There's something that's been bugging me for a while, now.
How have films swung the pendulum back from not having enough material to pad out ninety minutes to having too much for two-plus hours?
Seriously; over the last five or six years there's been an absolute landslide of films that have struggled to make it to the theatrical release mandated (at least I think it's mandated, it's been a while since I checked) run time of ninety minutes; a lot were, in fact, closer to eighty plus credits, and some barely cleared seventy-plus.
It was the same rationale, I would assume, as why American TV series (or, at least, the ones I watch) have switched season lengths from 22 to 12 (either that or it's a subconscious affiliation with Firefly's brevity of time).
But recently the swing back to longer films - at least, in blockbuster terms, and it's quite revealing how many films I own that are in the >90 minute category and aren't very good - and, with that, there have been one or two examples of films that feel like they could actually benefit from being split apart or expanded upon.
A counter-example of this would be The Avengers, because such a good job was done of fleshing out the world in the films prior to that (and why there's such a lack of love for Captain America, I do not know, but anyway) that the film could just start at a breakneck pace and continue that way from thereon in (although, as they Honest Trailers does say, you do get to watch Iron Man fix an engine for twenty minutes).
I know there's a lot of brackets and sidebarring here. It's semi-stream-of-consciousness at the moment. All part of the fun.
But The Avengers did have one or two odd elements; Hawkeye had been barely introduced in Thor before he got hit with the AHA YOU ARE NOW EVIL stick in The Avengers and spent the first hour or so being an antagonist before the power of Scarlett Johannsen's cranial trauma re-aligned him.
And how Thor was able to cross to Midgard - sorry, Earth - when that crossing had been decisively all kinds of fishheaded up at the end of, well, Thor, which was explained away in one throwaway line.
And the enemies could have used some more explanation, as well, because as it stands they were Just Another Nameless Alien Race trying to take over Earth because they... Well, just because it was something to do, as far as I could tell. And decidedly organic-looking soldiers all fall over when their connection to the home dimension is cut, as if they're radio-controlled.
Oh, yeah, I should probably have posted the mandatory spoiler warning by now, really, but hey, if it's too late, it's worth pointing out; Robert Downey Jnr. Is Actually Iron Man In Real Life.
Seriously.
Expanding on the theory above, though, there's two films I'd like to talk about that represent opposite ends of the should-they-shouldn't-they theory of expansion in film terms.
At one end, there's Looper, which I saw only a few days ago.
I loved it; there's no denying that.
And having seen previous films by Rian Johnson, I kind of went in expecting the pace to be a little... odd. Not bad, not better than anything else, just different - because, for instance, The Brothers Bloom had very odd pacing, and Brick before that had a pacing of it's very own and thank you very much but you can't touch it. If you were being unkind - and I remember a few people being so - the word glacial was bandied about, because there is a certain slowness to these films that you don't find anywhere else.
There's a word I'm particularly fond of that I learnt ten years ago and never truly forgot; entelechy. I had it mentally filed as "a slow movement towards an eventual completion", or like the unfolding of a flower; slow, precise, ends in something beautiful unless you're a hay fever sufferer.
I like to think that Rian Johnson's films are basically entelechy on celluloid (that is, virtual celluloid, these days) in that they can't be rushed, and wouldn't benefit from it if they were.
Don't misunderstand me; I came here to write tonight fully expecting to say how Looper should have been much faster and the pacing different and and and... Then I stopped, and thought about it, and, well, if the pacing were faster and it was just balls-to-the-wall action, what would make it any different from any other action film out there?
So maybe it's time to celebrate that sort of difference. The only film I can think of with a comparable kind of pacing and structure is Way of the Gun, which just kind of unfolds with a slow creeping terror about exactly how things are going to end, including sudden broken glass.
The Dark Knight Rises, though - which I saw not quite so soon ago - had a completely different feel to it viz pacing.
In that it was a wonderful film, with a deep, decent emotional payoff at the end (although, as Cracked point out, a slightly unbelievable one in practical terms).
But - to me, and only to me - it felt like it should have been two films.
This is just my opinion, and bear in mind opinions are like elbows - everyone has at least two - but bear with me as I put this together for all y'all.
