A closer look at the realities of an awards bait movie

We're only two months from the start of awards season, which means all the high-profile Oscar contenders about serious, relevant social issues are hitting theaters. Or, as someone more cynical might put it, all the Oscar bait has finally been released into the waters.

Filmmakers want to tell meaningful, engaging movies, but to be frank, studios back those films because they want to capitalize on popular topics and snag awards attention. The Los Angeles Times went into this tension in a recent article; they interviewed directors and writers of current Oscar contenders and found their interests divided between the creative and social dimension and the realities of the movie business.

Take Jeff Nichols, director of the upcoming interracial marriage drama Loving, who found the film's true story important to tell. He also recognized that his film was checking a lot of boxes for distributor Focus Features, adding that fitting into a targeted, award-friendly slot in a studio's schedule is "a big part of the business of this particular film and this model – and to deny that would be kind of silly."

Movies can't exist without support or some plan for revenue, no matter how heartfelt or timely. You might understandably be skeptical that all the serious movies come out right before Oscar nominations begin, but that's a reality that allows them to get made.

How the West was whitened

The Western genre is having something of a mini-comeback between Westworld and The Magnificent Seven. (Or, maybe we all just love Yul Brynner?) This year's trips to the Old West look a little different than in the past, specifically the actors. Our collective imagined memory of the Western looks white, middle-aged, and male. But if anything, Denzel Washington showing up in The Magnificent Seven is closer to the reality of the western than film has us believe.

Leah Williams wrote a great piece for The Atlantic about how classic Western films do a disservice to the historical truth of race in the West. The Searchers was inspired by the stories of a black cowboy named Britton Johnson, but the lead role was played by John Wayne, a notorious white supremacist. Casting non-white actors in a Western is often seen as an act of subversion, but if anything, that's closer to reality.

Sadly, that all-white image is so ingrained in pop culture that it won't be erased anytime soon. In another 50 years, maybe Denzel will be the new John Wayne?

What does Netflix's shrinking library mean for film history literacy?

Even with our collection of 14,000 DVDs, we'll all admit to watching things on Netflix and Hulu all the time. Streaming subscriptions are convenient, and we're realizing that it's their primary way that many incoming students watch movies and television now. But we're concerned about how that narrows what movies and television people can watch.

According to a report by Exstreamist, Netflix's library has shrunk by 50% in the last four years. As Netflix has pursued its own original shows and movies, the company has started cutting back on titles by other studios. Today, by Exstreamist's estimates, Netflix has lost over 5000 titles since 2012, and the ones that are left aren't exactly the greatest.

This could have a serious chilling effect on what people watch. Consider the Indiana Jones movies. None are available on any American streaming service unless you pay for a rental. If media consumption habits become more and more reliant of what's available to stream immediately, that cuts off a massive amount of film and television history. And what about independent films that can't break onto a streaming platform?

We hope there's a change in viewing patterns soon. But the library's collection will always have physical copies that won't be removed at the end of the month.

Every Frame a Painting looks at the surprisingly unmemorable state of modern film soundtracks

Every Frame a Painting continues to be one of the best online film criticism video series. Usually the channel looks at editing and composition, but this time, creator Tony Zhou turned his sights to a very difficult film question: why are modern film soundtracks so uninspiring?

Zhou puts forward a cohesive argument, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its focus. Over the last twenty years, movie soundtracks have become background music that matches rather than sets the mood of what's happening on-screen. That's not inherently good or bad, but it's less memorable than the fanfares and character themes from older blockbusters.

The video spends much of its time addressing a bigger concern, the use of "temp music" in editing. During production, films are often scored with placeholder music from other composers, frequently soundtracks from other movies. Increasingly, rather than starting from scratch, filmmakers ask composers to match the placeholder music, resulting in a soundtracks gradually sounding identical and borrowing the same generic structure and composition.

Speaking unobjectively, we hope that turns around. We understand why tone-setting scores have become popular, but Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future music is far more lovable than his work on The Avengers.

Do some TV shows work better un-binged?

So today, a contentious issue came up in Media Services: one of our staff members gave up watching HBO's Deadwood. One reason it didn't click, they thought, was that episodes might not play as well when watched one after another. Unlike some shows with slowburn stories that make sense to watch in extended sessions, maybe Deadwood flowed better with a week between episodes.

We tried to figure out if there was some consensus or scholarly thoughts on this subject, and of course, opinion is split. On the one hand, Grantland once made the strong argument that binge-watching "allows you to completely ‘immerse’ yourself in the world of your new favorite show." "By binge-watching," they say, "you are spending quality time with the characters, forming a deep emotional connection with them."

