Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Post Crunch-Week, Pre-Total Crunch
So Slump Week is over.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Slump Week, as discussed, was the time when study fatigue starts to kick in, because it's all learning and no application.
However, thanks to the vagaries of scheduling, slump week was immediately followed by Crunch Week, which contained no less than five deadlines across three courses co-inciding.
And, of course, if any one of these deadlines gets pushed even slightly, you end up pulling all-nighters, and that, to be frank and speaking from recent experience, is a young person's game.
I'm ready to admit to pulling a couple of all-nighters during my first time on the merry-go-round, but - crucially - not for study. I like being a creature of deadlines, don't get me wrong, but if you're still drinking coffee and cursing like a sailor at 3a.m. the night before something is due, then boy howdy, you need some kind of time management thing going on.
And so it was that on Wednesday this week, following a mandatory all-nighter, I ended up driving home at 4a.m. for the first time in, like, well, ever.
Driving at four in the morning after an all-day-all-night work assignment is kind of bizarre, because I was too wired to sleep but too terrified of falling asleep at the wheel to do anything other than ride a strange adrenaline rush that made navigating the dark, orange-hued and, crucially, wet roads home a very, very strange experience.
Where I'm studying has a kind of weird kink, in that it runs the two semester program - much like the first place I attended - but with a weird Easter Holidays thing built in, whereby in week eight you take a two week break in order to come back for weeks nine through twelve.
It is, as I say, a bit weird.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for holidays, but like I said above, I'm a creature of deadlines, the main one of which that is occupying my concern at the moment lies after the two week break during which you can, crucially, do almost nothing in terms of work towards it.
This strikes me as odd. It's the opposite of pleasure delaying; it's anxiety-prolonging, stress-increasing and generally ever-so-slightly sadistic. It's not like the students don't get a five month summer break, after all; so to dump two weeks into the schedule two-thirds of the way into the second semester seems like some weird causal hangover from The Way Things Were Always Done back in the day.
In Real World terms - and let's not forget, these courses are supposed to be preparing the underprepared for the Real World, or at least something like it - this makes no sense, unless, frankly, you plan on being a teacher, in which case it makes perfect sense. But here's the rub; for a film course, almost none of the students will end up getting any job other than being a runner after graduation, because of the 'experience' conundrum - i.e. you have to have experience to get the job, but you have to have had a job to get the experience - which means that they go from one broken facsimile of real life to another with, it is devoutly hoped, no waiting.
This is the equivalent of spending three years at business school and then becoming a supermarked cashier for the experience. Don't get me wrong, there is a degree of sense in putting the young, recently-graduated through a difficult job - it winnows out the minnows, it's cheap, easy labour, and it allows those who shine to shine - but if I were a young student faced with this, I can't help but feel I'd be thinking well... what's the point?
Don't mistake me - from the point of view of an Older Person, I have a vague plan as to What To Do Next following this degree, but nothing more concrete than vagueness, because the way the world is at the moment it doesn't feel like making plans is the smart thing to do. No, as Cayce Pollard would have it, it's all about the jack moves...
Monday, 11 April 2011
Friday, 25 March 2011
Sign on the line and we'll give you the money, and then we'll be fine and we'll fly somewhere sunny
Our Director Writes:
There's something I've been meaning to write about for a while now, and it's what could technically be referred to as the Dewey Paradox;
The level of activity of a student library exists in direct relation to the approaching deadlines
In week zero, campus is empty other than staff members (although not faculty members, necessarily, because... why?), P.h.D students, researchers and the few dedicated or bored students who like the peace and quiet.
Week zero is a magical place. Reports are even cited of unicorns emerging from their burrows to take advantage of the opportunity to frolic across the main campus square before the students arrive, although this could be put down to either the faculty sense of humour, the prevalence of psychedelic drugs in some areas, or simply overdoses of the bad coffee served by the on-campus shops.
Week one isn't too different; traditionally an introduction week, week one is designed to act as an academic airlock, equalising the pressure between moving back from wherever home is and starting the semester anew. No courses have yet pulled the devious trick of making week one actually key to the following twelve to fourteen, because, in all probability, it wouldn't work; attendance is traditionally high, however.