How about this:
The Dark Knight Falls
(Because it's a pun on Knightfall, i.e. night fall, geddit? etc etc oh god help me please)
Ignoring the shittiness of the pun - but acknowledging it nonetheless - you could have a good ninety-to-one-twenty minute movie setting up an epic confrontation between Batman and a more fleshed-out, more understandable Bane. You wouldn't need contrivances like Bruce Wayne's money being fraudulently stolen in its entirety in eight minutes through a glorified iPad; you could actually have Wayne/Batman being slowly and completely stripped of his assets, his allies, his equipment and, at the conclusion of the movie, his ability to fight.
This would allow for much more exploration of the motivation of, well, everyone, and more character setup time. Hell, there'd even be more time to explain how Bane managed to get the Gotham construction companies to create the absurdly spacious sewers (thanks, TV Tropes!) necessary to hide his equipment and his army, and more time to introduce Selina Kyle rather than just her getting a pearl necklace from - no, let's stop that amazingly vile joke right there and then. But more setup time for Selina would also have been nice, because in the film although we know her motivations are questionable there's the whole thing of whether she does feel genuine, total angst about selling out Batman to Bane.
And equally there would have been more time to spend on John Blake and Miranda Tate, with equally more time to spend on myriad little plot things and such here and there and everywhere.
And at the end of it, Bane still breaks the living shit out of Batman.
The Dark Knight Rises
One of my main issues - and don't get me wrong, I raise it from no platform of experience of my own, but it's just something that bugged me - was Wayne / Batman's recovery time. Although it's been a while since I saw the film, it did seem to boil down to
10 Back Broken
20 GOTO Turkish (?) Prison
30 Receive rope-based chiropracty
40 Do press-ups
50 All better! Go fight now.
Again, if the first film had been spent comprehensively breaking Wayne, the second would have had more time to devote to how he raised himself back up to fighting condition and found the inner strength necessary to make the jump without the rope. To do so so quickly kind of trivialises the matter, although in a way it's productive in terms of stating just how kick-ass Wayne really is when everything's up against the wall, and such.
An extended run-time would have allowed for more time to show just how the GCPD were coping with their enforced prison time underground, too (and heaven knows there's a raft of characters from Gotham Central that could have been brought in in big or little ways).
Plus... The close-to-final scene in Florence was genuinely effective (I... Well, I got a lump in my throat, I'm not really ashamed to say). But it was telegraphed earlier in the movie; if things had been split into two, then it might have had even more emotional heft when it made the viewer recall Alfred's speech from not just an hour and a half ago, but from the previous film entirely. It might have been more rewarding, that way.
Then again, it might not. Because how would it have worked, this way? Release one film in May and another in September? There would have been pros and cons to this approach, i.e. extra box-office versus extra pr spending and the need to maintain the attraction between two films for the entirely mainstream audience as opposed to just the specialist sector, all sorts of things like that. Plus it would have made keeping schtum about all the plot twists and secrets just as hard.
And god knows there probably would have been a Previously On The Dark Knight recap at the start of the film. Nobody wants that.
I can't actually think of a way this has been done before except for, maybe, the Matrix sequels, which were - if memory serves - exactly a year apart.
But I'm not a studio executive, a marketing mojo, a film director, a screenwriter or an economist. I'm just a fan with an opinion that's probably wrong and an overactive imagination.
At the heart of it, a film plot is just a series of events in one long progression. The best films make this look effortless or make it look like that's not what's happening at all.
At times, The Dark Knight Rises felt to me and probably only to me like event -> event -> event -> end.
But it was still a beautiful piece of filmmaking filled with amazing actors evidently giving everything to the final piece in a trilogy (pre inevitable reboot, of course) and it should be celebrated as such.
But maybe...
Wednesday 21 November 2012
Saturday 10 November 2012
Other Dancers May Be On The Floor
I forgot to post the one thing I came here to post, last time, actually. Here it is:
We are none of us alone.
Even as we exhale it is inhaled by others.
The light that shines upon me shines upon my neighbor as well; in this way everything is connected.
Everything is connected to everything else.
