Odds & Ends
Saturday, April 28, 2007
All "Bodyguard," All the Time
A colleague alerted me to this interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) that looks at a bunch of boffins who think they've come up with a mathematical means of identifying hit movies. It contrasts their belief that there are rules that can identify potential hit movies with William Goldman's famous dictum that "nobody knows anything," and suggests there are two basic approaches to the idea of "rules" in art: What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one's own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. "Beauty is no quality in things themselves," the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. "It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty." Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything. I'm inclined to think that Gladwell's boffins are barking up the wrong tree, with way too many variables in their system to ever allow reliable calculations. Gladwell starts by talking about music, an area where it seems more persuasive that their approach might work: I can see how there might be particular patterns of beat or melody that just "sound right," and which could be mathematically described. For example, Gladwell mentions that Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" scored super-high on their scoring system, and this seems plausible: if ever there was a song that sounds like it would max out a computer's hit-single algorithm, it's that one. But I just don't think it could ever work for movies, and Gladwell's rather vague description of the buffs' trial run of the system does nothing to change my view. Gladwell makes it sound impressive, talking of the application of the system (called Epagogix) to nine unreleased movies: On three of the films - two of which were low-budget - the Epagogix estimates were way off. On the remaining six - including two of the studio's biggest-budget productions - they correctly identified whether the film would make or lose money. On one film, the studio thought it had a picture that would make a good deal more than $100 million. Epagogix said $49 million. The movie made less than $40 million. On another, a big-budget picture, the team's estimate came within $1.2 million of the final gross. On a number of films, they were surprisingly close. "They were basically within a few million," a senior executive at the studio said. "It was shocking. It was kind of weird." Gladwell puts a reasonably positive spin on this, in the circumstances, but break this down and what do we have? A third were off completely. Of the remaining six, we're told it only predicted whether the film made or lost money: but that allows a huge spread in terms of what counts as a successful prediction. (If a $100 million movie is predicted by Epagogix to make $250 million but actually makes $110 million, then the system can still be said to have correctly predicted it would break even). We have one out of the nine that we know the system got within $1.2 million, which is very close, but hardly compelling with eight other guesses that were obviously further off. Even for the film correctly predicted to underperform, Epagogix was still more than 20% off. So I'm a sceptic about the ability to predict the gross of movies. But I'm not having a go at Gladwell, who it eventually becomes clear has much the same reservations as I do about the system. And I think that the idea that art is designed by rules that can be objectively analysed is true to a point. It should be noted that Gladwell conflates Goldman's dictum, which is about predicting success, with the Hume / Kames debate, which is much more about formal aesthetic principles that underly art. There is some degree of overlap between a discussion about what is good and what will make money, but there's also a a fair bit of difference too, and that difference is crucial. Predicting the latter involves, effectively, mastering an incredibly complex system of multiple variables (relating to both the qualities of artwork itself and the response of the wider population) and the even more impossible task of factoring in essentially random outside stimulus. How, for example, can a computer program intuit that its values for Tom Cruise's box-office value are worthless because he jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch? Yet describing the formal properties that make a piece of art good is a much more respectable exercise. We don't baulk at all at the idea that there are formal principles that matter in visual arts like painting, photography, or architecture. We can instantly tell the difference between a well-composed image and a badly composed one, and some very simple principles (like the rule of thirds) can be persuasively demonstrated. And there are any number of similar rules of thumb for extended narrative forms such as the cinema: that a story should build to a climax, for example, or that the lead character should be taught a lesson during the course of the plot. These basic principles are so ingrained we generally don't even think about them. What is much more difficult, though, is in describing that extra something that makes a