If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.

   
The obvious danger is expressed in a question: what will people do to keep their jobs?  What ethical corners might they cut?  Jake Gyllenhaal’s new movie Nightcrawler offers some unsavory — some might say psychopathic — answers.

   
Gyllenhaal’s eerie Louis Bloom stumbles into a career as an ambulance-chasing videographer.  Increasingly unscrupulous, he elbows out other mercenaries competing to provide exclusive, “first-on-the-scene” footage of fires, collisions, and killings.

   
News director Rene Russo offers him candidly damning advice.  She’ll pay more for videos which depict the creep of violent crime toward L.A.’s white, affluent suburbs.  Such footage inspires fear in viewers.  And people in fear watch the news.  At 6 in the morning.  Again in the evening.  Fearful people sign up for alert texts and e-mails.  Have there been any developments?  Have cops run the bad guys to ground?  Is the fire creeping toward my neighborhood?

   

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Bloom risks big to win big.  He executes a chillingly calculated plan for besting his rivals, not really weighing the consequences of his reportage.  By the time the ethics alarm sounds, Bloom’s hook is in too deep.  He has ingratiated himself as an indispensable news gathering professional. 

   
Many essayists lament the slant of news in service of political agendas.  Nightcrawler and Gyllenhaal’s career-defining performance reminds us of an equal or greater threat.  Ratings fever, simple popularity — in short, raw democracy — prioritizes the worth of human lives.  It is true on American Idol.  It is true on the evening news.  It has been true of the drug war for decades:  Afghani farmers will stop growing poppies when Americans stop buying heroin.

The Scariest Comedy Ever (A)

If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin.  If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton.  But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors. 

Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los Angeles.  He promises to send for his naïve fiancée when he makes good.  But he can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk.  When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers.  Only the roommate never quite does his share of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without a net.

You're freaking me out, Harold.

I don’t care that the film is more than ninety years old.  I don’t care that the effects are simple tricks of camera placement and composition.  I only know that’s Lloyd’s brand of thrill comedy twisted me in knots.  I could hardly look at the screen as Lloyd scaled the DeVore Department Store – but I certainly couldn’t look away.  I was nearly apoplectic by the time he created one of cinema’s most iconic images, that of the bespectacled everyman dangling from the hands of a clock.  Even the less perilous scenes were tense with comic anticipation.  Gag elements came together, paying off in ways that seldom seemed contrived. 

Crowning the story’s own excellence is a 2013 high-def restoration.  Blu-ray is ideally suited to high contrast stock of the silent era.  But it can also magnify every artifact of dust, hair, wear, and neglect.  If you’ve bought the Criterion re-issue (and why wouldn’t you?), breathe easy; once again, the distributor earns its reputation with a crisp print that justifies its cost.  Buy this one to share with friends.

The Edge of Not As Bad As It Could Have Been (B+)

Tom Cruise as Bill Cage
in Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow

"Not as bad as I expected," seems to be a recurring theme of response to Edge of Tomorrow. Because I don't have money to throw away on intentionally disappointing films, I generally don't buy tickets to movies I expect will be bad (live Rifftrax events being an important exception to the rule).

Based on word of mouth or trusted critics, I decide whether to see a movie (1) in a first-run, 3-D, IMAX theater after a steak, (2) in a $5 second-run house with a box of smuggled Junior Mints, (3) on a scratched DVD borrowed from the library, or (4) interrupted by commercials on broadcast TV. Okay, I employ other nuanced tiers of discernment, but you appreciate the gist of the economic scale.

I paid for three people to watch Edge of Tomorrow in its initial release. No 3-D. No IMAX. I downed an overpriced box of dark chocolate Raisinettes before the previews finished. I watched a man repeat the worst day of his life about fifty times... and I didn't get bored. I saw Tom Cruise play iterations of the same character across a broad spectrum of emotion and thought "okay, he's got some acting chops." I was impressed (but not browbeaten to exhaustion) by character design and FX spectacle. Afterward, I took a family out for burgers and joined in their conversation about time paradoxes, second chances, and the "gamification" of life.

I didn't regret the cost.

A Pretty Good Gatsby (B++)

Dramatic Script Analysis, Rule One:  The character who undergoes the most change is the story’s protagonist.  Seems almost self-evident, doesn’t it?  Scout matures in her understanding of racism.  Lawrence grows in his sympathy for Bedouin tribes.  Peter Parker becomes Spiderman.  It is chiefly from the perspective of these characters that audiences experience the plot.

This is, frankly, one of the problems with the Jesus narrative.  Immediately, audiences identify him as the central character.  But one of his chief attributes is immutability.  Indeed, a great many of his followers are comforted by the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  He can’t change.  He can’t learn.  No one can surprise him.  So, as a dramatic character, he’s terminally boring.  (Please understand, I’m not faulting the salvific work of Christ.  I’m insulting no one’s Savior.  Don’t write me angry e-mails.  I’m talking only about the difficulty this character presents to storytellers.).

