Kyle Deas

A Meditation on Movie Trailers.

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:54:00 -0700

Battle: Los Angeles is a prodigiously stupid film. The plot is stupid. The characters are stupid – both in their conception and in their actions. The aliens are stupid. The film is almost proud of how stupid the whole thing is.

That being said, Battle: Los Angeles also manages to be fucking awesome no less than 65% of the time. The twelve-year-old sitting behind me in the theater loved it, and so did I; I left the theater wishing that I, too, could shove my submachine-gun underneath the metal-plated ribcage of a robotic alien and empty a clip into its slimy thorax. The alien-invasion subgenre has become fashionable recently for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, though I mostly blame District 9. And while B:LA is nowhere near as smart as that film, it’s also no stupider than Signs, which I also loved.

However: I don’t really want to talk about B:LA. What I really want to talk about are movie trailers – because they’re one of my favorite art forms, and because most people think about them in the wrong way.

Most people think of movie trailers as being a reasonably good representation of what’s in the film. They watch the trailer, take in the stars, plot overview, and general tone, and decide to whether to see the film based on that.

But this is a recipe for disappointment, because the point of trailers is not to accurately represent what’s in the film. The point of movie trailers is to cram as much enticing footage into two or three minutes as humanly possible, in the hopes that it’ll convince you to buy a ticket. This is why it’s so common to hear people walk out of a theater and say, in disgust, “Well, that was nothing like the trailer”. Of course it wasn’t: if trailers accurately depicted what movies were actually like, many fewer people would be tricked into seeing bad movies.

Trailers are representative of movies in the same way that yogurt commercials are representative of what it’s like to eat yogurt. That doesn’t mean that people don’t decide to see films based on the trailer, in the same way that yogurt commercials do actually sell yogurt. But it’s obviously not an accurate depiction.

In the olden days, even the movie studios who made the trailers hadn’t figured out how this marketing distinction was going to work, which is why old movie trailers seem so unsubtle and weird. The studios in those days figured that the best way to sell tickets was to give you as much information as possible about the plot and characters of the film, which turns out to be emphatically what people do not want from movie trailers. Check out this trailer for the original True Grit, which was released in 1978.

Now, check out the trailer from the 2010 True Grit.

Which of these trailers most accurately represents the film its promoting? The first one does. In fact, watching that trailer almost negates the need for you to watch the film at all. Whereas the second trailer doesn’t represent the tone of the Coen Brothers’s True Grit at all; it has none of the sweetness and whimsy that underlies most of the film. But it’s undeniably a better trailer.

The more interesting way to think about movie trailers is to decouple them from their associated films and instead consider them as their own art form, with their own conventions and artistic vision – as two-to-three minute experimental short films, designed to play upon your imagination and your visceral reactions. This fundamentally changes what it means to have a ‘successful’ trailer: instead of one that accurately depicts the film, a successful trailer is one that is the most effective at thrilling, saddening, intriguing, or otherwise moving the viewer.

Which brings me back to Battle: Los Angeles, whose moody, eerie trailer was the only reason anybody even knew about the film in the first place.

No plot. No characters. Not even any information about the film, really. Just a single effective song, random images from the film, and a creeping sense of dread. It’s beautiful. This is what music videos have the capacity to be but usually aren’t, because few artists seem to care much about the visual component of their music videos.

And I love it even more now that I’ve seen the film, because I can understand why the trailer was made as it was. I can almost see the editor in charge of the trailer slumped at a desk, his head in his hands. On the screen in front of him are hours of footage full of ham-fisted dialogue, over-earnest acting, and mediocre special effects. He doesn’t even know what the film is called yet – during production, the film was variously known as Battle: Los Angeles, Battle: LA, World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles, and Battle for Los Angeles. His superiors have told him that people are really into gritty, indie sci-fi films now, like District 9 or Sunshine. How am I supposed to make this crap look like that? he thinks. And then: fuck it. I’ll just make it look crazy instead.

The earliest example that I know of this sort of plot-less trailer is for 1979’s Alien, a two-minute nightmare that’s infinitely more upsetting than the entirety of most horror films. Imagine watching this in the same session as the older True Grit trailer – I’m surprised people didn’t flee the theater. (Here’s a higher quality version that is not embeddable.)

More recently, the trailer for The Social Network opened with a sort of strange multimedia poem set to a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” by a Hungarian children’s choir; it’s the sort of thing that almost anyone could have made but somehow no one else did. The remainder of the trailer is mostly random lines and shots from the film, and I honestly think that you could substitute almost any line or shot from the film and it would be equally effective.

There are a number of films for which I prefer the trailer to the film itself, and would rather rewatch the former than the latter. These include The Watchmen…

… and Where The Wild Things Are.

I even like trailers for films I never bothered to see, like the 2006 Dwayne Johnson vehicle Walking Tall.

Such economy of storytelling! How could another ninety minutes possibly improve on that?

Possibly my favorite trailer of all time is for a documentary about Jerry Seinfeld called Comedian. Not only does it not include any footage from the film, or tell you what the film is about, it is actually a meta-parody of trailers themselves.

It’s possible that the trailer for Comedian wasn’t particularly effective, though, because no one I know has ever seen the film.

Lastly, my favorite trailer of the moment is for the third Transformers film, Dark ~~Side~~ of the Moon (wow, that is a horrible title).

