Could Fox's Reincarnation Detective Show Signal The Death Of Scifi?

from io9: A pair of detectives tackle old unsolved crimes by talking to the reincarnated victims. It sounds like a totally off-kilter premise for a TV show, but Fox's Past Life actually made me question the future of genre television. Spoilers ahead.

Past Life, airing spring 2010 on Fox, seems to be trying to piggyback on the success of Medium, a show I haven't actually seen. You have a kind of procedural crime-solving aspect to each episode, but there's also a spooky supernatural aspect. And it's all sprinkled with a dash of personal growth. It's very loosely based on an M.J. Rose novel called The Reincarnationist, but I don't think much beyond the idea of reincarnation got carried over.

Fox kindly sent us a DVD of this pilot, and it's got the same rough edges as a lot of other pilots. It's also saddled with the task of selling you on one of the oddest premises I've seen in quite some time. In a nutshell, Dr. Kate McGinn is a psychologist who works at New York City's Talmadge Center For Behavior Health, which is dedicated to studying "the human soul." McGinn specializes in "regression therapy," helping people to confront the stuff that happened in their previous lives which may be affecting them today. McGinn is almost paranormally sunny and cheery, except when she's comforting someone who's grappling with having been murdered.

And because (I guess) these cases often involve ferreting out the details of exactly what happened the last time around, the Talmadge Center hires a detective, Price Whatley, to help McGinn out. Whatley is the Scully to her Mulder — he doesn't believe in all this past life nonsense, but he needs the money since he lost his job at the NYPD. But Whatley harbors a secret pain having to do with his dead wife — and you won't be too shocked to hear that he's secretly hoping all this reincarnation nonsense will lead to some sort of reunion. (I'm picturing Whatley eventually having a very serious relationship processing conversation with a one-year-old, which is how old his reincarnated wife would be now.)

The Talmadge Center, incidentally, is quite swanky, and seems to be able to afford to keep Kate McGinn in classy therapist outfits. The clients we meet in the pilot, whose 14-year-old son is having weird murder-esque flashbacks, seem extremely well heeled. So I'm guessing we're mostly going to be concerning ourselves with the previous lives of the wealthy and troubled here. Besides Kate and Whatley, the Talmadge Center is also home to Dr. Malachi Talmadge, who stands around looking worried and occasionally butts heads with Whatley. And then there's Rishi Karna, the hard-working research assistant who barely pops up in the pilot.

I'm just going to pause here and wonder whose idea it was to call our tough-guy detective character "Price Whatley."

So I'm guessing that not every episode of this show will involve murder, per se. You could have a character who got mugged during the 1920s, and never got over it, and now is still pissed about it thirty years into a new incarnation. Presumably, there has to be some kind of crime every week, though, or Price Whatley won't have much to do.

Judging from the pilot, there'll be two tracks to every episode: the therapeutic track, in which the reincarnated person works through all of their issues under the sympathetic, tight-lipped smile of Kate McGinn. And then the mystery track, where Price Whatley searches through old case files and says things like, "I know it sounds crazy, but I really think we're on to something here." (That's not a quote from the pilot. That's just the sort of thing I can imagine Price Whatley saying.) Price Whatley, of course, is on the outs with his former superiors, but there are still some cops who owe favors to him and will let him research old unsolved crimes on the sly.

And then, at the end of every episode, the two tracks will converge somehow, as the tormented reincarnatee finally discovers the truth of what happened and gets some closure. And Whatley gets his man, or woman, or whatever. A crime is solved, a soul is healed, and the cycle of suffering turns a bit slower. Or something.

If you're thinking "This doesn't sound like my cup of tea," then it's probably not. I went into the pilot feeling somewhat apprehensive, and nothing about it was quite able to change my mind — although there was nothing wrong with any of it. The main thing that jumped out at me, honestly, was that Price Whatley should be a laughing stock. He's a former cop who now runs around chasing leads that come out of vague past-life visions from people who seem a bit mental. Nobody should be taking Whatley seriously at all, and yet somehow he manages to fulfill the same role as every detective on every procedural show ever. And the show invests a lot of energy in showing how professional and serious Kate McGinn and the rest of the Talmadge team are, with their jargon about regression therapy and their great resources.

So why do I feel as though this is some kind of watershed for genre television? Maybe because it feels like an uneasy fusion of a few different genres, into something that I'm not sure is ever going to be as thought-provoking as other Fox shows like Fringe or Dollhouse (or the late lamented Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) Rather than boldly venturing into speculative territory, this show reflects the gathering consensus that any speculative themes must be subtle, vague, and swaddled in formula.

