Subtle Bluntness

So, Pierre Morel is really making a play to break out of Luc Besson’s shadow, at least in terms of directorial skill.  I mean, he’s still working in Camp Besson, but he’s at least in charge of the productions, rather than just the cinematographer.  District B13 was awesome, Taken was way awesome, and the verdict for From Paris With Love, at least from me, is fairly awesome.

It’s not novel like B13, or as well done and tense as Taken, but it’s still a really fun action movie and worth checking out if you like European action flicks, John Travolta, or lots of people getting shot in Paris.  As I described the movie in my Den of Geek review, “It’s like The Odd Couple, but one of them kills dozens of people!”

Wouldn’t Camp Besson be the real most magical place on earth?  I mean, you run from explosions down a hallway, you shoot down dozens of people in cold blood, you have ripping action sequences and car chases, and you’re generally the most awesome guy around.  There’s no way I wouldn’t go to Camp Besson every summer for a refresher course in ass-kickery.

After a long, sleepless night worrying myself stupid about snow that may or may not fall during my commute home, I decided to say, “We don’t give a shit about tomorrow.”  Hey Suburbia.

I reviewed Legion over at Den of Geek.  Look on these works, ye Paul Bettany fans, and despair.  Also, there’s Charles S. Dutton and Dennis Quaid, so despair a little extra for those two.

Yes, I know I just mixed Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Shelley’s Ozymandias.  I did that in much the same way Legion mixes The Bible, action movies, zombies, and ham-fisted CGI:  deliberately and with malice aforethought.  It’s not that Legion is bad, it’s just that Legion is incredibly dumb.  I have no doubt that it’ll make a great Rifftrax one day.

When I was at the coffee shop the other day, I was talking about movies.  (What, me?  Talk about movies?  Never!)  I forget how I got on this subject, but eventually it all came around to The Book of Eli.  I mentioned that I reviewed it for Den of Geek and mentioned how, five years ago, it’d be a Wesley Snipes movie.  And it’s true.  I mentioned that in my review, as well.  (I also called the movie Mad Blax, as in the blaxploitation Mad Max, even if the movie and character of Eli are colorblind.)

Either way, I think pretty much any B-quality movie (which Eli is just because of its setting) can be improved with the presence of quality actors who are willing to slum it a little.  Hence Denzel as Eli.  Gary Oldman, while a fine actor, is always willing to slum it in a B-style movie (see his long history of working with Luc Besson), so he doesn’t count for this discussion.  His style of villain is always appreciated.

This topic smells like an article idea, so if you have any good suggestions for A-list actors in B-movie roles, please suggest them below.  I could use some help on this one from the collective Internet Braintrust.

There’s just something about a list that makes people virulent.  Take, for example, my list of 10 big films to watch out for in 2010.  On the surface, if you actually READ the entries, you’ll see that these aren’t all guaranteed to be good.  However, they *might* be good and even if they’re not, they will be much talked about.  Tell that to the trolls who lack reading comprehension skills.

For the most part, my list seems to get approval.  Some people don’t like the inclusion of B movies like Machete and The Expendables; that’s fine.  They’re mostly respectful.  Some people are angry that I left off movies that come out in 2011.  That’s fine too; it’s not my fault you can’t read or do simple Google-based reasearch.  Some people think my selection of an 11th movie, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, is stupid.  I guess they didn’t read the part where I talked about how excited I am by the chance to slag off yet another Turdlight film.  That’s fine, I can’t force people to get sarcasm, and DoG hasn’t paid up to buy the Sarcasm Mark yet.

However, one common thread is that people are livid about two movies:  Alice in Wonderland and Robin Hood.