On the other hand, NPR's Fresh Air points to The Jinx as an example of how rationing out a show through serialization gives the story more time to breathe. "Embracing new technology doesn't mean abandoning old storytelling forms that work," David Bianculli says.

Screenrant has similarly mixed thoughts. Some binge-watched shows benefit from a compressed narrative, but that sacrifices the opportunity to let those shows percolate between episodes.

Obviously, watching a show on DVD with a week between episodes is an artificial constraint, but changing the time dimensions in how you watch something does seem to have an effect on how it's received. And kudos to you if you have the power to hold back that long.

When happens when film crews lack diversity, too?

We know that the film industry has visible diversity problems, from directing to acting. We can point to the lack of racial diversity among the Oscar acting nominees as a glaring problem, but less obviously, behind-the-camera craft roles like sound and editing suffer from both subtle and overt racism.

Variety recently ran a cover story about what they've termed #ArtisansSoWhite, the white male dominance of the technical side of the film industry. Their article includes a number of troubling anecdotes, not just of racial imbalance but outright hostility. One visual effects supervisor even recounted having his skills questioned by someone who asserted he was a diversity hire.

This has implications for mentoring opportunities and the type of work available to non-white artisans; one interviewee noticed that she had worked overwhelmingly on films about African-Americans, exclusively slotted into those films by producers.

Variety's exposé is long, disconcerting, and worth a read for those interested in where the industry needs to improve.

Matt Damon in The Great Wall sadly isn't unprecedented

Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu

Last week, a trailer debuted for Matt Damon's new film, The Great Wall, set during the Song dynasty in China. Matt Damon basically has no business being in that movie, and the fact that he's the star at all sadly capitalizes on how international audiences associate white male action heroes with high production value.

It's also yet another example of whitewashing in film. For as long as Hollywood has existed, white actors have been cast in non-white parts, usually to horrifying or embarrassing results. A few months back, IndieWire rounded up the twenty most egregious examples, in case you've forgotten the extent of this lousy tradition. It affects movies good and bad, past and present. We can look at Katharine Hepburn's horrifyingly offensive portrayal of Jade Tan in 1944's Dragon Seed and shake our heads in hindsight, but it's less easy to dismiss the white casting of a real, living Indian-American man in The Social Network.

You could dismiss Damon's new role as a byproduct of international film development, but consider how bizarre it is that America's long, poor diversity track record in film has become the standard even for other countries. We can do better, folks.

Even reviews of media for women are more hostile

Gender-targeted abuse and harassment have long made comment sections on the internet borderline unreadable, but those same nasty attitudes have been poisoning the digital well for years in subtler ways. As a recent exposé from FiveThirtyEight shows, online reviews for television shows geared towards women have been artificially lowered by axe-grinding men.

By analyzing a trove of IMDb data, Walt Hickey discovered that among shows more often rated and watched by women, large shares of reviews by men have been extremely low. This has disproportionately tanked their scores: the average 1-to-10 rating for the top 100 shows aimed towards women trails the average for shows aimed towards men by almost a full point. For shows like America's Next Top Model – which we can attest has a health fanbase across gender – men rated the show almost three points lower than women did. But this is an issue with the aggregate, not the quality of individual shows.

It would be easy to blame this on loud sexists, but we should be blaming the way gender and media are talked about. Those men giving Tyra Banks a 1 have probably been subtly, tacitly conditioned their whole lives to look down on things made for women as inherently inferior or less engaging. So, you know, just factor in decades of systemic sexism when looking at IMDb scores.

Vanity Fair turns blockbuster movie credits into a budget list

A $200 million movie budget almost seems abstract. We can say that a whole bunch of that money went to the effects, but what does that actually mean? How much does the assistant director figure into it? Does Robert Downey Jr. just get $180 million and everyone else splits it up?

Vanity Fair made a mock movie credit roll to break down how much money goes to each crew member, and the numbers are sobering. Pay rates vary wildly from position to position; cat cameos get paid more than some stuntpeople. The most unusual are the positions where people earn different amounts for the same jobs. Set production assistants, for instance, have a $5000 range, maybe because some spend longer or only work with the second unit.

Watching a giant wall of credits can become a little numbing, but you start to get the sense of the scale of film production when you see that $229,000 went into matte painters. And if you feel a little anger at the lead actor being paid about as much as the rest of the cast combined, we don't blame you.