In this way I am connected to my friend even as I am connected to my enemy.
In this way there is no difference between me and my friend.
In this way there is no difference between me and my enemy.
We are none of us alone.
I wish I could go ahead and say that's from some deep and meaningful Zen philosophy, but it's not. It's from Life. While this doesn't make it any less deep or meaningful, obviously, it's Televisual Zen.
But I love it.
Things to do, places to be and, most importantly, words to type, documents to fill and emails to reply to.
I just figured you'd like to know that the blog is up and running again after that prolonged, embarrassing absence and the failed attempt at a daily writing exercise.
A glorious failure, though. Although why in your-deity-of-choice's-name-here the entry on The Beach got so many hits, I have no idea whatsoever.
In fact, that's something for a future entry; a Greatest Hits compilation.
Yes, really!
We are none of us alone.
Even as we exhale it is inhaled by others.
The light that shines upon me shines upon my neighbor as well; in this way everything is connected.
Everything is connected to everything else.
In this way I am connected to my friend even as I am connected to my enemy.
In this way there is no difference between me and my friend.
In this way there is no difference between me and my enemy.
We are none of us alone.
I wish I could go ahead and say that's from some deep and meaningful Zen philosophy, but it's not. It's from Life. While this doesn't make it any less deep or meaningful, obviously, it's Televisual Zen.
But I love it.
Things to do, places to be and, most importantly, words to type, documents to fill and emails to reply to.
I just figured you'd like to know that the blog is up and running again after that prolonged, embarrassing absence and the failed attempt at a daily writing exercise.
A glorious failure, though. Although why in your-deity-of-choice's-name-here the entry on The Beach got so many hits, I have no idea whatsoever.
In fact, that's something for a future entry; a Greatest Hits compilation.
Yes, really!
Creaky Crawley Monster Bawley
Today's a celebration of getting out of old habits.
Like putting off work.
Like putting off exercising.
Like putting off Nanowrimo.
Oh, sure, even with today's work I still have to write 1,950 words a day for the next three weeks in order to meet the deadline, but hey, if I write more than that for the next week, the average goes down.
And that's maths.
Life's... Well, firstly, life's been good to me so far. It's important to recognise that, even though I have no idea absolutely where the hell that song came from - some weird shared musical inheritance, no doubt.
But life's been weird, too. In a good way, no doubt whatsoever, but I feel like some time ten years ago someone proposed a trade to me then wiped my memory;
"Tell you what. You can study, and you can keep studying until you're satisfied. But you'll neglect your body, and you'll avoid relationships, maturity and all manner of adult things in order to do so.
Trade me your dignity and I'll give you your motivation."
It always sounds a bit odd when I try to articulate the trade me your dignity part, because it sounds so histrionic. But by all societal markers, that's what I've done; unlike many of my contemporaries, there's no wife, no house, no mortgage to show that I've grown up and matured. Instead, there's - depending on your classification - between six, twenty-two and thirty letters after my name to prove that, by some definitions, I'm a smart bastard.
Here's the difficult thing, because this is text, and text, by definition, strips out any emotiveness other than the extremes;
I'm happy.
Oh, sure, I've been in a state of arrested development for ten years, in some respects. I got a massive inferiority complex from my first degree - didn't try hard enough and, when I did put the effort in, it was too late - that lasted a decade and two more degrees. I'm not even sure if I'm over it now, but results would tend to support the theory that maybe just maybe I am.
But the thing is... When I look back over a lot of the Diary of a Mature Student entries, and a lot of the other entries on top of that, I see progress.
Kind of.
Well, progress, in that catharsis-mandated way that means we have to talk about our feelings, in that way that British people like me are only just coming to understand is actually useful.
The other thing is that this blog is now, I think, directly linked to my youtube channel, so not only can you see what I've been chattering about as a film student, people who watch the films can also, I think, come here.
Which might explain the eight hits the last entry got, although that doesn't explain the weird pageview stats - like how twice as many people in America have read this blog over time (Hi, American People!) than British people, or who the twenty pageviews from Turkey and South Korea are.
It's weird to have reach to people you don't even know.
But I'm babbling, again, as per usual.