So you have the "team of experts" model of detective show, not unlike Bones or CSI. (Except that instead of having a laboratory, these people have a therapist's office.) You have the therapeutic, personal-growth type show, where every week someone is going to get past his/her trauma. And then you have the one strand of actual speculative fiction, the past life regression, which doesn't look like it's ever going to evolve into a mythos or ask deeper questions. It's just going to be the McGuffin — and it's going to allow us to have spooky J-horror-esque blurry flashbacks to something vague and terrifying happening in the 1960s or 1970s, which get slightly more detailed every time we see them throughout the episode.

It's a perfectly solid show, and a nice enough cast, but the genre element feels like weak tea. And I'm really not sure how the reincarnation-of-the-week format will pan out week in, week out. It seems like it could suffer from the same problems as Tru Calling, only worse. Still, I have a feeling this show could be a humongous mega-hit, and further drive genre television in the direction of being somewhat apologetic, and vaguely detective-oriented.

New and Old, Old and New

An interesting piece from Jeff Anderson over at Cinematical: A few movies out there, specifically Easy Virtue (255 screens), The Brothers Bloom (209 screens) and the new Cheri (opening this week on 80 screens), have taken it upon themselves to try and re-capture something of the style of old movies. Easy Virtue is based on a 1926 Noel Coward play, which was previously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1928. Cheri comes from a 1920 novel written by the creator of Gigi (1958). And The Brothers Bloom is a new, original screenplay but it comes with some of the sensibilities of old films, namely snappy dialogue and hats.

I'm all for this, since many of today's movie fans who name their "all time favorite" films rarely list anything made before 1999. Aside from that at least half the cinema buffs out there is generally aware of a short list of classic films, which includes things like The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, maybe some Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Casablanca, etc. And those are, of course, great places to start for those interested in looking at something beyond the IMAX screen. But there's a danger in labeling all that stuff "old movies." Not all of them come with country estates, or hats, or even dialogue.

Firstly, "old movies" come in an amazing array of styles. Just consider the Italian neo-realist movement (Bicycle Thief), the French New Wave (Breathless), the silent comedies, the German Expressionists (Sunrise), American film noir (Double Indemnity), screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby), samurai films, weepies, Westerns, etc. Believe it or not, there were even bad movies back then, but thankfully those tend to fade away while the good ones rise to the top. Then consider technical advances like sound, color and 3D, as well as slight adjustments in film stocks that make the 1950s films so boldly colorful and the 1970s films so gritty. Social conditions were also important. Films made up to 1934 were able to cross certain moral boundaries, but from that point up to the mid-1960s, strict censorship was in place (that's why Tarzan and His Mate, from 1934, is sexier than Gone with the Wind, from 1939).

Additionally, independent films were practically non-existent during these times (it was virtually impossible to get them shown at regular theaters). Most film was churned out by the studio system, with everyone working as part of the same staff. You could argue that having all your writers showing up for work at the office was a better system than today's, in which they hire a writer to turn in a draft, then hire a different writer to re-write it, etc. But in today's independent system, it's possible for a really clever script to slip past all the red tape, such as the one for The Brothers Bloom. And today, it's also possible -- thanks to everything we've learned over the past 100 years -- for a new degree of subtlety in movies (as well as new degrees of bombast; yes, I'm thinking of you, Transformers).

As for Easy Virtue and Cheri, neither of them effectively defines exactly what kind of old movie they want to be, and the marriage with modern times seems uncomfortable at best. But at the very least, they do acknowledge that the past actually existed. If your "all time" favorite movie was made in 2007 or 2008, you owe it to yourself to dig a little deeper. A good place to start is the IMDB Top 250 list, which comes entirely from users (i.e. "actual people" instead of critics). It's not infallible -- it contains three movies currently in theaters -- but it does contain many reliable classics. For the more daring, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? contains a comprehensive, ranked list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, based on many, many different critics' lists. If you really love movies, you'll find that age does not matter.

Kings of the past

If you have not seen the show "Kings" on NBC, chances are you never will. The brilliant series has unfortunately been cancelled. In my opinion it could have been the successor to "Battlestar Galactica" or "Carnivale" in terms of alternate universe dramas. I could (and will at a later date) get into a deep analyzation of the show and the politics behind it, but for the time being I came across a post on IMDb's message board that was written by a bitter fan after learning of the show's cancellation. It is not EXACTLY what my thoughts are on the matter, (as it happens to harp on a few shows that I admire) but it is in the same tone. So until i get a chance to devote time to a full breakdown, here is the post:

"I loved the show Kings, it had me on the edge of my seat throughout the show and most importantly I thought it was new and nice change from the same old cop or hospital drama that's always on.