When it comes to Alice, I kind of understand.  People (geeks) are sick of Johnny Depp prancing around in an incredibly gay costume.  I get that.  People are also sick of Tim Burton selling them a bill of goods, then delivering another half-baked shit brownie of a movie.  I get that, too.  But the outright hate is kind of mystifying.  Doesn’t he still have moments of occasional brilliance, even in his lowest moments?  Well, not Planet of the Apes low, but Sweeny Todd wasn’t all bad and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had its moments!  Hell, I threw the caveat right there in the description!  “Despite being burned by Burton’s last few films, it’s hard not to be taken in by the chance that this sequel to Alice In Wonderland recaptures the laudanum dreamscape of Burton’s classic films.“  Plus, the script is out of his hands and is in the hands of someone who has won a Best Picture (Linda Woolverton), so hopefully it’ll be better than his normal product.

And the other object of hate?  Robin Hood has been done to death; I get that.  People are letting Russell Crowe’s personal life and temper detract from their enjoyment of his acting work; I get that too.  But are people really not familiar with Ridley Scott?  I mean, does the fact that he made Alien make a difference?  OR that Gladiator was actually a really good movie in spite of the hype?  Blade Runner?  Legend?  Am I wrong in saying this could be the best version of Robin Hood’s tired story since the Disney cartoon?  I threw a caveat on this one too, saying its quality would depend largely on Brian Helgeland’s script (he did both LA Confidential and The Postman, so it’s a crapshoot [literally]).

But no, I don’t want to see them remake Clash of the Titans and ruin it with computers when they’re doing better stop motion now than they ever have.  No, I don’t give a crap about Prince of Persia.  And no, I’m not terribly excited by Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, if only because I’m kind of sick of Michael Cera and am totally unfamilar with the source material.  I can’t even get credit for the 8 good movies I did pick versus the toss-ups I included and the exercise in masochism I added.

But hey, fuck me for having some uncharacteristic optimism, right?

Midwestern Songs of the Americas is a damn fine punk rock album, kids.

In honor of the snow outside, and in honor of my week-long nosebleeds (I’ve gotten my first sinus infection of the season, so I guess those pills and sprays are working out for me), I thought, “Who knows more about snow and nosebleeds than Dr. Rockzo, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Clown?  Nobody, that’s who.

So, I got to see The Blind Side last week, and while I took my sweet time getting the review out there (and they took their sweet time to publish it thanks to holiday vacations and the like), I have to say I was really impressed with Sandra Bullock.  In the review I mentioned Erin Brockovich, and Bill Simmons summed up The Blind Side and Bullock’s performance in one phrase:  She out-Juliaed Julia.

Think about it; if this was Julia Roberts in the role of Leigh Ann Tuohy, are you impressed, or do you just think, “Man, Julia Roberts is great at these kind of roles!”  I mean, you expect Julia Roberts to kill this part, because it’s what she does best.  But Sandra Bullock?  Sandra “the only movie I’ve ever carried is Miss Congeniality and that was 10 years ago” Bullock?  It came out of left field for her.  At least I thought so, anyway; feel free to disagree with me.

This is a $200 million grossing movie, and it’s Sandra Bullock’s movie.  No Hugh Grant, Ryan Reynolds, or Keanu Reeves to lean on.  There’s nobody *but* her!  That’s what makes it so amazing.  Never thought she had it in her.

Happy New Year, gang.

I was listening to the BS Report, that podcast that Bill Simmons does over at ESPN, and during his long conversation with Chris Connelly, they discussed some things that kind of piqued my interest.  Connelly mentioned the demise of the various industries and brand names, like sports, music, and particularly writing.  I’ll try to transcribe it as best I can below, but it happens at about the 69:45-ish mark.