Because there's one more thing I haven't mastered yet.
And that's putting off letting go.
I have a lot of bitterness in my heart about the way certain things worked out over the past few years, and that's... Well, it's really stupid to be the kind of person who hangs on to the bitter only to let it cloud the good.
It's what people in my family do - which is not a criticism in any way, just an observation - so it's what I've learnt to do, because holding on to a grudge gives you something to nurse and look after.
But life's been good, and continues to be good, and to concentrate on the bad is just a way of... I don't know, really. It's just something that we, as humans, are good at - storing up ammunition as proof that we're not perfect, because to be perfect would invite other people to tear down that ideal of perfection.
Look at it this way. It's Saturday night, and I'm writing this having finished a 3,000 word writing binge on my NaNoWriMo 'novel', most of which I'm just making up as I go along in order to fill out wordcount (although it's fun doing that, if I'm honest).
So it's time to admit it.
- If we are what we do;
- If Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is right;
- And if it's time to finally admit it;
I guess I'm a writer.
But I know my narrative is changing.
Like putting off work.
Like putting off exercising.
Like putting off Nanowrimo.
Oh, sure, even with today's work I still have to write 1,950 words a day for the next three weeks in order to meet the deadline, but hey, if I write more than that for the next week, the average goes down.
And that's maths.
Life's... Well, firstly, life's been good to me so far. It's important to recognise that, even though I have no idea absolutely where the hell that song came from - some weird shared musical inheritance, no doubt.
But life's been weird, too. In a good way, no doubt whatsoever, but I feel like some time ten years ago someone proposed a trade to me then wiped my memory;
"Tell you what. You can study, and you can keep studying until you're satisfied. But you'll neglect your body, and you'll avoid relationships, maturity and all manner of adult things in order to do so.
Trade me your dignity and I'll give you your motivation."
It always sounds a bit odd when I try to articulate the trade me your dignity part, because it sounds so histrionic. But by all societal markers, that's what I've done; unlike many of my contemporaries, there's no wife, no house, no mortgage to show that I've grown up and matured. Instead, there's - depending on your classification - between six, twenty-two and thirty letters after my name to prove that, by some definitions, I'm a smart bastard.
Here's the difficult thing, because this is text, and text, by definition, strips out any emotiveness other than the extremes;
I'm happy.
Oh, sure, I've been in a state of arrested development for ten years, in some respects. I got a massive inferiority complex from my first degree - didn't try hard enough and, when I did put the effort in, it was too late - that lasted a decade and two more degrees. I'm not even sure if I'm over it now, but results would tend to support the theory that maybe just maybe I am.
But the thing is... When I look back over a lot of the Diary of a Mature Student entries, and a lot of the other entries on top of that, I see progress.
Kind of.
Well, progress, in that catharsis-mandated way that means we have to talk about our feelings, in that way that British people like me are only just coming to understand is actually useful.
The other thing is that this blog is now, I think, directly linked to my youtube channel, so not only can you see what I've been chattering about as a film student, people who watch the films can also, I think, come here.
Which might explain the eight hits the last entry got, although that doesn't explain the weird pageview stats - like how twice as many people in America have read this blog over time (Hi, American People!) than British people, or who the twenty pageviews from Turkey and South Korea are.
It's weird to have reach to people you don't even know.
But I'm babbling, again, as per usual.
Because there's one more thing I haven't mastered yet.
And that's putting off letting go.
I have a lot of bitterness in my heart about the way certain things worked out over the past few years, and that's... Well, it's really stupid to be the kind of person who hangs on to the bitter only to let it cloud the good.
It's what people in my family do - which is not a criticism in any way, just an observation - so it's what I've learnt to do, because holding on to a grudge gives you something to nurse and look after.
But life's been good, and continues to be good, and to concentrate on the bad is just a way of... I don't know, really. It's just something that we, as humans, are good at - storing up ammunition as proof that we're not perfect, because to be perfect would invite other people to tear down that ideal of perfection.
Look at it this way. It's Saturday night, and I'm writing this having finished a 3,000 word writing binge on my NaNoWriMo 'novel', most of which I'm just making up as I go along in order to fill out wordcount (although it's fun doing that, if I'm honest).