This is because, largely, the dropoff begins in week two. Some people attend week one as a taster for the course, knowing that they can sign off at any point before the end of week two, so that accounts for some natural drop. Other drops are accounted for by people being able to access the necessary materials online (and so not needing the lecture), being ill, being unable to attend, or being lazy.
This reaches an apex at week six, for no reason other than it's traditionally slump week. Last year, week one of a mandatory course yielded 140 students. By week six, this was down to 60.
Fortunately, this is the most impressive dropoff so far. (But give it time).
So if you're ever bored, and want to find out how close a deadline is, visit the library. Granted, in this brave new world, people have a tendency of downloading the books, or just using internet sources, but there still seems to be no substitute for filling a room with hundreds of books then letting stressed students loose therein. Apparently, it's just fun.
Qui dit le amour dit les gosses, dit toujours et dit divorcé
Our Editor Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Slump Week
Every now and then I actually forget that I'm surrounded by people a decade younger than me for at least ten to twenty hours a week. I was brought up with a fairly simple outlook vis-a-vis age; I was taught, or at least learnt, that you don't treat people differently because of it. Sure, the younger are less experienced - sometimes - but apart from that, a person's a person, and the number's kind of irrelevant.
Thus, when someone wants respect because of their age - old or young - I tended to think, well, huh. But that's a different line of thinking.
No, what I'm considering now is the amount of truly stupid shit I did when I was a student on the first ride on the degree merry-go-round. I won't bore you with the funny but l-o-n-g details, because we all (most of us, anyway) do stupid things in our youth.
But it does leave me with a quandary.
Do I warn someone who's about to do something stupid?
If I do, there's chances that it (a) won't alter anything, (b) will make me look like I'm interfering, and (c) that the people in question won't make the mistake that they need to learn from.
If I don't, I have to step aside and watch as people make all the mistakes they have to learn from, but, crucially, they have to make the mistake in order to do the learning. And it's kind of heartbreaking.
And I do attend a course where dressing a coursemate in a neon pink bandolier, two tutus, and a matching neon pink bandana for an assignment is considered a sane and rational act.
Making a film is, by definition, neither a sane nor a rational act. It's the imposition of order on a fundamentally disordered system; trying to bring together cast, crew, location, equipment and mentality followed by months of editing in order to create something people will either not pay attention to or will forget, if not tomorrow then soon,and for the rest of their lives until they remember it again, for whatever reason.
It feels a lot like that's how culture works - people forget until they remember, and often enough remembering is triggered by something media or culture-related anyway, so...
I'm having a good week, anyway, in case it's not entirely evident. The strange thing about most university courses is that the longer you stay on them, the less tuition you receive; the first year is bootstrapping, designed to bring everyone up to an approximation of the same level.
But here's the weird thing about slump week - traditionally, the first week in the second half of the semester - it affects everyone differently. It's all about the assimilation of information, you see; after six to eight weeks of constantly being told to learn new things, the course becomes less a matter of research and more a matter of neuroplasticity,in that you have to be able to take up what you learn, otherwise it's just waves crashing on a beach.
After the six to eight, it becomes less an issue of learning and more a matter of survival, because suddenly instead of a theoretical exercise you're actually expected to put what you've learned into practice, with the aim of being assessed not necessarily on your ability, but more on whether or not you've been paying attention.
Slump week is nearly over, but that's not necessarily a good thing, because of what comes next...
Diary of a Mature Student: Slump Week
Every now and then I actually forget that I'm surrounded by people a decade younger than me for at least ten to twenty hours a week. I was brought up with a fairly simple outlook vis-a-vis age; I was taught, or at least learnt, that you don't treat people differently because of it. Sure, the younger are less experienced - sometimes - but apart from that, a person's a person, and the number's kind of irrelevant.
Thus, when someone wants respect because of their age - old or young - I tended to think, well, huh. But that's a different line of thinking.
No, what I'm considering now is the amount of truly stupid shit I did when I was a student on the first ride on the degree merry-go-round. I won't bore you with the funny but l-o-n-g details, because we all (most of us, anyway) do stupid things in our youth.
