It looked like Rainforest’s Takers had narrowly lost the weekend box office battle to The Last Exorcism by a hair (well, if you count 300 Gs as a hair).

However, upon further review:
http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2903&p=.htm

Takers actually took it in a healthy late-summer weekend at the box-office.

Of course, local sentiments were pulling for the Rainforest Film to do well and it looks like their No. 1 streak continues.

Congratulations to them for that feat.

Ferrell plays meek desk jockey Gamble, a forensic accountant who has never shot his gun and is content using his computer to enforce law and order. His partner is Terry Hoitz (Mark Whalberg) a tightly wound could-a-been, bristling at being tethered to Gamble and a desk after accidently shooting Derek Jeter.

Gamble and Hoitz, as well as most of their department, sit in the shadow of supercops Danson and Highsmith (Dewayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson). Even though they can rack up insane amounts of property damage and place innocent bystanders in harm’s way, Danson and Highsmith are revered by the city.  Hot dog vendors offer them free dogs for life—but no cokes, can’t afford that—get decorated with medals, and they party with the rich and famous.

When Danson and Highsmith—in the film’s most darkly comic moment, as well as most pointed jab at buddy cop clichés—are killed in the line of duty, Hoitz, sees his chance to stop pushing paperwork and to finally hit the streets solving crimes like a real cop. However, thanks to Gamble’s lead foot, the Prius’s surprising get up and go, and a ill placed corpse, Hoitz and Gamble’s first attempt to nab a case doesn’t go the way they hoped.

Instead of heading back to the station to sulk and lick their wounds, Gamble forces Hoitz to follow up on the case Gamble’s been working on, which is investigating why financier David Ershon (Steve Coogan)  hasn’t filed any scaffolding permits for any of his building projects. Hoitz, thinks it’s a dud of a case until a security team crashes into Gamble’s prius, seizes Ershon, who begs to not be taken, and in one of the film’s running gags, grabs Gamble and Hoitz’s shoes and guns.

Wringing new humor from the Buddy Cop genre is no easy feat. The genre and its variants not only devolved into self parody years ago, but action comedy hybrids like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours have long existed. Ferrell and McKay, succeed where many have failed by crafting a film that’s not just another parody of 80s action films, but an updated take that is more a sly satire and commentary on our current age of Bernie Maddoff, Enron and billion dollar schemes. In the years since drug deals and arms smuggling became front page news, and fodder for Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson to lay waste to a sea of nameless bad guys on screen, it’s become more and more evident that white collar criminals and crimes are just as dangerous. When the average person knows what a Ponzi Scheme is and can describe how it works, you know the world has changed.

At one point, Hoitz and Gamble’s Captain (Michael Keaton) points out that for all of their flash, Danson and Highsmith were actually shitty cops. Shitty cops bad at doing their core job which is solving crimes and not simply arresting perps.

One gets the sense that Keaton’s Captain Mauch wasn’t happy about having to sideline cops like Hoitz and Gamble. But as long as the city and the police brass were behind Danson and Highsmith, and Hoitz and Gamble weren’t producing tangible results that earned the department good press, there wasn’t much he could do. It’s a point of view that share’s more than a few  similarities to The Wire’s own cynical take on real police work losing out to internal police politics and favorable PR.

Ferrell and McKay also score comedic points with their casting. Eva Mendes as Gamble’s hot doctor wife, Steve Coogan as the slimy investment banker, and Keaton as the harried Captain who’s working a second job at Bed, Bath and Beyond to pay for his bisexual son’s dream of being a DJ, fill in nicely. Jackson and Johnson aren’t on screen long, but they leave a lasting impression—literally when you see how they’re dispatched—on the film.

As with their previous films, Ferrell and Mckay also illustrate that they know how to construct running gags that work, such as Gamble’s inexplicable ability to attract women who are 9’s and 10s to his, at best, 6. The dinner scene, when Hoitz meets Gamble’s wife Sheila for the first time, is a comedic master class in how important understatement and timing are just as important as dialogue.  And fans of Anchorman will find that The Other Guy is nearly as quotable. “Pimps don’t cry” is all I’m going to type.

Where the movie falls flat is in the poorly constructed action scenes and length.

In terms of economy and keeping the story moving forward, the action is serviceable, if often visually incoherent. And admittedly, while the film can feel long, considering Mckay and co-writer Chris Henchy built their jokes on a rather involved and credible plot, a plot that could have been the basis of a played for straight cop film, the length is a worthy trade-off.

