The Wire : Cinelogue

The Grand Theft Auto franchise is the one of the most popular video game brands in the world. Its latest generation, Grand Theft Auto IV, earned the Guinness World Record for most profitable entertainment release of all-time, raking in $310 million dollars in the first twenty-four hours of its 2008 release. As of March 10, 2011, Rockstar Games, the makers of GTA, report the title has sold over 20 million copies, putting the series lifetime total somewhere north of 100 million units since its 1997 premiere. We’re a long way from the days of DOS and Windows ’98. And the man most directly responsible is named Dan Houser.

He’s too English and polite to say something like that, which is part of what makes him a Rockstar. He and his brother Sam (the two are co-vice presidents of Rockstar Games) go out of their way to make sure we know their products (whether 2006’s Bully or 2010’s award winning Red Dead Redemption) are a team effort from start to finish. So any interview with either Houser brother is a treat. I found this Hollywood Reporter interview after discovering Rockstar’s next game, a “violent crime thriller” set in the Golden Age of Hollywood called L.A. Noire, will (for all intents and purposes) premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on April 25.

Houser is the producer of six GTA games, the writer of nine (plus RDR and Bully) and a voice actor in five. As anyone who’s even glanced at the games should be able to tell, he and his brother developed a deep, abiding love of American crime films in early childhood. From their work we can see influences ranging from Scarface to Boyz in the Hood to the James Bond franchise to last year’s cookie-cutter anti-Terrorist action films. It became more than loving homage somewhere around 2004, with the release of the sprawling San Andreas. That’s when I personally realized the Houser brothers have recreated their childhood dreams. Like so many of us who lived within easy range of a video rental store, what the two really gained was an abiding love of telling stories. They’ve just chosen to apply the lessons of influential films to video games, leading to many a critical use of the term “cinematic” as a complement.

This time, Houser cites The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Naked City, Out of the Past, Chinatown and L.A. Confidential as inspirations for L.A. Noire’s setting and tone. He then drops the following bit of Wisdom:

“Virtually all movies made from games are awful, while many games made from movies are also pretty horrible. This will change, but with an ever more discerning audience, the goals of taking something from film-to-game or game-to-film have to be more than financial. If you feel the property has something about it that is universal or could work in another medium, and it is not simply about making easy money, then that is something worthwhile.”

Something we should all take to heart. The entire interview is filled with golden nuggets like this.

Beyond that, we have the larger fact: no matter how cool Houser might try to play it, his is the first video game ever honored by a major film festival. And in New York. If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere. I can’t imagine what Roger Ebert will make of this. Then again, he loves noir the same way I love Japanese monster movies. And L.A. Noire seems to do for its genre what Red Dead Redemption did for the Western: give it a big, sloppy, thirty-plus hour kiss. If there was ever a video game designed for Roger Ebert, L.A. Noire is it.

That’s the secret to Rockstar’s success. Let Halo court the hardcore players who conform to tired stereotypes. Rockstar makes the games that appeal to people who don’t play video games. I was such a one. Sure I played a little Mario, but I sucked. And I didn’t care. Princess, mushrooms, evil turtles. Big deal. Then in 2001 (when GTA protagonists were still silent) a friend passed me a Playstation 2 controller. I’ve never looked back.

He may not be the most famous indie director in the world. With the release of Super, he probably won’t even be the most famous one in the nerd-controlled corners of the internet where I stake my claim. But Thomas McCarthy has had one of the most extraordinary careers of any director currently working the publicity circuit.

His third film, Win Win is now playing, and if this is the first you’ve heard of Tom, you are not alone. Given that McCarthy started out as the proverbial actor who really wants to direct, odds are you’ve seen him more than you’ve heard about him. He’s played Dr. Bob in the never-ending Meeting the Parents franchise, a shady reporter in The Wire’s last season, three characters on Law & Order, and one love interest on Alley McBeal. I know him as one of the many Crusading Teachers of Boston Public, because I have a unspeakable addiction to David E. Kelley dramedy. McCarthy only really escaped the TV ghetto in 2003, the same year he made his first film, The Station Agent, which won every Independent Film Award that matters (and even a few that don’t).

The Station Agent starred Peter Dinklage (since seen in…god, what would you have seen him in? The seven episodes of Nip/Tuck he’s been in?) as a friendless city slicker who rediscovers friendship and love in the most romantic place on Earth: rural New Jersey.