I don’t know how big of a plot point this is in the film, but the conceit here is absolutely brilliant. It’s doubling down on the traditional conspiracy theories about the moon landing – not only did we actually visit the moon, we found GIANT SPACE ROBOTS while we were there! I love it. And while I’ll probably see Dark ~~Side~~ of the Moon when it comes out, I honestly wouldn’t care if no further scrap of footage from the film were ever released. The trailer is enough.

And that’s really what the point of all this is: sometimes, two minutes is more effective than ninety-two. And I think that once you stop thinking about trailers as being abbreviated versions of the films themselves, that time before the feature presentation will become a lot more interesting.

Self-Promotion.

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:59:00 -0800

I had the opportunity this weekend to sit down with James Marsh, the director of documentaries like 2008’s Man on Wire (which won an Oscar) and this year’s Project Nim. He’s a hugely talented filmmaker who turned out to be a charming, funny interview subject. He’s also loquacious, which is a huge relief; it’s much easier to cut a long interview down than it is to stretch an unproductive one. I was pretty pleased both with the interview and with the feature that came out of it.

You can read the long(ish) feature I wrote on Marsh for Vox Magazine, or you can listen to five minutes of excerpts from our conversation at KBIA’s website. And here are a few things about the interview process itself:

The night before I interviewed Marsh, I had a dream that I spilled coffee across the table and into his lap. (This is a recurring nightmare of mine whenever I have advance notice I’ll be meeting someone for the first time.) The next morning, the first thing that I did when I sat down was – yes – spilled my coffee. It wasn’t exactly a flood, and it didn’t get anywhere near him, but still – I couldn’t fucking believe it.

So Marsh said, “Oh, let me get you some napkins.” But I was already standing, so I said, “No, no, it’s ok, I’ll get them.” I was harried and upset with myself, and listening to the tape later, I realized that it showed; in fact, it sounded like I was upset with Marsh, for offering to get me napkins. I certainly hope he didn’t take it that way.
It’s stressful to interview someone whose made his professional career interviewing people. At one point there was a lull in the interview as I thought about what line of inquiry to pursue next, and Marsh noticed and started giving me tips on what to do when the same thing happens to him. Which was useful – actually, very useful – but he still acknowledged that the interview had hit a snag, which interviewees tend not to do.
As we were leaving the cafe, Marsh asked if I knew someplace to get some beer. I figured he meant a bar, so I started rattling off a few places downtown, but then he said no, he was looking for bottled beer. I generally get my beer from the local HyVee grocery store – it’s got a kickass craft beer selection – so I told him so and gave him directions. It was only after we parted ways that I realized that it was likely he was planning to walk there; the grocery store was two or three miles away, and some of the terrain in between was not particularly kind to pedestrians.

So long story short, I may have sent an Oscar-winning film director on a wild goose chase through Columbia. And all because the guy wanted a six-pack.

A New Theory For Travel.

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:26:40 -0800

When people come back from a vacation, what do they always say?

If they went to Hawaii, then sure, they talk about the beaches. If they went to Switzerland, they talk about the skiing. If they went to Italy, they talk about the food.

But by far the most common refrain I hear from the recently-abroad, regardless of their destination, is: oh, the people were just fantastic. So nice and welcoming. Totally open to talk, and very curious about what life is like here.

Germans say it about Americans. Americans say it about the Japanese. I myself have said it about Cubans, Mexicans, Spaniards, and probably more. People even say it about places inside their own country. I just love the people out there in the Midwest.

My theory, then, is this: most people in most places are friendly to travelers most of the time.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s wise to wander aimlessly around whatever foreign country you please without regard for the possible consequences. But I do think that it means that if you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, you have a reasonably good chance of striking up an edifying and interesting conversation with someone around you. This is doubly true if you vacation in a place that normal people actually live. It’s possible to have edifying conversations at a resort in Cancún, but they’re probably just going to be with other Americans.

I don’t know what says more about humanity: that the above theory is true, or that people inevitably seem so surprised to have good interactions with the locals while traveling. It’s as if our default reaction is to assume the people at our destination are complete assholes, and we’re floored when they turn out not to be. Which doesn’t really make much sense, because who would want to travel anywhere that the people are accepted to be actively hostile?

Once you start assuming that the people around you could be as interested in you as you are in them, traveling becomes a lot less scary and a lot more interesting.

The Problem With Free.

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 11:28:00 -0800

As a rule I avoid Gawker and its associated blogs, but I do have a soft spot for Lifehacker. The blog recently published a list of its favorite iPhone apps, and there was a theme running through the article that disturbed me a little. Here, let me pull out some representative quotes.

Looking to power up your iPhone with the best free and cheap apps out there?

With a couple of $10 multi-service IM clients available, Meebo stands out especially because it’s free.

Although not free (weighing in on the more expensive side at $2.99)

The catch: It’s $2.

The biggest difference is price: PasteFire is free and MyPhoneDesktop costs a whopping $5.

Pano’s one of the more expensive apps in the list, at $3

Now, I know that one of Lifehacker’s aims is to help people find cheaper ways of living. And I also know that this ‘race to the bottom’, in terms of app pricing, is nothing new for iOS. The lower pricing has actually helped a lot of iOS developers: it’s better to sell a half-million apps at 99¢ than it is to sell 25,000 at $4.99.

But I do think that articles like this one reflect a widespread shift in the way people perceive software¹ and its monetary value. And I don’t like it. In fact, I would say that a world in which $3 - roughly the cost of a Big Mac - is a totally unacceptable price for a useful application is a world that has gone batshit insane.

