When distortions go unnoticed

A friend of mine had a unique viewing experience when watching District 9.

He watched some kind of pirated digital copy on his computer at work. Everything about the movie seemed normal; there was nothing that gave away the fact that it was an inferior reproduction. So he had no way of knowing that when there were no subtitles for the alien dialogue, this was a mistake. He thought it was just a bold creative choice by writer-director Neill Blomkamp -- a bold choice that he loved, which helped him love the movie. Kind of wish I'd seen that version of District 9, because the one I did see didn't leave me very smitten.

In discussing the movie with friends, he eventually learned that his copy was missing something. But that didn't change his impression of the film. District 9 was still a thrilling cinematic experience for him, even if it was the "wrong" experience, an experience he never should have had.

A thing like this happened on Friday night when I watched Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow. In order to understand the experience, you have to understand a little more about the LG 3D TV we bought back in June.

If you own a "sophisticated" TV, you know that it has any number of picture settings that make the picture look absolutely awful. Seriously. Out of the dozen or so distinct picture settings these TVs have, 11 of them look like utter shit. I guess the point is that under some circumstances, this is the picture setting you want. Us, we've found that the only picture setting we ever want to watch is the one called Game, as discussed in this post. 

However, as discussed in this post, we recently discovered a problem where the mouths don't always sync up with the dialogue when we watch Netflix streaming through our BluRay player. Sometimes they are off by just a hair, which is just enough to annoy the f___ out of you.

On Thursday night, when watching Get the Gringo (as discussed in this post -- okay, I'll stop now), I noticed the problem again and decided to mess around with the picture settings, which proved fruitful in the case of watching The Crucible (as linked to in the previous paragraph -- okay, really stopping now). I didn't find the magic touch to make streaming through BluRay look correct, but I did find a very good setting to watch the movie with correctly synched dialogue straight through our TV (which has an internet connection and a Netflix app as well).

I managed to forget that I had left the settings in a non-standard state by the time I put on Beyond the Black Rainbow on Friday night. That's kind of ironic, because this non-standard setting is actually called Standard. So I had non-standardly left it on Standard for my Get the Gringo viewing straight off the TV, but then gone back to watching BTBR through the BluRay player.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would have noticed the problem immediately. Standard creates what I like to call the "Masterpiece Theatre look" -- everything you watch looks like a low-budget BBC production from the 1970s or 1980s. Simply put, it looks like cheap video with poor lighting.

With Beyond the Black Rainbow, though, that's the look they were going for. The debut film from Panos Cosmatos, the son of director George P. Cosmatos (Tombstone, Rambo: First Blood Part II), BBTR is a psychedelic horror movie set in 1983 -- and designed to look like it was actually made in 1983. I'd heard the movie described and recommended on the podcast Filmspotting: SVU, and it was part of a weekend binge of Canadian low-budget horror movies that also included Pontypool (also recommended).

So having forgotten that the TV was set wrong, I watched this movie unfold before my eyes, looking like it was shot on cheap video with poor lighting -- a phenomenon that utterly enhanced the fact that it was trying to look like it had been made 30 years ago, on cheap video with poor lighting. I sat there, mesmerized by the content itself, even more mesmerized by this impossibly executed filter of low-budget 1980s schlock. For the first half of the movie, I thought it might be one of the trippiest and most exciting movie-watching experiences I've had in years.

It was only at some point late in the second act that I realized that wait a minute -- I might have the TV set wrong. Indeed, I changed it back to Game, and indeed, the movie started to look a lot more conventional. You could still tell that Cosmatos was going for a look -- a TV setting alone can't either add or subtract that intention. But now it looked like low-budget film rather than low-budget video, which is decidedly a different thing, at least in terms of the paradigm under which I had already loved experiencing it.

So I switched it back to Standard and tried not to let it bother me.

It didn't bother me -- that much, anyway. It must have bothered me to some extent, because I was inspired to write this post about it.

The thing that's really funny is that I actually thought to myself earlier in the movie "You know, given how abstract and psychedelic this movie is, it doesn't even matter if the dialogue is off by a half-second. In fact, that might make it even better." So I knowingly accepted and in fact embraced an error in the audio synchronization, without even realizing the possibility that the picture setting was anything other than it should be.

I guess what bothered me is not that the experience of watching the movie itself was diminished by the realization I had the picture settings wrong. It's that I thought that Cosmatos had achieved something he actually did not achieve. I thought he had been actively responsible for shooting his movie in such a way that it created this cheap 1980s appearance, and was mesmerized by the level of success he had with that intention. When in fact, it only looked like it did because of a setting on my TV that makes things look terrible 99 out of 100 times.

