Been A Long Lonely x4 Time
May. 14th, 2015 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustI'm transposing this from Tumblr, where I'm happy it's getting some likes and reblogs:
I’ve been thinking about writing an LJ post which is just one long rebuttal of that idiotic leaked memo in which Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter tried to convince Sony Studios executive Michael Lynton that no female-led movie could be profitable by citing those three hoary bugaboos, Elektra, Catwoman and Supergirl. These movies did, indeed, make very little money, which proves exactly nothing, viz:
I’d obviously begin by pointing out that all three are shitty movies in general, so they give no hint as to how a well-made female-led movie formed around a comic-book character would or would not do, because that option hasn’t yet been tried. After which I’d go on to point out that not only is there an almost twenty-year gap between Supergirl and Elektra, which is truly pathetic, but also that when they put that stupid-ass Catwoman project together they didn’t even bother to use the DC character associated with the name, because they didn’t think that would be worth it. No, they instead made up a knock-off version who happened to also be named Catwoman but otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with Selina Kyle, then went ahead and made the movie, after which they purported to be STARTLED to discover that people felt cheated by A) the movie not being about the Catwoman they all really wanted to see a movie about and B) how completely fucking crappy it is on every possible level except the one where Halle Berry looks sort of okay in ripped pleather chaps.
Since then, we’ve had a series of female-led movies which have made (surprise, surprise) a heck of a lot of money, often with very little financial investment. Now grantedly, none of these have been based on comic-book characters, and a bunch of them have been in non-action-oriented genres like comedy and/or drama. The biggest single moneymaker of recent years, Frozen, is an animated movie with the cross-marketing force of Disney behind it, and I’m taking it nobody probably wants to discuss the fact that most horror movies, especially the ones with the biggest low budget-to-high box office ratio, tend to have female protagonists due to Final Girl Syndrome. But even if we ONLY consider the action/fantasy films with female protags and/or female-heavy casts, we still end up with (all figures from Box-Office Mojo, in case you wondered):
Kill Bill Vol. 1 ($181 million worldwide)
Alien ($204 million)
Aliens ($131 million)
Tomb Raider ($275 million)
Salt ($293.5 million)
Lucy ($458 million)
Gravity ($675 million)
The Divergent franchise ($278 million and counting)
Alice in Wonderland ($1.024 billion)
The Twilight franchise ($1.36 billion and counting)
The Hunger Games franchise ($2 billion over three films and counting)
So, yeah: cry bullshit on all that. No matter the problems/issues we may have with some or all of the movies listed above, it seems pretty likely that to rake in that kind of money, they were monopolizing ALL of the potential moviegoing audience, even (or maybe particularly) that segment of it most comic-book movies tend to ignore. The message seems really, really clear, when you let yourself look it face-on: build it–or better yet, put WOMEN in it, hopefully not only more than one but also more than just one type of woman–and we will come.
You will not lose money doing this, therefore, Mr Perlmutter. You will MAKE money, hand over fucking fist.
So yeah, that comes about as close to writing about movies as I've done in a while, which makes me happy. My brain isn't working all that well right now, possibly due to biology (got my period the night before last), which means putting my thoughts together on pretty much any subject has been an aggravatingly slow process. Didn't help that I spent most of the weekend reeling from one social interaction to the next, rehearsing four hours on Saturday only to have to immediately run to tech for a performance (reading a poem, singing a song) at Pages UnBound's Cabaret of Wild Culture right after; it wasn't worth going home in between, so I stuck around in the Annex for four more hours, performed, went home, crashed. Sunday was Echo Women's Choir's spring concert, meanwhile, which meant another four hours of singing/socializing; it was great overall, but exhausting.
So I started the week on a deficit, spent Monday taking two movies back to Suspect Video, bought two more, then returned to my neighbourhood in time to pick up Cal. Since then, I've been pecking away at stuff--a short story that needs to be in by the 31st, "That Girl (Is A God Damn Problem)", various first lines that refuse to grow into narratives of their own, the WFA reading material slog. I did my initial picks for novel, found out we need to get our Lifetime Achievement votes in for June 1, had debates about genre with the other judges. Etc.