film great. You can tick all the boxes of the formulae that are taught in screenwriting manuals, and what you'll get will be servicable, but it tends to be the intangibles that make for real greatness. This might be particular actors, sparkling dialogue, aspects of the directors technique, the innovative departure from the usual narrative rules, or something even more indefinable. A careful analysis of a completed film should be able to tease out both the formal elements that work, and also the more unpredictable elements that lifted it above the mundane. But before it's made, you have only the formal stuff - that the plot is well constructed, say, or that the protagonist has a clear motivation - and that isn't enough to tell whether the final product has that extra something. Which might be the problem with the Epagogix exercise: only mediocrity can be scientifically described. This comes out in grimly humorous latter part of Gladwell's article, in which the boffins give their suggestions for improving Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter: essentially they decide that to maximise profits the film should be turned into The Bodyguard, a conclusion that upsets even those who devised the system. It's a point that reminds me of Roald Dahl's story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator," which contemplates a machine that generates short stories and novels according to mathematical principles. In Dahl's vision, the hand-crafted stories of human authors can't compete with the mass-produced versions, and gradually authors sign contracts to turn their own names over to a literary agency for use on machine-made stories. So we should probably hope that the Epagogix formula never really takes off. Certainly the prospect of studios lured to the sure cash of endless machine-tweaked Bodyguard clones brings to mind the final refrain of Dahl's story, as the author tries to summon up the courage to not pursue profitable option: "Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve." Labels: commentary Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 28.4.07 - 0 comments  
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Harry Potter and the Adults Who Read Children's Books
For those who are keeping track of such things, here's the latest trailer for the new Harry Potter. (It's available in much better quality here). The fifth Harry Potter book is easily the weakest so far, but it may well make the best film. The other films have been too crammed with plot to be very satisfying; J.K. Rowling's plots generally don't condense very well. Yet Order of the Phoenix, the book, was different in that it was very light on plot for a book of its length. The most interesting thing about it was its vision of Hogwarts' conversion to a repressive fascist institution under a government in denial, but this element felt lost in a book that was much too long. With everything shrunk down to two hour length, however, it could make a very strong through-line indeed. I also like the bold new long-haired look for Draco Malfoy.  Oh, wait: that's Luna Lovegood. Labels: harry potter, rumours, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 25.4.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, April 21, 2007
A Cutting Room Floor a Long Time Ago
When George Lucas created the Star Wars: Special Edition (which soon became Star Wars: The Only Edition) he re-introduced two major deleted scenes into the film. The first was the awful Jabba scene early in the film, and the second was Luke's reunion with Biggs, his old friend from Tatooine, just before the final battle. While fans mostly dislike the Jabba scene, generally the Biggs scene has been accepted as a good addition to the film. Biggs' death in the final battle now has a little more weight, and incongruity in the original cut of Luke fighting alongside his friend (or someone with the same name) with no explanation is eliminated. However, a much longer scene with Biggs was left on the cutting room floor, and it's easily the most interesting of the various deleted scenes from the Star Wars trilogy. (If the YouTube version below doesn't work, or is too slow, you can get both video and a transcript here.) There are all sorts of good reasons the scene was cut. It's long and pretty dry, and couldn't really be shortened because Lucas has played it in a series of long takes, without intercutting. (Although I suppose it's possible that only the master take has survived, and that other shots were filmed as well). It repeats a lot of exposition that is dealt with more succinctly elsewhere. And frankly, both the script and the performances feel a little off: the dialogue doesn't flow at all well, and Biggs feels like he's wandered in from some other film. (His costuming, in particular, seems all wrong). So while I don't think the movie would be better with it in, it remains really interesting. I like the setting of the conversation, an apparently isolated cluster of huts in the middle of nowhere, which reinforces the feel of Tatooine as a really remote western frontier that you get in the original cut. (Lucas would spoil this in the new versions by making the town of Mos Eisley seem much