“Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”
Luke Skywalker, Star Wars
Los Angeles is the movies, and the movies is LA. If you drive north of the city on the 101 for an hour, you get to suburbs filled with peripheral industry people. Somebody did a rewrite on Lethal Weapon II and put a downpayment on a house. Another person did the same with royalties from an insurance commercial. That’s every third house in Sherman Oaks or Woodland Hills.
Drive up the 101 another half hour and you start hitting farms and beach communities. This is where industry people go when they don’t want to be found. Hang a right and drive another half hour inland and you’ll get to the citrus groves and chaparral hills. That’s where I grew up. My house is 45 miles as the crow flies from the Hollywood sign. 45 miles and a different cultural universe.
It used to be almost impossible to watch cool movies. If you were lucky, your had access to an independent video rental store with some personality. We had a Blockbuster. Our selection of “Foreign” movies consisted of about one shelf of DVDs.
Anime, black and white classics, silent film, these were hard to find. Forget gay and lesbian movies. You could put in the work to see them. You could make a trip to a bigger city with a better selection. Universities sometimes had media libraries. You would watch movies on a 15″ screen with headphones in an uncomfortable study carrel warmed by CRT tubes. Local libraries having big, good movie collections is a recent phenomenon. If you could afford it, you could order from a mail order catalog, or from Amazon. Amazon’s deep catalog of old books and movies used to be a killer feature.
If you were lucky, really lucky, you knew someone with a killer home video collection. That used to be what it meant to be “into film”. It meant shelves and shelves of tapes in their basement or living room. Those people shaped so much of my taste. Indie dramas, foreign films and music documentaries from L——. Queer cinema classics and Merchant and Ivory films from M——. Studio action films from G——.
This assumes that the movie got a home video release. There were plenty of movies that never got a VHS release.
The arrival of Netflix DVD-by-mail changed everything overnight. It had a broad collection, accessible to anywhere the Postal Service reached. It improved some other parts of the video rental experience that sucked. No late fees, keep it as long as you want, drop it back in the mail when you’re ready to send it back. “I have to return some videotapes” is a punchline in American Psycho. We really did have to figure out when to return tapes all the time.
Netflix swept away Blockbuster. It delivered the killing blow to the independent rental stores*. It devalued physical media. Netflix originals ducked legacy union contracts by streaming instead of releasing in theaters or on home video. Now it is killing its DVD by mail service, as it has wanted to since the early 2010s.
I sometimes think about those people with big collections in the 90’s and early 2000’s. They paid a lot of money, and even the big collections only had a fraction of what is available on the big services now. In the last 10 years I have paid a lot for streaming. I have nothing in my house to show for that spending. We used to have more power to shape the culture that got left to the future through the objects we left behind. Movies can disappear, or be censored so easily now. The entire paradigm where I hand you money, you give me something I want, and we both go our separate ways seems to be ebbing away. In this new world, anything that provides you ongoing value, that brings you joy must be paid for, again and again, until you cannot afford to keep it.
*Except my beloved Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon, which has not died but did retire—it’s now operated by a non-profit.
It was the Oscars tonight! I watched the full telecast for the first time in several years tonight, and thought it was a surprisingly inspiring and life-affirming broadcast. Here’s my picks of winners and losers this year.
Winners
Parasite. The winner that everybody is going to be talking about tomorrow is Parasite. The best case scenario is that this becomes an early episode in a process of the American film ecosystem becoming more curious about international films and less chauvinistic about Hollywood movies. There’s a lot to consider here: the politics of the movie, production nominations vs. acting nominations, the relationship of South Korean culture to US culture. I’m not informed enough to have an opinion on all that, what I do know is that the movie was very good and deserved every award it won tonight.
Olivia Coleman. She is glorious, and one of the sharpest, most witty people in entertainment right now. Her wit allows her to get away with saying things that push the envelope of taste with this regal dominance that is a joy to watch. There are few people who can take a stage like that and be so secure in their ownership of it that they can be playful. Every time she is on stage as “Olivia Colman,” it’s down to earth, warm, and with a hilarious angle that nobody else would take. This guy fucks.
Quality movies. One of the reasons that this Oscar year felt good was that there were relatively few victory lap/middlebrow consensus winners. There was a little more Ford vs. Ferrari and 1917 presence than I would like, but otherwise it seemed like all the winners were rewarded for outstanding work, rather than because of popularity
Corniness. Janelle Monaé opened the broadcast with “Come Alive” from The ArchAndroid. It’s not my favorite song, but the feel of the song is like this strange mixture of B-52’s/Violent Femmes novelty rock and Cab Calloway big band schmaltz. It (mostly) worked, and it was very corny. Also corny was Maya Rudolph and Kristin Wiig’s a capella songs-about-clothing melody that was both incredible and completely embarrassing. Very skit-from-your-theater-camp-counselor vibes.