The price trend for software over the last decade has been steadily downward. Apple’s App Stores, for the Mac and for iOS, have allowed developers to sell to users without worrying about distribution channels or payment processing. The internet, and the ad-supported model, has allowed online services to provide powerful, programming-intensive services at little or no cost.

But the rise of low-cost software seems to have given rise to the idea that this stuff is easy - that anyone with a few extra months and half an ounce of programming knowledge can bring an app to market or create the next delicious. And people don’t put a high value on things that are easy to produce.

The reality, of course, is that programming is hard, designing is hard, marketing is hard, and managing the people who do all these jobs is hard. On a superficial level, a programmer’s job is to write code and a designer’s job is to create user interfaces. But on a deeper level their job is to make decisions, and each one of those decisions is an opportunity for something to go wrong. For a tiny bit of interface lag to be introduced. For a common task to be made unintuitive. Good software is composed of countless such decisions, and each one is a place where something can break.

It’s incredibly difficult to bring a high-quality piece of software to market, and each one of the good, usable, useful apps in the App Store - and certainly every one of those on Lifehacker’s list - is a minor miracle, the culmination of a process that could have collapsed at almost any point along the way.

People deserve to be paid fairly for the work that they do. That’s especially true when that work results in an ongoing, appreciable improvement in your life. And the best pieces of software really do change people’s lives. Think about the applications or services that you use on a regular basis. What value would you attach to, say, Tumblr? Or Reddit? How about Angry Birds? Gmail? Instapaper? Evernote?

I would hope, if you’re really honest about it, that the answer would be more than a Big Mac.

In this article, by ‘software’ I mean anything that requires developers to maintain, including mobile apps, desktop applications, and web applications and services. ↩

On Attention, and Great Films.

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 08:14:00 -0800

Last night I decided to watch a movie. I made myself a cup of tea, browsed Netflix for a few minutes, and eventually settled on the 1973 classic The Sting, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman.¹

About twelve minutes into the film I was startled by a gunshot onscreen. I was startled because I hadn’t actually been watching the film. Instead, I had been: having a text message conversation; sending a few quick emails; checking my RSS reader (twice); keeping up to date with the latest tweets; and trying, without much success, to pass a particularly vexing level in an iPad game called World of Goo.

I looked the film and realized I had no earthly idea what was happening in it. I didn’t recognize any of the characters. I hadn’t consciously processed a single line of dialog. I had actively looked at the screen for perhaps a minute, cumulatively, during the whole quarter-hour that it had been playing.

I like the internet, but sometimes I worry about what it’s doing to me. It’s not like I wanted to be this guy. The guy who responds to a text message while he’s driving, even though he knows it’s incredibly dangerous. The asshole who pulls out his iPhone at the party when everyone else is playing Scattergories. The guy who can’t make it through five minutes of a film without having something, anything, else to do with his brain. A guy who, in short, spends his time hopelessly trying to multitask, flitting, hummingbird-like, from empty task to empty task.

So I took my iPad and my phone and my laptop and I stashed them in another room. I moved the stack of half-read New Yorker and Wired magazines in there too, just for good measure. Then, I restarted the film and tried, for the first time in who knows how long, to really watch a film from start to finish.

And you know what? The Sting is a great fucking film. The Joplin soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. Redford and Neuman are cool, as always. It’s funny and compelling and exciting. And the details are well-done too, the little things, the costumes² and the set design. I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed any movie in recent memory.

But I was still a little uncomfortable through the whole thing. Still a little itchy. Still felt like there were things I was missing.

I’m not usually much for New Years Resolutions, but I made just one this year. And it was this: be mindful. I want to really think about the things I’m doing, and cut out the things I do carelessly or out of habit alone. I want to stop shoving food into my face just because I’m bored, stop checking my RSS reader or my email just because a little red badge tells me I’ve got unread items out in the ether, weighing down my soul. I’ve only recently begun to realize that my time and attention are only worth as much as I’m willing to invest in them, and that recently I’ve been treating them as though they weren’t were much. Because seriously: is there anything less worthy of your obsession and your constant focus than Twitter?³

But being mindful is hard, and you have to start in little doses. That’s why I’m breaking it down to pieces of media. Every day, I’m going to try to focus for a few minutes on a work of art, whether it’s a song, a film, a novel, a photograph, or even a compelling blog post. Try to give the artist my undivided attention. Try to cut out all the bullshit.⁴

Try to be mindful.

And if the behavior I’ve described here sounds like you - if you can’t remember the last time you really focused on a piece of art, just because it was beautiful - then I recommend you try it, too.

Because life’s too short for multitasking.

The Sting, incidentally, was directed by the criminally under-appreciated George Roy Hill, who was also responsible for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Slaughterhouse-5, and The World According to Garp. The fourteen films he directed garnered 37 Oscar Nominations and 2 Best Picture wins, yet today I’d be surprised if one person in a thousand knew who he was. ↩
Seriously: the costumes. This film is like an ode to the well-fitted suit, in every color, cut, and style imaginable.↩
Or World of Goo, for that matter.↩
Maybe this is why people still enjoy movie theaters so much – it’s the last place it’s not socially acceptable to have your face stuck in a screen. Though even those walls are breaking down.↩

Cry Me A River.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:25:00 -0800

thesignaturething writes:

Yeah, Taylor Swift writes songs about her ex-boyfriends and uses their real names, and in a lot of ways it’s immature or obnoxious. But why do people act like she’s the only one in the history of music to do that? Remember “Cry Me a River”? We all love JT, the song is a jam and the video is hot—but holy jesus, why was there not more of an outcry about how fucking creepy it is?