A lot of TV characters similarly threaten audiences with boredom.  Consider Gregory House.  He needs to be the same at the beginning and end of every story arc.  So even if it looks as if he might conquer his Vicodin addiction, he’s obliged to relapse.  Otherwise, he might cease to be the irascible addict that is the show’s reliable anchor.

To keep persons interesting who have a net character growth of zero, storytellers often opt for revelation.  House will always limp, but recollection (as in the excellent episode “Three Stories”) could show us how his leg came to be injured.  The continuous flashback that comprised all nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother demonstrates the principle taken to an extreme.  Such post-modern structural experiments can even make Jesus an interesting character (if you’re inclined to wince your way through Mel Gibson’s 2004 snuff-film-in-sheep’s-clothing, The Passion of the Christ).

Now imagine you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It’s 1924.  Your editor, Maxwell Perkins, has just returned the draft of a novel you’re calling Trimalchio in West Egg.  Despite your attempts to produce "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned,” Perkins calls it vague and asks you to spend a winter on the French Riviera revising it.

Your idea is to indict the emptiness of addictive decadence.  You wind the story around an increasingly hollow core of people.  You’ve set for yourself a thought experiment, to see if you can actually tell a story showcasing negative character growth.  The more readers learn about the book’s central personality, the less interesting he becomes.

Featuring characters that are neither likeable nor deep, the book is published to mixed reviews and sells a pitiful 20,000 copies.  You die 15 years later, believing your life to be a failure.

We know the rest.  In the wake of World War II, The Great Gatsby (as it was retitled), became the American novel and a must-read for every eleventh grader.  It also became a play, an opera, a Korean web comic, a theoretical economic model, a made-for-TV movie (twice) and a theatrical film (five times over).  Not one of the these re-tellings really wowed critics.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal referred to Baz Luhrman’s 2013 version as “a spectacle in search of a soul.”  Which is precisely the point of the novel.  Accurately reflecting Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age ennui means, necessarily, making a movie which wins Oscar and BAFTA Awards for costume and production design – and nothing else. 

I once referred to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as the sort of book that couldn’t possibly be made into a film.  The threads of its plot were just too intricately woven.  But master editor Walter Murch made a liar of me.  Should have seen that one coming. 

Gatsby (in any of its incarnations) makes me think that perhaps character is a bigger challenge to storytelling than narrative structure.  I won’t say the book defies adaptation, but Jay Gatsby certainly resists audience empathy.  By design, he goes nowhere – neither forward through observable growth nor backward through expository revelation.  As Gertrude Stein famously observed “There’s no there there.”  Gatsby is nobody. 

And he’s a huge nobody.  At the height of his career in 1974, Robert Redford was Gatsby.  Leonardo DiCaprio was Gatsby in 2013.  Leo took home a $20 million paycheck to create a performance intentionally lacking charisma and depth.  To do otherwise would have strayed from the novel’s intent.  Audiences expecting star vehicles for their favorite heartthrobs were rightly confused.

 

Perhaps because of the bold nothingness at its center, I truly enjoyed The Great Gatsby.  I found Luhrman’s structure clearer than the book’s, the lines between people easier to map on screen.  The excesses of Gatsby’s bacchanals evoke the 1920s, yet seem pointedly lifted from “Rich Kids of Instagram.”  I wanted to go to these parties – yet the desire to do so colored me with guilt.  I wanted to visit these extravagant mansions, but only if it were possible to avoid their shallow owners.  I think I was lured to the precisely the scrutiny Fitzgerald hoped to engender.  Many times since (spoilers!) Gatsby’s funeral, I’ve found myself looking for the holes privilege might have dug in my own character.

Clash of the Titans (C-)

In its initial theatrical release, Clash of the Titans took a deserved drubbing from critics, who often pointed to it as an object lesson in post-production 3D conversion. The 2010 iteration was also swimming upstream against reviewers’ nostalgia for Ray Harryhausen’s quaint, 1980s-era stop-motion.

Does director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) deserve a 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating? The answer is probably a function of ticket price. I bought a used DVD for $5, saw it in 2D on a 9’ screen with my 14-year-old son, and didn’t regret its 106-minute running time.

Some viewers were troubled by what they considered inaccuracies or continuity gaffes. Their complaint was often that scriptwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, and Matt Manfredi strayed too far from Edith Hamilton. Considering these are among mankind’s oldest characters and narratives, I think perhaps we’ll have to relax our grip on 11th-grade classroom memories. Surely no one invested in this film hoped for Bullfinch’s Mythology.

I have an opposing conviction: that this script hews too closely to the source material – at least in structure. Tales of Perseus and the Argonaut Jason are linear quests. Adventurers wallop a beastie in the forest, then survive a magical firefight on the beach, then behead a stony serpentine seductress in her lair -- connecting the dots from A to B to C. But modern audiences prefer to juggle multiple threats (even multiple timelines) simultaneously. Without more “meanwhile-back-at-Argos” cutaways one frequently forgets that the clock is ticking on the noble, would-be sacrifice Andromeda. Even when she does get screen time, she really doesn’t seem all that upset about her impending death. The stakes of Perseus’s failure thus seem pretty low.