Tag: movies

Recommendations

Blogs are ancient technology, an elegant weapon from a more civilized age, and nowadays they can be found mainly in museums. However, back in their heyday, blogs were so popular that their authors would post lists of their favorite blogs on their own blogs in a sort of blogception. They called it a blogroll. Yes, people once used the term “blogroll” with utter seriousness.

Being an ancient artifact myself, I’ve been thinking for a while that I ought to make one of these blogroll things. I’ve also occasionally thought about off-topic posts where I talk about my favorite music or movies, but we all know that successful blogging requires total focus on your chosen topic, and if I veered off into something like music, I’d never get any views or subscriptions ever again.

Luckily, I’ve found a loophole. I’ve created the Recommendations page! It’s in the menu! You can get to it from every page!

Now I can have lists of my favorite blogs, books, movies, games, TV, music, tabletop games, and more—all without cluttering up that precious RSS feed—another ancient technology that I’m sure you’re all using. I’ll be updating these lists…sometimes. Occasionally. Whenever I come across something so good it needs to go in a top ten list for a while.

And as long as we’re being off-topic, feel free to comment and tell me about whatever show, movie, song, game, book, podcast, TTRPG, or anything else that’s got you excited today.

Asteroid City and Excluding the Audience

Asteroid City is the latest movie by Wes Anderson, released this summer, but written and filmed during various stages of  the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve touched on Wes Anderson once or twice before. He’s a divisive figure who makes movies with a very particular aesthetic. Some people revere him, some can’t stand him.

Asteroid City is, in many ways, just another Anderson film, with many of his usual virtues and foibles. However, I can’t help but feel there was one way it diverged significantly from other Anderson movies, and it was not a positive change. The problem with Asteroid City is its ending.

What Works

Like so many Anderson movies, Asteroid City starts with a frame. The main story is supposed to be a famous play, while the frame is a documentary about the author and the creation of that play. The brunt of the movie follows the plot of the play, with small asides back to the documentary.

In a pastel pastiche of the 1950s, a young scientist convention brings a number of children and their families to the small desert town of Asteroid City. The festivities are interrupted by the brief arrival of a UFO, and the government puts the town under quarantine. However, the children work together to get news of the situation to the outside world, and this results in public pressure to drop the quarantine. The various people who have come together in this strange situation then leave the town and return to their separate lives.

There are a whole host of fairly obvious correlations to the pandemic quarantine in this plot, and the bonds and romances that develop among the characters in a stressful situation. These are all relatable themes; perhaps the most universally relatable themes available to a storyteller in 2023.

I was a little leery of Wes Anderson delving into science-fiction when I first saw trailers for this movie, but the actual sci-fi elements are quite slight, and mostly played for humor. This works well enough in the Andersonian medium, and there’s even a funny little call-back in the “documentary” portion of the movie, where it’s revealed that the alien in the stage play is a masked Jeff Goldblum, the only scene he appears in.

Where it All Falls Apart

As the plot of the convention and the short-lived quarantine wrap up, the movie shifts back to the documentary. In an acting class taught by Willem Dafoe and populated by most of the cast of the movie, there is a discussion about sleep and dreams. Then the group begins to chant, over and over…

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

It is this chant that ends the “documentary.” When I talked with my wife afterward, this was also the exact point where she said that she gave up on the movie completely.

It’s Weird, So What?

I think it’s safe to say that the average moviegoer finds most Wes Anderson movies to be weird. These movies usually don’t see wide distribution, and they don’t make blockbuster money; they exist on the edge between Hollywood and low-budget art film. They’re not trying to be a realistic depiction of life, and they’re also not full of bombastic special effects like the typical Hollywood blockbuster.

In my opinion, Anderson movies occupy an interesting niche. They’re clearly on the hoity-toity, film festival end of the movie spectrum, but they’re usually plotted in a straightforward way. They’re open to interpretation, but they’re not inscrutable.