And watched movies, as I said. Today it was Life Itself, the documentary about Roger Ebert--hardly a hagiography, but I found myself misting up by the end nonetheless. Ebert remains my personal template for film criticism: clear, concise, contextual, human, humane. He used to say that cinema was "a machine which generates empathy," and though he could be cutting, arrogant and full of himself (like all of us, he was a little in love with the sound of his own voice), that sentiment only grew stronger in his reviews over time, in much the same way that his blog utterly blossomed in a multitude of interesting directions after the removal of his jaw and his loss of the ability to speak at all. He was clear-eyed about making the distinction between a movie and his own reaction to that movie, which is something I've always struggled with; sometimes I think I love things for their flaws and the inspiration I take away from them, or for the movies they spark inside my head which may have very little to do with what's actually onscreen, and that seems very Ebertian to me, in hindsight. As does the observation that's grown in me since my twenties that in the main, I would rather love the stories I consume than hate them, in any medium (at the most, given I have nothing to do with their construction, all I can ever be is disappointed in them afterwards, and try to tell you why).
Now that he's been dead for a while, I still feel it's odd to find myself "missing" someone I never really knew, though I at least had the pleasure of meeting him once; we argued over Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn at TIFF one year. He didn't persuade me and I didn't persuade him, but we met in the middle, were passionate yet respectful and kind to each other, and walked away afterwards smiling, which is the best kind of conversation to have with anybody (especially another film critic). So when one of my friends later accused me of becoming "a populist!" in my cinematic tastes, I thought about Roger Ebert and decided that maybe wasn't such a bad thing to be.
The true worth of the film is seeing how many people (from Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog to Gene Siskel's wife, Richard Corliss and his old drinking buddies at the Chicago Sun-Times) remember him fondly, though equally clear-eyed, and observing the great love he shared with his wife, Chaz. He lived well and died as well as he could have, given the circumstances. We might all do far worse.
Amongst the other films I saw: George Romero's Martin, Stuart Gordon's Dolls, the Lovecraftian Hollywood fable Starry Eyes, and Adrian Garcia Bogliano's film Penumbra, a dark comedy of no manners about an Argentine sun cult in search of a very specific apartment. All are worth talking about, but I have to go out and get a photo copied for Cal's school, so maybe later.
I’ve been thinking about writing an LJ post which is just one long rebuttal of that idiotic leaked memo in which Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter tried to convince Sony Studios executive Michael Lynton that no female-led movie could be profitable by citing those three hoary bugaboos, Elektra, Catwoman and Supergirl. These movies did, indeed, make very little money, which proves exactly nothing, viz:
I’d obviously begin by pointing out that all three are shitty movies in general, so they give no hint as to how a well-made female-led movie formed around a comic-book character would or would not do, because that option hasn’t yet been tried. After which I’d go on to point out that not only is there an almost twenty-year gap between Supergirl and Elektra, which is truly pathetic, but also that when they put that stupid-ass Catwoman project together they didn’t even bother to use the DC character associated with the name, because they didn’t think that would be worth it. No, they instead made up a knock-off version who happened to also be named Catwoman but otherwise had absolutely nothing to do with Selina Kyle, then went ahead and made the movie, after which they purported to be STARTLED to discover that people felt cheated by A) the movie not being about the Catwoman they all really wanted to see a movie about and B) how completely fucking crappy it is on every possible level except the one where Halle Berry looks sort of okay in ripped pleather chaps.
Since then, we’ve had a series of female-led movies which have made (surprise, surprise) a heck of a lot of money, often with very little financial investment. Now grantedly, none of these have been based on comic-book characters, and a bunch of them have been in non-action-oriented genres like comedy and/or drama. The biggest single moneymaker of recent years, Frozen, is an animated movie with the cross-marketing force of Disney behind it, and I’m taking it nobody probably wants to discuss the fact that most horror movies, especially the ones with the biggest low budget-to-high box office ratio, tend to have female protagonists due to Final Girl Syndrome. But even if we ONLY consider the action/fantasy films with female protags and/or female-heavy casts, we still end up with (all figures from Box-Office Mojo, in case you wondered):
Kill Bill Vol. 1 ($181 million worldwide)
Alien ($204 million)
Aliens ($131 million)
Tomb Raider ($275 million)
Salt ($293.5 million)
Lucy ($458 million)
Gravity ($675 million)
The Divergent franchise ($278 million and counting)
Alice in Wonderland ($1.024 billion)
The Twilight franchise ($1.36 billion and counting)
The Hunger Games franchise ($2 billion over three films and counting)
So, yeah: cry bullshit on all that. No matter the problems/issues we may have with some or all of the movies listed above, it seems pretty likely that to rake in that kind of money, they were monopolizing ALL of the potential moviegoing audience, even (or maybe particularly) that segment of it most comic-book movies tend to ignore. The message seems really, really clear, when you let yourself look it face-on: build it–or better yet, put WOMEN in it, hopefully not only more than one but also more than just one type of woman–and we will come.