The fact that this show got canceled so early tells me that we are headed towards another decade of the same old cop and hospital drama trash. CSI? Trash. Fringe? Trash. House? Trash. Law and Order? Trash. They all have the same plot EVERY EPISODE. If I wanted to watch a hospital drama I'd watch General Hospital where at least people can admit it's for old people with to much time during the day to do anything else. I read Sherlock Holmes, it was alright, I don't need the same who-done-it story modernized and told to me every single hour of the day. It's predictable garbage.

Even some new shows that try to stretch from the norm still go back to the same old plot in the end. Dexter showed good potential but in the end only about 50% of the show is about Dexter and the other 50% the same boring cop stories as the rest of television. People told me to check out Grey's Anatomy. In the end that shows just the same as the other hospital dramas with the odd joke followed by an awkward stare to make the audience laugh.

I had hoped NBC actually gave me something different with the show Kings, something rare like The Tudors (just about the only show still being made I can't wait to catch the next episode of), that's different from the same boring norm, but it's clear by this point that they're just going to try to spoon feed me the same crap as the last 10 years with new shows like Lie to Me and Southland WHICH HAVE THE SAME PLOT.

Even shows that once did have strong potential are now falling apart. Supernatural has gone all crazy religious, Psyche can't break out of it's mold since episode 1, The Unit is desperately trying to keep in ratings by adding in plot twists that just make the show impossible to keep up with anymore, The Simpsons and Family guy that use to be groundbreaking with new jokes just recycles their old ones, and American Idol doesn't have the razzle-dazzle is use to have (the knock offs aren't even worth talking about).

I saw Slumdog Millionaire in November when it was limited release and few had heard about it. When it went on to become one of the biggest hits of the year and win best picture I was confident that movies and movie watchers are headed in one of the best directions ever. I feel that TV is headed the exact opposite way. Is anybody else as pissed off about the bad direction TV is taking as I am? Stop watching tv? I love film, I love TV, it's a passion of mine. I'm not about to go pick up knitting as a new hobby.

-Rust"

Josh Krebs talks "Gabriel Byrne and the Dying Theater"

Weatherlight Contributor Josh Krebs discusses the stage.

When American television and films don’t reflect complex ideas, and the theater scene is dying, where are the new ideas going to come from? I did a play by Eugene O’Neill called A Touch of the Poet on Broadway a few years ago. I remember looking out into the audience at one point, and the theater was packed with wealthy, white-haired people. After the curtain call I turned to one of the other actors and said ‘Theater is dead.’ He laughed and said “That’s a good one.” I said ‘No, seriously, theater as we’re doing it now is dead. There’s not audience. There’s no one under 60 out there. They’re all white. And they can all afford $300 for a night.

-Gabriel Bryne -- Venice magazine on April 5th of 2009.

Once reading this statement and doing an immense amount of cogitating I felt like I had to agree with this hard truth of the future of theater. Based on a good amount of observation of the Broadway community and general interest in the evolution of social commentary and visceral effects that theater tends to have on contemporary society, I feel that this has made a great and thoughtful statement that propelled a lot of questions and theories as far as whether theater is dying or if has been dead for several years, have we been so blind as to not notice it and whether or not there is a possible second life for theater.

Now given the track record of Broadway in recent years it has been known to profit from millions of dollars with productions and as any producer knows, these can be extremely risky. Recouping all of their funds as well as profiting back a little something extra is always the main objective to a lot of producers, whether it be in film, television or in theater, and why the hell shouldn't it be? We have to spend money to make money, most would say and the production values of a lot of shows range from six million to fourteen million to produce. This proposed a problem for me, how can a simple thing as a show need so much money in order to perform? And then of course the producers are always worrying that they will make their money back.

Now why should I be upset about this and how does this correlate into the quote that generally got the ball rolling on this theory? Well first let’s take a look at the shows on Broadway at the moment.

This list is generally made up of the highest grossing Broadway shows at the moment. (Be advised that one of these shows "Guys and Dolls" has since closed since the beginning of this article.)