Grand Budapest Hotel is partly a love story, and partly about a man who inherits an expensive painting and earns the ire of a the deceased woman’s murderous family. Moonrise Kingdom is about a pair of kids who run away together in the face of an impending hurricane. Isle of Dogs is about a kid looking for his lost dog. The Anderson movies that appeal to wider audiences are the ones with a surface-level plot that is easily understandable. They contain quite a bit that you can appreciate in a single viewing, even if you’re not worried about the vagaries of cinematography or frame stories or aspect ratios.

These movies are still “weird.” They’re still arty and invite all sorts of deep reading. You just don’t need those things to have fun watching the movie. This is where Asteroid City fails its audience.

Most of Asteroid City follows the ethos of an interesting surface layer on top of deeper weirdness. The parts that take place within the play are straightforward, bright, and funny. The parts that take place in the frame story are less straightforward, but they have their share of jokes, and they take up much less screen time. It’s only at the end where this spirals out of control.

The chanting actors are not at all straightforward. Their mantra, “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” has almost nothing to do with the movie on a surface level. It demands that the viewer try to make some non-obvious interpretation in order to square this ending with what they just watched. Anyone in the audience who merely wants to watch and enjoy a movie is immediately excluded.

Even worse, this phrase is chanted over and over and over. The viewer is bludgeoned with it. The movie literally shouts out the importance of this singular phrase. It shows a complete lack of trust in the audience, a fear that we might miss this vital thing if it wasn’t so explicitly spelled out.

You Choose Your Audience

If the movie had ended with the temporary residents of Asteroid City saying their goodbyes and driving away, it would have worked for a “surface-level” audience. It would have welcomed the average moviegoer along with the cinephiles. Instead, it ended with an event that demands interpretation and demeans the audience with a complete lack of subtlety.

And I know, at least anecdotally, that parts of the audience felt excluded. They decided this was not a movie for them.

I don’t know what Anderson was hoping to accomplish with this ending. He may very well have been happy to make something just for the ardent fans. But he made a choice that profoundly affected who can enjoy his movie. These are the kinds of choices we all make in our work, either purposely or by accident.

It’s also worth noting that you can cater to a variety of overlapping audiences. It’s not always a zero-sum game. You can provide an entertaining surface-level plot, with readable character motivations, and still embed deeper ideas, complex metaphors, or mysterious events that are never adequately explained. Nothing can appeal to everyone, but you can make choices that widen or narrow your audience.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to write something that you know will have a limited audience. If that’s the story you want to tell, then tell it. But think about what you’re doing, and do it as purposely as you can. Make sure you’re not excluding the audience by accident.

The Inevitable Fall of the Superhero Movie

I would describe myself as a mid-level comics nerd. I’ve subscribed to comics. I worked at a comics store in high school. I still read comics in trade paperbacks, but rarely the ones with superheroes. I’ve seen at least half of the Marvel movies, although I’ve really cut back in recent years. The last DC movies I saw were the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. (But honestly, I’ve never been that into classic DC characters.)

In short, I come at this topic as someone at least reasonably informed, but not quite a super-fan. Unfortunately, from this point of view, I think superhero movies as they currently exist are doomed.

The Structures of Comics

For many years, comics have been primarily periodicals. They exist somewhere in the universe of magazines and newspapers, traditionally printed on cheap paper and published in monthly 30-page installments. You can find many examples of other form factors, but this is the standard, and this has had a strong influence on the structures of the comics industry and the stories comics tell.

Comics follow a structure I call “endless episodic.” There may be arcs to the story, but the overall goal is to keep publishing issues, month after month, year after year. If the story ends, it stops making money. “Endless episodic” naturally trends toward a steady state, a cartoon-like existence where the world and the characters are more or less the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning.

This steady state is death for good storytelling. If nothing changes, there are no stakes. There is no satisfying resolution. The ending is what provides meaning.

This is one of the reasons why origin stories are so important to superheroes. Often, they are the best story about that character, the only one a non-comics-nerd is likely to know. If the average normie knows anything about Superman, it’s probably that he comes from the planet Krypton, that it blew up, and he was adopted by farmers. If they know anything about Spiderman, it’s probably that he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and that “with great power comes great responsibility.” That’s because the origin story is allowed to have an actual character arc. At the beginning, the hero is just some person, and by the end, they are a superhero. They’ve changed. They’ve learned things. They’ve experienced loss.