So it's time to admit it.
- If we are what we do;
- If Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is right;
- And if it's time to finally admit it;
I guess I'm a writer.
But I know my narrative is changing.
Sunday 4 November 2012
It's time to run it's time to run
So it's probably also time to address the Kevin Smith issue.
It's complicated, though - and not in the sexual sense, which is probably for the best. And, as usual, it all comes down to access, that perennial problem.
Here, in Britain, the first time I was ever aware of Kevin Smith was when I got round to seeing Dogma. This must have been some time in 2000, and my brain pegs it as late 2000 because I'm convinced (and perhaps mistakenly) that I saw it on a screener videotape sent to the university newspaper at which I was working. More likely is that it had come in and been left around after being reviewed and I had snaffled it, as I was wont to do.
Equally likely is that I rented it or bought the screener as a used tape from Blockbuster, because that was just how I rolled back then. (Actually joining Blockbuster? Pssh. Spending more than it would cost to join buying used tapes? Sure! Why not.)
Dogma is a clever, sarcastic, and above all amazing film; so much comedy wrapped around the possibility of the end of existence in its' entirety.
And to be honest, I didn't actually pay much attention to who the director was, because it wasn't really just 'A Kevin Smith Film' to me at that point. That's the thing; all the identifying features (type of humour, Jay and Silent Bob - who them? - featuring prominently, Affleck and Damon - who we'll come back to later - among other things) were alien to me. It was just a cool, funny movie with a lot of heart and a willingness to include a lot of random biblical concepts not because the plot needed them, but because the plot functioned well because of them instead of in spite of them.
See Legion if you want to see the opposite of how that works.
Now here's where it gets problematic; I distinctly recall seeing Chasing Amy on that fun staple of early filmmaking developmental love, late night BBC2 programming. (See also Strange Days, among others; the programmers at BBC2 in the late 1990s / early 2000s were great at bringing in films like that. Hell, they may still be, for all I know).
Chasing Amy is problematic not because I can't exactly remember when I saw it (although I have it filed as After Dogma, so let's run with that) but because of the sexual politics of the piece; you could make an argument that it was, in theory, one of the first post-gender, post-sexuality pieces of the time, but I don't think you'd get altogether too far. Not that I cared, at the time, because it was Pretty People Doing Pretty Things, which included, of course, The Sex. Which was pretty much all I needed to look for in films at the time.
And again, it didn't really impact upon me that it was a Kevin Smith film, because, to be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention.
After this, we can basically fast-forward to 2003, when a friend - of the time, no longer, but let's not get into that whole bridges thing again, although I'm now really impressed at how easy it is to find old posts, but I'm getting distracted - brought over Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and alcohol.
We've now moved on from the Video and BBC 2 days, folks, and into the wondrous land of DVD, albeit played on a Playstation 2. (Which, in a funny way, I kind of miss every now and then, having sold off most of the physical stuff from that time and just kept the memories.)
I really, really liked Jay [...]. It appealed to my sense of humour at the time, as I was also on the path to getting into Family Guy, etc. I still think it's a pretty bravura piece of filmmaking, and would happily sit down and watch it again.
But here's the somewhat fucked-up part; I only discovered Kevin Smith after seeing Jay and Silent Bob, in the sense that I'd been watching his films for that long and not actually caring who made them. I know; shallow, right?
So after a while, I bought the Clerks X edition of... Well... Clerks, in, of all places, Dagenham. And watched it, and loved it, and, for no real reason, ignored all of the special features in the package.
Now, Clerks has a wonderful story attached, which many other sources - Jon Pierson, Peter Biskind et al - tell much better than me, of the young, driven filmmaker who risked it all by putting $22,000 on credit cards to make the film, risking financial ruin if it didn't come off. And it is, like I said, a wonderful story (although it's not wonderfully inspiring for as many people as try this and end up, well, bankrupt) and it forms a key part of the issue I have with Kevin Smith; he's a master mythmaker.
This is not a bad thing. Nor is it a criticism.