1. Wicked
2. Jersey Boys
3. Lion King
4. Billy Elliot
5. West Side Story
6. Shrek: The Musical
7. Little Mermaid
8. Phantom of the Opera
9. Mama Mia
10. Guys and Dolls
11. Chicago
12. Hair
13. 9 to 5: The Musical

Now these are only a handful of the shows that are presented on Broadway at the moment, generally performing six days a week with some performing eight or nine shows out of those days. Now with these shows there is a general recognition of these names, mainly Lion King, Billy Elliot and Shrek being the titles that have been adapted from films that people are generally aware of, can recognize and be something that they already know and enjoy.

And some like West Side Story, Phantom of the Opera, Guys and Dolls and Chicago, are all revivals or have been on Broadway for so long that the general public knows of these productions to be "classics" or as sometimes as I like to call "shows straight from the mama birds’ mouth to her kids". The shows generally on Broadway either consist of a familiar name or a theme of regurgitation that producers can find safety behind financially knowing that the people visiting New York will shell out a hundred and ten to three hundred dollar tickets in order to see them. It’s what I have been labeling the "financial safety net".

And who can really blame them? While living in the days where restaurants have meals that are referred to by a number and game shows consist of people pointing at briefcases hoping that there is money in it, it doesn't really surprise me that the spectacle element will always prevail over substance. It’s off putting and places me in a general malaise as far as where we are at the moment with not being viscerally stimulated by theater and instead just being numbed with wanting to see the Michael Bay type of theater, general big bang for our bucks.

Where in the hell did we go wrong in just finding great intellectual theater? If it were up to me, I would blame Cats. Or just Andrew Lloyd Webber in general, but I am not one to point fingers so lets just not force anyone to walk the plank just yet. A few years ago I went to go and see a production of Marquis De Sade in Harlem and I was incredibly blown away with it. It was generally an unforgiving, vile, disgusting piece of theater, but it was so engaging. Once the show was over I was talking to a confidant who accompanied me to the show and they weren't as enthusiastic as I am about how fantastic the show was but we both agreed that a lot of times during the show we felt scared.

And a thought had occurred to me that theater should not be safe.

In order to create a visceral reaction from the audience and begin to allow the discussions of the themes of the show come to life there must be this rule that all of the actors in the show are following, saying to themselves that "in order to understand what is happening in this play, we have to be unrelenting with our emotions, unforgiving with our actions and unapologetic for what we are doing". Of course a lot of this isn't marketable for the general public. No one wants to see Blasted or Marisol, instead they long to see something that gives them a sunny disposition, like Lion King. Its disheartening that we have come to this point.

Can this be changed? Is there some sort of light at the end of the tunnel is there any redemption that is possible in these trying times of seeing a witch "defy gravity" or Ariel learn to be herself? The only thing I can initially suggest is that Broadway itself is in desperate need of rejuvenation. With a few simple modifications, at least simple in my eyes.

First of all, producers of all Broadway shows must join a sort of union that allows them fully to adhere the certain rules laid out in the plan for rejuvenation. Within this union shows that are produced are given a certain budget, this covers all aspects of the production including, lights, sound, wardrobe and makeup, this also includes the salaries for actors and crews for the show, who are paid the same amount throughout the course of the run. This negates all aspect of some sort of favoritism for certain duties of a Broadway show, as actors are often the top billed and receive the most notoriety for shows, especially big names such as Mathew Broderick who is now performing The Philanthropist and James Gandolfini who is currently on Broadway with God of Carnage, there would be no definite sense of general monetary favoritism among the ones who are involved in a show. Within this said budget no shows are allowed to go over said budget and could face possible backlash and fines from the Broadway union.

Secondly ability to get tickets would change incredibly. There would be no longer convenience of web purchases. The only way to possibly do that would be through the box office of a certain show. Within this change there would be a price change for all shows. All seats for every show would be at least twenty to twenty five dollars, on a first come first serve basis patrons are able to choose the seats that are available. Also instated would be a limit of six tickets per person for a purchase. With this it will hopefully eliminate the elitist persona that is a famous with Broadway shows that those with money are able to enjoy a show more than those who come from a blue collar background.

Of course this does stand the argument of scalpers and how they would affect this new deal. If a scalper walks into this new box office environment and buys as many tickets for twenty dollars as they can for let’s say, "Phantom of the Opera" and tries to sell them for less than what they are worth. Is that really a profit they are making?