Connelly: I never would have thought that magazines… newspapers too, but magazines would be in such dire straits as we head into 2010.  That’s the saddest thing for me, you know?  We grew up loving magazines, reading magazines, dreaming of writing for them, imagining the life we would lead if we were around a bunch of guys… I mean, that’s what I grew up thinking about and I was lucky enough to get to do it and I-I can’t believe now that it’s going to be so hard for the next generation to do something like that.  I think it’s great that there’s all this multiplicity of voices, the explosion of the first person singular on the web and stuff, but the difference is that those guys who wrote the sports sections in newspapers and those people who wrote our entertainment magazines and stuff–because of their jobs, they got to buy homes.  They got to have families.  They got to send their kids to college.  I don’t feel like the people who are doing that on the web now are going to be able to do that in the same way.  They’re not going to be able to have full lives doing that the way the other guys did.  I would never have expected that, in this boom of information that we experienced, that those things would be the casualties.

Simmons:  I’m with ya on magazines.  I thought it was going to happen to newspapers, and in fact, you know, the last part of the last decade, I was convinced that it was gonna happen.  I just thought the Web was going to win.  I just thought that…

Connelly:  Your podcast with John Walsh, actually.  You went into that in some fascinating degree also.

Simmons:  Yeah.  I knew it was going to win, but magazines, I always thought… you know, it’s 12 times a year or once a week or whatever, and you’re gonna be able to hire the best writers and all that stuff.  It just seemed like they were infallible.

Connelly:  Yeah, you’re gonna hold it in your hand, it’s always gonna be fun, you’re gonna look at the pictures, you know?  So the idea that those have… those are fighting for their lives right now… is very disconcerting and–maybe naively–I never saw it coming.

It raised all sorts of interesting thoughts in my own head.  I mean, I write every day.  I write anywhere from 45-50 posts a week.  Most of them are in the neighborhood of 150-250 words, but I do hit out 500 and 700 and 1000 word pieces when I have to do a review or write up something article-like for Den of Geek.  Conservatively, I write 10,000 words a week, not counting weekends and stuff like this that I don’t get paid for.  If all goes well, I’ll make (not clear) a nickle a word.  More often than not, it’s more like 3 cents a word.

If I were writing some 20 years ago, would I be in a magazine or newspaper?  Probably.  Would I be getting paid better?  Definitely.  However, if I wasn’t doing this by myself and for myself, would I be getting paid at all?  Would I even be writing?  Probably not.  Yes, writing would have been a legitimate job then, and maybe it’s still possible to cobble together a job as a freelance writer, but it’s a lot more work for a lot less return these days.  Why hire more than a few staff writers and have to pay all those benefits when you can just pay grateful freelancers a quarter a word?

Is Bill Simmons a writer?  Yes.  Does he work for a magazine?  No.  He works for a company: ESPN.  He writes for their magazine, he hosts a podcast, he writes for ESPN Page 2, he appears on TV… he makes a whole lot of money every year and most of what he does isn’t actually writing.

The writer is dead.

This is the era of the generalist… the dabbler, if you will.  Simmons dabbles in writing magazine articles, online articles, blog posts, Tweets, podcast hosting, TV appearances, producing, etc.  My friend Sarah, when she worked in the publishing industry, didn’t just write for Micro Mart or Wired or wherever; she wrote for the magazine and for their various online blogs and websites.  TV talking heads have blogs; newspaper reporters take viral videos; bloggers do podcasts and make viral videos.  If you’re a one-trick pony, you’re on your way out.  That’s why magazines are struggling.

Example:  Playboy Enterprises is turning a small profit, but it’s struggling.  Why?  Because the magazine is losing money.  It’s one of the most popular men’s magazines in the world, but they can’t turn a profit.  The magazine is worth significantly less than all the other Playboy holdings even though it makes the most revenue because the magazine market has changed and the company can’t adapt the flagship.  They got used to doing one thing well, and now that one thing is dragging them down.

The solution is out there for proprietary companies (i.e., the Wall Street Journal model), but for writers who want to make a living off their words?  The only solution is to kill yourself for less money and/or get a day job if you’re not one of the lucky 1% who can latch onto an old media salary for a few years.

But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m cranky that, between my day job and my side gigs, I’m lucky to get 5 hours of sleep a night.  Killing Yourself To Live isn’t just the title of a Klosterman book these days, campers.