A couple of tangentially-related points:

This video is fucking creepy. Music video directors don’t usually get a ton of recognition, but it’s worth noting that Francis Lawrence – in addition to directing music videos for just about every major pop artist of the last twenty years- would go on to direct Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video, as well as Constantine and I Am Legend. I wonder how much of the video’s vision came from Lawrence, and how much came from Timberlake.
The most famous example of public-figure-as-song-inspiration that I can think of is “Layla”, a song for which Clapton garnered almost universal acclaim. I’m not denying the gender angle, but some of the backlash toward Swift might come from the fact that while Clapton and Timberlake both sound heartbroken, she comes off as a little petulant. Take a song like “Forever and Always”: sure, the lyrics are sad - but the music? It’s upbeat power-pop.
Julia, before you say it: no, the Unplugged version of “Layla” is in no way whatsoever superior to the original.
One thing that I think gets overlooked about modern pop-music is how weird it can be. My favorite example of this is actually “Viva La Vida”. Coldplay was a group that, until that song, had played conventional soft-rock music. But that song is a weirdly orchestral thing: gone are the electric guitars and the drum kit, and in their place is literally a string quartet. It sounds more like a genre cover of a Coldplay song than it sounds like an original Coldplay song. Yet it was a smash-hit by any standard.

”Cry Me A River” is the same way. The song is introduced by a weird organ solo that sounds like it was lifted from the soundtrack of a film about a haunted carnival. There’s a bass-line to the song, sure, but the rest of the percussion is all a-capella, a bunch of weird mouth noises. And the coda to the song features an interplay between Timberland’s backup singers and a string section.

Of course, pop music is generally a conservative medium, but that’s precisely why I wish there was more attention paid to those songs that wildly appropriate musical conventions from other genres.

This Post Is For TV Nerds Only.

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:50:52 -0800

Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine for a moment that 30 Rock had been unexpectedly cancelled after Season 2. The series closes on somewhat of a cliffhanger: Jack has gone to work for the Pentagon, Kathy Geiss is in control of NBC. None of the subplots of the third, fourth, or fifth season would ever exist: no Jon Hamm as clueless doctor, no Selma Hayek, no Mamma Mia spoof, no Jack-Nancy-Avery love triangle.

In this alternate universe, would 30 Rock be as beloved and as mourned as Arrested Development is today?

And, the uncomfortable follow-up question: how much of Arrested Development’s critical and commercial cache springs directly from its early cancellation? Would an Arrested Development that ran for six seasons be better or worse, on the whole, than one that ran for three?

Discuss.

Reboots.

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:22:00 -0800

Action franchises often run up against what I call the Law of Escalating Crises: the tendency for the threats confronted by the hero to grow more outlandish as the franchise ages and the writers are forced to one-up their own canon. A classic example of this is the James Bond series: in Tomorrow Never Dies, 007 averted World War III; in The World Is Not Enough; he kept a nuclear bomb from exploding in Istanbul; and in Die Another Day, he foiled a plot to use an orbital sunlight deflector to burn down the Korean Demilitarized Zone and throw Asia into turmoil.

So when it came time to talk about a sequel to Die Another Day, the producers looked at the options for further escalation and wisely decided they were a touch improbable even within the freewheeling confines of the Bond canon. So they broke the cycle: Casino Royale eschewed all of the established backstory, and the threat faced by Bond, while suitably heinous, was of something less than world-destroying proportions. A freedom was found in the paring down of tradition. ¹

Now, allow me to propose the following analogy:

The Hazards of Love is to Die Another Day as The King is Dead is to Casino Royale.

The Hazards of Love and The King Is Dead are albums by the Portland folk-rock quintet The Decemberists. Hazards was released in 2008 and was the capstone of a five-album ascent to respectable popularity. The Decemberists had a love of allusion and poetry from the first, but they were somewhat unusual in that they trended toward greater experimentation as their popularity grew. As I put it in my review of Hazards of Love two years ago:

“The Decemberists seem to have realized that pretension is somewhat expected of them at this point, and have found a sort of freedom in that expectation. The Hazards of Love is a full-fledged rock-opera. It is, in other words, the album that the Decemberists have always wanted to make, with all of the strengths and weaknesses implied therein.”

I gave The Hazards of Love a positive review, and it remains a significant musical achievement. But for me, the album has not aged well. The cohesion of the album actually works to its disadvantage: there are few individual songs that I find myself revisiting, and it turns out that I’m not often in the mood for a seventeen-song rock-opera about forest creatures. Like Die Another Day, The Hazards of Love was supposed to be the fullest expression of a particular artistic vision; like Die Another Day, it was ultimately forgettable.

The King is Dead, then, is a musical reboot. It’s musically ambitious but thematically conservative. The songs are short and loose. Colin Meloy, the lead singer, sounds better than he ever has, and guest-spots by R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Gillian Welch work splendidly. It’s just a lovely album, filled with lovely songs – like “Calamity Song”, “January Hymn”, and “All Arise”.

We sometimes put too much focus, I think, on innovation. There’s a tendency to think that each album in an artist’s oeuvre should make obvious their musical growth, that each release should be the most ambitious. Sometimes – like this time – it’s more important to excel at something humble than to reach for something grandiose, and miss.