Of course, comics writers have long understood this limitation of the form, and they’ve come up with many solutions and band-aids. They’ve ramped up the stakes in each subsequent story arc, saving the city, the country, the world and the universe. They’ve written tie-ins that pull in other, unfamiliar characters to provide novelty and sell more books. They’ve killed off the main character and put a replacement in the same old super-suit. They’ve explored alternate realities.

All of these are ways to create an arc while keeping the endless episodic story going, but you can only squeeze so much juice out of each of these techniques. Readers might get excited by the first or second jaunt into alternate realities, but eventually they’ll get bored. Everybody can only get worked up about the death of Superman so many times when you know he’ll be back in a couple months.

Comics will even go so far as to completely reboot their entire lineup and shared universe, and it’s all because they’re fighting against the intractable problem of endless episodic stories.

The State of Movies

The pandemic had a profound effect on movie theaters and theatrical releases, but the truth is that it only accelerated processes that were already in motion.

Movies today are a luxury item. Theaters have more screens, reserved seating, big fat recliner seats, restaurant food and a full bar. Taking my family of five to a movie is a significant outlay even if we only buy the tickets, and it’s very easy to spend over a hundred dollars on two hours of entertainment. Small, discount, and second-run theaters are essentially extinct.

The big studios are bigger than ever, and they’re putting more money into fewer movies. These bigger tentpole movies are designed to be as safe as possible, and are engineered by committee to appeal to a maximally broad audience.

It is in this environment that the superhero movie has ascended. I don’t necessarily think this environment boosted superheroes into pop culture. It may just be coincidence. However, superhero movies are the flavor du jour, and the current environment has resulted in maximum saturation. Disney spent billions to acquire Marvel and has continued to pour billions into it, and Disney will get its money’s worth. Same goes for DC and Warner, although they’re not quite as good at the money extraction process.

The State of Streaming

It’s easy to forget how young the streaming industry is. Netflix started streaming in 2007, and it didn’t really take off until 2010. The industry rode a decade of steady growth and market expansion into the pandemic boom, and now it’s quite possible that we have just entered the era of flat growth that will become the norm going forward. Prices are rising, everyone is adding commercials, and all of this looks awfully familiar to anyone who saw the rise of cable TV. Nobody knows yet how much people are willing to pay (in cash or commercial attention) or how many different services can coexist.

Early in Marvel’s meteoric rise, they released a few limited series on Netflix. These featured characters ranging from moderately popular (Daredevil) to almost unknown (Jessica Jones). These initial forays into superhero TV were largely self-contained, with real character arcs—although the origin story is always a bit of a freebie. The series were popular enough to warrant second seasons in a couple cases, and eventually a tie-in series that featured the whole Netflix superhero crew.

When the contracts between Disney and Netflix ran out, the new home of Marvel streaming became Disney+, and with this, they doubled-down on integrated stories. The movies told an ongoing, interwoven story, so why not include TV series in that and sell some subscriptions? Just as comics love crossovers to sell more issues across different lines, comics movies love crossovers to sell more tickets and subscriptions.

However, this also begs the question of just how many people are willing to see that many movies per year, and subscribe to the streaming service just to get the “whole story.”

The Present Moment

When the movie studios bought Marvel and DC, they bought a massive back-catalog of superhero stories. Decades of content, some of which is effectively modern mythology, it has so permeated modern society. From this huge backlog, they can pick and choose the best stories…for a while.

The studios wanted a return on their investments, and they have kept their foot on the gas for years now. They have burned through some of the biggest classic comics stories. Eventually they will have to look to more and more obscure and mediocre storylines, all that filler that kept those “endless episodic” stories going. Of course, they could take a chance on a brand new story, but big studios don’t like to take chances.

It seems inevitable that comics movies will fall into the same patterns as comics, only faster. The same forces are shaping them. The more history the movie universes accrue, the more is expected of new viewers to “catch up.” Big, integrated universes become weighed down by their history. The temptations of reboots and alternate universes grow ever stronger. Hell, we’ve already had multiple movies featuring multiple alternate-universe Spidermen.

