that the lead be a white straight male, maybe. A pocket of supportive movie fans might make a point of following the "First Weekend Club" to support new small films right away. But is that on the principle of "support Canadian films" or in a market where there is so much competing for eyeballs and ears can we only truly get behind a director we like, a writer with a certain style, or a premise that looks intriguing? The Rez was a short-lived CBC show that could have been given more commitment, based on W.P. Kinsella's work and the Bruce McDonald film of Dance Me Outside. There have been campaigns come and go where people were encouraged to send books and creative supplies to isolated indigenous communities. There have been people given cameras and encouraged to express their authentic voice. Well, if that just means documenting despair and glue sniffing and suicide, overall it will be less effective in lifting people. Give a Native filmmaker the tools if he/she wants to make a monster movie or a silly comedy, maybe something that has nothing to do with truth. To flip the words of Truffaut, film is 24-lies-per-second. I would rather see a bullshit story that is lovingly directed. If a dumb premise - like the escaped mental patient being chased by his doctor before he can kill everybody - made with style and wit and clever use of the frame and the displacement of the edit can engage me then we are talking about loving cinema. I haven't learned much about the plight of Mexicans and Latinos from Robert Rodriguez movies, but what I have learned is that The Mariachi is cool, Machete Cortez is cool, the Cortez Spy Kids are cool, and Robert Rodriguez is cool. Rogue One is not nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this year, nor I expect will any Star Wars movie (the 1977 film being the only exception). But it is the only film this past year that I saw twice in the theater. Previous year, that was The Force Awakens. I also attended a "roadshow" screening of Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. But you know something these films have in common? I was going to see them ASAP whether or not I saw a single trailer, and I carefully avoided any reviews. Because these films arguably didn't really need hype. If anything, the hype is off-putting and misleading. There are degrees of want-to-see. I was one of three people in the movie theater when I saw The Beaver by Jodie Foster on it's opening weekend. Months later, I bought the DVD. Doesn't mean that I want to see many movies about coping with depression with a puppet. When Sodderberg made Behind the Candelabra I saw it on-line right away, but I'll admit I would not have rushed to the theater for it. I will see any movie directed by Sarah Polley or David Cronenberg, but I admit I now generally see them on DVD. The 1980's are a maligned era of cinema, but most of the movies I own a copy of come from that decade. Nothing against Taxi Driver and the heyday of the Seventies, but would cinema really be better (or alive at all) if it was all about alienated loners feeding their psychopathy? If Hollywood has a formula that comes from Aristotle but is blamed on Rocky, Jaws and Star Wars, to me it is nothing more than charting engagement with a story. There is an accurate conceit as to where the audience is at any given moment. The more didactic or social-issue cinema (well-intended though it may be) might even regard style with suspicion. But in genres where style is vital, there is nothing to hide behind. There are some filmmakers who do exist in a rotation of boards that can keep each other in contention for grants. There are people obsessed with statistics as to how many women are directing or how many cultures are represented. That for me is a discussion separate from whether a movie is any good and whether a director has talent or is coasting on a social issue or a Director of Photography who may be the de facto co-director. I don't conflate those issues. I've seen each Ruba Nadda film, sometimes in a theater, and I go back to the days when I got her short 16mm films on VHS. She knows what she is doing and I've seen her work evolve. Jane Campion I respect because she storyboards, whether or not that is the popular view in the "no rules" cop-out era that yawns at the thought of film grammar. Are you making a movie or just recording the content of a scene with rote coverage. I don't much care for the John Cassavettes or Robert Altman loosy-goosey approach, but in the digital age those are the kinds of movies that can be made by anyone with a DSLR or a smart phone. Nobody will be harmed if you are merely recording actors and expressing yourself. No reason to suppress that impulse, talented or not. But as much money as The Blair Witch Project made nobody was chomping at the bit for what its directors would next shoot...because it wasn't much of a directing reel. I'd rather see people be more deliberate and not slavish to realism. When the Trumpster fire has been extinguished, hopefully not ALL energy has been expended stewing over the jaw-dropping flagrant corruption and evil presented unvarnished from the White House. I don't know if people in Flint Michigan can or should think about anything other than avenging the water situation there. But unless people are willing to use what's left of their lives plotting vigilante activism against so-called public servants, there is also going to have to be healing (not sedation), and appreciation for slight-of-hand, craft, and manipulations that can come from cinema. The movies have to come before over-arching and over-reaching mission statements about the film industry. And whether that observation comes from the trenches or the sidelines, it is feedback from the viewing public. If I like your writing, I seek it out. If I like your directing, I seek it out. If I like your politics, I click like on your Facebook post.