But it does leave me with a quandary.
Do I warn someone who's about to do something stupid?
If I do, there's chances that it (a) won't alter anything, (b) will make me look like I'm interfering, and (c) that the people in question won't make the mistake that they need to learn from.
If I don't, I have to step aside and watch as people make all the mistakes they have to learn from, but, crucially, they have to make the mistake in order to do the learning. And it's kind of heartbreaking.
And I do attend a course where dressing a coursemate in a neon pink bandolier, two tutus, and a matching neon pink bandana for an assignment is considered a sane and rational act.
Making a film is, by definition, neither a sane nor a rational act. It's the imposition of order on a fundamentally disordered system; trying to bring together cast, crew, location, equipment and mentality followed by months of editing in order to create something people will either not pay attention to or will forget, if not tomorrow then soon,
It feels a lot like that's how culture works - people forget until they remember, and often enough remembering is triggered by something media or culture-related anyway, so...
I'm having a good week, anyway, in case it's not entirely evident. The strange thing about most university courses is that the longer you stay on them, the less tuition you receive; the first year is bootstrapping, designed to bring everyone up to an approximation of the same level.
But here's the weird thing about slump week - traditionally, the first week in the second half of the semester - it affects everyone differently. It's all about the assimilation of information, you see; after six to eight weeks of constantly being told to learn new things, the course becomes less a matter of research and more a matter of neuroplasticity,in that you have to be able to take up what you learn, otherwise it's just waves crashing on a beach.
After the six to eight, it becomes less an issue of learning and more a matter of survival, because suddenly instead of a theoretical exercise you're actually expected to put what you've learned into practice, with the aim of being assessed not necessarily on your ability, but more on whether or not you've been paying attention.
Slump week is nearly over, but that's not necessarily a good thing, because of what comes next...
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Well I won't man your jets and tanks and jeeps - and speaking on behalf of all my fellow creeps
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Week Three
There's a kind of feeling you get when your body hasn't had quite enough sleep - enough to function, but not enough to do much beyond that - where everything feels like there's a half-second delay built in.
For some reason I haven't been sleeping well for the last few days, and I'm kind of operating on the assumption that I haven't developed an alternate persona and started a cult while I'm being an insomniac that manages underground fight clubs.
So there's a lecture in one hour, forty-nine minutes. It's half an hour's drive away, followed by the hunt for a parking space - because my university renounced believing in cars in 1972 under papal edict - followed by a fifteen minute walk from the only place you can park, at which it's recommended you don't by the same university, even though there's no alternative.
This is all part of the fun, see.
I love my course, and, by extension, I love my life, even if I have to do so on five hours' sleep...
Anyway.
As it came up last time, here at Eton Crow, for a film blog we don't actually talk about films that often, and for a filmmaker's blog, we don't actually post that many films. So you've been waiting for so long, here's two at once; firstly, Eton Crow's own attempt at a Jenny Everywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Everywhere) film:
And secondly, a friend has asked me to host and post this:
Which I was fairly happy to do, given just how pretty it is.
Anyway, it's early yet. I wonder what today has in store...
Diary of a Mature Student: Week Three
There's a kind of feeling you get when your body hasn't had quite enough sleep - enough to function, but not enough to do much beyond that - where everything feels like there's a half-second delay built in.
For some reason I haven't been sleeping well for the last few days, and I'm kind of operating on the assumption that I haven't developed an alternate persona and started a cult while I'm being an insomniac that manages underground fight clubs.
So there's a lecture in one hour, forty-nine minutes. It's half an hour's drive away, followed by the hunt for a parking space - because my university renounced believing in cars in 1972 under papal edict - followed by a fifteen minute walk from the only place you can park, at which it's recommended you don't by the same university, even though there's no alternative.
This is all part of the fun, see.
I love my course, and, by extension, I love my life, even if I have to do so on five hours' sleep...
Anyway.