But of course there is an argument of this implemented deal would actually work. Mainly the main thing that constitutes a valid argument is the rental of the theater space. The spaces are immensely expensive to maintain since the buildings themselves are so old. Of course this argument I am incredibly shrugging my shoulders at. Of course there is no way out of that seeing as I don't know the logistics of a lot of ownerships of Broadway houses and what the basic rental agreement is and how much is it in general. So I for one am not going to touch that topic.

But still it bothers me, of that financial safety net. But again, who can blame anyone who wants to put money into a Broadway show. Perhaps the general populous has such a fascination with seeing John Goodman or Susan Sarandon on stage performing with some of the necessary gusto that makes you satisfied that you shelled out a hundred and twenty dollars to watch them perform.

There is also a rumor that Ashton Kutcher will come to Broadway performing Neil Labute's Fat Pig....frak me

The World As We Know It Is Over? 10 Insights on Today’s Film Business

“The way we operate is being dissected and reassembled in front of our eyes,” noted Endgame’s James D. Stern in a keynote speech at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend (which was published in its entirety by indieWIRE). Later that day, a panel of key industry players gathered at the fest’s Film Financing Conference to, as moderator and industry blogger Anne Thompson put it, “parse the desperate stage of the indie economy” right now. The panel, titled “The World As We Know It: Is It Over?,” included “Che” producer Laura Bickford, Christian Gaines of Withoutabox, Ted Mundorff from Landmark Theatres, “Notorious” producer Bob Teitel, and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

The discussion touched on how to profit from Internet and VOD distribution plans, the increasingly uncertain fate of traditional media, the financial limitations of producing independent film in the current economic climate, and the recent formation of DF Indie Studios. Though realistic about the challenges facing the industry, all the panel members offered valuable insights on how to make the financing, marketing and distribution of independent films come together during tough times.

1. Christian Gaines on the changing role of film festivals.
Insight: Festivals may be returning to their roots as a showcase for filmmaker’s work and become less of a platform for corporate sponsors and the industry to promote themselves.
“The 80s and 90s came along and there was a proliferation, a globalization and standardization of film festivals. All of a sudden film festivals had to serve other constituents besides simply filmmakers and audiences but also sponsors and the media, the film industry and so on… Every town has a film festival, there are film festivals of every possible genre, every possible niche that you can think of. And so now we’re kind of entering this world where nontraditional distribution platforms are starting to emerge and film festivals are definitely coping with and struggling with that new world. There’s real fear, I think, of obliteration. People think that technology will obliterate anything that came before it and I don’t believe that at all. I do think that film fess have to recalibrate, reboot, what their role is and why they’re important beyond simply promoting a sponsor’s product or beyond being a good junket for a few celebrities prior to the theatrical release of a big film. I do think that there are some fundamental core principals that film festivals are returning to such as presenting a film in the best possible picture and sound and honoring the artist by yielding to the experience, yielding to their work of art from beginning to end. I believe that film festivals are returning to that.”

2. Adam Yauch on starting an independent distribution company, Oscilloscope Laboratories, during a recession.
Insight: Allow your company to grow at a manageable rate and don’t just rely on traditional marketing to get the word out about your film.
“The time we actually launched the company was just before the economy tanked so that was not actually part of the decision making process. But it actually worked out all right because the company’s already so small and we started looking at picking up inexpensive films and distributing them in ways where we weren’t spending too much on ads and finding other ways to do the press for it… And so far it’s been okay because we’ve been able to ramp up the company in a way that feels like it makes sense with where the economy is at, rather than being in a place where there’s already a company that has hundreds of employees and has to refigure how to deal with people buying fewer DVDs.”

3. Laura Bickford on the innovative VOD distribution model for “Che.”
Insight: VOD may be able to maximize a relatively small marketing budget’s impact.
“On ‘Che’ we couldn’t get a US distributor to be interested while we were shooting because it was in Spanish. And it wasn’t politics like a lot of people thought it might have been. It was that the US distributors make a huge chunk of change on pay television. Pay television deals cover their marketing costs on movies. The more your movie makes at the box office, the more pay television has to pay for it. But it’s only for English-language products. It was a financial reason that they didn’t want to spend the marketing dollars on it. We thought if we went to Cannes and won an award—which we did—that there would be a buyer… Fortunately we ended up with IFC films and approximately one million dollars in marketing money—no money to go to the Oscars—and happily at Landmark and VOD which was fantastic for us. We got to maximize all our marketing dollars by having people be able to buy it at home at a good price at the same time they went to the theater.”