Win Win takes place in the same, savage land of Kevin Smith and Bruce Springsteen. A land that, for all its flaws, is all warm, comforting, fuzzy and triumphant in its own, quietly defiant, New Jersey way.

Which is part of why I found this interview with McCarthy in my old home town paper, the Kansas City Star, so hilarious. I try to avoid being too patronizing and paternalistic towards my home region…but sometimes, the naivete of its press is downright cute. McCarthy casts a dwarf as a leading man, and that’s all it takes to make him an “art-house” director in the Star’s eyes. God, I remember a time when I lived in the Midwest and didn’t know what “art-house” really meant either.

If you’ll pardon me for a moment, I’d like to give big ups to Highland Light Productions, a Vancouver, WA based film company that just finished wrapping its first feature, Dancing on the Edge. The film is a $200,000 first time effort from Alexander MacKenzie, star of Flophouse (2002) and The Hunted (2003).

MacKenzie is also the president and CEO of Highland Lights, pulling three more shifts as Dancing on the Edge’s writer/producer/director. At age 63, the veteran character actor looks like he stepped from the back of a Tom Clancy novel. He’s the kind of man who unironically refers to his home town of Vancouver as “The Couv.” I thought that was just a slur snobbish Portlanders like me dreamed up, but apparently our neighbors to the north have embraced it. You go, guys. Take the words back.

To be fair, it’s not easy for irony to come through in text, and Dancing on the Edge sounds like an absurdly earnest production. A labor of love, detailing a teenage ballerina’s struggles with substance abuse.

So what if everyone will mistake it for a Black Swan rip-off? You wanna know what I love? MacKenzie lays out a radical critique of every fly-by-night feature film and shitty TV movie that ever exploited the Pacific Northwest to great profit in exchange for a three-week cash injection to the local economy. I’m looking at you, Captain America II: Death Too Soon. Even better, the Columbian actually quotes him as saying

“I got tired of seeing crews come into town, spend some money, but then leave and take the big profits with them.”

MacKenzie has sworn to make “family-friendly entertainment while generating jobs and enriching the local economy.” And I say more power to him. We need this if we’re ever to break the backs of the Big Six and end the tyranny of empty, stupid, popcorn flicks. And Philip K. Dick adaptions that chicken out in the Third Act by resorting to Deus ex machinas.

Sorry. I saw The Adjustment Bureau over the weekend. In Vancouver’s own Cinetopia Theaters! Ha-ha! Tenuous segues!

So the big news of the weekend, to the surprise of absolutely no one, was the astonishing failure of Zack Snyder’s latest, Sucker Punch. But I don’t really want to talk about that, or its implications for the Superman franchise. (By the way, The Fighter’s Amy Adams will be our next Lois Lane.) But I don’t want to talk about that. That title was my insidious hook, meant to snag your eyes and glue them to this page. Ain’t I a stinker?

No, I want to talk about the Wimpy Kid…franchise, I guess…Its second film cleaned Snyder’s clock, revealing once again that, whether we like it or not, we’re living in a post- Twilight world.

Children’s book author Jeff Kinney published his first Wimpy Kid book in 2007, just as Stephanie Meyer’s vampire abstinence porn slid through Development Hell. The Wimpy Kid series now stands at six volumes. Two more, and it’ll eclipse J.K. Rowling’s yarn, who stands in back of both Meyer and Kinney, the progenitor of the modern “children’s” fantasy franchise.

Don’t be fooled by reviewers who mistake The Wimpy Kid for some form of realism. They’re just repressing. It happens. Instead, consider The Wimpy Kid a proper heir to Meyer’s sparkly vampire franchise. The first film only pulled down $11 million overseas but $54 million domestic is nothing to sneeze at, especially if your film cost $15 to make and didn’t get marketed worth crap. It’s perfect for the home audience: glorifying that great American institution, childhood, in a way that doesn’t cost so damn much money.

This is a great time for children’s fantasy authors of any stripe, but the lower your budget, the better your chances of selling out. Just thought I’d share the trend I’d noticed in my years of watching Amazon.com’s children’s best sellers become number #1 hit movies. What Young Adult fiction would you rather see translated for the silver screen? Never touch the stuff, myself. Too many comic books to read.

Meanwhile, the Boston Independent Film Festival announced its 2011 lineup. I’m only announcing it down here because IFFBoston hasn’t posted any official synopses yet. At this point, we have only the unofficial ones. Like this one from Dead Central.