It’s this reliance on the enduring power of 1980s and 1990s action movie iconography that makes 80 percent of The Expendables an excruciating bore. Stallone and his co-writer Dave Callaham lazily rely on the audience’s expectations and warm fuzzy memories to auto-magically fill in the gaps where characterization, decent dialogue and well staged action should be. The other 20 percent uses that same iconography and well worn, yet time honored, action tropes to great effect. Temporarily providing visceral thrills that invoke the golden age of squibs, witty one-liners and explosions of improbable, but holy-shit that was awesome, size.

The heart of the story, fleshed out just enough so it can be considered a story at all, revolves around Stallone’s Barney Ross and his team of Expendables’ attempt to assassinate one General Garza (David Zayas) on the behalf of the mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis). The dictator of a fictional South American island, Garza is little more than a figure head working for rogue CIA agent John Monroe (Eric Roberts). Part Cuban, part Columbian, all cliché, the island’s people are being oppressed so Monroe and Garza can get rich growing coca plants undisturbed.

Enter Garza’s daughter Sandra (Giselle Itié), Ross’s contact on the island and guide to help the Expendables scout the island. When they’re caught snooping around, Ross and Statham’s Lee Christmas leave a trail of destruction as they fight their way back to their plane. Fearing for her life and believing there’s nothing on the island worth fighting for, Ross begs Sandra to go with them. She refuses, wanting to stay and fight for her people’s freedom.

Returning stateside after abandoning the mission, Ross inexplicably–she’s willing to kill her own father to liberate her people, so duh–can’t understand why Sandra would stay knowing she’ll surely be executed. As the thought that he left her behind weighs more and more on his mind, Ross decides to return to the island to save Sandra, finish the job he and The Expendables started, and as implied by some very clunky foreshadowing, save his own soul.

The plots of 80s actions films were generally simplistic, the villains even more so. The Expendables takes that bare bones approach and strips it down even further, stretching out what would barely qualify as a one act short into a feature length film.

This creates dead spots that Stallone and Callaham attempt to enliven with macho man banter. However, the results tend to inspire a lot of cringing and bewilderment that the co-writers could be so tone-deaf or Stallone so awful at finding a comedy beat. More than once, Stallone amps up the male bonding and my gun is bigger than your gun posturing so high scenes become infused with a homo-erotic undertone that just miss qualifying the film as gay porn.

So what does work? Statham and Rourke for starters. In the quieter moments they’re the only two members of the cast who don’t totally embarrass themselves. Both actors exude a charisma and ease that Stallone would have been smart to build the picture around. As Statham and Rourke ably demonstrate, cool doesn’t try so damn hard, it just is. If it wasn’t so poorly edited there’s also a Corey Yuen choreographed Statham-Li team up that might have qualified as one of the most legendary fights ever put on screen. Even chopped to hell and back, how that fight ends will have most action fans pumping their fists.

What also works are the few moments characters are allowed to shine, like Crews finally getting to use his 200 rounds per minute shotgun to leave nothing but piles of viscera and smoldering piles of wood behind him. Ross and Christmas turning around to rain death from above from their seaplane is also memorable. And Rourke’s scene where he recounts the moment he realized he had lost his soul, is an actor’s tour-de-force that’s aching to be in a better movie—and better written.

What’s disturbing about The Expendables is how it revives the more racially troubling elements of 80s action films. Scary Black people from a remember when it was in the news African nation—this time Somalia pirates—waving guns around and snarling incomprehensibly? Check. Stereotypical Hispanic accents that don’t exist in real life? Check (Garza and his daughter don’t even share the same accent…and Zayas’s, amazing on Dexter, is particularly bad). South American country exporting vast amounts of cocaine, and appearing to have no other viable economy? Check. Nearly all white team of heroes liberating helpless brown people so they can bring them (American style) freedom? Check. Folks of color being manipulated by the evil white man who seems to outsmart them at every turn? Check. Hero demonstrating a blind spot for a country’s culture and history and only seeing it as a hell hole that one should escape from? Double check.

If you think this is overreaction, there are even two points in the film where a white character calls someone who is brown skin either a monkey or an ape. In the defense of Stallone and Callaham, I don’t think they were intentionally trying to be racist. It’s just when you start to add up the moments, it becomes pretty damning, and reiterates how oblivious Hollywood can be.

Where Stallone gets the film most wrong is that, even though it’s called The Expendables, plural, the movie is really all about one Expendable, Stallone’s Ross. An exercise in egotism, the final product comes across more as Stallone’s attempt to prove that, even in his 60s, he’s still a man’s man.

