Archives for posts with tag: hollywood

Desultory thoughts on why I didn’t like Slumdog Millionaire

February 24, 09 //
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For one, it comes a little too close to the voyeurism of “slum tours” to me. Of course, I myself am a bit torn about this since photojournalism and documentary photography, crudely put, often partake in this kind of dynamic. most photographers and filmmakers try to justify, at least to themselves, their actions with some principle of moral concern, whereas the slum tours are more experientially akin to the one night stand.
You could argue that this film isn’t like that, and is above that, and again, this is not meant to be a full condemnation—but I think it appropriate to discuss the relation of the film to the sociological backdrop of which it partakes.

People in the film industry are quite utilitarian: they are investing what for most people is an astronomical sum of money, and they hope to make as much as possible on it. Someone like Danny Boyle, an established filmmaker, operates within these parameters as much as anyone else. So they pick these exotic backgrounds and make these feelgood stories so that middle classes of the developed world will fork over their money. Of course, most movies are like that. That’s what they are—mass entertainment. A chance to forget the world for two hours.

So they go there and scout locations, and learn about their characters by staying there. Again, this is standard operating procedure, and its no doubt educational for someone.

But that’s at the microlevel, and what bothers me is that at the macro-level, nothing changes. They come in and shoot their movie and go out. The slums don’t change. Poverty is not eliminated. They couldn’t find a suitable boy in the slums for this role—because as we know, the main actor is everything and has to be vetted by the suits before the movie is a go. So they get an English Indian kid to play the lead. So they exploit the area and the social reality for the backdrop, but when push comes to shove and there’s money on the line, they go with something a bit more safe. Dev Patel isn’t a bad person, but honestly, he does, no matter what, look a lot more London than Mumbai.

And now, Danny Boyle, Dev Patel, et al. get their statues, and DVD sales go through the roof.
They make f*ckloads of money and get more gigs, sustaining or in Patel’s case, launching a career. He was just a somewhat well-known TV actor in England before all of this. And now, in some sense, he belongs in a rarefied elite of actors who played leads in Best Picture films. So his life, no doubt, has been changed, and drastically so.

And yet the slums remain. Of course, the slums aren’t all misery—there is real human community there, and, at least according to Dev Patel on the Jon Stewart show, there is a real joie de vivre there as well. Which is a nice and uplifting thing to say, and which no doubt assuages the conscience of the popcorn munchers around the world. All I know is that the amount of money that Dev Patel and Danny Boyle and them are worth is more than most of those slumdogs will make in their entire lives. I bet Danny Boyle himself is worth more than the aggregate wealth of at least 100 slumdogs.

Of course, I am not better: the whole reason why my conscience is troubled is because I belong to that same global middle class of popcorn munching voyeurs. But I stand by the point that the meta-discussion of the relation of the movie business to the social realities they depict—be it war-torn Iraq, Israeli vets, Japanese orphans, what have you—is something we ought to continue, or, in the case of many people, begin. Movies—what are they? No one is naive enough to dream that they could ever be vehicles of human liberation. How about make them mildly educational, give us isolated, navel-gazers a glimpse of a world we might not ever see. Saturated and vibrant images, great camera work is much appreciated, thanks. We can do that. Yes we can. But of course, I hope for more. I hope for art to somehow trump business, and I hope that egalitarian distributions of income, around the world, will become normative, will become something that human civilization aspires to, because of the basic dignity it could afford us.

So, then, what about the relation of global capitalism to the global South then? That’s a huge can of worms, and one that I, ill-educated in economics of any sort, am not able to answer. I can say that capitalism can create jobs and thus alleviate poverty. But I can also say that this should never be used as a means of justifying the status quo, that is, actually existing capitalism. There can be a better capitalism, I believe. A more humane one. Right now, capitalism seems to do more for the greedy CEOs and elites of the developing countries than it does for the bottom fifth dwelling in the slums of the South. Sometimes we middle-class people get some tax breaks. Sometimes Republicans and Democrats pretend to care about people in the US working minimum wage, even while their overriding goal is to keep the system runnign smoothly and not rock the boat.

The movie business is no different, and no number of George Clooneys or movie star UN ambassadors is going to change the fact that it is still a huge for-profit machine, one that generates huge sums of money for its stars and one that, for the most part, doesn’t mind its role as an opiate for the masses. Art brings liberation. Revolution can bring liberation. Is it naive to believe in these? Of course it is, and I know better—but in my heart of hearts, I will go on believing these, maybe just to spite those who are better adjusted to reality than I am. Or maybe because not only am I an idealist, but also because I believe there are too few of those out there, especially among that demographic that can afford a bit of extra idealism here and there. But they refuse, for the most part, and keep reading their business and financial news and keep caring about companies and people who do things that neither illuminate nor change something about the human condition, in the most fulsome sense of that phrase—but where’s the surprise there? These traits are rampant. But let’s not that call them traits. They are, ahem, the discreet charms of the global bourgeoisie.

Movies I’m Watching:Seven Pounds

January 7, 09 //
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OK, so Will Smith is sad because he caused the death of his beloved wife and a bunch of other innocent souls, and now is suicidal. He impersonates his brother’s IRS identity and goes on moral audits of people, people that we find he is scoping out for eventual organ donations–where the organs being donated are his own.