The flavor du jour of movies will change. Just like Westerns, superhero movies will eventually discover that they can’t command the same budgets they once had. There will be less room for incredible effects and star-studded casts, and these are integral parts of the modern superhero movie formula.

There are even signs that the super-fans are tiring. I wasn’t even aware that there was a Secret War series on Disney+, until a wave of nerd-rage and complaining washed over Twitter. As someone who hasn’t watched these series, it was quite the contrast to the excitement that followed Wandavision or Loki. And even if you ignore bombs like Morbius, people just don’t seem to be talking as much about the current crop of movies as they did in the era of Endgame (or even Justice League).

The Future

People have been debating whether big-budget superhero movies have peaked for nearly the entire time studios have been making them. We could debate whether now is an inflection point, but it doesn’t really matter. It seems inevitable to me that there will be a hard turn sooner or later, followed by a significant decline. Nothing lasts forever.

As a somewhat-invested comics fan who is burnt-out on Marvel and DC, I think I’m a reasonable bellwether for the broad audience. Super-fans might stay invested longer.

On the other hand, the genre won’t go away completely, and that’s a good thing. Projects like the Spider-verse films and “off-brands” like Umbrella Academy or Sandman show the possibilities of less-integrated properties, less focus on classic superhero archetypes, and eschewing the “endless episodic” formulas.

Superhero movies are, in some ways, burdened by the need to be the 900lb. gorilla at the top of the hill. If budgets shrink and opportunities dwindle, it will force some limitations on the genre, and limitations breed creativity. If movies and shows are given smaller budgets, the people in charge of the money may be more willing to dig into the many weird and interesting corners of comics, taking on riskier projects on the chance that they hit big.

I’m hopeful that the future of comics movies will be filled with cheaper, smaller things, and more innovation. I’d love to see more exploration of less mainstream titles. I think the massive shared universes will eventually collapse, although I doubt any media based on comics can completely escape the gravity of cross-overs, alternate universes, and reboots. Even if the number of releases and the budgets decrease, the future of superhero media is bright. In fact, it’s likely to be better than an alternate universe where they remain big-budget blockbusters forever.

A Month In the Moment

During the month of May I performed an experiment. I decided to limit myself: I would watch no video (TV, movies, streaming, or internet), play no video games, and stay off social media. It was an enlightening experience.

Soma

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley introduces a fictional drug called soma, which is used to make the people in the story’s future civilization happy and docile. A variety of people have excitedly pointed toward media, and especially television and social media as a kind of modern soma.

I think those arguments are overblown in some ways. In the past hundred years, various pundits have claimed that newspapers, paperback books, comics, radio, and every form of television would also turn us into mindless zombies. Somehow society hasn’t collapsed. However, there’s also clearly some truth in the idea: media can be an escape from the real world, and it’s certainly possible to use it as a mind-numbing drug.

There’s plenty of “junk food” media that passes time, but nobody would claim is great art. Or even mediocre art. A great movie can feel elevating and change your whole outlook on life. But also, Jersey Shore exists. The junk can be fun, but too much of it is obviously problematic.

I’ve certainly done things like doom-scroll Twitter while watching a movie I don’t care about with half an eye. I would frequently watch whatever the YouTube algorithm threw at me while playing a low-effort video game. That’s the sort of behavior that really crams so much stuff into the eyeballs that the brain short-circuits. I like the word used by the YouTube video game theory channel Extra Credits: abnegation, literally entering an ego-negating mental state via the consumption of media.

Finding My Keys

Over the month, I shifted from a lifestyle where I was frequently performing this kind of media-fueled abnegation to one where I consumed almost no screen-based media at all. I did continue to listen to podcasts (although most of these are writing-related) and I read books.

I’m reminded of a comedy act I saw years ago (and unfortunately can no longer find to give credit). They talked about giving up smoking weed.

I could remember things again. I thought I was psychic. I was like, where are my keys?

They’re over on the counter!

How did I know?

I don’t smoke, but I did find that my time used to disappear mysteriously. Where did my evening go? My weekend? That time would just vanish. During May, I really didn’t have that feeling at all. I was experiencing all that time instead of letting it just slip away.