4. Bob Teitel on the announcement of the formation of and speculation surrounding DF Indie Studios.
Insight: If DF Indie Studios is, in fact, real, the formation of an independent production company is a risky move but a hopeful sign.
“It’s like opening a car company now… People were so surprised that during these times a company would come out like that. I know everyone’s trying to figure out if it’s real or not, who’s in it and who’s not. It’s a positive thing if it is real. And I hope it is real for everybody’s sake.”

5. Laura Bickford on the state of the major studios.
Insight: The current distribution model of major studios is simply not sustainable and can not successfully be applied to smaller budget films.
“The reason the studios aren’t doing these [smaller budget] movies isn’t because of taste, it’s because the economic model didn’t work for them. And right now they know they’re on their way down, too. The studios are facing what the music industry was facing. They know that they’re dinosaurs, they know that they’re bloated and they know that they’re going to be over. But they don’t know when and they don’t know what’s going to replace it. Nobody knows how to monetize the internet, nobody knows how monetize video on demand and other forms of that, which is the way of the future shared with the theatrical experience… But they just don’t know where their revenues are going to come from… If we can show them how to make money on smaller budget films they’d be doing it.”

6. Ted Mundorff on the changing roles of traditional media and the film critic.
Insight: The impact that a local critic in print can have on a film’s performance at the box office has not been supplanted by the internet.
“We’re scared to death that critics have gone away. Wire services don’t cut it. Those reviews, the aggregators, just don’t do the same job as your local critic does in all the markets in the country. Currently, when a local critic reviews a film positively, there’s a spike in box office. I have never seen a spike in box office because of an online critic.”

7. Christian Gaines on piracy.
Insight: The often long period of time between a film’s premiere at a festival and its eventual theatrical release can harm its success in an increasingly on-demand world by killing buzz and encouraging piracy.
“I think the long lag between the excitement a film generates on the festival circuit and then its eventual theatrical release—the three, four, five, six, ten month lag—can kill a film and open it up for piracy… I think the only thing one can do is have due diligence, have caution [to guard against piracy at festivals]... It’s the answer to a lot of things but it really has to do with education and letting people know that pirating something and receiving something that is pirated is a crime.”

8. Laura Bickford on the state of indie distributors.
Insight: Filmmakers have to be realistic about their chances of getting distribution through an indie studio which is even tougher now than it has been in recent years and budget accordingly.
“The bad news is, there’s a huge constriction. Most of the indie distributors have gone down as we’ve known it so there will be new ones… It’s a great time for new ones. But they take a while to ramp up so right now it’s very constricted for US distribution. As your financing model for film, you can’t really count on that as a ‘money piece,’ you can’t give a value to it, if you can get it. So that’s really, really tough. And at the same time the foreign buyers are not buying [like they were before the recession]. It’s devastated them so they’ve bough nothing this year… [Indie filmmmakers need to be] realistic about what the economic value of your film is so that you can price it accordingly.”

9. Ted Mundorff on how the recession has affected theatrical releasing.
Insight: In many ways, the recession has not affected box office performance and ticket sales are up from last year.
“We’ve had only one week this year that’s actually less than last year… November and December—key months—were record months for Landmark theaters. It never was better. So it’s amusing, amazing to watch the depression, almost, that has set in that ‘independent film is dead.’ I think there’s a concern but there’s also a huge, huge opportunity in the marketplace… People want and will support the theatrical experience and we’re pretty happy right now.”

10. Christian Gaines on making your short film available online while submitting it to festivals.
Insight: Film festivals are becoming increasingly more comfortable with accepting work that is already available online.
“This is happening more and more lately. More and more filmmakers have been calling up the film festival [they’ve submitted to] and said, ‘My film is paying on YouTube right now. Is that a problem?’ And I think you’re going to see more and more and more film festivals make it not be a problem. And it shouldn’t be a problem, actually, because at the end of the day what a film festival should really be doing is providing as many opportunities as possible to the artist, to the rights holder, to the filmmaker… A few festivals still really do have a problem with you showing your film on the internet but more and more don’t. Sundance this year actually showed a few shorts that were on the web.” - Andy Lauer

Whether you agree with the quotes from Andy's article, you must admit, there are certainly A LOT of things to think about.

Watchmen: On the verge of a new kind of visual storytelling.

Since their beginning, superhero flicks have always scavenged special effects magic and visual style from the tables of preceding adventure films rather than their original source material, comic books themselves. Superman could only fly through Metropolis after Skywalker flew through the Death Star Trench; Batman only became a believable crime-fighter in the vein of Jason Bourne’s hyper-realism; and I groaned aloud in the theater when my own best-loved comic hero, Spider-Man, performed a horribly superfluous Matrix-esque slow motion flip-dodge to evade a hail of razor-sharp projectiles.

