Re: Movie culture slipping away?

On 27 ene, 17:09, Flasherly <gjerr...@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 26, 9:44 pm, Steve <h...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



Excerpts fromhttp://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-02-01/hollywoodtx.php

How is it that fanboys - a pimply-faced set that in previous
generations would have been kicked into the dirt by the bullies on the
playground - emerged as the arbiters of twenty-first-century film
culture? This turn of events can be traced back to Austin, circa the
nineties and early 2000s, where the seeds of Geek Nation were first
sown.

Our history lesson begins with Robert Rodriguez, the DIY filmmaker
who, in 1992, poured all of his juvenile energy into a physics-defying
action movie called El Mariachi. Initially, it seemed as if he might
become another Jonathan Demme or Brian De Palma, directors who made
their marks with genre quickies before moving on to more complex
material.

Except Rodriguez never moved on. He was the first of a group of Gen-X
filmmakers, weaned on the works of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,
who clung to their adolescent fantasies - and who, emboldened by
emerging digital technologies, kept refining those fantasies. With
movies like Spy Kids and Sin City, he created a brand of technically
exacting whimsy clogged with nerdy backstory and arcana.

Other filmmakers, including Rodriguez's buddy Tarantino (Kill Bill),
Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), and Guillermo del Toro (Blade
II), rapidly followed suit. So that by the time Rodriguez's acolyte
Frank Miller and director Zack Snyder released their blockbuster 300
(2007), with its nonstop bloodletting, fantastical creatures, and camp
sexuality, a movement as monumental as Abstract Expressionism had
taken grip.

It suddenly seemed as if just about every story - be it a political
thriller like Pan's Labyrinth, a literary adaptation like Beowulf, or
even a coming-of-age memoir like Perseopolis - had to first be
filtered through a graphic novelist's sensibility before it could hit
a movie screen.

Of course, movements can't occur without an audience or a few
tastemakers to coax those sparks of hype into a bonfire. Again we must
look to Austin, where people like Harry Knowles, who launched his
Ain't It Cool News Web site in 1996, and Tim and Karrie League, who
founded Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in 1997, were providing the space,
both in the cyber world and the real world, for all this juvenilia to
flourish.

Knowles' site, with more than 600,000 unique visitors per month,
became a place for mostly twenty-something men to stoke their
enthusiasm about upcoming comic book adaptations and franchise films.

The Leagues, meanwhile, lent an air of hipster sophistication to the
run-amok geekiness. Although the Alamo mainly specialized in revival
screenings of B-movie obscurities, it also began hosting festivals
like Tarantino's collection of trash classics, QT-Fest, and the
Knowles and League-founded Fantastic Fest. Here was a temple for arch,
weirdly elitist moviegoers, who gathered to exalt genre junk as high
art and who cheered on ever more outlandish portrayals of violence.

Hollywood studios embraced the fervor and soon began launching new
movies in Austin. Indeed, by the time Mel Gibson sidestepped all the
major fall 2006 film festivals in favor of a sneak preview of his
Apocalypto at the Alamo - a sadistic, gory cartoon that earned
widespread praise as a bold, otherworldly vision - the cinematic
universe seemed to have gone topsy-turvy.

A few film critics tried to put up a fight. They argued that these
movies were soulless, that these filmmakers were rendering traditional
storytelling irrelevant. But other critics, especially those who grew
up reading Knowles instead of James Agee or Pauline Kael, predominated
with their blustery cheerleading. It didn't matter if the movies were
stultifyingly dumb or morally bankrupt, so long as they served up an
enjoyably gruesome time.

Besides, what good could any critic do against the sheer force of
commercialism? By 2006, only one of the top ten grossing films, The
Pursuit of Happyness, was CGI-free. The runaway success of so many of
these titles made it so that the studios no longer had a reason to
produce movies for anyone over the age of forty.

What few adult-minded works are made these days play on one or two
screens in New York and Los Angeles and then are available for
download on your laptop a month or so later. A group of
technology-obsessed directors and Internet trollers have taken the
most democratic art form we have and turned it into their exclusive
domain.

Welcome to the future of American movies.

No sense berating the commons, the impulse buyers and status-quo
seekers, the narcissism of parental incertitude reflected back in
faces of the tit-sucking televised screens. Engineered for the masses,
there's no social core, rudiments of villages or the left-wing left,
where media supplants nurtured growth images, the formulaic methadrone
of a pervasive police autocracy, 24/7, of acceptable aspirations and
limits, apportioned consumptively into a four-minute hack of
commercialized/programmed segmentation. These are not geeks but
simply youth. Youth lost in buying what tired eyes demographically
long lack to acquire, to stay a course beaten over time, once left to
pasture, devoid and destitute and damned futilely to meander the
wasteland and eminent domain of a tattered culture.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face." -George Orwell

in order to write in a texas company you have to be crap so the puny
anglocentrism is understandable- he wouldn't recognise an adult pic if
it erected his nipple. that having been said, the reason ledger will
be remembered for another retarded bat*** vehicle and not for i'm not
there says it all.
.

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