I'm reminded a bit of the great documentary My Kid Could Paint That, which I watched about two months ago. The film has a lot to say about art and what it means -- whether art should be taken at face value, or if the history of its composition should come into play. Without giving away too much of that movie, I'll just say that it involves these masterful paintings created by a four-year-old girl -- and whether she was actually the one who painted them. Whether she painted them or not, they still are what they are -- they still create a certain emotional impact on those who behold them, if viewed in a vacuum, without any knowledge of their origin. However, it's certainly clear that the people who want to buy her paintings want to buy them because she painted them -- and not necessarily because they are objectively powerful works of art.

And so I am kind of left wondering about my own impression of Beyond the Black Rainbow. Was I as enthusiastic as I was about it only because I saw it on the Standard TV setting, or would I have found it just as profound if I'd watched it on Game? I can't go back and erase my initial viewing experience. As long as I had the reaction I had to it, does it matter how or why? Like my friend who watched the incomplete copy of District 9, I guess I will just be glad for the experience I did have, whether the movie "should" benefit from that or not.

However I end up coming down on that topic, I'm glad to say that at least two other things left me unambiguously loving it: 1) The terrific synth score by Jeremy Schmidt, which I have spent the better part of a couple days trying to find online to download; 2) The creepy lead performance by Michael Rogers, which contains (without hyperbole) some of the most nuanced expressions of emotion through minor facial expressions that I have ever seen in a movie.

The problem with my skewed viewing experience is, of course, the question of how fully I should really recommend it to friends. And at least with Beyond the Black Rainbow, there's something that prevents me from giving it my fullest recommendation: The movie has an extremely disappointing ending.

Then again, with a movie like this, neither the lucidity of the narrative nor the satisfaction of the payoff are really the point. I read a review that described it as poetry, and indeed, I think that's the best way to consume it.

Preferably with your TV on the wrong setting.

Spoilers to follow (in a different post)

I've had my blog for almost nine months now, and I am considering making a change.

Not a radical change, mind you. But as I reflect on the things I've been writing about, I realize that I have not been writing about film as much as I originally thought I would.

Huh?

I haven't been writing about film? What the hell have I been doing, then?

Well, you may have noticed an inordinate number of posts about things tangential to the films themselves. Titles. Movie posters. Trailers. Patterns in career choices by actors and directors. Granted, if it's a movie I haven't seen yet, that's all I have to go on. And I feel firmly that I want this blog to have the function of discussing upcoming releases. Gives the blog more currency than if I am just telling you about watching Freddy Got Fingered or The Pride of the Yankees.

But another important component of this blog should be discussing the content of films -- especially films most of us have seen. Discussing theories about how characters are similar in a director's body of work. Talking about whether a third act in a certain movie is a cop out. Debating the effectiveness of a particular plot twist.

So why don't I do it?

One word: Spoilers.

You see, as a critic, one of my cardinal guiding principles is to keep from revealing spoilers. In one sense, a film review can be viewed as one giant spoiler -- by saying whether a movie is good or bad, you're helping people decide whether or not to see it. A negative review of a film you're excited to see can be the ultimate way of "spoiling" it. I have friends who don't even want to know whether I like a movie a lot, or just a little, because they don't want their viewing to be biased. Depending on the movie, I sometimes do the same.

But more commonly, we consider spoilers to be information revealed about a movie that prevents it from being viewed from the perspective the filmmaker intended. We all know what a spoiler is -- I don't need to tell you that you'd watch The Crying Game much differently if you knew from the start that the chick was a dude.

And so, as a critic, it's my job to make sure you don't know that. And it can be hard, because sometimes, a twist plays a crucial role in whether a movie is worth recommending or not. Sometimes you have to talk yourself in circles, use abstractions, to kind of half-indicate there is a twist, without saying it out loud. Even the simple fact that there is a twist -- regardless of what that twist may be -- is usually spoiler enough. It causes a viewer to be suspicious of anything that's presented to them in a straightforward way, and renders the eventual reveal of the twist anticlimactic. Far too many critics are careless about how they talk about spoilers -- you don't even have to say what the spoiler is to ruin it.

I've taken this informal critics' code with me to this blog. I've tried to make this blog a safe zone, where you did not have to worry about landmines of unwanted information. Some like-minded publications have taken to issuing warnings, either in the body of the piece (Warning! Spoilers to follow!), or as a banner above the piece (Warning! This piece contains spoilers!). There can be nothing more frustrating than reading a piece that fails to include one of these warnings when it's direly needed. You're reading along, minding your own business, not expecting anything juicy to pop up and bite you, and Wham! You find out Darth Vader was Luke's father.