At first you might not see where the movie is going. You might think that he really is just an eccentric IRS man, a former hotshot entrepreneur that lost it after the tragic accident. However, when the meandering strands start falling into place, you begin to realize what is happening.

The disparate strands keep you guessing, and sometimes to the detriment to the emotional depth of the movie–because you could never fully settle into the lives of any of the characters, other than Will Smith’s character. For example, Woody Harrelson’s fine turn as a blind telephone operator/piano player gets somewhat short-shrifted, mostly in order to develop Will Smith and Rosario Dawson’s blooming romance. Many aspects of the plot defy belief, but overall, there was great chemistry and charisma in the two leads as they slowly, haltingly, did a little dance and then finally got around to making a little love. Dawson’s character has a failing heart that puts her at fate’s mercy, and the tremulous romance that develops between someone on the verge of death and someone who has planned his own death–opposites, in that regard–is quite interesting. Dawson has a lot of charisma. She can take something as far-fetched as this role and use her naturally accessible beauty to make it completely believable.

Part of that is because she isn’t say, Nicole Kidman. Rosario Dawson is the undiscovered Latina beauty next door that vast idiotic mass of men somehow managed to ignore. I can’t say the same for Will Smith–being, after all, the black actor with the most star power working in Hollywood today. He tries to be shy, diffident, damaged, despairing–and for the most part, he pulls off this range, though for the longest time you still stare at his face and say to yourself, “this is Will Smith”. This is an aspect of the modern cinema-going experience that I wonder if anyone has explored–that is, how does someone’s off-screen fame and media exposure influence the way that we judge their performances. Of course, it’s not to say that our criterion are warped by their fame, just that the basic act of suspension of disbelief, upon which the act of watching movies is predicated, becomes that much harder when you are talking about someone famous.

The industry perpetuates that, of course, by making them take huge roles. Thus Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman do roles like the ones in Australia. You aren’t going to find them in small indie, character-driven movies anytime soon. As far as recent movies go, I would have to say that Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler or any of the actors in Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World was much better, in terms of bringing the emotional truth of a character out.

So as far as Seven Pounds goes, I would have to say that the movie ain’t terrible, but fairly forgettable as they go.

Chinese in Sichuan province to boycott Kungfu Panda?

June 21, 08 //
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So, as one might expect, there are some calls from people on the web to boycott the movie Kungfu Panda, an animated film about a panda that learns kung-fu and saves the day. First off, I’m not 100 percent sure whether this is purely an expression of popular sentiment or an official pronouncement, but according to one website it said that on June 20, which was the day that Kungfu Panda premieres in China, no Sichuan province movie theaters will show the movie.

Why would Chinese people not like this movie, to the point of calling for a boycott? I suppose that every person would give you a slightly different answer, but most of them are going to tell you something along the lines that it’s “insulting” to Chinese culture and Hollywood’s slickly produced orientalism really doesn’t come across well so soon after the deadly earthquake that ravaged Sichuan, where the pandas mostly live, and where it might seem kind of wrong for Hollywood hucksters to be making some money.

I am not going to bother reading through tons and tons of angry tirades, so the above is just my conjecture of a typical Chinese viewpointmeaning typical “against” position. One writer, for example, says that although it’s insulting to Chinese wushu that they shouldn’t get too up in arms about it. He calls it an “artistic insult” and says that perhaps they ought to just change the name of the movie to “American Kungfu Panda” and “American Hero” or something…just to make sure there’s no false advertising and people know that there’s nothing real, authentic, traditional, etc. about this movie. The captions in the pictures on this essay are funny…and also capture, in a more succinct way, what the author feels about the movie.

Another writer asks what the point of boycotting Kungfu Panda would be. The essay mentions that on the 16th there were some people that went to SARFT with a few banners to protest the movie. Some guy named Zhao Bandi, compared Hollywood to Sharon Stone, which, in my mind, would imply first and foremost that Hollywood is eminently fuckable for its age, but I don’t think that’s what he meant. No, he probably meant something a bit more sinister … this Zhao fellow was evidently appalled by the fact that Hollywood intended to make money from this movie, a point which the writer calmly replies “uh…DUH” to and points out is the way the world works, no different from when the Chinese aim to sell a computer to the Americans.

The writer then takes on Zhao’s second point, which was that Kungfu Panda “steals” a Chinese national treasure (the panda) and kung-fu and spins into an American-style coming of age story. The writer replies that since Zhao, of his own admittance, has not even watched the movie, he might as well go around and offer his services as a psychic.

The writer concludes that says that the movie does put Chinese culture in a positive light and is about goodness, truth, and justice. So what’s the point of boycotting it, he asksand I’m inclined to agree.

I know that some people out there probably hate Jack Black, but I think he’s pretty funny…Nacho Libre, School of Rock, Be Kind, Rewind…don’t know if I’ve seen any others but they appeal to a cheesy side of me. There might be something essentially American about this kind of comedian and his brand of humor. All I can say is that, on the whole, I think he’s good for the world.

Just noticed that there are already similar posts/articles about this, one from People’s Daily and another from Variety Asia Online.