So let's set out my stall. I love most of Kevin Smith's films. I've listened to a good many - although nowhere near all - of the SModcasts, and I've grown to love Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. I think he's an inspiration to several generations of filmmakers, that his films are well-made and his sense of humour is something I really admire.
I also think that the mythmaking is out of control.
The past few years have not been kind to Kevin Smith, really. There's the whole "too fat to fly" thing - and, speaking as a fat man, I dread the day that could ever happen to me - along with the problems surrounding Cop Out and the controversy - well, kind of controversy - about how Red State's distribution rights were sold.
I will admit, because of these and other things, my love for Kevin Smith waned a little. Then I thought; you're being a jackass. You're judging him without knowing the facts, just basing it on what you've heard on the internet. You should look into things more.
And I did.
And, like I said, it felt like the mythmaking has overtaken the filmmaking.
And all this stems from a comment from a friend of mine to the effect that "Yeah, Kevin Smith's really good at blaming it on other people."
I thought - even with the bloom coming off the rose, the scales falling from my eyes, etc - that's a bit harsh, surely?
Then I read Tough Sh*t, and, well, it really did feel like the friend in question was right.
There's a chance that Southwest Airlines really were complete asses who treated him unfairly and caused him and his family a lot of woe.
There's a chance that Bruce Willis was a complete and total bastard on the set of Cop Out, which caused the whole film to melt into the puddle that it became, in the end. I've seen Cop Out and it's... Well, I have this thing. I don't like to judge other people's work until I've done something similar, because you can't know how difficult something is until you've done it yourself, right?
But Cop Out feels soulless in the worst sense of the word. And in Tough Sh*t - and in Q&A sessions, and on the Podcasts (if memory serves) - Smith eloquently but persistently lays all of this at Willis' door.
And maybe it's true.
(And maybe I'm starting too many sentences with And. My A Level English teachers would be so proud.)
But how is it even remotely in Willis' interest for the film to be bad? Sure, many stars turn up for the paycheck and the free craft services. Many films are not good for many reasons. But if I'm Bruce Willis - and, more importantly, if I'm Bruce Willis and I don't want that whole Ocean's 12 fiasco again - I'd make sure to actually, I don't know, engage with the director and the film, rather than be the unconsciable, unworkable prick that Smith portrays him as.
Yes, there are all sorts of power games like refusing to read dialogue, or refusing to do certain things, or such. If I had to guess, you do them because you want something - more money, more craft services, something - rather than to just torpedo a film that you're involved in because you can.
If everything Smith says about Willis' behaviour in Cop Out is true, we're looking at the most self-destructive actor around. And it doesn't look like Looper had the same problems, now, did it? Although that's an unfair comparison, maybe. But to lay all the blame squarely at an actors' door belies a terminal lack of flexibility on his part, and maybe if I'm ever in the same situation, I'll be able to do things differently.
Ha. Like that'd ever happen - but still, Tough Sh*t - for all its' merits - acts as somewhere between apologia and polemic about other people's problems.
Red State is equally problematic. On the one hand, you have to - and I mean, have to - celebrate an attempt by a director to branch out from their previous, deeply established style in order to try something new and different and evolutionary. And, as a script, Red State really is something interesting, and anyone who's willing to take a stab at people like the Westboro Baptist Church has to be applauded.
And there's some bravura filmmaking in there - Mark Kermode in particular singled out Michael Parks' sermon as a particularly interesting element - but the result felt, on watching, curiously flat, somehow. It's the weirdest thing; it felt - to this viewer, if to nobody else - that all the elements that made Kevin Smith films Kevin Smith films had been surgically excised when they could have been retained and tweaked.
It's as if Eli Roth made a comedy and removed all the horror elements just in case someone made a comment about how it was so much like his previous films; it might not work. It'd be interesting, but it might not work.
So here's how it works, because this is too long to keep going much longer; Kevin Smith was - and is, in some ways - a hero for me. But he's also a myth, and a self-made myth at that, which threatens to become PR of the worst sort. And, sadly, PR never ends well, because, at the end of the day, it's all spin.
Wow. That's kind of a downbeat, waffley ending for something I wanted to use to express both praise and concern (and, maybe, disappointment) in someone I'll never meet, speak to, or interact with, but who's had a giant impact on my life.