As it came up last time, here at Eton Crow, for a film blog we don't actually talk about films that often, and for a filmmaker's blog, we don't actually post that many films. So you've been waiting for so long, here's two at once; firstly, Eton Crow's own attempt at a Jenny Everywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Everywhere) film:
And secondly, a friend has asked me to host and post this:
Which I was fairly happy to do, given just how pretty it is.
Anyway, it's early yet. I wonder what today has in store...
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Summer '92, I remember it clearly
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Just Consider This
So this is just a short entry.
First, listen to this, from Sunshine:
Now watch this:
Now watch this:
Now go watch Kick-Ass
. 'Cause this music shows up again. See, now, previously I'd only noted it in relation to Wolverine and The Adjustment Bureau, but thanks to the magnificence of TV tropes, it appears that the same music - or rearrangements of the same music - pop up in four different places.
So... Consider that, if you will. Because I know I am...
Diary of a Mature Student: Just Consider This
So this is just a short entry.
First, listen to this, from Sunshine:
Now watch this:
Now watch this:
Now go watch Kick-Ass
. 'Cause this music shows up again. See, now, previously I'd only noted it in relation to Wolverine and The Adjustment Bureau, but thanks to the magnificence of TV tropes, it appears that the same music - or rearrangements of the same music - pop up in four different places. So... Consider that, if you will. Because I know I am...
Monday, 17 January 2011
I'll hold tight - I'll remember to smile
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Waiting for the day after the day
So it occurs to me that for a film blog, there isn't too much actual writing about, y'know, film. Apart from complaining about 3D, but that makes me a redshirt in a sea of crimson.
Here's the thing; studying anything tends to change how you look at whatever it is you study. I know this isn't a revelation, but as has been said before, it's like watching a magic show from the side of the stage, where you can see the mirrors and paraphenalia. You won't catch all the misdirection and presdigitation, but you won't miss it all either, and that halfway stage between knowledge and understanding can get kind of annoying.
So watching your actual film becomes a kind of well, look at how they did that, or I can see the plot structure from here, and you can kind of tell what's going to happen way before it does, which any sane person who's seen enough films can also do, but at least they're not inculcated into doing it as a routine.
So you - or at least, I did - start looking for films that are different in some way, and start to treasure that little occasional bit of difference. It's not quite the same as the fan who rabidly defends the obscure because they like it before it was cool. It's just... When something falls into the venn diagram of both different and good, well, that's a nice event.
This is why I need you to check out Black Dynamite
.
Black Dynamite is, in an odd kind of way, the perfect film for film students. This is primarily because, in aping the low-budget films it affectionately parodies, Black Dynamite helps point out what you shouldn't do while making you laugh at how they do it.
The DVD comes out in the UK on Monday, for the low, low price of £7.99. You have no reason not to buy it, because it's one of the funniest films I have ever seen. Granted, my recommendation not withstanding, it's also very well done, extremely clever and has one of the best sight-gag setups I have ever seen, without any hyperbole.
So... there you go! That's this month's quota of writing about actual films.
Diary of a Mature Student: Waiting for the day after the day
So it occurs to me that for a film blog, there isn't too much actual writing about, y'know, film. Apart from complaining about 3D, but that makes me a redshirt in a sea of crimson.
Here's the thing; studying anything tends to change how you look at whatever it is you study. I know this isn't a revelation, but as has been said before, it's like watching a magic show from the side of the stage, where you can see the mirrors and paraphenalia. You won't catch all the misdirection and presdigitation, but you won't miss it all either, and that halfway stage between knowledge and understanding can get kind of annoying.
So watching your actual film becomes a kind of well, look at how they did that, or I can see the plot structure from here, and you can kind of tell what's going to happen way before it does, which any sane person who's seen enough films can also do, but at least they're not inculcated into doing it as a routine.
So you - or at least, I did - start looking for films that are different in some way, and start to treasure that little occasional bit of difference. It's not quite the same as the fan who rabidly defends the obscure because they like it before it was cool. It's just... When something falls into the venn diagram of both different and good, well, that's a nice event.
This is why I need you to check out Black Dynamite
. Black Dynamite is, in an odd kind of way, the perfect film for film students. This is primarily because, in aping the low-budget films it affectionately parodies, Black Dynamite helps point out what you shouldn't do while making you laugh at how they do it.