New infographics break down gender in screenplays... and it's about what you'd expect

Late last week, Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels released a study on Polygraph breaking down the dialogue of over 2000 major screenplays by the gender and age of the actors. If you've followed any of the other news about representation in film for the last few years, the results should come as no surprise: it's men all the way down, and older women are especially absent.

Polygraph bills the study as the largest demographic breakdown of film ever undertaken, and its scope certainly helps make the point. Among the 2000 screenplays dissected, over 75% give a strong majority of their dialogue to men. Only eight screeplays feature all-women speaking roles – a number even that's more troubling in comparison to the 304 scripts with only men. Age breakdowns are similarly frustrating, with roles increasing for men as they age and decreasing for women.

To make the point, the authors included a separate list of statistics just for Disney movies. Even in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a movie noted for its progressive gender representation, men get 72% of the dialogue.

As with other tests and measurements, this isn't an indication of whether a movie is a good or morally acceptable. It also isn't wholly reflective of individual movies: men have a majority of the dialogue in Kill Bill, but the movie has an exceptional cast of women. But it's statistical confirmation that, on the whole, women (and older women) are still disproportionately out of the spotlight.

Stealthy challenging censorship in China with film

Film has always been an instrument for pushing back against media censorship. The need is less visible and more subtle in America than it was during the years of the Hays Code (see This Film is Not Yet Rated, HU DVD 2414), but in other countries, overt suppression of creative content continues to be the norm. In one of the most audacious examples, China continues to prohibit depictions of same-sex relationships in movies and television. (This is an equality issue the country has long struggled with, having only effectively decriminalized same-sex relationships in 1997.)

So it comes as a major victory that, this year, China will release its first commercial film about a same-sex relationship. Although the promotional materials for Seek McCartney seemingly downplay the romantic aspect of the film, this way of sneaking in socially taboo content is a classic subversion of censorship laws, like the decades of "curious" characters in film.

It's unclear if this is the beginning of a trend – an interviewee in the linked Quartz article above sees the censorship process in China as too unstable to depend on – but at the least, it is a testament to film's continued social power.

Screening Room wants you to watch new movies at home, and not everyone's on-board

photo by Mr.TinDC via Flickr

Years ago, we mentioned PRIMA Cinema, the absurdly expensive streaming device that requires a home inspection and, for $500 a pop, allows you to watch first-run Hollywood movies. This was mostly intended as a way for the Jay Lenos of the world to see The Force Awakens in the comfort of their home, something far beyond most people's reach. The selective audience and high price meant that PRIMA Cinema didn't eat into box office revenue too much, so everyone sat well with that.

But a new, similar fight has been brewing in the past several weeks with the proposal of Screening Room, a more budget-minded version of PRIMA Cinema for the average consumer. Tech entrepreneur Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network) has been shopping the idea around to studios and distributors, gaining high-profile support from J. J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and other film icons.

Not everyone agrees with the conecpt, though, especially not the theaters that depend on a cut of movie revenue. Only AMC has expressed support for the idea, with seemingly all other theater chains and organizations disavowing the concept for understandable business reasons. Mega-directors James Cameron and Christopher Nolan have also objected to Screening Room, citing not just piracy and abuse but the need to preserve the experience of seeing a movie in theaters.

That may be the strongest argument against this type of idea. With the appeal of cramming into a theater on opening weekend with dozens of people equally excited to watch a new movie on a huge screen, would you really prefer to have to see the next Captain America in your living room? Many people might not care, but for all the convenience of home viewing, film is strongest as a communal experience.

A rough early road for the Irish in film

Still from Whom the Gods Destroy via "Unsung Divas of the Silent Screen"

While St. Patrick's Day is now a generally beloved holiday (we're going to grab Shamrock Shakes in a moment), it's easy to forget that much of the world was inhospitable to the Irish a century ago. The hostile attitudes toward the Irish continued through the early 20th century in the lead-up to the uprising in Ireland in 1916. In an interesting bit of timing, that coincides with the early days of film.

We found this lengthy but extremely in-depth article by Kevin Rockett from Trinity College Dublin about the representation of the Irish in pre-1916 films. To summarize, Ireland didn't have much of a film industry until World War I, so a majority of Irish representation on-screen was left to American producers. Only a few of these films depicted the Irish was menacing stereotypes; most of these films depicted Irish history just because of the interesting content. But more controversially, they scrubbed these stories of their more radical, political elements, possibly as an appeal for cultural assimilation and an attempt to quell the rising anger.