My favorite example of the LOEC is 24. In Season 1, Jack Bauer saves the President from an assassination attempt and retrieves his kidnapped family. Ok. In season 4, Bauer averts no fewer than three nuclear-based terror plots – in a single day! ↩

The A-Team.

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:09:00 -0800

One of the few valuable things about the Academy Awards is that they force moviegoers to consider the more subtle efforts that go into making a successful movie. It’s rare that people leave a film and say, “well, the story and the directing were mediocre, but the sound-editing was fantastic and well-worth the price of admission”. But when things work well, they’re almost always attributed to the director, even though it’s unlikely that David Fincher applied even a single daub of makeup during the filming of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which won Best Makeup in 2008).

I like that before you get to disagree with what the Academy thinks is the best film of the year, you have to sit and acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the countless Foley artists, special-effects artists, and costume designers who generally get no credit whatsoever.

So while you’re watching True Grit this holiday season, you should revel in the Coen brothers prodigious talent and Jeff Bridges’s phlegmy rasp. But you should also consider that the film is most accurately understood as the product of a razor-sharp team of adept craftsmen that the Coen brothers have gathered around them over the last thirty years, and that without their contributions the film would almost certainly be a lesser thing than it is.

These people can be buried far in the background - like Peter Kurland, who was a boom operator on the brothers’s first film, 1984’s Blood Simple and has worked on their production sound in some capacity on every of their efforts since.

But they can also be people key to the success of the film, like Carter Burwell. Burwell has composed the score to every one of the Coen brothers films and found the time to work on films like Where the Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich.

Burwell’s work on True Grit rivals any other score he has produced, though I think it falls short of his efforts for 1991’s Miller’s Crossing. I am biased, though, for Miller’s Crossing is one of my favorite films, and it shares with True Grit a love of genre and of its gentle tweaking.

Miller’s Crossing also marked the end of the brothers’s long collaboration with then-cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who would thereafter satisfy himself directing middling comedy films. But into the void left by Sonnenfeld stepped Roger Deakins, and through his work since — both with the Coen brothers and not — Deakins has cemented himself as the greatest cinematographer of our time.

He has worked on every Coen brothers film in the last twenty years save one: 2008’s Burn After Reading, during which he was otherwise engaged. That’s a run that includes Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and The Man Who Wasn’t There. He has also found the time to shoot The Shawshank Redemption, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Jarhead, among others. For this he has been studiously overlooked by the Academy, and if that streak continues with True Grit, it will be a tremendous shame. If the film contains a shot anything less than spectacular, I did not see it.

My point with all this is: film is a collaborative medium. And like Commander Shepard or Hannibal Smith, the Coen brothers have spent the last thirty years building themselves the best damn team they could find. The result is a film that finds not only the director but every crew member, from the top on down, working at the very height of their ability. And that’s a rare thing.

And just for kicks, here’s the trailer for the Deakins-shot The Shawshank Redemption — a trailer that I was surprised to learn featured the Burwell-composed main theme from Miller’s Crossing.

Four Reasons Why You Should Like "Love and Other Drugs", Despite Its Obvious Flaws

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 09:31:00 -0800

Love and Other Drugs is a fairly predictable romantic comedy. If you’ve seen the trailer, you probably know how the film will end. That being said, it’s also a tremendously likeable film with a tremendously likeable cast, and it has a couple things that distinguish it from your normal romantic-comedy fare.

1. The characters like having sex with one another. In mainstream Hollywood movies, sex is usually either played for laughs or treated as the most important moment in these people’s lives up to this point or possibly ever. But in Love and Other Drugs, Jamie and Maggie have sex the way that normal people have sex: enthusiastically, awkwardly, ccasionally with great embarassement, and with a firm grasp on their sense of humor. They don’t fall in love by exchanging longing looks or chatting with one another online. They fall in love in bed, in between vigorous bouts of bonking.

2. The film is set at a definite time and place, and that setting is important to the plot. Many films, especially romantic comedies, take place in what I think of as the “indeterminate now” – a featureless, vaguely modern time period of little to no color or detail. This is almost always a lost opportunity. In real life, people don’t wander around scrupulouly avoiding references to current events or pop culture. To the contrary, they often derive much of their conversational material to the thing they just watched or the new invention they just read about or what just happened in international news.

Love and Other Drugs is set in the late-nineties. The characters have pagers. They dress like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. They go online occasionally, but not often. The release of Viagra, and the subsequent media hullaballoo, are important subplots. These details aren’t a waste of time; they help to establish these people, and their relationships, in a world that seems real and fully fleshed-out.

Love… is also thankfully not set in New York City. I love New York. It was my home for five years and I hope to return someday. That being said, it is seriously overrepresented in American popular culture. The vast majority of romantic comedies and sitcoms take place in New York City, and it’s a shame. It’s a shame because people fall in love in Portland or in Cheyenne or (in the case of Love…) in Pittsburgh, and their stories are often the peculiar by-product of the place they choose to live. Yet those are realities that we rarely get to experience.

3. The honest and painful depiction of Parkinson’s disease. Cancer is the go-to villain in popular culture these days, because we all know what cancer looks like: you feel a lump, you get sick, you lose your hair, and then you die. Or maybe live. In any case, we know the process.