The DVD comes out in the UK on Monday, for the low, low price of £7.99. You have no reason not to buy it, because it's one of the funniest films I have ever seen. Granted, my recommendation not withstanding, it's also very well done, extremely clever and has one of the best sight-gag setups I have ever seen, without any hyperbole.
So... there you go! That's this month's quota of writing about actual films.
Monday, 3 January 2011
It started out as a feeling, which then grew into a hope
Our Director writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: The Inbetween Hours
Let's kick off with a not-so-controversial statement: £11.30 feels like a ridiculous amount to have to pay to see a film.
It's popular to jump upon the anti-3D bandwagon. I don't really want to do that, but there are - obviously - reasons why people wield the hammers of discontent in the direction of the 3D film phenomenon.
Sure, it makes films a new and different experience - temporarily - but at the core of things, it feels oddly Barnum and Bailey, because, thanks to the way things are, cinema is, well, suffering. So why, you might ask, should we begrudge the Film Industry the chance to fight for its' continued existence?
Because, I would say, 3D conversion isn't fighting.
I feel old at the moment. This is just life, really, 'cause everyone feels this every now and then. But right now I feel how I must imagine my grandparents felt on the introduction of Television, or how my parents felt during the shift between eight-track and vinyl to cassettes, to CDs. And let's not be excluding minidiscs, because it ain't nice to exclude.
What it feels like, to myself and probably myself only - and considering nobody reads this blog anyway (I've just found the Stats button, and my all time high was a post on Doctor Who which garnered an impressive 15 pageviews) is that cinema is currently trying to make a shift analogous to the difference between audio cassettes and audio CDs.
For those of you too young to remember - and, unfortunately, I know you exist - cassettes, like their predecessors, were linear in function, i.e. you listened to the songs one, by one, by one, and you had to rewind or fast-forward in (approximately) real time to skip them or listen to them again. Suddenly - well, relatively suddenly - CDs come along, and you can skip from track to track and back and back with merry abandon, in nonlinear time.
Functionally, it's the same principle as the difference between video cassette and DVD - a film on video was linear, in that you had to rewind or fast forward without any particular degree of accuracy. They were bulky, and that was the biggest problem once DVDs came along - you could stop worrying about storage space and upgrade to something half the size or, if you got shot of the case, just the size of a CD.
Now, in theory, you don't have to buy a physical product at all, which is kind of mindblowing for a child of the 1980s.
Of course, we can reparse that last sentence with a reitalicisation, because now you don't have to buy a product at all, physical or not.
Here's a declaration; back in the day, I loved the idea of Napster. Friends used it, and they couldn't stop espousing the virtues of downloading what you wanted, when you wanted it, forever, for free. Napster had a window of approximately thirteen months before it was shut down, but it's not particularly hyperbolic to state that it had a revolutionary impact upon the "illegal transfer of intellectual property" or, to yourself and myself, music.
Now, I have a fairly confused moral stance on torrenting, which may make me unpopular with the current generation, because, basically, I don't do it.
This isn't necessarily because of the whole "illegal" part - although that's certainly a part of it, wacky square that I am - but more a choice, albeit one that's certainly not the popular way of doing things in this, our modern world.
For me, it comes down to the issue of access. Napster was revolutionary not because of the 'music for free' part but because of the sheer amount of things you could access. In the end, it was oddly fatiguing; those I knew who used it would end up running out of things to search for long before they'd accessed even a percent of what was there.
As a teenager, music meant listening to the limited choice of radio stations - in the hope they'd play something from the last year, and not the last forty - or going to that mythical place, the Record Shop, and actually having the money to buy something.
At my computer now, I can access Spotify - which will find anything they have in their server cloud, and stream it to me (albeit at the price of occasional advertising). Alternatively, people upload songs to Youtube so I can find anything I particularly want there as well. If I want to pay for it, I can download the MP3 via Spotify or Amazon or iTunes.