That's because, as was said, It's Complicated.
But overall I'm glad of the influence Smith has had on my life.
It's complicated, though - and not in the sexual sense, which is probably for the best. And, as usual, it all comes down to access, that perennial problem.
Here, in Britain, the first time I was ever aware of Kevin Smith was when I got round to seeing Dogma. This must have been some time in 2000, and my brain pegs it as late 2000 because I'm convinced (and perhaps mistakenly) that I saw it on a screener videotape sent to the university newspaper at which I was working. More likely is that it had come in and been left around after being reviewed and I had snaffled it, as I was wont to do.
Equally likely is that I rented it or bought the screener as a used tape from Blockbuster, because that was just how I rolled back then. (Actually joining Blockbuster? Pssh. Spending more than it would cost to join buying used tapes? Sure! Why not.)
Dogma is a clever, sarcastic, and above all amazing film; so much comedy wrapped around the possibility of the end of existence in its' entirety.
And to be honest, I didn't actually pay much attention to who the director was, because it wasn't really just 'A Kevin Smith Film' to me at that point. That's the thing; all the identifying features (type of humour, Jay and Silent Bob - who them? - featuring prominently, Affleck and Damon - who we'll come back to later - among other things) were alien to me. It was just a cool, funny movie with a lot of heart and a willingness to include a lot of random biblical concepts not because the plot needed them, but because the plot functioned well because of them instead of in spite of them.
See Legion if you want to see the opposite of how that works.
Now here's where it gets problematic; I distinctly recall seeing Chasing Amy on that fun staple of early filmmaking developmental love, late night BBC2 programming. (See also Strange Days, among others; the programmers at BBC2 in the late 1990s / early 2000s were great at bringing in films like that. Hell, they may still be, for all I know).
Chasing Amy is problematic not because I can't exactly remember when I saw it (although I have it filed as After Dogma, so let's run with that) but because of the sexual politics of the piece; you could make an argument that it was, in theory, one of the first post-gender, post-sexuality pieces of the time, but I don't think you'd get altogether too far. Not that I cared, at the time, because it was Pretty People Doing Pretty Things, which included, of course, The Sex. Which was pretty much all I needed to look for in films at the time.
And again, it didn't really impact upon me that it was a Kevin Smith film, because, to be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention.
After this, we can basically fast-forward to 2003, when a friend - of the time, no longer, but let's not get into that whole bridges thing again, although I'm now really impressed at how easy it is to find old posts, but I'm getting distracted - brought over Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and alcohol.
We've now moved on from the Video and BBC 2 days, folks, and into the wondrous land of DVD, albeit played on a Playstation 2. (Which, in a funny way, I kind of miss every now and then, having sold off most of the physical stuff from that time and just kept the memories.)
I really, really liked Jay [...]. It appealed to my sense of humour at the time, as I was also on the path to getting into Family Guy, etc. I still think it's a pretty bravura piece of filmmaking, and would happily sit down and watch it again.
But here's the somewhat fucked-up part; I only discovered Kevin Smith after seeing Jay and Silent Bob, in the sense that I'd been watching his films for that long and not actually caring who made them. I know; shallow, right?
So after a while, I bought the Clerks X edition of... Well... Clerks, in, of all places, Dagenham. And watched it, and loved it, and, for no real reason, ignored all of the special features in the package.
Now, Clerks has a wonderful story attached, which many other sources - Jon Pierson, Peter Biskind et al - tell much better than me, of the young, driven filmmaker who risked it all by putting $22,000 on credit cards to make the film, risking financial ruin if it didn't come off. And it is, like I said, a wonderful story (although it's not wonderfully inspiring for as many people as try this and end up, well, bankrupt) and it forms a key part of the issue I have with Kevin Smith; he's a master mythmaker.
This is not a bad thing. Nor is it a criticism.
So let's set out my stall. I love most of Kevin Smith's films. I've listened to a good many - although nowhere near all - of the SModcasts, and I've grown to love Jay and Silent Bob Get Old. I think he's an inspiration to several generations of filmmakers, that his films are well-made and his sense of humour is something I really admire.