I also noticed some of the environmental factors that contributed to my problem. On day 2, I realized I had the Twitter app open on my phone, with no recollection of opening it. I ended up turning off notifications, because the bird app would ping me first thing in the morning, inviting me to turn off my brain before I even got out of bed.

I also began to notice just how many pings I got from services like Steam and Oculus. When I wasn’t paying attention, all these things together created a steady stream of invitations to distraction every single day. But being aware of them also takes away a lot of their power. It turns out almost none of those notifications were for anything that was more than a 5/10 on my excitement scale, so why would I bother opening them, except out of habit?

What I Did Instead

I read eleven books in a month. (Granted, there were a few short ones in there, but I still find that hard to believe.) I have a bad tendency of buying books faster than I read them, and I have quite a backlog on the book shelf. If I keep reading like this, I could get through it in a couple months.

In addition to all that reading, I got a lot more of my to-do list done. And when bedtime rolled around, I was much more inclined to actually go to bed. I got the appropriate amount of sleep most nights, which is another strange feeling when I’ve spent years depriving myself of sleep to various degrees.

I wrote more, but not a lot more. I found that even when I had more time, my ability to write (as well as do other things) was still limited by my energy. As much as I love it, writing is not low-effort or relaxing to me.

During the week, I only have time at the end of the day, and I’m already drained. Unfortunately, I didn’t find my secret to writing productivity, but I did come to a better understanding of what’s limiting me.

What Changed?

It’s now June. My experiment is over, but it really changed my outlook. While I had the periodic itch to watch something, or pick up Twitter or a video game, I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it.

At the start, I was worried that May would be a miserable month for me. In actuality, it felt really good—so good that I want to keep that feeling going. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up most media forever, but I am going to be much more discriminating when I spend my time watching or playing something.

Taking a month off really clarified which media I’m genuinely excited about. I found that I had no desire to go back to most of the “junk” I was watching before, but I wrote a small list of movies I’ve been meaning to watch and never got around to because it was just slightly more effort than firing up the first thing that caught my eye on YouTube or Netflix. I can still watch less, but feel like I’m getting more out of it.

I’m honestly not sure if I’ll go back to Twitter. It was a slow-burning dumpster fire in April, when they broke all the integrations, and I sincerely doubt it has gotten any better in the past month. It is, unfortunately, still the social media hangout for writers though. I’ve found a lot of great books, blogs, substacks, etc. through it. Time will tell.

Try It, You’ll Like It

I’ll close with this. If you’re someone who consumes a lot of media, I’d encourage you to try this experiment: one month, no TV, movies, games or social media. If it turns out to be miserable, well, it’s only a month.  But I don’t think it will. It changed my perspective and my priorities, and somewhat to my surprise, it made me a happier person.

If you decide to try it, let me know. I’d love to know how it goes for you.

Storytelling Class — Scripts 101

Every week, my daughter Freya and I have a “storytelling class.” Really, it’s just a fun opportunity to chat about writing stories. This week, our topic was beginnings, middles and ends.

We always start with two questions: what did we read and what did we write over the past week?

What Did We Read?

I read the usual blogs, more of The Wes Anderson Collection, and Damn Fine Story. I also read the first two trade paperbacks of Y: The Last Man (found among a pile of random Vertigo TPBs that my wife found at a garage sale for a pittance).

Y’s main character, Yorick is the literal last man on earth when a mysterious event causes all other men to simultaneously die. The premise is fine, and the world-building is done well enough, but the story frustrated me (at least in these first two books) because Yorick just isn’t very interesting. He has trained himself as an escape artist, but we don’t really find out why he has this odd interest, and his only goal in post-apocalyptic life is to get to Australia to find his girlfriend.

What made this more perplexing is that all of the secondary characters either had odd and interesting personalities, or hints of strange backstory, or both. I felt like a version of the story from any of these other perspectives might be preferable to following Yorick around.

My bedtime reading to the kids this week has been Poison for Breakfast.

Freya continues to read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and her class, having finished The One and Only Ivan, has begun the sequel, The One and Only Bob.

What Did We Write?

I’ve been banking up some scheduled blog posts this week, working on Razor Mountain as usual, and revived an old half-finished story for my class “homework.”