European audiences imported and generally enjoyed these films, but it wasn't until the rise of Ireland's nationalist cinema a few years later that the Irish found their cause represented on-screen. Rockett notes that those nationalist films depicting Irish rebellion sparked such a strong, violent reaction that the film was banned in multiple countries.

Even as critics and producers at the time tried to downplay film as only an entertainment medium and not a political one, the depictions in and outside of Ireland – discouraging versus embracing Irish identity – had a message associated with them. You can read that same thread into modern depictions of race on film too: you can't depict history without at least an implicit message.

This might be a little academic-y for St. Patrick's Day, but we were greatly interested in Rockett's take on this unexamined slice of film.

Another challenge for small DC theaters: actually being allowed to show movies

Rendering via Landmark Theaters

We've talked about the struggles of DC movie theaters in the past, especially neighborhood community theaters like the recently re-opened West End Cinema that have to compete with major chains and often need to foot the bill for new digital projection systems themselves. As it turns out, costs of operation aren't even the biggest obstacle to running a small theater: sometimes the big brands can just completely box them out.

The Washington Post recently published an article about the bizarre phenomenon of "clearances" in which major theater groups can pressure film distributors into providing exclusive access to some movies. In the specific case mentioned by the Post, one of Landmark Theaters' new DC locations couldn't play the James Bond movie Spectre because Regal had to cloud to limit its availability. A number of lawsuits are in motion – including from Landmark – and the Department of Justice's anti-trust wing is reportedly investigating these practices.

Such is another odd wrinkle in the life of a local theater. Even if you can afford to operate your theater and maintain its equipment – no small feat even for large theaters nowadays – you might just not be able to show the most popular movies. Remember to support your favorite limited-run theater in the area when they show something you're interested in watching!

25 years ago, an Islamophobic film dented the public imagination

On this week in 1991, MGM released Not Without My Daughter, a drama film about a woman and her daughter held captive in Iran. It was hacky, received poor reviews, and generally flopped. It also carried the unusual, regrettable status as being one of the only American films about Iran at the time. For years, it served as one of the few contemporary pop culture depictions of Islam and the Middle East, and as Vulture tells it, that's an bad legacy.

In the film, an Iranian man effectively imprisons his American family in Iran after rediscovering his Islamic faith. Vulture's retrospective goes into the constant harmful portrayal of all these elements, from the vilification of Muslim men to the staging of Iran as an dark place. More troubling is the long-lasting impact of these depictions: reportedly, the film was been regularly shown in schools across the county as a cautionary tale about Iran – and was once even intentionally aired on television before a major soccer match against Iran to fire people up.

Gazelle Emami's article is a potent example of the ripple effect that even seemingly throwaway media can have on our beliefs and ideology. By all accounts, Not Without My Daughter is a forgettable, low-quality movie. But for a while, its charged representation of Iran and Islam was the only representation of Iran and Islam, and that influenced the public's perception.

Not Without My Daughter is available from our collection if you want to see it for yourself (HU DVD 2183). As an alternative, we recommend watching an expression of Iran from Iran itself, like the Academy Award-winning film A Separation (HU DVD 10336).

The definitive Star Wars remaster came from fans, is super illegal

George Lucas's remastering the original Star Wars trilogy has gone down as perhaps the most controversial decision in film history. Even without discussing the merits of the changes made (many of which stand out like a sore thumb or detract from the original meaning), Lucas's permanent alterations to the films' negatives effectively erased the original versions of some of the most successful films in history. It'll be difficult to get that back... legally.

Film restoration hobbyist Petr Harmy has assembled a "Despecialized" version of the film, using elements taken from Blu-rays, DVDs, television broadcasts, production stills, original film copies, and other fan remasters to create a high-definition version of the film as it was projected in 1977. Often these changes make the film look objectively worse – Lucas at one point smeared Vaseline on the lens to disguise part of a shot – but it accurately represents the original release of Star Wars.

Of course, that edition brazenly violates copyright law and is illegal to obtain. This puts cultural history and the law at a crossroads. Matthew Yglesias at Vox does a good job explaining the ramifications of this, even if his explanation veers into political bluster a bit. As the video above also explains, the Library of Congress never received an archival copy of the original film, so it's up to renegade fans/heroes/criminals like Harmy to get as close as possible.

Star Wars was probably not "brutalizing children" in 1983

With its Disney-fication complete, the Star Wars series has become embraced (or begrudgingly accepted) as a family-friendly sci-fi adventure series. That wasn't always the case. Not that the series was ever adult or hyper-violent – it was meant for kids! – but at least a few cultural critics still objected.