Fortune’s called it, so the writing’s on the wall: Zediva, perhaps the most-hyped Netflix rival of the year, has officially flopped. All those clarion calls announcing Hollywood’s impending fall crashed on the rocks of server overload. Heck, the service they’re offering might not even be legal.

In the week since the new-release streaming movie site announced itself to the public, visitors (by which I mean me) have gone crossed-eyed staring at it’s Registration Full page. Even existing users, who spent the last year presumably helping the site ready itself for prime time, are reporting large-scale slow downs and further debut hullabaloo.

I hope everyone’s learned something form the experience. Specifically, I hope they’ve all learned what not to do when rolling out a new movie rental site. I was going to critique their catalog’s limited selection, or the abysmal load times of their movies, or any of a dozen other stock things we critics love to complain about. But, of course, I can’t even get in for that. So I’m forced to critique Zediva itself, which is why the site’s word of mouth died such a quick and squishy death this week. Forget allowing everyone to browse their catalog alphabetically: how about browsing the catalog, period?

The more complex your site’s overall architecture, the longer it should be in beta, and the more I learn about the way Zediva’s railroad runs, the more I wonder “How could they not have seen this coming?” Basically, Zediva’s doing an end-run around the current legal framing of the Great Copyright Debate. They’re not streaming their moves from some central data hub stocked with torrent copies. No. Instead, your $1.99 secures you access to the stream from one of (I assume) a half-dozen DVD players Zediva owns, stocked like jukeboxes with legitimately purchased, newly released movies in boring shiny-disc-only format.

Zediva flacks liken its service to a library, lending out both hard- and software to the consumer for a price. A more apt metaphor rises from the swampy depths of my memory: video stores renting out video game consoles for a nominal fee, allowing everyone to rent their games without going through the hassle of buying every console in a generation.

Problem is, there are an astonishing amount of bottlenecks in this set-up. Zedvia must’ve realized this would happen. How could you not plan for something like this? It’s only one of the most common occurrences on the internet. Everyone trumpeted their $1.99 new release rentals. Find me a popular website that hasn’t had to deal with this crap. Odds are they were doing a lot more than just offering up DVD streams. Not that Zediva’s accepting any responsibility for it’s own bumbling. No, like any good business, it’s gone on to blame the very media attention it encouraged. As CEO Venky Srinivasan put in Zediva’s most-recent blog post (as of this writing):

“When we spoke to the press, we sensed that they were excited by the story. Though we could hardly imagine what was to follow. Just about everyone we spoke to, immediately published a story. Within a day, we were covered in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, just about every major news outlet — and dozens of others. Getting featured on the Yahoo! homepage drove huge volumes of traffic our way, and our servers got overwhelmed. We were disappointed that we couldn’t handle the traffic.”

You and me both, Srinivasan.

As if we didn’t have enough frightful news knocking about, Deadline threw another log on the fire on March 17 with its announcement that Darren Black Swan Aronofsky (I’m sorry…I meant to say “Academy Award-nominated director Darren Aronofsky”) will not be directing Fox’s forthcoming The Wolverine.

As long-time readers of these missives (both of you) might remember, my write-up of Aronofsky’s initial involvement was one of my first contributions to Cinelogue, allowing me to kick this whole “Wire” thing off on what, at the time, felt like the best possible note. My initial misgivings about becoming a “content writer” were basically laid to rest when I saw Aronofsky’s name next to Hugh Jackman’s face. Here, I thought, was the perfect intermingling of my world and Cinelogue’s. My personal interests necessitate I keep close tabs on the Big Six and all the other major players in our unfortunate industry, meaning I come to the world of “independent” film with only marginal familiarity.

But by God, I remembered Requium for a Dream and I read Wolverine comics back in the character’s brown-and-gold Dark Ages, before everyone and their mom knew him as a poor man’s Clint Eastwood protagonist and he could actually kill people on screen in variously interesting and gruesome ways. News that Aronofsky would direct the sequel to 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine (or X-MOW, as I’ve come to call it, because it sounds funnier when I say it with a posh British accent) hit me like a slippery fish, not because of the film itself, so much as what I felt it represented.

We’ve seen a lot of this in recent years: bright, young, talented directors exchanging their fresh ideas and unrealized creative urges for the golden leash that is a big budget, “mainstream,” “summer” movie. The most famous example (i.e., the one I can think about without recourse to a search engine) is the great disaster of last year’s summer season: M. Night Shyamalan’s Last Airbender. If a film could only shout out its director’s intentions with every frame, The Last Airbender would’ve screamed “This is my last chance, you bastards! You didn’t appreciate my genius! Now look at me! And look at this! You think I wanna do this? I didn’t have a choice!”