So why can't I use these warnings in this blog? After all, I am a critic -- it's possible you might like to know what I actually think about the movies I see.

A perfect example came recently when I saw District 9. Whereas numerous critics were rhapsodizing about how it was the most important piece of science fiction filmmaking since Star Wars, I felt quite differently about it. In fact, although I give the film a thumbs up overall, I have a litany of complaints about it that make it a close call. What better place to air these out than my blog?

Except I was worried about spoilers. I was worried about ambushing you, my readers, with commentary/plot reveals that you didn't want. And perhaps, on some level, I was worried about you skipping the piece and forgetting to come back to it once you'd seen District 9. Which is patently ridiculous, when you think about it. The surest way for you not to read a piece of my writing is for me not to write it.

And why should I care if you read all my posts, anyway? If you are reading even some of my posts, you are doing better than 95% of my personal acquaintances. (Hey, blogs just aren't for everybody).

And so begins a new venture:

Actual film criticism appearing on this film critic's blog.

Don't know when the first piece will appear, don't know what it will be about. But the monkey is off my back.

And now it's on yours. Get ready to be spoiled.

A confluence of 9s

I'm trying to figure out if the reason there's so many movies with 9 or nine in the title this year is because it's 2009.

That seems too easy. But could it really just be a coincidence?

I saw Shane Acker's 9 on Tuesday, and it seems pretty clear that Focus Features embraced the year tie-in once they recognized it. After all, the film was released on 09-09-09. But there's no need for the chicken-or-the-egg debate to start, because Acker's film was based on an Oscar-nominated short, also called 9, which he made in 2005. Because 9 is the name of one of the characters, and the film also features characters named 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8, he could have actually changed the title with the times if that had really been his plan. But then the first movie would have been called 5, and that would have just been silly, because 5 is a relatively small character in the film.

Then there's another film this year called Nine, the latest from director Rob Marshall (Chicago), scheduled for release on November 25th. This too doesn't really seem to be specially timed for the current calendar year. In fact, this film has an extremely serpentine history that got it to this point. The original 1982 musical, with book by Arthur Kopit and lyrics by Maury Yeston, was actually based on an Italian play, and that play was inspired by a movie, Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2. Not only that, but in 2003, Nine: The Musical won a Tony for best revival, and featured the likes of Antonio Banderas and Jane Krakowski. The film features such heavyweights as Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman. In short, with all this behind it, you'd think that its 2009 release was simply felicitous, though it's hard to be sure.

And then of course there's District 9, likely to be the box office champion of all these. Ironically, like 9, District 9 is also based on a 2005 short film by its director, Neill Blomkamp, whose first film was not called District 9, but rather, Alive in Joburg. The film operates as a (not very subtle) metaphor for Apartheid, and the title itself references a real place in Cape Town, South Africa, called District Six, which was declared a "whites only" area in 1966. One would think that the actual choice of the number 9 was somewhat random -- the movie might have just as well been District 8 or District 11.

So, just a coincidence, I guess.

One thing I can tell you: 9 was a short-ass movie. Slightly longer than its forbear, to be sure, 9 still clocked in at a mere 79 minutes. (There's that number 9 again).

"How short was it?"

Well, it was so short, I had to go to the bathroom before it even started, but decided to just hold it. That's right, I'd filled my bladder up with a Coke on the drive up, then a beer at the theater bar (I met five other friends a half-hour beforehand, expressly for this purpose), and I still said "Ah, fuck it" when I walked in to the theater and the trailers were already playing. Instead of alleviating a known need to urinate, I decided that 79 minutes was short enough to hold it.

And not only did I hold it for those 79 minutes, but I didn't even end up going until 25 minutes after the movie ended, after driving back home.

Now that's a short movie.

Whose definition of appropriate?

Saw District 9 on Friday, and I'm not going to discuss that here, but I did want to mention the trailers I saw beforehand. They were hardcore.

Whether they were "appropriate" or not is another question.

District 9 being an R-rated movie, they were allowed to show us some pretty intense trailers. The first of the ones I want to discuss here was for The Fourth Kind, a movie about a really scary owl, and abductions occurring in Nome, Alaska as a result of said creature. The second was for Legion, a movie about angels sent to earth to exterminate the human race, which looks to be in the Constantine family, and has the inauspicious release date of next January 22nd. The third was for Zombieland, a jokingly violent comedy about a post-apocalyptic earth populated almost entirely by zombies. The last was basically just a teaser for Saw VI.