What this reminds me of is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when three cryogenically frozen people from 20th century Earth were revived in the 24th. One of the 20th century folk, marveling at all the techno-advancement, asks where’s the television? I believe it’s Riker or Picard that intimates with their answer that Federation society has evolved beyond television.

When I was 14, I bristled at the idea that ST:TNG would make such a claim, not because I was a TV watching teenage fiend, it was because it sounded arrogant. It was one of those elements that demonstrates why some people have never warmed to Star Trek‘s utopian undertones. Gene Rodenberry’s egalitarian vision of society aside, Trek could often feel more exclusionary than evolutionary.

In imagining the theatrical landscape of 2025, Lipsky makes the same mistake. By ignoring the actual social component and artificially separating the film experience into “then” and “now” he never takes into account how audiences actually consume, participate and engage in the movie experience. The Grand Movie House experience may be what Lipsky wants exhibitors to aspire to, or ultimately not, either way it isn’t what modern audiences want. And technology may change many things, but creating an experience that only folks like Lipsky will enjoy won’t be one of them.

Lipsky does try to address the social side of film watching with this bit here: “the coming metamorphosis will not only provide a superior and untethered AV experience, it will enhance the communal aspect of “moviegoing” to an almost unimaginable level.” However I suggest you should never underestimate the power strangers sitting together and enjoying the same event has. It is one reason why, among many, plays, concerts and sporting events have existed and thrived for thousands, not hundreds, not dozens, but thousands, of years.

All Audiences want to be pulled into a movie, and to feel the entire endeavor from credit card transaction to final credits was worth it. Ask the folks who saw Inception or Toy Story 3 this Summer. However, I’m pretty sure the multiplex itself isn’t the prime culprit for audience dissatisfaction–that would be horrible movies and poor scripts (and I’m pretty sure it isn’t since the multiplex has been king for the last 30 years plus). Nor, do I think that home theaters are going to totally replicate what it feels like to hit your local theater to laugh, cry or recoil in anticipation–nor do I think it’s the only, or best way to see a film, or any film for that matter.

That all being said, IF studios, and exhibitors, do not adjust their business to meet audience expectations, to give audiences films they’ll respond to, except for when they are at home watching those same films on a flat screen in HD with surround sound, then yes, theaters will be dead.

Fifteen years later, as someone who is always curious about the culture and business of film, loves writing for this here digital rag, and as someone who works at a film festival, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the current New Media/Transmedia conversation. As I’ve been exploring, reading and chatting, the part of me that wanted/wants to see films that include folks like me keeps peeking up time to time and can only marvel at how more alike, than dissimilar, in otherwords how monochromatic, those who are driving the New Media/Transmedia conversation are. More distressing, is how monochromatic those who seem to be participating are.

It’s not like folks like Henry Jenkins or Brian Newman have avoided the question of diversity. Newman himself has sat on panels and asked why are there so many White guys. Jenkins has pointed out that non-white students create a whole hell of a lot of what we would call New Media content.

However, honestly, it’s not Jenkins or Newman, or any of those other cats I’m looking at to lead the charge. No, I want to know, where are my fellow 37 year-old folks of color? Where are the guys and gals I remember seeing Love Jones on opening night with, who 13 years ago said “finally” under their breath, and 13 years later are now asking “what happened?”

I’ve started doing some preliminary searching, and I can’t find a damn thing from anyone that seems to dissect this new frontier from the perspective of being Black, Latino, Asian, etc. One of the most interesting and empowering storytelling revolutions is developing around us, and unless I’m blind, stupid and forgot how to do a basic keyword search in Google, we seem to be sitting on the sidelines, contributing silence and indifference.

So am I missing those folks who are doing the interesting work? If so, please point them out to me. Because this conversation extends beyond just People of Color. As someone who proudly calls themselves a Southerner, who revels in films that explore different times, different eras and different questions, I’m dying to see more stories spring forth from unlikely sources.

In the strip, it was a measure by which the character decided if she wanted to see a movie or not, 25 years later, it’s being applied to measure a film’s woman friendly bonafides.

It’s easy to understand why the test has such a seductive quality. It reflects how often women in film have been relegated to little more than the girlfriend, mother or wife role. In comparison to men, they are much more likely to be a plot device, a source of exposition, or a prize for the protagonist to win or lose. Complexity and dimensionality for female characters has a troubled history.

As a conversation starter, and not taken too seriously–remember, it was basically a joke in a comic strip–the test is fine. Used much too literally, the test not only retards the overall conversation, it undermines the deeper problems when it comes to women in film and lowers, not raises, the bar filmmakers should aspire to.