I’m always interested, then, in stories that depict other equally-debilitating conditions – like, say, diabetes, or multiple sclerosis. Because in those areas we have the opportunity to learn something new through the story about how those who suffer from it live and cope.

Now, I’m not saying that Love… is like a Lifetime disease-of-the-week film or anything. The writing, and especially Anne Hathaway’s depiction of Maggie’s early-onset Parkinson’s, keep the character from being totally defined by her disease. And the scene where Maggie attends a meeting of other Parkinson’s sufferers, and hears for the first time the stories of other people like her – well, it’s emotional stuff, and ably done.

4. The Village Voice hated it. On any subject, you can count on the Voice to take the most pretentious and arrogant angle imaginable; they’re like Pitchfork but without any taste whatsoever. About Love… they wrote that “the most egregious four-quadrant pander-party of the year, Ed Zwick’s latest middlebrow atrocity has been so carefully market-tested that it needn’t even be seen, just administered directly into the bloody mainstream”, a statement that shows such contempt for anyone not the critic that it makes me want to spit. In any medium, you can be fairly sure that if the Voice hates it, you”ll like it, and vice versa.

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:12:00 -0700

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail:

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”
The average respiratory rate for adults is 12-20 breaths per minute, which is the rate that the sleep-indicator light fades in and out on most Apple laptops. Older models such as the Macintosh PowerBook, however, use a blinking LED indicator, with discrete pulses in one-second intervals.

This creeps me out. I already have an unhealthy way of projecting human-like qualities onto inanimate objects: for example, I feel guilty when I leave the DVD player running with a disc inside, because it has to sit there and replay the same thirty second clips over and over and over again. And I apologize to my car when I bump a curb or close the door on the seatbelt. So for Apple to subliminally suggest that my computer breathes when it sleeps takes the metaphor a little too far for comfort.

Not to mention the fact that the rhythm is psychologically comforting because we like things that breathe because they are alive. The feeling that we derive from the Macbook’s indicator light originates in some reptilian part of our brain that sees the pattern and says, take comfort, for you are not alone. But the problem is that when we are with our laptops and no one else we are, of course, alone. And to suggest otherwise is creepy.

"In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life."

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:12:40 -0700

“In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life.”

- The opening sentence every budding journalist dreams of being able to write, from a fascinating Wired article about flushless urinals.

"In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a..."

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:56:00 -0700

“In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year—thirty million every day—and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days.”

-

Articles like these are why I love The New Yorker. Can you imagine trying to pitch this to any other magazine? ”I want to write an 8,000 word article on elevators. Not about anything specific - just a bunch of interesting stuff about elevators.” They’d laugh you out of the room.

Rufus.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:32:41 -0700

Rufus.

This is getting ridiculous.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:30:03 -0700

“Here,” the receptionist said. She handed me two pieces of paper, stapled and folded into fourths. “If you ever get cataract surgery in your life, you will need to show these to your surgeon.”

We need electronic fucking medical records.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel..."

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:56:02 -0700

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

- Steve Jobs, in a 1996 interview with Wired.

How To Think About Apple and Google.

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:48:00 -0700

In Chuck Klosterman’s IV he reprints an essay from 2004 about how to tell the difference between your nemesis and your archenemy:

You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. If your nemesis invited you out for cocktails, you would accept the offer. If he died, you would attend his funeral and—privately—you might shed a tear over his passing. But you would never have drinks with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike his gin with hemlock. If you were to perish, your archenemy would dance on your grave, and then he’d burn down your house and molest your children.

We measure ourselves against our nemeses, and we long to destroy our archenemies. Nemeses and archenemies are the catalysts for everything.

I actually think this is the most useful way to think about the Apple - Google rivalry that’s sprung up in the last few years.

Apple and Google are typical nemeses. Sure, they’re competitors, and they’ve been taking a lot of little jabs at one another recently - Apple made Bing a search-engine option on the iPhone, Google devoted most of their recent I/O Conference to unveiling products that directly compete with Apple.

But deep down they maintain an affection for one another, and after every product launch, every escalation, every new gauntlet thrown down, their respective leaders shake their heads, smile, and mutter “clever bastards - I’ll show them”. They’re like the Beatles and the Beach Boys circa 1967 - Android being the Pet Sounds to the iPhone’s Rubber Soul, if you will.

Apple’s archenemy has and always will be Microsoft, which is why their passing of Microsoft in market-share was such sweet revenge.¹ Steve Jobs may sit down to sip coffee and talk smack with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, but whenever Jobs sees Steve Ballmer he just wants to punch Ballmer in the throat.²

As for Adobe - well, they’re not really important enough to be Apple’s nemesis or archenemy. Adobe is that guy that you were friends with in high school but who grew up to sell car insurance, and now he’s always calling you up and guilt-tripping you by playing on your former friendship, except his policies suck and his deductible is too high and also he has a crappy custom UI and crashes all the time.

Google’s archenemy is the People’s Republic of China.↩
To be fair, this is most people’s reaction to Steve Ballmer.↩

"Recent Grad Shocked To Learn That Being In Debt Sucks."

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:20:00 -0700

A couple of years ago I was sitting on a bench in Mendocino, California, a little town about an hour up the coast that I sometimes visit when I need to think things over. Mendocino is perched above the Pacific, and at the edge of town - which is, truth be told, only about two blocks from the center of town - the streets give way to a series of paths that meander around windy bluffs and tide pools and skirt the rocky places where the water meets the land.