Cinema Spin: John Carpenter's Halloween

The opinion of a movie critic is only marginally more interesting than the gossip and lobby group marketing that crowds the entertainment pages. Any accurate observation is likely to be an obvious one, and sometimes the most banal or tedious drama can be heaped with praise merely because it will not satisfy the masses and therefore one will seem “better than” to prop it up. The reverse principle is at work when it comes to the ghetto that sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventure and horror (genres that are the genres that we call “genre fare” as a catch-all) usually find themselves in as a stigma. This is partially enforced by critics who don’t want to be caught elevating something fun and/or would rather be writing an essay on social ills and speculating on how the underclass is controlled by its entertainment. It is also enforced by actors who want to be the special effect, the element that has a disproportionate amount of focus, as opposed to the technique of the director and his/her team. If an actor is bouncing off the walls with personality (Silver Linings Playbook) or suffering drug withdrawal or falling off the wagon, it likely will be in a story that has a meandering plot but it will be forgiven because the director gave them freedom. Of course actors will talk up work that is personally satisfying, but that doesn’t mean the movie is satisfying. And if all the director needs to do is stand back and cover the acting epiphany in a two-shot, an over-shoulder, and a single on each actor that might very well be enough to earn a Best Director nomination or Best Choice of Subject Matter. I don’t begrudge Steven Spielberg his Oscars for directing Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan, but arguably a less talented director could have covered those scripts and snagged the Oscar; Had he won for Jaws, E.T. or Raiders of the Lost Ark, then I would have rejoiced because then it would be more clearly the director’s contribution to the impact of the movie and not the inherent gravitas of the subject matter. John Carpenter’s Halloween often plays out in masters because they didn’t have time for coverage. This is only hurt in one scene Jamie Lee Curtis notes in the DVD commentary – where a close-up of her disgust that she has the knife in her hand would have helped explain why she tosses it away, since for years audiences have grumbled about the seeming convenience and illogic of not keeping the knife handy. It wasn’t logic, it was emotion – revulsion. Close-ups can be over-used, and in small-screen the reasonable fear is that the perfect master shot will be disposed of for bland close-ups of faces and that in comedy the dialogue or sustained tension or foreground-background contrast may be lost with ham-fisted close-ups and cut-ins telling the audience what is important. Halloween gains more than it loses from having very little coverage. It is intended to be seen on as large a screen as possible, and some people can’t be bothered. On a cell-phone video, a wide image that might have been grand and epic ill seem like puny actors dwarfed by scenery. The seriousness of this is that the grammar of cinema that had evolved through Hitchcock and Spielberg has little value to some producers whose understanding is not much different than that of an average movie-goer or viewer who see a movie purely because they believe the actor is the quality control factor. I would even go so far as to say that the tradition of marking progress of a shooting day in terms of eights of a page of script covered is misleading. Just because the film team “got” the page content from one camera does not mean they can revert to it as a patch if they don’t have a beat or line or special shot from the angle the director needs. The frame is part of the communication, not merely the conveyance of it. Here is a controversial statement, but I’m not inviting debate. I know there are cinema sacred cows. I’m just going to say it as I say most things, like I am pulling the pin out of a grenade and throwing it into a room I am not in and running away: I don’t think of Robert Altman as a master, God rest his soul. His back-up director on A Prairie Home Companion Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates more ambition and facility with the tools of directing in his own films than Altman. To the extent that when I see amusing scene transitions in Short Cuts I am not sure they came from the director. Maybe they were in the script. His more verbal and ramshackle movies, miking even the extras and keeping the coverage loose rather than “manipulating” the audience get by on charming actors, improvisation and subject matter. If you want to see what he is made of watch The Gingerbread Man, a thriller where there is no place to hide – the sort of genre that a director’s director should embrace. Or see Popeye, a movie where realism is not especially helpful. The actors are very game, but the movie is too cluttered. A pair of set-piece moments like the wrestling match and the squid-punching are amusing enough that they might have been shot by a second unit. If an award winning Robert Altman (say Gosford Park with story co-written written by Bob Balaban despite being somewhat stogie) were assigned to Robert Rodriguez to direct with the same cast and budget I have no doubt that Los Hooligan would make the better movie. Altman, however, would not have been able to direct From Dusk Til Dawn. John Carpenter’s Halloween has maintained some status and respect in comparison to the sequels, reboots, remakes and imitators. It plays as formal and elegant. But not without annoying detractors chiming in. There was a Facebook link asking if Halloween is still scary after all these years, on the authority of a screening for ten “Millennials.” If these are people born on or after the millennium, then in the year 2013 they were no older than 13, which may or may not be too young. They can’t be expected to champion their father’s favourites from when he was 13. They are likely to dismiss the shooting style of most films from the seventies and eighties, as opposed to the clean video-game graphics look of a digital movie. It is heartbreaking that some people under 20 don’t realize how inferior the Star Wars prequels are to the original trilogy. But I digress. The truth about the reputation of John Carpenter and late producer co-writer Debra Hill’s Halloween is that the first onslaught of critics got it wrong and then the Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice give the movie proper credit and recognized its Hitchcock homage and the care with which it was made and this caused the other critics to remarkably recant. I don’t want to slam a Toronto International Film Festival programmer, but Cameron Bailie published a smarticle in Now many moons ago trying to retro-spin Halloween and the career of John Carpenter with the idea that Andrew Sarris was wrong and the other critics were brainwashed by him and the movie is really not anything special. The take-away from that is “Cameron Baillie doesn’t like John Carpenter and hates Halloween.” His piece appeared to be written for smug types who have not even seen the film, the most serious cinephiles who can turn the buzz of a great flick into the doldrums of discussion. The official consensus remains that John Carpenter’s Halloween is a well made and entertaining flick. If any outstanding movie happens to occupy the genre ghetto, it has an uphill battle with the “opinions of record.” It is actually a remarkable testimony that so many critics flip-flopped after Andrew Sarris showed them the error of their ways. Halloween had been cited by alarmists and arm-chair politicians looking to scapegoat Hollywood for violence or a puritanical view of women but Carpenter and Debra Hill have repeatedly slapped those assumptions down. The victims of Michael Meyers in this movie get killed because they are not aware and are buy thinking about other distractions. And Jamie Lee Curtis has made the point that in the supposed “exploitation films” she has made in her years as horror “scream queen” her characters were smart and fought back against adversity.