As an example of how easy it is for a film to pass here’s how The Karate Kid passes the test on bechdeltest.com.

Sherry Parker talks to the school vice-principal about her son. Sherry also meets a woman at the airport who drives them to their apartment and tells Sherry who to talk to if they have problems.

Then there’s this excerpt from the back and forth about about the worthiness of 2009′s Star Trek ticking off all three boxes:

Uhura and her roommate Gaila briefly discuss Uhura’s lab time, and her interception of a Klingon transmission. The interaction is brief, but necessary to the plot.

Becky disagreed with the rating and said:

True, except my roommate and I feel that this brief interaction, while theoretically passing the tests is compromised by the fact that Kirk is hiding under the bed watching while Uhura strips down until both women are nearly naked and conversing in their underwear.

Mireille disagreed with the rating and said:

As Becky and Em point out, unaltered, the test ignores context, action and motivations. It also leaves out the most important, at least in my mind, component: agency.

Female characters who talk to each other, yet have no influence on the plot, or don’t demonstrate control over their own situation, is still a fail if the goal is to create better, more interesting female characters. And it’s this last point that’s hard for many folks to understand.

Too often folks confuse a character’s strength and/or perceived importance as a proof of agency and of complexity. She’s an ass-kicking president, therefore she must be a fully rounded character, right? If she’s ordering people around, she must be helping drive the plot? Not necessarily so.

Salt opened this past weekend and it features Angelina Jolie as a near unstoppable spy being hunted by the U.S. government, who suspects she’s a Russian sleeper. Jolie’s Salt is strong, capable and smart. She also frustratingly has almost no inner life and her backstory is mostly only directly relevant to the plot. Her life, at best, is perfunctory and the movie never slows down long enough to give us an idea of who Salt is.

Can you say Salt is a complex character? Not really, as it’s less what we see Salt do, and what the filmmakers choose to hide, that make Salt’s motivations appear more complicated than they ultimately are. Reinsert a few key scenes and Salt’s through line becomes simplistic and her character arc is rendered nearly flat. By the end, you’ll find that Salt only had one real motivation, which, even if there was another woman in the film for her to talk to, spiritually violates the Bechdel Test. There’s nothing more driving Salt, nothing else tugging at her soul.

However, without Salt, the movie’s story, wouldn’t exist as it does. If Salt doesn’t do half of a dozen things, the other characters don’t react to her, and she in turn doesn’t react to them. So she does have agency, but she lacks true depth.

This doesn’t make Salt a bad movie–although I do think it’s a middling one at best, with a house of cards plot structure. Nor does it make Salt a bad character, just a disappointing one, as her motivations are more rooted in her role as a girlfriend and wife and not so much as her role as a spy.

And this is what the application of the Bechdel Test misses. It shortchanges in depth analysis for a reductive pass/fail dynamic.

It may not be possible, but if we want to have a Bechdel like test that really motivates conversation and analysis, we can’t ignore how context, action, motivation and agency are used to build and inform female characters.

Netflix prospects are being hurt by internet delivery of premium content through websites like Hulu, but, people are also  going back to theaters to watch the movies. A Netflix subscription is $8.99 a month, which in a recession is a fantastic bargain. A subscription allows nearly unlimited access to DVDs by mail and TV-viewed movies. A movie theater ticket for single show can cost more than an entire month of Netflix. The trouble with Netflix is that people have to watch the content in their homes. A large part of the population never took a liking to the model, and now those people, and many others, can once again spend the $15 it costs to sit in a real air-conditioned movie house, where the cost of the popcorn is often more than $10. - How The Movies Killed Netflix – 24/7 Wall St.

Is “the trouble with Netflix” really “that people have to watch content in their homes?” Of course not. Business and media analysis aside, no layman would utter this aloud. Between cable, VOD, online options, and yes rental (via Blockbuster or Redbox) home entertainment continues to be huge. People like watching movies at home. It’s why Blockbuster became BLOCKBUSTER. This is one of those pronouncements people are pulling out of their ass that irks me.