I know that if you're under, say, 25, none of this is news or even remotely novel to you, but that's the joy of youth, I guess. If you are young and reading this - two rarely co-inciding dynamics, I suspect - then try and imagine that mythical land before 2000 where there were only four, then five television channels, where the internet streamed at 56k down the phone line, and when information that wanted - as the hacker dictum goes - to be free, wasn't.
And now it is.
So here's the thing. Even though information - in the form of songs, books, films, whatever - is now free, it hasn't stopped the information being produced. Breaking down the dam hasn't stopped the river flowing - it just means that the average netizen is flooded with choices and methods and ways and means.
If I were part of the bricks-and-mortar information industry - the music companies, the publishing companies, the film industry as a whole - I would, obviously, be very worried about the money aspect.
Having been to the cinema today, it feels like - in the film industry, at least - that worry is starting to manifest itself in undignified ways.
I'll give you an analogy. I drive a reliable car. For two years, the service costs were reasonable, what you'd expect. The year the mechanic servicing my car decided to retire, the cost of servicing was three times the previous years. This would be understandable if anything more than previous years had been wrong, but it seemed, at the time, as if the mechanic was just charging as he liked because, hell, he wouldn't have to do it again, see me again, or care what I thought.
Today, at the cinema, I was five minutes late. This meant I only had to sit through thirty-five minutes of commercials.
Unfortunately, once the trailers and adverts were done, there was some of the most blatant shilling I can honestly say I have ever seen.
Let's talk about Paul.
I like Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, because of Shaun of the Dead and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hot Fuzz. (I liked Spaced for a time, too, and maybe even Hyperdrive.) I like watching Simon Pegg's career go from little fish in a tiny pond - i.e. the British film industry - to little fish in a bigger pond, to a growing fish - supporting roles in MI:3, Star Trek and, of all things, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's nice to see homegrown talent doing well.
It's not nice to see homegrown talent desperately shilling for business.
Once the trailers had finished, but before the film, Pegg and Frost appeared. At first it was to give the whole "Thanks for actually coming to the cinema!" thing, which is getting a bit tedious in itself - it feels like you're being thanked for making the goddamn effort to drag yourself into town and concurrently being patronised for paying eleven! pounds! thirty! (plus £1 for the 3D glasses). In communicative terms, it doesn't make sense - once the audience have paid, there's no real need to thank them for doing so, you've already got them - and it's also odd to be, functionally, thanked for not being a pirate.
So far, so usual - but then because they were willing to do their bit, the trailer for Paul followed, which is, technically, fair enough.
After this, Pegg and Frost joke for a minute about how you should see their film, then try to sell you the Odeon Loyalty Card.
Wait, what?
In effect, it was like paying to be advertised to, as if you have to put up with the adverts for the right - nay, the privilege - to see the film in the first place.
This is where I can kind of understand the attraction of torrenting and downloading - you're not suffering a constancy of advertisement just to see what you've paid to see.
Another example; I went out and bought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on DVD last week, being a huge, nerdy SP fan.
Before playing, there are six - skippable, thankfully - trailers on the DVD for not just films, but enticing you to buy the next generation of DVD player, to visit the Universal Studios park on the other side of the goddamn world - and how does that work, really? "Oh, honey, we've seen the film, now let's fly to LA! - before the film comes on.
At least now the trailers are unskippable, for I recall a dark time when some DVDs came with unskippable adverts for things like Maltesers.
So. Let's bring in the standard cliché; the Film Industry stands at a crossroads, right now. it's a cliché because it's true.
On one hand you have crackdowns and ISPs getting stricter on downloads, prosecuting the users and shutting down the torrents, which is scary and, given the proliferation of technology, unrealistic. In some ways, it leads to a future where all downloading via legal ISPs will be monitored in realtime.
On the other hand, you have the choice of finding a new way to entice people. Forget 3D, because yes, it's pretty, but it's also going to be a long time before it's perfect and the glasses don't induce a headache. 3D feels like an attempt to buy time and get the last generation of cinema-goers to retain their interest. Instead, you have to find a way to stop talking at people - mandatory advertising, high costs, new gimmicks - and actually establish some sort of dialogue to find out what your audience actually wants, because, frankly, it's not forty minutes of 3D commercials followed by shilling for a loyalty card that only exists because people over 25 still go to cinemas.