What I noticed about each of these trailers was the banner beforehand:

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR APPROPRIATE AUDIENCES BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

Maybe it's been awhile since I've seen a good juicy R movie in the theater, but this one was new to me.

It seemed to me that "appropriate audiences" must be the new name for what they used to refer to as "mature audiences." "Mature" is clear. "Appropriate" is ambiguous at best.

So ambiguous, in fact, that I was genuinely confused about what it meant before the Legion trailer came on.

I'd just survived the Fourth Kind trailer, and I was somewhat relieved to see that the next trailer was for "appropriate audiences." (I guess I didn't catch the banner for The Fourth Kind). I must have read that as "appropriate for all audiences," because I thought, "Okay, this will be pretty tame relative to what I just saw." (And what did I just see? It definitely got my scare juices flowing -- a number of subjects from supposedly real video recordings being scared absolutely batshit by this freaky owl that they're all seeing in their dreams. And seeing someone scared batshit can be pretty scary if it's done well. In fact, I searched for the poster for The Fourth Kind to accompany this post, but apparently it doesn't exist yet, even though the movie is coming out on November 9th. Anyway, it wasn't anywhere on the internet).

So the Legion trailer began, and I saw a windmill, a desert fence, a couple other things that could go either way. Then there's a cafe, and an old lady in the cafe. Someone approaches the old lady and asks her a question. Upon which her face morphs into that of a demon, she screams that everyone's going to die, and she scurries up to the ceiling of the diner. Pretty freaky.

Appropriate for all audiences? I don't think so.

Clearly, I realized, I just read it wrong. But what really does "appropriate audiences" mean? Appropriate for what? And what was so wrong with "mature audiences"?

I haven't been able to find an explanation on the internet, but I have been able to find a number of other bloggers curious about the same wording. But these bloggers aren't commenting on the trailers they saw before District 9. One of them was talking about the trailer for New Moon, the sequel to Twilight. Another for the trailers they saw before Harry Potter.

Both of those movies -- the one being advertised, and the one people paid to see -- are suitable for teens. So, wait, what?

But here's where it gets even more interesting. Another blogger talked about seeing this "appropriate audiences" banner before seeing Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. A movie that has a PG rating, as we know from this post.

Okay, so I'm changing my analysis here. "Appropriate audiences" is not a synonym for "mature audiences." Maybe it just means "age-appropriate." But then again, are you going to tell me that a trailer you'll see before Ice Age is not appropriate for the adults in the audience?

It seems to be a bit of a tautology, actually: "This trailer is appropriate for anyone who is already watching it anyway." (Is that a tautology? Upon looking it up to confirm my definition, my answer is "sort of," so I will leave it.)

I guess you could conclude that it's the ultimate example of insider baseball. Whoever makes the decisions about which trailers play before which movies has already determined that the trailers you are going to see are appropriate. They've done the vetting so you don't need to even worry. Just sit back and enjoy.

Hmm.

Good old MPAA. The notoriously secretive ratings body does it again -- comes forth with a system that makes sense only to them.

In the old system, trailers themselves had ratings -- not letter ratings, but wording that told you whether you needed to proceed with caution. While this only gave you about a two-second window to cover your kids' eyes, at least that was something. Plus, if you were finding it on the internet, and you were not of the appropriate age to view it, you could theoretically police yourself and stop watching, if you didn't want to have bad dreams or something. (Yeah, like anyone looking up hardcore trailers on the internet is actually going to do that).

But now? Some kid could be looking up The Fourth Kind -- oblivious to its subject matter, because the title doesn't really tell you anything -- and say "Ah! I see it's approved for appropriate audiences. I guess I qualify . . . ?"

Then ... bam! Some dude sitting straight up in bed, his mouth so far open in a brink-of-insanity scream that his face might peel apart, like the Nazis at the end of Raiders.

And yeah, that theoretical innocent self-policing internet surfer is going to be shit out of luck. Bad dreams aplenty to follow.

I'll be monitoring this thing for you, dear readers. Next time I'm in the theater, I'll be watching those trailers like a hawk. Or a really disturbing owl.

You can count on me. I'll always do what's appropriate.

Because hey, if I'm the one defining what's appropriate, that could be just about anything, right?

An August to remember?

Used to be, August was about the second-worst month of the year for a movie to come out. Okay, maybe the third. January is certainly the worst, then let's call September the second worst. August was definitely #3.

Defies logic a little bit, doesn't it? After all, August is one of two core months we associate with summer, the other being July. June is pretty summery, but technically speaking, all but nine days of it are in the spring.