I was sitting on a bench overlooking the sea, eating a chicken sandwich. I was also wearing a Harvard t-shirt. I didn’t go to Harvard, but my cousin did and she had recently given me the shirt for Christmas.

A man, walking leisurely by, glanced at me as he passed and inclined his head. He walked a few more steps, but then wheeled completely around and headed toward me. I was surprised: I had driven to the coast alone, and I didn’t know anyone in Mendocino. But the man approached nevertheless, and when he was close he stuck his hand out. He was indeterminately elderly but spry and his grip, when I took his hand, was strong.

“You know, it’s like I always say,” he said, pumping my hand with uncommon vigor. “You can always tell a Harvard man.” He looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for a response. But I had been mid-bite when he approached, and in all the commotion I had not yet been able to swallow the assorted bread and chicken matter, so he had to settle for being nodded and chewed at.

He fidgeted, antsy for the punchline, and after a moment his resolve failed and he leaned toward me. “Yep, you can always tell a Harvard man - but you can’t tell him very much,” he said, beaming. And with that he (finally) released my hand, gave me what he obviously felt to be an insouciant wink, and wandered off cackling to himself.

This sounds like a weird story, but this sort of thing actually happens all the time in Mendocino; it’s just that kind of place. The larger reason why the story has stuck with me was because of the man’s obvious and inescapable pride in his school: in the fifty years since he attended Yale (or wherever), he had enough school spirit left over that it still compelled him to approach total strangers and ridicule their intelligence. This struck me as deeply weird - in large part because even then, in my sophomore year at New York University, I was already starting to suspect that my relationship with my alma mater would not be so harmonious.

Cortney Munna also recently attended NYU. Like most NYU students, she was forced to take out increasingly-absurd loans to pay for her education; unlike most students, she is the focus of a recent New York Times profile. Cortney has nearly a hundred-thousand dollars in student loans and currently works as a photographer’s assistant, making about twenty bucks an hour. Although she seems to be in somewhat more difficult financial straits than I, the story of how Cortney acquired her debt is familiar:

She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.

When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn’s credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor’s degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn’t afford. So before Cortney’s junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.

Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back.

This is not a new story for the Times; in fact, they run these sorts of profiles reasonably often, especially around graduation. But given the current recession there does seem to be more discussion now about whether or not private schools - and the loans that almost inevitably come with them - are worth it.

Of these the most emotionally cathartic is almost certainly Meaghan O’Connell’s post “fuck you, pay me. or something”, with its wonderfully concise thesis: “NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT WHERE I WENT TO SCHOOL.”¹ More damning, though, is Zac Bissonnette’s article from the Huffington Post called “Why College Is A Terrible Investment to Finance With Loans”. To wit:

There’s no collateral to sell off if you realize you over-borrowed. Students loans are just like a mortgage or car loan except that there is no asset to sell if you realize you can’t afford them.

Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. If you default on a student loan, penalties and collection fees will stack up — and debt collectors can garnish your wages, Social Security, and tax refunds, and there is no statute of limitations on student loan collections.²

An unreliable income stream. 17- and 18-year olds are signing up for debt based on their ability to make payments from an income stream that’s at least four years away — in a career that they haven’t even decided on yet.

Add to this the fact that college tuitions have risen faster than income levels and without regard to the economic climate, and the fact that anyone thinks private school is a justifiable investment seems insane.

This is a weird thing for me to say.

The reason why it’s a weird thing for me to say is that I loved going to NYU. I met, worked with, was taught by, and befriended innumerable smart and creative people during my time there. I was seventeen when I went to the school, and if they threw me into a safe, controlled dorm environment, then they at least threw me into a safe, controlled dorm environment that felt like a genuine New York City apartment. Attending the school had a transformative effect on my personality and my way of thinking.

So I’m not saying that I regret going to NYU; I absolutely don’t. And when I start thinking about the hypotheticals - what would it have been like to go somewhere else? What would it be like to be debt-free? What kind of person would I be if I hadn’t lived like/where I did? - I just end up driving myself crazy. Those are unanswerables; they’re not even worth thinking about.

What I do wish is that someone had put things in perspective for me, back when I was sixteen or seventeen. I wish someone had said: Think about five hundred dollars. Think about what you can buy with five hundred dollars. Now imagine paying that much money, every single month, to a loan company with a silly name. Six thousand dollars a year, just gone - money that you can’t spend on food, travel, or lodging.

You will be unemployed. Your friends will be unemployed. You will not be able to afford a bed. Your grocery shopping will consist of cereal and pasta. And, yes, there will be things you want to do - opportunities you want to take - places you want to go - that you will have to give up. Getting a job that pays enough will be harder. Finding a place to live that’s affordable will be harder. Graduate school will be harder to pay for. Your debt will affect every decision you make from graduation day on, it will absolutely limit your opportunities, and there will be things you will have to sacrifice.

That’s what I wish someone had said.

It’s time to stop acting like a degree from a private university is its own reward. Because except for the Man from Mendocino, nobody gives a shit where you went school.

To quote everything that I agree with in Meaghan’s post would be to reprint the entire thing, so you should really just go read it at her place.↩
I have already graduated and have tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, yet I had absolutely no idea that this was true.↩

A Bunch Of Questions No One Asked Me About Why I Moved To Tumblr.

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:50:00 -0700

So what the heck address does this blog live at, anyway?