In some respects, it's basically, to call back to my analogy earlier, time to find a new mechanic.
Of course, I'm buggered if I know that would look like...
Diary of a Mature Student: The Inbetween Hours
Let's kick off with a not-so-controversial statement: £11.30 feels like a ridiculous amount to have to pay to see a film.
It's popular to jump upon the anti-3D bandwagon. I don't really want to do that, but there are - obviously - reasons why people wield the hammers of discontent in the direction of the 3D film phenomenon.
Sure, it makes films a new and different experience - temporarily - but at the core of things, it feels oddly Barnum and Bailey, because, thanks to the way things are, cinema is, well, suffering. So why, you might ask, should we begrudge the Film Industry the chance to fight for its' continued existence?
Because, I would say, 3D conversion isn't fighting.
I feel old at the moment. This is just life, really, 'cause everyone feels this every now and then. But right now I feel how I must imagine my grandparents felt on the introduction of Television, or how my parents felt during the shift between eight-track and vinyl to cassettes, to CDs. And let's not be excluding minidiscs, because it ain't nice to exclude.
What it feels like, to myself and probably myself only - and considering nobody reads this blog anyway (I've just found the Stats button, and my all time high was a post on Doctor Who which garnered an impressive 15 pageviews) is that cinema is currently trying to make a shift analogous to the difference between audio cassettes and audio CDs.
For those of you too young to remember - and, unfortunately, I know you exist - cassettes, like their predecessors, were linear in function, i.e. you listened to the songs one, by one, by one, and you had to rewind or fast-forward in (approximately) real time to skip them or listen to them again. Suddenly - well, relatively suddenly - CDs come along, and you can skip from track to track and back and back with merry abandon, in nonlinear time.
Functionally, it's the same principle as the difference between video cassette and DVD - a film on video was linear, in that you had to rewind or fast forward without any particular degree of accuracy. They were bulky, and that was the biggest problem once DVDs came along - you could stop worrying about storage space and upgrade to something half the size or, if you got shot of the case, just the size of a CD.
Now, in theory, you don't have to buy a physical product at all, which is kind of mindblowing for a child of the 1980s.
Of course, we can reparse that last sentence with a reitalicisation, because now you don't have to buy a product at all, physical or not.
Here's a declaration; back in the day, I loved the idea of Napster. Friends used it, and they couldn't stop espousing the virtues of downloading what you wanted, when you wanted it, forever, for free. Napster had a window of approximately thirteen months before it was shut down, but it's not particularly hyperbolic to state that it had a revolutionary impact upon the "illegal transfer of intellectual property" or, to yourself and myself, music.
Now, I have a fairly confused moral stance on torrenting, which may make me unpopular with the current generation, because, basically, I don't do it.
This isn't necessarily because of the whole "illegal" part - although that's certainly a part of it, wacky square that I am - but more a choice, albeit one that's certainly not the popular way of doing things in this, our modern world.
For me, it comes down to the issue of access. Napster was revolutionary not because of the 'music for free' part but because of the sheer amount of things you could access. In the end, it was oddly fatiguing; those I knew who used it would end up running out of things to search for long before they'd accessed even a percent of what was there.
As a teenager, music meant listening to the limited choice of radio stations - in the hope they'd play something from the last year, and not the last forty - or going to that mythical place, the Record Shop, and actually having the money to buy something.
At my computer now, I can access Spotify - which will find anything they have in their server cloud, and stream it to me (albeit at the price of occasional advertising). Alternatively, people upload songs to Youtube so I can find anything I particularly want there as well. If I want to pay for it, I can download the MP3 via Spotify or Amazon or iTunes.
I know that if you're under, say, 25, none of this is news or even remotely novel to you, but that's the joy of youth, I guess. If you are young and reading this - two rarely co-inciding dynamics, I suspect - then try and imagine that mythical land before 2000 where there were only four, then five television channels, where the internet streamed at 56k down the phone line, and when information that wanted - as the hacker dictum goes - to be free, wasn't.