I also think that the mythmaking is out of control.
The past few years have not been kind to Kevin Smith, really. There's the whole "too fat to fly" thing - and, speaking as a fat man, I dread the day that could ever happen to me - along with the problems surrounding Cop Out and the controversy - well, kind of controversy - about how Red State's distribution rights were sold.
I will admit, because of these and other things, my love for Kevin Smith waned a little. Then I thought; you're being a jackass. You're judging him without knowing the facts, just basing it on what you've heard on the internet. You should look into things more.
And I did.
And, like I said, it felt like the mythmaking has overtaken the filmmaking.
And all this stems from a comment from a friend of mine to the effect that "Yeah, Kevin Smith's really good at blaming it on other people."
I thought - even with the bloom coming off the rose, the scales falling from my eyes, etc - that's a bit harsh, surely?
Then I read Tough Sh*t, and, well, it really did feel like the friend in question was right.
There's a chance that Southwest Airlines really were complete asses who treated him unfairly and caused him and his family a lot of woe.
There's a chance that Bruce Willis was a complete and total bastard on the set of Cop Out, which caused the whole film to melt into the puddle that it became, in the end. I've seen Cop Out and it's... Well, I have this thing. I don't like to judge other people's work until I've done something similar, because you can't know how difficult something is until you've done it yourself, right?
But Cop Out feels soulless in the worst sense of the word. And in Tough Sh*t - and in Q&A sessions, and on the Podcasts (if memory serves) - Smith eloquently but persistently lays all of this at Willis' door.
And maybe it's true.
(And maybe I'm starting too many sentences with And. My A Level English teachers would be so proud.)
But how is it even remotely in Willis' interest for the film to be bad? Sure, many stars turn up for the paycheck and the free craft services. Many films are not good for many reasons. But if I'm Bruce Willis - and, more importantly, if I'm Bruce Willis and I don't want that whole Ocean's 12 fiasco again - I'd make sure to actually, I don't know, engage with the director and the film, rather than be the unconsciable, unworkable prick that Smith portrays him as.
Yes, there are all sorts of power games like refusing to read dialogue, or refusing to do certain things, or such. If I had to guess, you do them because you want something - more money, more craft services, something - rather than to just torpedo a film that you're involved in because you can.
If everything Smith says about Willis' behaviour in Cop Out is true, we're looking at the most self-destructive actor around. And it doesn't look like Looper had the same problems, now, did it? Although that's an unfair comparison, maybe. But to lay all the blame squarely at an actors' door belies a terminal lack of flexibility on his part, and maybe if I'm ever in the same situation, I'll be able to do things differently.
Ha. Like that'd ever happen - but still, Tough Sh*t - for all its' merits - acts as somewhere between apologia and polemic about other people's problems.
Red State is equally problematic. On the one hand, you have to - and I mean, have to - celebrate an attempt by a director to branch out from their previous, deeply established style in order to try something new and different and evolutionary. And, as a script, Red State really is something interesting, and anyone who's willing to take a stab at people like the Westboro Baptist Church has to be applauded.
And there's some bravura filmmaking in there - Mark Kermode in particular singled out Michael Parks' sermon as a particularly interesting element - but the result felt, on watching, curiously flat, somehow. It's the weirdest thing; it felt - to this viewer, if to nobody else - that all the elements that made Kevin Smith films Kevin Smith films had been surgically excised when they could have been retained and tweaked.
It's as if Eli Roth made a comedy and removed all the horror elements just in case someone made a comment about how it was so much like his previous films; it might not work. It'd be interesting, but it might not work.
So here's how it works, because this is too long to keep going much longer; Kevin Smith was - and is, in some ways - a hero for me. But he's also a myth, and a self-made myth at that, which threatens to become PR of the worst sort. And, sadly, PR never ends well, because, at the end of the day, it's all spin.
Wow. That's kind of a downbeat, waffley ending for something I wanted to use to express both praise and concern (and, maybe, disappointment) in someone I'll never meet, speak to, or interact with, but who's had a giant impact on my life.
That's because, as was said, It's Complicated.
But overall I'm glad of the influence Smith has had on my life.
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