Saalon Muyo

I wonder how many books will be written on the failure of network television.  Endless missteps combined with rapid changes in the technology of media have left it a hollow shell of itself.  The analysis will be nearly as endless, and probably as unsuccessful at keeping people in the future from making the same mistakes.  Sadly, I think the mistakes are hardwired into the genetic makeup of the people who end up running big media conglomerates.

Many, though not all, of the problems of network television can be chalked up to an egotistical competitive streak shared by all of the networks.  It’s never enough to do well.  You have to do well in relation to your competition.  Profit?  Yeah, that’s nice, but it’s only comforting if your profit is bigger than their profit.  In fact, it’s not even all that satisfying if they’re making a profit at all; winning means them losing.

It’s Upfronts week, and that means the networks are all releasing their new schedules.  One of my favorite shows, Community, will continue to hang out at 8PM on Thursday.  It’s been successful there, and that’s good news for viewers; Community is the best new sitcom in years, and anything that keeps the show on the air is good by me.  Meanwhile, over at CBS, they’ve got their own successful, newish sitcom: Big Bang Theory.  It’s been showing on Monday until now, but as of next season, they’ll be moving it to Thursdays at 8PM, where it can compete for roughly the same audience as Community.

So rather than pick a time slot where it can compete against different shows, CBS has decided that its best strategy is to fracture that audience between two similar shows.  What’s the rational here?  Even if Big Bang Theory wins, which seems to be the prediction, what’s been gained here? The best case scenarios is, what, killing off a competitor’s success, hopefully at minimal expense of your own?  How is this better than putting a different show against Community, servicing an audience that show is not, and putting Big Bang Theory elsewhere, against, say, a Law and Order clone?

Because it’s a zero sum game, I suppose, and if NBC is having success with an audience that you also target, even if you’re doing so on a different day, well that shit can not stand, man.

The reality is, people who watch both shows will continue to do so, you just increase the likelihood that people will do so on DVR.  Heck, there’s a good chance you might convince a few people who hadn’t DVRed either show to this point to start doing it with one or both of them.  And you increase audiences overall frustration with a television model designed more to enable arm wrestling matches between few ambitious media executives than be financially successful by putting out successful shows.

So when HBO or TNT or AMC puts out another show that they air fifteen times in a week and put instantly on On Demand, doing everything they can so that you can catch their show regardless of what other shows you watch, you lose a little bit more. You lose audience who doesn’t trust you to do what you can to help a show succeed.  You lose writers and directors who are sick of seeing their shows become pieces on a chessboard.

And you continue lose money.  The supposed purpose of the whole enterprise.

All because a few people at a few companies can’t stand to see someone else succeed along with them.

Look, let’s just get it out there.  I like Lady Gaga.  She’s good pop.  Good pop is hard to find.  Clear?  Cool.

That said, Telephone is a really horrible video.

I don’t have a problem, in theory, with a 10 minute short film masquerading as a music video. I’m sure there are a lot of directors trying to make their way into film through music videos. If they can snatch a budget big enough to do something more than shoot a couple of girls against a backdrop of fake smoke, I can’t blame them for going for it. But whatever it is you’re hoping for your career, you’ve got to, at the very least, still make sure there’s a music video buried in there somewhere.

There are a lot of things wrong with Telephone. It’s an exploitation film parody by someone who seems to be parodying other exploitation film parodies. If Jonas Acklund, the director of Telephone, is actually a fan of the films this is supposedly paying homage to, it doesn’t show. It’s also full of nonsensical, stylistic ticks that are, at best, distracting. It straight out steals the Pussy Wagon gag from Kill Bill, too, and it has so little to do with anything that I can’t really write it off as homage. Apparently the truck is owned by Quentin himself, so I can only hope that he at least got some cash for it. Either way, as a piece of film, it’s a hot mess.

None of that is really the problem.

The problem is that, unlike, say, Thriller, the “film” part of the video interrupts the song at the end of every verse. Just when the song is getting going, we get another pointless exploitation “homage” sequence. Yes, I think the film parts are bad. Maybe you think they’re good. But I’d bet money we both turned the video on to see a music video, not Jonas Acklund’s short film about Lady Gaga and Beyonce going on a costume party crime spree.