And now it is.
So here's the thing. Even though information - in the form of songs, books, films, whatever - is now free, it hasn't stopped the information being produced. Breaking down the dam hasn't stopped the river flowing - it just means that the average netizen is flooded with choices and methods and ways and means.
If I were part of the bricks-and-mortar information industry - the music companies, the publishing companies, the film industry as a whole - I would, obviously, be very worried about the money aspect.
Having been to the cinema today, it feels like - in the film industry, at least - that worry is starting to manifest itself in undignified ways.
I'll give you an analogy. I drive a reliable car. For two years, the service costs were reasonable, what you'd expect. The year the mechanic servicing my car decided to retire, the cost of servicing was three times the previous years. This would be understandable if anything more than previous years had been wrong, but it seemed, at the time, as if the mechanic was just charging as he liked because, hell, he wouldn't have to do it again, see me again, or care what I thought.
Today, at the cinema, I was five minutes late. This meant I only had to sit through thirty-five minutes of commercials.
Unfortunately, once the trailers and adverts were done, there was some of the most blatant shilling I can honestly say I have ever seen.
Let's talk about Paul.
I like Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, because of Shaun of the Dead and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hot Fuzz. (I liked Spaced for a time, too, and maybe even Hyperdrive.) I like watching Simon Pegg's career go from little fish in a tiny pond - i.e. the British film industry - to little fish in a bigger pond, to a growing fish - supporting roles in MI:3, Star Trek and, of all things, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's nice to see homegrown talent doing well.
It's not nice to see homegrown talent desperately shilling for business.
Once the trailers had finished, but before the film, Pegg and Frost appeared. At first it was to give the whole "Thanks for actually coming to the cinema!" thing, which is getting a bit tedious in itself - it feels like you're being thanked for making the goddamn effort to drag yourself into town and concurrently being patronised for paying eleven! pounds! thirty! (plus £1 for the 3D glasses). In communicative terms, it doesn't make sense - once the audience have paid, there's no real need to thank them for doing so, you've already got them - and it's also odd to be, functionally, thanked for not being a pirate.
So far, so usual - but then because they were willing to do their bit, the trailer for Paul followed, which is, technically, fair enough.
After this, Pegg and Frost joke for a minute about how you should see their film, then try to sell you the Odeon Loyalty Card.
Wait, what?
In effect, it was like paying to be advertised to, as if you have to put up with the adverts for the right - nay, the privilege - to see the film in the first place.
This is where I can kind of understand the attraction of torrenting and downloading - you're not suffering a constancy of advertisement just to see what you've paid to see.
Another example; I went out and bought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on DVD last week, being a huge, nerdy SP fan.
Before playing, there are six - skippable, thankfully - trailers on the DVD for not just films, but enticing you to buy the next generation of DVD player, to visit the Universal Studios park on the other side of the goddamn world - and how does that work, really? "Oh, honey, we've seen the film, now let's fly to LA! - before the film comes on.
At least now the trailers are unskippable, for I recall a dark time when some DVDs came with unskippable adverts for things like Maltesers.
So. Let's bring in the standard cliché; the Film Industry stands at a crossroads, right now. it's a cliché because it's true.
On one hand you have crackdowns and ISPs getting stricter on downloads, prosecuting the users and shutting down the torrents, which is scary and, given the proliferation of technology, unrealistic. In some ways, it leads to a future where all downloading via legal ISPs will be monitored in realtime.
On the other hand, you have the choice of finding a new way to entice people. Forget 3D, because yes, it's pretty, but it's also going to be a long time before it's perfect and the glasses don't induce a headache. 3D feels like an attempt to buy time and get the last generation of cinema-goers to retain their interest. Instead, you have to find a way to stop talking at people - mandatory advertising, high costs, new gimmicks - and actually establish some sort of dialogue to find out what your audience actually wants, because, frankly, it's not forty minutes of 3D commercials followed by shilling for a loyalty card that only exists because people over 25 still go to cinemas.
In some respects, it's basically, to call back to my analogy earlier, time to find a new mechanic.
Of course, I'm buggered if I know that would look like...
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