bigger). More importantly, though, the scene gives us lots of interesting information about what life is like for regular people under the Empire. One disappointment in the Star Wars films is that you never really get much sense of what the general society is like. After the early scenes on Tatooine in the first film, you don't ever really meet average citizens again: it's all freedom fighters (terrorists?), smugglers, military generals, politicians, and so on. In this scene, though, we learn quite a bit more. The Empire is much more explicitly a communist dictatorship, progressively centralising / "nationalising" commerce, and enslaving its citizens. The cold war overtones are also strengthened by the paranoia Biggs exhibits about talking about the Rebellion. And you get a clearer sense that the Empire is in some respects still being set up: it seems to have a tight control in the "central systems" but is only progressively starting to enforce its rule elsewhere. The scene also helps to dispel the vague idea created in the final cut that Luke was hoping to join the Imperial forces before he met Obi-Wan. In the film as released, Luke talks of joining the "Academy," which sounds suspiciously like the recruiting / training arm of the Imperial forces. The deleted scene makes it explicit that there is some sort of training school that is not affiliated with the Empire, and that the Empire then draft people from its graduates. Which puts Luke in the clear - but does mean that the Imperial forces slaughtered guilt-free throughout the original trilogy may consist largely of unwilling draftees. The rebels look more like a dodgy terrorist operation the more we learn. Labels: star wars Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 21.4.07 - 0 comments
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Here, Under Protest, is "Beef Burgers"
Now here's an oddity. For years a bootleg audio-tape has circulated of Orson Welles berating the directors of an advertisement for frozen peas, complaining about the script and the quality of their direction. It was a strange little curio, mentioned in David Thomson's Welles biography Rosebud, and one of those little pop-culture artifacts with its own tiny infamy - witness the existence of its own Wikipedia article. (Just thinking about it now, I wonder if it wasn't also the inspiration for the routine in Tootsie where Dustin Hoffman's Michael Dorsey complains about the script for an ad in which he played a tomato.) Anyway, that bootleg was the inspiration for a sequence in the nineties TV cartoon Pinky and the Brain where a slightly cleaned-up version of the dialogue was performed by the mice. (Maurice La Marche, who voiced the Brain, is known for his Welles impression: he overdubbed Vincent D'Onofrio as Welles in Tim Burton's Ed Wood). And now someone has gone and reunited the original Welles audio with the Pinky and the Brain animation. The result is, well, an even stranger little pop culture oddity. (This was brought to my attention, as so many of these kind of things are, by Jaime J. Weinman over at Something Old, Nothing New). Incidentally, I asked over at the the original post what The Brain had said instead of "I'll go down on you," and apparently it was "I'll make cheese for you." Which is a fortuitous substitution, as it preserves the lip-synch. If nothing else, the existence of the original Pinky and The Brain animation is a testament to the strange kinds of things that get slipped on to kids television when nobody at head office is paying attention. What on earth did the 99% of people who'd never heard of the "Frozen Peas" tape make of this? Labels: animation, commentary, humour Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.4.07 - 1 comments
Sunday, April 01, 2007
April Fools Day Declared Redundant: Real Movie News is Too Strange
For years I've had the same gripe with the news media's fondness for April Fool's Day stories: there are too many true stories floating around that strain belief as it is. When real life has become completely absurd, how are we to spot the jokes? This is doubly so in the world of online movie rumour reporting, where a) Hollywood is particularly crazy; and b) so many of the stories run as genuine aren't true anyway. A case in point: Ain't It Cool is running a story today that Pixar has picked up the rights to the cult property John Carter of Mars, and that the great Brad Bird (currently finishing Ratatouille) will direct. In live-action. With Pixar acting as an effects house, rather than an animation studio. I immediately assumed that it's a practical joke, and I'm still inclined to think so (particularly when the source blog's reputed transition to official Disney mouthpiece also happened on April 1). But the fine, upstanding journalists of Ain't It Cool have made it clear (here) that they have run it believing it to be genuine. Whichever way it goes (and again, I'm pretty sure it's bogus) it kind of bears out my reservations about April Fool's Day. Update: Confirmed bogus, by the source himself, in the comments. Labels: commentary, rumours Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 1.4.07 - 2 comments
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