Freya wrote for her school work, as well as her story “Amber and Floria.”

Homework

In previous weeks, we’ve done thematic homework that relates to the class topic of the week. That hasn’t really been piquing our interest lately, so we decided to change tactics this week. After all, this isn’t school. It’s just for fun.

From now on, our homework will be more free-form: we’ll just spend time writing some kind of fiction each week and then talk about it. If we want to tie it into the topic of the week, we can. But we don’t have to. Just as the best way to get kids excited about reading is to let them read the things that interest them, the best way to get a kid excited about writing is to let them write what interests them.

So, this week Freya worked on a story in progress called Amber and Floria, about two sisters who have to rescue their parents, whose plane crashed and stranded them deep in the jungle. Which sounds pretty awesome.

I worked “Understump,” a story I started writing for my children a year or two ago and set aside when I couldn’t come up with a satisfying ending. Time away from it has given me a fresh perspective, and I’m excited to work on it again. Kid-lit is definitely a new frontier for me, which is a good thing. It’s also the sort of story that could easily be the first in a series, which is a good thing too.

Scripts 101

After our third class, where we talked about turning ideas into stories, our homework was to come up with some new story ideas. Freya’s list included a couple ideas for homemade movies, and that got us talking about writing scripts.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on script writing. I’ve never completed a script. So this was an opportunity for us to learn a little bit together. What we covered in this class were strictly basics—the formatting and other differences between scripts and fiction.

Scripts, Scripts, or Scripts?

Not all scripts are created equal. Most scriptwriting advice I found was focused on writing for TV and movies. That’s probably what most script writers are hoping to write in this day and age, so it makes sense. However, there are other forms of audio-visual media with their own slightly different takes on what a script should look like.

Audio fiction was once a nearly extinct art form, a mainstay of radio before the advent of television. But podcasts went and reminded everyone that audio-only media is actually pretty cool, so “radio” plays are back and bigger than ever. Of course, this kind of script writing eschews camerawork and detailed descriptions of visuals, and focuses more on sound effects and dialogue.

Also, despite the best efforts of the pandemic, live theatre is still very much a thing. Stage plays have to work with the static perspective of an audience directly in front of the stage rather than flexible camera-work, and have more limitations on scene changes and special effects, thanks to being performed live by real actors and crew on a real stage with physical limitations.

Formatting

I found a pretty good Studio Binder page that describes the pieces of a script and their formatting, with an example script. We read through this and discussed the different parts.

Scene headings and character introductions are much more straightforward and terse than the typical descriptions of settings and characters in fiction. However, more attention has to be paid to the viewpoint of the audience from moment to moment: what are they seeing and hearing.

Length

Works of fiction get lumped together in rough categories like flash fiction, novella or novel by number of words. Scripts, on the other hand, are typically made to fit a particular format and hit a set length in minutes. Helpfully, the rule of thumb is that one page of script should equate to about one minute of on-screen (or in-ear?) time.

In the days when broadcast television was king, shows in the U.S. were written to fit in 30-minute or 60-minute time slots with a set amount of time dedicated to commercials, and perhaps a little extra set aside for an intro sequence and credits. Now we live in a world of network, cable, premium and streaming services, where commercial breaks may or may not be a concern and some shows even choose to have wildly variable episode lengths.

Movies follow similar rules, and much like streaming services you don’t need to worry about commercials. Movies typically run 90–120 minutes, but there are extreme exceptions like the Lord of the Rings movies, whose theatrical releases were close to 3 hours and whose directors’ cuts were even longer.

Structure

Script structure is an entirely different beast from fiction, and can depend quite a bit on the media format. How many commercial breaks? An intermission? Episodic series or one-shot? We didn’t get into this too much, because I don’t know much and it’s a big topic. If you’re serious about writing something to actually get made though, you’ll need to figure these things out.

Homework

As I said before, we’re stepping away from class-specific homework, so the goal for next week is to just do some fiction writing. Freya does want to make more home movies, but she has to wrangle her brothers into being the actors, and as we all know, actors (and brothers) are an unruly bunch who often don’t take direction well.

See you next week, when we’ll dive deeper into characters!