I find it symptomatic of the downward spiral that’s seized American moviemaking, both at the corporate and (more importantly) the artistic levels. Movies suck, so fewer people go to movies, so studios make less money, so studios stop making movies, focusing instead on making short-term, quick-fix, cash injection machines. Unfortunately, no one in Hollywood really knows how to manufacture such devices, and the only people movie studios really know are moviemakers. A movie is not an ATM, but try telling that to (oh, say, for example) 20th Century Fox, who’ve never hesitated to run profitable franchises aground in the name of making them more marketable. So they lean on filmmakers to make something other than a film. More often than not, the resulting movie sucks. So fewer people go to the movies…

“But,” say the studios, “we’re going to counter this by hiring actual directors with actual credibility among the ‘independent’ set.” Like Aronofsky. “Then, we’ll wave our big-ticket projects in their faces, get ‘em entranced with the glitz of working on a comic book film or some stupid cartoon/toy-commercial movie.” To your average suit, “independence” equals “ignorance of how things operate ‘round these parts,” making the “independent” director with the “artistic” vision theoretically more controllable than the kinds of B-list no-namers who toiled through the 1990s making sci-fi movies no one saw unless we haunted video stores.

Unless they up and leave your ass, as Aronofsky has Fox, claiming that The Wolverine ‘s year-long shooting schedule would keep him too long away from his family. That’s a disgraced politician’s excuse, everyone knows it and, thankfully, the internet (specifically Cinema Blend) has already called him on it. We all know he wanted more control over the film than Fox was willing to give. We can subsequently guess the studio countered by offering him more money, and Aronofsky told them where to stick it. We’ve heard this story before. But even the shameless gossip mongers are quick to add that their “Real Reason Darren Aronofsky Isn’t Directing Wolverine 2” is based on “rumor and speculation in the absence of secondary confirmation.”

Well, excuse me, but we’re never going to get “secondary confirmation” until months after the film’s in theaters. That’s if it tanks. If it succeeds (even by the purely-numeric metrics Hollywood uses to measure such things) we’ll get nothing but hours of feel-good, slap-happy, documentary extras on the Blu-ray release, composed entirely of cast and crew members talking about how the film was [insert director’s name here]‘s grand, holistic vision from Day One. Hollywood is a closed system of image management and public relations, with few willing to expose its shady backside even in the worst of times out of quite-reasonable fear for their own careers.

I’m under no such constraints, so I’m free to tell you Fox has been shitting on its directors for over a decade, especially when it comes to superhero movies. I was going to tell you the sad, sorry tale of Tom Rothman…but gosh darnit, his Wikipedia page has been scrubbed. And only a few days before the release of unfortunate news from Fox. What a coincidence. Were I an unscrupulous internet conspiracy theorist I might speculate that this was the deliberate move of some PR flack. Where, oh where will I find all that beautiful information? The multiple cached copies of Rothman’s Wikipedia page perhaps? Or the many, many, many sources contained therein.

But that’s a rant for another time. Darren Aronofsky’s left The Wolverine and now roams free, able to bring us his next (hopefully original) vision. What say you, true believers? I think you know where I stand.

While contemplating Sharktopus, I realized I’d made a major oversight sure to alienate me from the indie film in-crowd by not pushing South By Southwest. The annual Austin-based film/music/“interactive” festival is in full swing even as I type this. And their 2011 Film Lineup is a grab bag of obscure titles we’ll probably see a lot more of in the coming year.

We could just drill down through the data together and speculate about whose cuisine shall reign supreme, but one film immediately jumped out at me: James Gunn’s “indie black comedy” Super.

Gunn’s is one of the most interesting B-movie careers I’ve seen in a long time. Born in St. Louis, he got his fiction writing MFA from Columbia and earned his pedigree inside Troma Studios during their early-to-mid 90s decline. His first film was the under-appreciated Tromeo and Juliet, and the book he co-wrote with Tromeo co-director Lloyd Kaufman – “All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger” – has become something of a sacred text for indie genre filmmakers.

Gunn had all the makings of a D-list career, similar to Kaufman’s. Nothing too extravagant, but Gunn could obviously write and direct. He coulda been a contender…if his first major sale hadn’t been 2002’s Scooby-Doo movie.