Workers of the world. Julia Reichert is a documentarian who co-directed American Factory, which won Best Documentary. She has terminal cancer. In her speech, she recognized working people: ““Working people have it harder and harder these days — and we believe that things will get better when workers of the world unite.” I truly cannot imagine the emotions she must be experiencing, this wonderful validation and career highlight, in a time when she must be aware of every moment that she has left to live.
Frozen 2. I just loved everything about this performance. I love Idina Menzel (she was great in just a few minutes in Uncut Gems); I love when these kind of events can share the spotlight with performers that don’t always get this kind of reach and platform; I loved hearing the song in all of the different languages; I loved the haunting vocals (and very strange choice of staging) of the delightfully elfin Aurora; and I love the operatic power of many solo voices coming together and singing in harmony. Loved it.
The human quality of grace. Not everybody that won an award was able to accept it gracefully. That’s no knock on them, it’s a big event. Even Taika Waititi, who has a trickster energy and seems to be able to create a vaudevillian routine for every public appearance started to lose his hold on his composure when accepting his screenwriting award. But some others seemed to understand the power of the public platform that they were given, not feel rushed, and said what they felt like needed saying. It’s a wonderful human quality, grace. There is a physical sense of the word, graceful movements, graceful lines, etc. But the root of the word (Latin: “praising” “welcoming”) has to do with social interactions, the physical definition is the metaphor. It is being present in the moment and retaining your composure at the same time as you are aware of the different levels of context that are in operation. It’s like respect: if I am to be welcoming to you, I must not only choose to be welcoming, but be paying enough attention to you to understand how you will receive my gestures. The best speeches of the evening—Hildur Guðnadóttir for the Joker score, Carol Dysinger for Learning to Skate in a War Zone (If You’re a Girl), and Bong Joon Ho all evening—had this kind of grace.
Losers
Shia LeBeouf. Shia had a few years of psychotically bad behavior, but over the last few years has built up a portfolio of interesting performances. I have no insider knowledge, but my guess is that he is either incapable of making himself play nice with the media or he is still radioactive to publicists because his public image never really adjusted to where is is today. He presented a category with Zack Gottsagen, his costar of The Peanut Butter Falcon who has Down’s syndrome. Out of context, he had a moment where he seemed to get angry with and roll his eyes at Zack, but I believe was an expression of secondhand anxiety for Zack, who was struggling with stage fright. But for people who concluded that he was a dick and wrote him off in 2013, that seemed really dickish.
The Best Actor and the Best Actress. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Renée Zellweiger gave terrible acceptance speeches. Phoenix gave an emotional, rambling speech about human exploitation of nature and each other. You can’t talk about racism and animal rights and environmental rights in the same thought like that, you just can’t. There are ways to live in balance with nature while taking from nature what we need to survive. There is a range of opinions about whether there is a moral balance like that possible with animal protein and materials. There is no good, balanced way to exploit other human beings.
Zellweiger either winged it or thought that memorizing names would be enough because she read the entire production credits of Judy before getting to a personal message about rallying around “our heroes” with all of the coherence of Miss Teen South Carolina talking about maps in 2007.
Little Women. What a great movie. It should have been nominated for Best Director, it would have been a fine choice for Best Picture, and Florence Pugh was absolutely robbed by Laura Dern’s showy-performance-in-a-mediocre-movie for Best Supporting Actress. The only award it won was Best Costume, which was the only award it should not have won (all of the clothes in that movie were too clean).
Normal-sized women. There was an embarrassing amount of hollow “Girl Power” messaging that just underlined how shut out women were from directing and most of the technical categories. You don’t need any of that if people are getting jobs. That’s what people want, they just want their projects funded and to have a fair shot at getting hired.
Old men. There were moments of tension, where it seemed like the status quo of all-white and all-male categories cannot hold much longer. One guy who won an editing award thanked his wife for giving up her career to raise their kids, and it just clunked in the room. Chris Rock and Steve Martin had a couple of opening jokes, and they just seemed like dinosaurs. There’s enough momentum in the system that men who came up in it will be able to keep staying at the top, but the folks that are coming up now are—I am hopeful—bringing a different world with them, and there’s going to be a moment when that balance tips. This year felt like a step back, in terms of women and black nominees. But I don’t think the old boy’s world is coming back. These older, white artists have a challenge ahead of them, if they choose to engage with it. They have the opportunity to re-imagine a position in the industry that is not automatically on top. Some are going to choose to evolve, some are going to choose to hold onto the past with all of their strength.
hammer & jack 