The summer movie season, on the other hand, has an entirely different definition. Summer movies start coming out in May -- some years, even in April. May and June are the primary months, and by July, it already feels like it's late in the season -- like there might be something wrong with the movie that prevented it from coming out earlier. By August, the movie has a definite taint to it, a definite whiff of a would-be blockbuster that they knew was no good. To save face, they still have to release it in summer, but the only chance for it to make any money is to go up against others like it that came up short. August is the month in which such classics as The Avengers (1998) and Dukes of Hazzard (2005) were released. Movies like that.

But two weeks after Dukes of Hazzard, things changed, thanks to a little movie called The 40 Year Old Virgin. (I feel like I'm writing about that movie a lot this week). Virgin was released on the 19th of August in 2005, and it made big bucks. Another Judd Apatow-produced movie, Superbad, pulled the same trick on August 17, 2007. Last year's Apatow entry was Pineapple Express, slightly earlier on August 6th, followed a week later by the better and funnier Tropic Thunder.

All that must have been preparing us for this August, when I feel like the month has truly rehabilitated its public image back to "desirable" status. Can you ever remember an August featuring so many movies you were excited about, or at least curious about? I can't. In fact, I'd argue that the movies coming out this month interest me more than in any month since May. It gets even better if you consider yesterday's release of Funny People to be the first pseudo-August release. (Though I'm starting to hear not such things about that movie, so maybe not).

In order of release date, here are the movies I'm interested in this month, and why:

Julie & Julia (August 7th). This may be a chick flick, but it stars two pretty delightful chicks -- national treasure Meryl Streep and spunky not-quite-newcomer Amy Adams. Both are a joy to watch, and I have a special affinity for celebrity impersonations, so I'm looking forward to what Streep does with Child. I may not catch it in the theater, but that's just because it will be a busy month.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 7th). I expect this to be craptastic -- this is one of those "old August" releases. However, I did play with G.I. Joe figures when I was a kid. In fact, I played with them tons more than Transformers, amassing four or five dozen of them, plus a fleet of tanks, all-terrain vehicles and aircraft. I'll see it just for my own personal nostalgia, and I must say, the trailers leave me interested enough.

District 9 (August 14th). This might be the movie I'm most excited about this month, even if some friends tried to make me wary of it when we were discussing it at a 4th of July BBQ. That's when they told me this was supposed to be the Halo movie, but it went belly-up, so they hurriedly turned it into District 9. I thought that meant they were using the old, already-shot Halo footage and turning it into something else, but reading some more on it, I'm not so sure -- if I interpreted producer Peter Jackson's words correctly, I think it's a different project altogether because the first failed. Well, we'll see. Barring negative word of mouth that's so loud that I can't possibly escape it, I'll be at this one opening weekend.

The Time Traveler's Wife (August 14th). Another chick flick here -- more counter-programming. But I have a personal stake in this one, as I read (and really liked) the novel, and have been waiting for this to come out for it seems like two years since I first heard it was nearly finished. I guess it wasn't nearly finished, because Gus Van Sant was attached to direct back then. (Robert Schwentke is now the director -- let's hope he does better here than he did in Flightplan). I guess the delay is not a good sign, but consider me still very curious anyway.

Paper Heart (August 14th). A pseudo-documentary about an actress in the Apatow troupe (Charyle Yi, who appeared in Knocked Up) searching for her definition of love, or something. Perhaps of more interest, Michael Cera is the co-star as her (real-life?) boyfriend, or something. Could be twee, but could also be a lot of fun.

It Might Get Loud (August 14th). A documentary featuring three guitar luminaries discussing their craft: The Edge, Jack White and Jimmy Page. It might get seen. Then again, it might not. Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim directs.

Inglourious Basterds (August 21st). This is the one most people are probably looking forward to -- Quentin Tarantino's first film since his half of Grindhouse (Death Proof). The timing of this one may indicate more than any of these other films that "August is back." Tarantino's movies usually come out in the fall. Then again, it could also indicate that Basterds is just not very good.

Taking Woodstock (August 28th). Ang Lee's film about Woodstock, featuring one of my favorite comedians, Demetri Martin, as the kid whose farmland is used for the festival as a way of saving his family from financial ruin. Lee is always interesting -- he's one of our most unpredictable directors in terms of his subject matter -- and I'm interested to see what Martin can do off the stand-up stage.

The Final Destination (August 28th). Okay, this is probably "old August" as well -- a high-concept horror with a high body count. But it is in 3-D. And I've seen all the other Final Destination movies. Why stop now?

So will this be an august August?

I guess we'll have to tune in to see.