There was some confusion on that point because I jumped the gun: I wanted to post stuff on the Tumblr blog as soon as it was set up, but the changes I made to the server’s DNS entry hadn’t been reflected yet. So for a brief period two Fitful Murmurs blogs existed, a WordPress (at fitfulmurmurs.com) and a Tumblr (at fitfulmurmurs.tumblr.com). Both addresses should now point here. ¹

Isn’t WordPress is a powerful, extensible, open-source blogging platform, with a great developer community and oodles of acclaim?

All those things are very true! I love WordPress. I used it for over a year and in that time it helped me grow as a blogger and as a web developer. I think its a tremendous platform and I am in awe of the developer community around it - many of whom were wiling to offer their time and expertise to amateurs like me.

So what reason could you possibly have for moving?

Well, I have two, really: security and ease. But they kind of go hand-in-hand.

How do you mean?

I’m not sure if you know, but not all that long ago hundreds of thousands of WordPress blogs were hit in a concentrated, pernicious attack on the blogging platform. Users who were targeted - all of whom, I should point out, were using outdated versions of the platform - found posts deleted or scrambled, custom settings and content lost, and were even locked out of their Dashboards by newly-created “ghost” admin accounts. And this wasn’t the first time that WordPress had been hit: attacks on the platform were constant throughout 2007 and 2008.

WordPress’s official response to the attacks? ”The only thing that I can promise will keep your blog secure today and in the future is upgrading,” wrote creator Matt Mullenweg on the official WordPress blog. ”This is something that has happened before, and that will more than likely happen again.”

What’s the big deal? Just keep WordPress up to date.

Good point - and that was my strategy in the eight or so months since that last big attack. But this is where that whole “ease” part comes in. See, updating your WordPress installation is a cinch: you click a link, it ticks off the steps in the upgrade process, and you’re good to go. The problem is plugins.

There are core aspects of WordPress functionality that are not built in to the platform, and have to be dealt with instead by third-party plugins. This is true both of technical, server-side functionality - like creating blog caches, so sudden spikes in traffic don’t cause your blog to crash - and of more prosaic features like Twitter integration.

There is, of course, a large and active community of web developers who create and maintain those plugins. But WordPress has a notoriously speedy release turnover², and most third-party developers can’t keep up. So if you run a WordPress blog, you’re constantly juggling your twin desires of keeping your blog safe and keeping your plugins working - two impulses that sadly are often in conflict.

And don’t even get me started on keeping the plugins themselves up-to-date.

So what you’re saying is, you weren’t willing to put in the time and effort.

WordPress is for tinkerers. And for a long time that’s what I wanted to do and I had fun with it. But since I became aware of the security flaws, my relationship with WordPress became much more about housekeeping than about content, and you can see the drop of posts that resulted.

Eventually, I realized that I wanted a blogging platform that would just get out of my way. Where I didn’t have to worry about system updates or plugin compatibility, or how to hack in threaded comments, or the (admittedly unlikely) possibility that if I did hit the big time, people wouldn’t be able to access my blog. I wanted to focus on the writing. And I found myself increasingly unable to do that with WordPress.

Why Tumblr? Why not, say, Blogger?

Don’t be ridiculous.

Seriously.

I like Tumblr. I like that it is easily scalable - that I can use it to share quotes, pictures, snippets of conversation, long blog posts, or any combination thereof. The lead developer is Marco Arment, whose blog I regularly read and whose Instapaper service I find invaluable. Unlike Blogger, Tumblr blogs are visually appealing; unlike Posterous, I like their Dashboard.

I also feel weirdly comforted that Tumblr is a private company that depends on me for money. They don’t charge (yet) to run a Tumblr blog, but they nevertheless depend on content-creators for their revenue stream. At WordPress, I felt like I was part of a community - and that gave me a certain amount of implicit responsibility about problems that cropped up. With Tumblr, I feel like a customer - and successful companies take care of their customers. It’s a different relationship.

Hey, I can’t comment anymore! And all my past comments are gone!

This was the most difficult decision about making the move. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who commented on my WordPress blog, and there were great discussions that were lost in the move. I was sad to leave them behind.

But I was thinking recently about what makes for a good blog comment section, and I came up with some rough criteria - a strong community, an atmosphere that fosters discussion, an attentive curator, active conversation. I realized that my blog didn’t have any of those things. And I knew that I didn’t have the time or the inclination to put in the legwork it would take to create a place where people would have those kinds of conversations.

This doesn’t mean I’m unreachable! I still welcome (even crave) feedback and discussion, regardless of the form - I’ll respond here to emails, blog posts, Tweets, phone calls, or any other way you feel like getting in touch with me. But for the moment I’m giving this a go without comments.

Seriously - if you are still getting a redirect error or the old blog, please let me know. ↩
WordPress Version 2.7 was released in December 2008. In the eighteen months since, there have been thirteen non-beta releases (the most recent being 2.9.2). There is simply no way that unpaid, volunteer third-party developers can keep up with a platform that releases a new version every month and a half. ↩

At some point, don’t you just say: what’s the point...

Wed, 19 May 2010 19:48:00 -0700

At some point, don’t you just say: what’s the point anymore? It took me a good thirty seconds to realize this was a pro-smoking advertisement and not the opposite.

From the back cover of a Popular Science magazine - who should be embarrassed to print such a thing, if you ask me.

Upon further investigation, it looks like SNUS is actually some form of Swedish smokeless tobacco. I think it’s safe to say the ad is vague enough as to be practically useless.