You will not lose money doing this, therefore, Mr Perlmutter. You will MAKE money, hand over fucking fist.
So yeah, that comes about as close to writing about movies as I've done in a while, which makes me happy. My brain isn't working all that well right now, possibly due to biology (got my period the night before last), which means putting my thoughts together on pretty much any subject has been an aggravatingly slow process. Didn't help that I spent most of the weekend reeling from one social interaction to the next, rehearsing four hours on Saturday only to have to immediately run to tech for a performance (reading a poem, singing a song) at Pages UnBound's Cabaret of Wild Culture right after; it wasn't worth going home in between, so I stuck around in the Annex for four more hours, performed, went home, crashed. Sunday was Echo Women's Choir's spring concert, meanwhile, which meant another four hours of singing/socializing; it was great overall, but exhausting.
So I started the week on a deficit, spent Monday taking two movies back to Suspect Video, bought two more, then returned to my neighbourhood in time to pick up Cal. Since then, I've been pecking away at stuff--a short story that needs to be in by the 31st, "That Girl (Is A God Damn Problem)", various first lines that refuse to grow into narratives of their own, the WFA reading material slog. I did my initial picks for novel, found out we need to get our Lifetime Achievement votes in for June 1, had debates about genre with the other judges. Etc.
And watched movies, as I said. Today it was Life Itself, the documentary about Roger Ebert--hardly a hagiography, but I found myself misting up by the end nonetheless. Ebert remains my personal template for film criticism: clear, concise, contextual, human, humane. He used to say that cinema was "a machine which generates empathy," and though he could be cutting, arrogant and full of himself (like all of us, he was a little in love with the sound of his own voice), that sentiment only grew stronger in his reviews over time, in much the same way that his blog utterly blossomed in a multitude of interesting directions after the removal of his jaw and his loss of the ability to speak at all. He was clear-eyed about making the distinction between a movie and his own reaction to that movie, which is something I've always struggled with; sometimes I think I love things for their flaws and the inspiration I take away from them, or for the movies they spark inside my head which may have very little to do with what's actually onscreen, and that seems very Ebertian to me, in hindsight. As does the observation that's grown in me since my twenties that in the main, I would rather love the stories I consume than hate them, in any medium (at the most, given I have nothing to do with their construction, all I can ever be is disappointed in them afterwards, and try to tell you why).
Now that he's been dead for a while, I still feel it's odd to find myself "missing" someone I never really knew, though I at least had the pleasure of meeting him once; we argued over Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn at TIFF one year. He didn't persuade me and I didn't persuade him, but we met in the middle, were passionate yet respectful and kind to each other, and walked away afterwards smiling, which is the best kind of conversation to have with anybody (especially another film critic). So when one of my friends later accused me of becoming "a populist!" in my cinematic tastes, I thought about Roger Ebert and decided that maybe wasn't such a bad thing to be.
The true worth of the film is seeing how many people (from Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog to Gene Siskel's wife, Richard Corliss and his old drinking buddies at the Chicago Sun-Times) remember him fondly, though equally clear-eyed, and observing the great love he shared with his wife, Chaz. He lived well and died as well as he could have, given the circumstances. We might all do far worse.
Amongst the other films I saw: George Romero's Martin, Stuart Gordon's Dolls, the Lovecraftian Hollywood fable Starry Eyes, and Adrian Garcia Bogliano's film Penumbra, a dark comedy of no manners about an Argentine sun cult in search of a very specific apartment. All are worth talking about, but I have to go out and get a photo copied for Cal's school, so maybe later.