Business and media analysis applied, people going to the movies is good for Netflix, and will remain so, as audiences are much more likely to recommend and rent movies they’ve seen in the theaters. Nearly all the top rentals each week correspond to movies that were in the top 5 theatrically for their respective opening weekend. Netflix also benefits greatly from studio advertising as every studio film–with exceptions–will be on DVD. Few businesses get to draft off someone else’s advertising like the video rental business does and has. Then there’s these things that seem to be missing from this post:

Netflix is not Blockbuster. As I’ve mentioned, Netflix doesn’t have brick and mortar stores to contend with. They don’t have Blockbuster’s history of battling customer dissatisfaction. They’ve also been way ahead of the curve in online streaming, with one of the best online players, and partnering and investing in consoles like Xbox and Wii, and home devices like the Roku. Netflix will probably be here in 20 years. Blockbuster? Unless they truly tear up their gameplan and actually come up with some solutions and stop chasing everyone else (Netflix, Redbox, whoever else will pop up next week), they’ll be lucky to make it another five at the rate they’ve been going.

As far as theaters stealing Netflix’s thunder, that’s all bull. The slow down in growth is simple, the economy is still sh*tty and people are opting to cut back. End of story.

…Oh and streaming will not “probably be the “next big thing” in the movie and TV business.” It is the thing.

A scavenger hunt clue from THE DARK KNIGHT's Why So Serious?

Coming to Atlanta July 15-18 is the 9th edition of ARGFest, a conference and gaming festival that’s all about Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) and Transmedia Storytelling. If you think you haven’t heard of, or participated in an ARG, who’d be wrong if you followed on any level of The Dark Knight’s Why So Serious, Halo 2’s I Love Bees, The Blair Witch Project’s pioneering experience or the dozens of ARG’s that have been developed over the last ten years.

With the rise of social media, more dynamic and interactive websites, and mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, ARGs and Transmedia Storytelling have become one of the hottest topics of discussion over the last two years.

In my role as ATLFF Communications Director, I sat down with 2010 ARGFest Chairperson Brooke Thompson to talk* about this year’s fest and the past, present and future of Transmedia Storytelling and Alternate Reality Gaming.

Show notes below:

ARGFest 2010

Transmedia Storytelling: In Transmedia storytelling, content becomes invasive and permeates fully the audience’s lifestyle. A transmedia project develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different “entry points” in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme. – From Wikipedia

Alternate Reality Game: From An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. – From Wikipedia

giantmice.com

Perplex City

Unfiction

*Sorry about the background noise. With the festival so close to the recording date, we didn’t have time to setup a better place to do the podcast.

The Avatar...seriously

What’s the victim? Mainly objective film criticism it seems. And it appears to be contagious too.

I say this only to observe that there must be a list that circulates the “legitimate” entertainment media letting everyone know which films are to be the sacrificial lambs of the season. Which films can be hammered without a second thought to the entire field relatively speaking.

I guess we need good guys and bad guys in everything…including villains to blame for the less than staggering Summer Movie Season…and oh boy do we feel the need to pile on. Take the case of The Last Airbender  and its seemingly unprecedented stream of negative reviews. They aren’t just negative…they’re apocalyptically so.

“…it’s the worst use of 3-D in the modern era…” – Mick LaSalle (sfgate.com)

Come on; have you even seen Clash of the Titans (2010)? To be fair, I saw it in 2-D because…well, I’m cheap and I’d heard things like this said of the movie in 3-D. And to the point of the 3-D craze…I knew it was coming and I do reject it thoroughly except in rare instances that might make it an enhancement of a movie. However, that statement is just over the top-ism.

“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. – Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times)

Roger Ebert is an angry man lately, but somebody should tell him that M. Night Shyamalan does not, at least to my knowledge, belong to the Tea Party Movement. He too complained about the 3-D…maybe I spared myself some agony by skipping it after all.

“…Dev Patel of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire sleepwalks through the part of Ozai’s prodigal son, Prince Zuko…” - Sean O’Connell (filmcritic.com)

This one calls into question whether the zeal to slam these movies that have been designated Enemies of the Media State causes actual loss of more than one of the senses. Unless the 3-D version (which I need to point out all the critics above saw) is a different iteration of the movie, to say Dev Patel Sleepwalks is pretty silly. It either assumes that Dev Patel is ordinarily as High Energy as the Energizer Bunny or that you just simply wanted to include a slam of the fairly likable star of Slumdog Millionaire for acting in something other than Slumdog Millionaire.

The truth is that The Last Airbender, in my humble opinion, isn’t a great movie. However, objectively I just don’t see how it qualifies as an all-time bad film. Believe me, I’ve thought M. Night Shyamalan capable of that after his previous two films but for this movie, it’s just not a fair assessment.

And the racism controversy…well, that’s a whole other post…that I might entertain at a later date.

So, I’m not here to endorse The Last Airbender, I’ll reserve that for The Karate Kid…but you may want to ignore what you’ve read about the film and see for yourself if you have an interest.