Superheroes are homeless on the silver screen. The characters that inspired action films on a large scale too often prefer to dress themselves in the precedents other films rather than establishing their own stylistic identities. Good comics do more than depict fantastical stories about characters endowed with great power. They create an environment in which art and symbol converge to create semiotic storytelling that has the potential to transcend the written word. Is it possible then to develop a true “comic book film” genre, and would it have anything to contribute to the medium as a whole?

My answer: yes and yes—if it can avoid being mere extensions of the Tarantino B-movie aesthetic and if it is possible to ban Frank Miller from ever using a camera again.

Comics films have split into two camps that employ two opposing philosophies regarding special effects: The mainline trend attempts to make superheroes relevant by using the latest special effects technology to make unbelievable antics fit into a believable world. The underdogs are films like Sin City, 300, The Spirit, and most recently, Watchmen, which spend their FX dollars trying to create just the opposite: an intentionally unbelievable world in which superpowered tomfoolery entertains no pretensions of being realistic but instead create an environment with the capability to set its own rules, its own mood, and channel its own particular themes in a decidedly visual way.

In these films green-screen and CGI effects are taken in a fresh direction: one that does something artful, creating a stylized environment rather than just making the unreal appear real. This is the best way to realize on-screen the artistic contributions of the comic medium. The only problem is that, with the arguable exception of Sin City, these movies suck. But they don’t have to suck. Comic movies could represent a new kind of visual storytelling by combining digital effects with careful art direction and a stylistic use of special effects.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a good place to start. Just to get this out of the way: I didn’t like Watchmen. I think it’s a hollow film that hides juvenile sensibilities beneath a thin veneer of “cult” cinema. It puts you to sleep with long sequences of dialogue and wakes you up with pornography and glorified violence. But it sure is pretty. If Snyder did anything right by me it was his meticulous recreation of Dave Gibbons” artwork from the original comic book. As it happens, the art of Watchmen has just as much a hand in telling the story as the dialogue and plot. In writing Watchmen, author Alan Moore took influence from William S. Burrough’s comic The Unspeakable Mr. Hart which, as Moore put it, used “repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning.” In Watchmen, Moore used the picture-book format to give the story thematic depth using suggestive symbols. Exhibit A: the bloodstained smiley-face.

This image consistently haunts the backdrop of the story’s illustrations and it’s up to the reader to understand what it means. The blood mars the face’s symmetry, like the ugliness of the human stain disrupting utopia, but look at it long enough and it resembles a clock with the hand set five minutes to midnight. Is it a statement about human nature? A countdown to nuclear apocalypse? Is it both? The image is an illustrated double-entendre that recurs at key moments throughout the book in different forms. A man’s face is scarred in the same pattern, a giant spacecraft crashes over the right “eyeball” of the Galle Crater on Mars, a grinning shark is wounded in the eye, two people embrace forming the shape of the blood droplet before they are both disintegrated when New York is destroyed.

Each event injects the symbol with new meaning and allows the reader to participate in the interpretation of it and by extension, the story as a whole. There are a plethora of similar images that recur in similar ways throughout the book. Watchmen is a deeply symbolic tale that uses imagery as a concise way to tug at the soul in ways that words cannot express. It is, in a sense, a more “Catholic” way to tell as story than a novel, as it is less bound by the abstract authority of pure logos and gives the mind more room to play in a pictorial realm of inference and interpretation.

It is just this attention to detail and understated sense of grandeur that caused the book to be deemed “unfilmable” by fans and most vocally by Moore himself. They obviously hadn’t counted on today’s state-of-the-art post-production technology, which allows for an unprecedented amount of graphic control, right down to the shape of the bloodstain on the comedian’s smiley-face button. Snyder may have failed in making Watchmen a focused and coherent film but he succeeded in translating this “semiotic storytelling” to the screen. Though most people doubtless found these details to be little more than “easter eggs” for the fans, I think it is an admirable exercise in the human propensity to recognize and perceive meaning in symbols and engage in interpretation rather than just passively accepting given entertainment.