Specifically, watch this bizarre, recently popular clip from a 1983 episode of Nightline where film critic John Simon, noted for his acerbic reviews, decries the Star Wars as empty special effects showcases for "stupid children" that stunt growth and encourage violence. His critique is shockingly rude, calling the stars "lousy" and the script "ghastly" while simultaneously insulting Walt Disney's entire body of work.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert then provide a terrific counterpoint: "I feel badly," Siskel says, "that [...] John Simon didn't have a good time at these pictures. That's too bad for him." Ebert follows up, agreeing that "it made me laugh. It made me thrilled. And that's what a movie like this is for."

There's no retort to that. Sorry, Simon.

That snottiness aside, the conversation is relatively interesting, especially Siskel's discussion of whether we should reward films "for aiming low and hitting that mark." It's great to see two of the most renowned popular critics defending the gold standard of Hollywood blockbusters.

The future of film copyright could rest in the Hands of Fate

Beloved by fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 but unknown to the rest of the world, horror film Manos: The Hands of Fate is often considered the worst commercially released movie ever made. Nearly everything about the movie is a disaster, most famously the bizarre characterization and knee-heavy costuming of the evil henchman Torgo (pictured). Joel Hodgson described it as a movie where "every frame [...] looks like someone's last known photo."

Manos was recently re-released on Blu-ray, but as explained by Jonathan Bailey in Plagiarism Today, it might become the center of a landmark copyright battle. The producer of Manos neglected to copyright the film, leaving it in the public domain, but he did copyright the script before production. His son, inheritor of those rights, has threatened legal action – but no case has ever legally tested whether script ownership constitutes ownership of a public domain film. Bailey notes that similar cases have come up in the past, such as when story and soundtrack rights helped maintain control of It's a Wonderful Life, but Manos's case is far trickier.

(An interloper completely unrelated to the film's production has attempted to claim distribution rights, but that's a separate dispute.)

These specific ownership circumstances rarely happen, as proven by how this has never been tested. The answers could be a big moment for film copyright law, but Bailey sees little reason why such a thorny battle would end up in court given Manos's extremely low profile and revenue.

But we hope it does, if only so Manos can sneak into legal textbooks. Master would be pleased!

The Hateful Eight makes the case for physical film, so what if it backfires?

The upcoming release of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is a pivotal moment for physical film. Tarantino famously loves film stock (having shelled out money to keep film production plants running); the director wants his upcoming movie to showcase the rich power of film in a way that's undeniable to studios and audiences. But showing that film in all its glory takes specialized equipment. Only select theaters will project it as intended in Ultra Panavision 70  – a beautiful format that, it turns out, nobody really remembers how to use.

No major commercial film has been shot in Ultra Panavision 70 since the 60s, and given their rarity, few working projectionists have experience with the format. This might explain The Hateful Eight's apparently disastrous advance screening last night, as reported by HitFix's Drew McWeeny, in which the film drifted out of focus for two hours before the theater decided to play the digital version instead. The event meant to celebrate physical film stock might have convinced attendees that the format isn't practical anymore.

McWeeny warns that too many of these failures could reduce film stock to a fetish object for filmmakers with little meaningful use. He notes that the most recent season of Project Greenlight involved a huge push to shoot on film rather than digitally, "[a]nd in the end," he says, "it made no difference."

If theaters struggle with the medium's show-off piece, that's a bad portent – and clearly not what Tarantino and other film diehards hoped for. We're sure The Hateful Eight looks gorgeous when projected correctly, but the long-term outlook on watching film like that seems more uncertain.

Raise awareness of film censorship by making a censor watch paint dry

Still from Paint Drying via Charlie Lyne

There's a lot of insightful talk about the role film boards play in censorship – why do these unaccountable groups get to decide what can practically be released? – but sometimes it's more fun just to be a jerk about the whole process. This is one of those cases.

In an act of crowd-funded ultra-spite, filmmaker Charlie Lyne plans to submit an epic-length film titled Paint Drying to the British Board of Film Classification, which will require a censor to watch hours of basically nothing. The BBFC charges per minute, so Lyne is raising cash to submit at least 14 hours of video. Besides being obnoxious, Lyne started this project to raise awareness about the censorship performed by ratings boards.

It worked, and now we're cheering for Paint Drying to go the distance. Mashable confirms that the BBFC will be required to watch the entire film, so many Lyne can slip in a single f-bomb at some point just to keep them on their toes.

For a more serious take on the issue, seek out This Film is Not Yet Rated (DVD 2414). In the meantime, we're waiting for a DVD of Paint Drying.