Thriller interrupts the song once, in the middle, but otherwise it’s a straight ahead showcase of a great pop song and awesome dancing. Yes, it’s also just a better shot piece of film. Yes, it’s directed by John Landis, who’s a fantastic filmmaker. But even if you hate the werewolf movie parts, you can get to the song part and run with it without being interrupted every 45 seconds with nonsense.

If you want to make a self indulgent piece of crap, go for it, but at least make a self indulgent piece of crap music video.

And sorry for making you watch Telephone. Here, I’ll make it up to you with Thriller.

Bullitt

You’ve probably heard of this film because of its classic car chase and little else.  That’s because the car chase is literally the only reason to see this movie.  It’s a brilliant scene wrapped in an utterly pedestrian police procedural.  There’s a mystery, but it’s nothing to write home about.  Or even write about, for that matter.  Fast forward to the car chase, then hit stop.

Play Misty For Me

The daddy of modern “I dated a woman and O Noes she’s psycho” films.  It’s also Clint Eastwood’s first film behind the camera.  He plays a radio DJ who’s getting calls every night from a woman who wants him to – see if you can guess – play Misty for her.  Then one day he runs into her in a bar, and the dating and sex begins.  Only the woman is unstable, and when Clint tries to break off the relationship, the stalking and terror begins.  Unlike later films in the genre, the film never hops the rails of reality and keeps its characters mostly plausible.  Also, it’s got a great sequence at the Monterey Jazz Festival.  Worth seeing for education reasons, but it’s not exactly a classic film.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

On the other hand, this is definitely a classic.  Deservedly so.  There were a lot of science fiction films in the 50′s, but most of them were cheesy horror romps made for quick double feature business.  The Day the Earth Stood Still is an exception. Directed by Robert Wise, with an honest to god SF story at its core, the film is a must see.  An alien and his robot come to Earth to deliver a message: Stop your warlike ways, or we will destroy you for the good of the galaxy if you try to leave your own planet.  It never becomes a mindless action film, but instead stays a quiet, contemplative film about a peaceful alien here on a mission of necessity.  Also: Klaatu Barada Nikto!

The Mouse That Roared

I was so impressed by Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove that I decided to grab another one of his films as soon as possible.  Why The Mouse That Roared? I think someone mentioned it once and it stuck in my head. So, no reason, basically.  It’s about a miniscule nation in Europe whose entire economy is based on selling wine to the United States.  When California wineries start making a cheap knockoff, the nation devises a plan to save the economy.  They’ll go to war with the US, lose, and in surrender will be economically rehabilitated by the nation on which their economy depends.  Hijinks ensue.  Not brilliant, but funny and cute, and it’s got Jean Seberg, for whom I crush hard.

La Chambre / Hotel Monterey / News from Home

I’m lumping these all together because they all came on the same DVD and I watched them all at once.  All three films are directed by Chantal Akerman, a Belgian director who moved to the States in the 70′s.  All three films are semi-experimental (ok, some of them are full out experimental) works made during that period.  La Chambre is a 10 minute pan around a single room.  Hotel Monterey is an hour of mostly silent shots of an old hotel in NYC, from the people moving through its lobby, to its rising and falling elevators and finally out the windows as the sun rises.  It’s amazing how, by the end of the film, the hotel has become a real, tangible place.  Finally there’s News From Home, in which the director reads letters from her mother over shots of NYC.  Since we never hear Akerman’s responses, just her mother’s letters, we can only speculate at how her time far away from home is affecting her.  If you’ve ever moved far away, there’s a lot in this film to recognize.  Its final shot, shot from a ferry of Manhattan slowly receding into the mist, has stayed with me since seeing it.

High and Low

Akira Kurasawa is best known for his period films, but his modern pieces are easily as strong as his best known Samurai epics.  High and Low plays almost as two films, linked by the same central plot.  The first half tells the story of Gondo, a business executive who’s staked his entire fortune on a bid to take of his employer.  But when kidnappers mistakenly abduct his chauffeur’s child, he’s forced to choose: does he pay the ransom and ruin himself, or deny responsibility for the kidnapping even when his own child was the target?  The second half of the film follows the police as they attempt to find the kidnapper.  The first half is the more compelling, but the second is a detailed and effective procedural investigation that gets downright intense by the time the police descend into the underworld of Tokyo.  Especially effective is the horror of Junkie Alley, which plays more as a vision of the underworld than a real place.  Like Ikiru, it’s a film with a challenging structure but is a brilliant film because of it.