Gunn’s post-Troma career took an even worse step in 2006, when he committed a cardinal sin by daring to have fun without Lloyd Kaufman’s express written permission. His Slither blended comedic and horrific story elements with that trademark Troma flare, but it did so by ripping off Night of the Creeps, Romero’s Dead films, and a little bit of nothing made by some Canadian hotshot in the 70s, name a’ Shivers. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The internet of 2006 apparently hadn’t.

Super tells the story of a man who decides to become a superhero after his wife leaves him for a drug dealer. The fact that it caught my eye (and set me on a quest to find out “who the hell’s this Gunn dude anyway?”) should come as no surprise to those of you who know me. BlackBook caught up with Gunn at the SXSW, and got the man to say his movie is “more modeled after post-modern fiction than a standard superhero story.”

For me, this is the equivalent of a writer/director erecting a gigantic neon sign designed to warn me away. Nevermind I’ve no idea what Gunn means by “post-modern fiction” (nobody knows what that means – that’s half the reason why it’s so “cool” to be “post-modern”). I know for a fact the only out-and-out good post-modern superhero movie to date – Kick-Ass – saved itself by embracing a Modernist philosophy…or having its main character vocalize some, at the very least.

“Three assholes laying into one guy while everybody else just watches, and you wanna know what’s wrong with me?” Will Gunn’s Frank D’Arbo spend the film learning what Matthew Vaughn’s Dave Lizewski knew before he even put on the tights? Will Super be the success Slither should’ve been, now that Gunn’s become the darling of the Real Life Super Hero community? Only time will tell me, but as soon as I know, I’ll tell you.

After six months and a few hundred repeats since its original airing back in September, Sharktopus is coming to DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, March 15.

Dinoshark, the next released from the Roger Corman Presents label, will come for us on DVD and Blu-ray April 26. I can only hope that Corman’s little half-hearted self-parody will spur interest in his older, better films. As far as I’m concerned, the man’s yet to top It Conquered the World. It certainly made for a wonderful episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Maybe if enough people pay $20 for a chance to examine Sharktopus someone will finally be able to tell me why it’s so darn popular.

Warner Bros. broke into the online streaming service this week by offering Facebook users the chance to rent The Dark Knight through that film’s Facebook page. For $3 (or 30 Facebook Credits) viewers can enjoy the film for 48 hours after purchase.

Question is, how many of Facebook’s 500 million users already own the film? Will those who haven’t bought it yet pay what used to be New Release price for a three year old movie? Will the novelty of Facebook and the announcements about The Dark Knight Rises push the film back into the front of our conscience? Is this Warner Brothers’ summer strategy in the face of Thor and Captain America?

Certainly cheaper than making a whole other film. Certainly cheaper than that Wonder Woman we all got our hopes up for. At least the TV series is finally set for this fall. From David “TV Warrior” Kelley, of all people. Cross your fingers.

Starting this week, opera lovers lucky enough to live near one of the seven hundred and fifty participating U.S. theaters will get a special treat: the theatrical debut of Francesca Zambello’s Royal Opera House production of Carmen. In 3D. Of course.

More than simple bandwagon-jumping, this Carmen looks more like the culmination of a recent ROH trend. In such a tough media environment, everyone’s frantically trying to adapt and survive. Even London’s premiere opera company is getting into diversification. The Financial Times has an excellent piece that waxes poetic on opera in general and the process that gave Carmen: 3D birth in particular, including the ROH’s 2007 acquisition of Opus Arte, the UK’s leading producer of classical performance DVDs. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it fascinating to hear an opera company press director say the same things movie studios said way back when they started buying up TV channels.

“We recognised,” Christopher Millard said, “that with developing technologies there was an opportunity to take greater control over the process rather than handing over to outsiders. And we also have more control over the life of it, so if it has a broadcast on television, we can then take it to cinemas.” And so, here we are…with Carmen. All three hours of it.

Director Julian Napier, whose previous work includes (and is pretty much limited to) 2003’s Starlight Express 3D seems to have armored himself against charges of “sophomore slump” by filming the world’s most famous opera, performed by the world’s most famous company. Nice gig if you can pull it off. Too bad for him, long-standing loyalties compel me to love Jean-Luc Godard’s 1983 adaption, First Name: Carmen above all others. The one where Carmen’s an ersatz Patty Hearst who falls in love with a bank guard and Godard’s his usual, French-and-therefore-insane self. Opera lovers looking for some cheap fun around the house are hereby ordered to check that one out. You’ll find a Carmen you’ve never seen before, and that’s an actual fact.