Watchmen proved that comics have ability to engage us semiotically and add layers of understated symbolic depth using pictures rather than the written word. Snyder may not be the most mature filmmaker in the biz, but he did understand the importance of visual storytelling in truly bringing a comic book to life. This method of repeated visual cues in building thematic grandeur has been used from time to time in cult cinema (e.g. John Patrick Shanley’s Joe vs. the Volcano; Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain), but the broad appeal of comic book films, particularly those starring iconic superheroes, have the potential to put visual symbolism into mainstream consciousness and re-activate our right-brained sensibilities, dulled nearly to dormancy by ultra-realistic entertainment.

Superheroes were never meant to be realistic: they were meant to be symbols. Men and women in capes and costumes with spiders, bats, and large bold letters emblazoned on their chests do not at their core represent some escapist desire to achieve the impossible. They are iconic incarnations of man’s hopes, fears, dreams, and desires, figures with an endless potential for social and political commentary, and self-reflection but only insofar as they remain symbols. Take them out of their mythological habitat, put them in the “real world” and the only way to keep them from resembling goofy dressed-up action figures is to give them a complete makeover (à la The Dark Knight) or at least by adding in a few moments of self-aware, ironic banter:

Wolverine: [eyeing his tight, black costume] You actually go outside in these things?

Cyclops: Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?

- From Bryan Singer’s X-Men

Bruce Wayne: “[a] guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues.”

- From Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins

The power of symbol is more potent than the thrill of seeing people fly or climb walls. Watchmen, for all its faults, puts superheroes back in their original semiotic habiliment, one that privileges symbolism over realism and creates stylized mythology rather than just another super-powered action movie. What would it look like to restore the pantheon of traditional comic book heroes to their original exaggerated environments instead of taking such great pains to realize them in a contemporary setting?[1] Maybe Batman would just make more sense fading into the inky shadows of a dark CGI Gotham City or Spider-Man would be better rendered in his original bright newsprint tones. I say we put those green screens and color-correction to good use and create more permanent “myth-scapes” for our symbolic heroes who are currently lost in the YouTube generation of shaky cameras and stark, warehouse backdrops. I fear that our commitment to the recreation of reality condemns our heroes to an unending cycle of re-incarnation since what is now seen as “contemporary” will someday be considered “dated,” and archetypal characters, stripped of their mythical qualities in favor of the instant gratification of “relevance” will certainly find themselves in need of yet another update in another ten or twenty years. Superheroes deserve better.

Wayne: “. . . as a man I'm flesh and blood I can be ignored I can be destroyed but as a symbol . . . I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting . . .”

- From Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins

[1] Incidentally, it may seem antithetical to my point that the only blatantly stylized feature-film realization of a popular superhero also proved to be his most obviously dated and unrelentingly goofy incarnation, but I happen to think that the method of Adam West’s Batman: The Movie is just the medicine superhero cinema needs. The film and subsequent TV series faithfully captures, through color, camerawork, set design and acting, the spirit and style of the happy go-lucky Silver Age Batman and Robin comics in all their campy glory. Adam West’s Batman policed a theatrically innocent world that, though absurd, effectively contextualized the pre-adolescent ethos of 1960s America in a stylistic rather than realistic way. Using modern special effects technology, we could conceivably do the same thing today and pursue a wider range of themes. - Alexander Wilgus

Is the Star System dead?

Jeff over at Cinematic asks is the Star System dead? "To some, it was a surprise upset: the week-old The Hangover outgrossed the brand-new The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Or, in other words, the film with no stars beat out the film with two humongous stars. It's easy to look back over the past 12 months and find similar trends. Star Trek is currently the year's biggest smash, with no stars. (I'm using the term "stars" here very loosely; I'm talking, big, big stars, known the world over.) Likewise, Slumdog Millionaire, Up and Watchmen were all big hits with no big stars. We could argue that stars like Hugh Jackman, Tom Hanks, Ben Stiller and Christian Bale have been in hits this summer, but you could also argue that they're all in sequels that have sold because of other factors.

Some stars seem unstoppable. Will Smith, for example, rarely stars in a film that grosses less than $100 million, and when he does, he gets an Oscar nomination for it; the exception, last year's Seven Pounds, even managed to turn a profit despite the fact that nobody liked it and it disappeared before anyone could blink. And you could hardly argue that Gran Torino would have been much of a film without Clint Eastwood. Indeed, most of the big hits of the past year and a half have had big stars in the cast, but relying on a star and a star alone to carry your film seems to be a thing of the past. There needs to be a big concept or a selling point that's as big or bigger than the star. What do you think, dear readers? Is the star system obsolete? Are there stars you adore so much you'll see anything they're in? Or do you go to the movies for other reasons?"