--j.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
Old Movies?
"Y'know, I don't like to call films 'old films.' Nobody ever says, 'have you read that old play by Shakespeare?' Or 'have you read that old book by Steinbeck?' Or 'did you hear that old symphony by Mozart?' Nobody ever says that. It's only 'old movies.' Well, I don't believe in that. I think they're older movies, and made in an earlier period, but they're not old if you haven't seen 'em--they're new."
--Peter Bogdanovich,
from the documentary BY BOGDANOVICH (2011)
--Peter Bogdanovich,
from the documentary BY BOGDANOVICH (2011)
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Bacon Breaking: Following THE FOLLOWING Season 1
Television tends to suck. It isn't true, as some have suggested, that recent years have seen a general turnaround in the quality of the medium in the U.S. For all the hype, most tv these days is the same old space-wasting seven-and-six it's always been. It is true, however, that these last few years have seen the appearance of a handful of tv-based projects that are often every bit as good as and sometimes even better than the best the cinema is presently offering. Realizing the fortune to be made in producing original programming, the
cable channels have provided creators with an environment wherein
content restrictions are much looser, wherein shows are free to be much
more daring in both their subject-matter and in their approach to it and
wherein one can survive and thrive with a much lower ratings-base than
on the big networks. As a consequence, the cable channels have become
the source of nearly all of the great tv work of recent years.[1] The much-vaunted Golden Age of Television in the 1950s was really, in its totality, a handful of great shows in a sea of otherwise forgettable ones and if that's what qualifies as a Golden Age when it comes to television, I suppose one could say we're living through one right now. I am, in general, a movie guy, not a tv guy. I'm no chauvinist on the point, but it is, initially at least, a well-founded prejudice. Still, I've managed to become embroiled in more television in the last two or three years than I had in the previous twenty combined.[2]
THE FOLLOWING, my subject here, appears on a major network--Fox--instead of cable. Monday saw the conclusion of its freshman season, which seems as good a time as any to offer up some thoughts on it.
The series tells the dark, very much film noir tale of former FBI hand Ryan Hardy, who, back when he still worked for The Man, once apprehended a brilliant and vicious serial killer named Joe Carroll. Carroll had been a professor of literature specializing in Romantic writers and particularly obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. He modeled his crimes on his interpretations of Poe's work. Hardy caught him in the middle of an attempted murder and managed to save the intended victim, but in their confrontation, he was grievously wounded. Grafted to a pacemaker as a result, he left the bureau, authored a bestseller about the case and took to combating his personal demons with demon rum. A decade later, Carroll escapes from prison and the bureau ropes in Hardy as an adviser. He manages to catch Carroll again, but only after the killer has managed to murder the last victim of his original killing spree--the one Hardy saved a decade earlier. It turns out Carroll has been spending every waking moment of his captivity devising his revenge on Ryan Hardy and he's been developing a cult following from prison, building a sort of twisted religion around Poe and attracting, via the internet, a coterie of killers, crazies and miscreants for the purpose of carrying out his plan.
As that basic outline suggests, THE FOLLOWING is, conceptually speaking, very derivative. There are big, meaty chunks of Thomas Harris in the stew ("Red Dragon", "The Silence of the Lambs" and their screen adaptations), along with bits of flicks like SE7EN, COPYCAT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, even James McTeigue's recent Poe flick THE RAVEN. The lifts are reflected in every physical aspect of the series, from the direction to the editing to the musical choices. It would, however, be wrong to simply dismiss THE FOLLOWING as just some rip-off. The series is the creation of SCREAM scribe Kevin Williamson, who always offers up appreciative tips of the hat to the genres in which he often works. THE FOLLOWING uses a few worn items from the toolkit of the better killer thrillers but the tale it tells is its own. The real question in judging it is, how well does it work?
And in season 1, it worked pretty damn well most of the time, which is no small accomplishment. While the series legitimately takes critical lumps for its conceptual cannibalization, the fact that it's being done as a single story in the serial (as opposed to episodic) television format does make it bold and even original. Pulling off a killer thriller in weekly installments is a daunting task. It's never been done before. It has never even been attempted. These sorts of stories work as features because filmmakers can put an audience on a roller-coaster, send them for a brief, white-knuckled ride, then, like any other roller-coaster, it reaches the end of the track and it's over. An open-ended series operating under the same rules is a roller-coaster that theoretically never ends. THE FOLLOWING tries to keep viewers on the edge of their seats in as close to perpetuity as it can manage, working at a much more intense pace than most television. Mirroring its noir roots, the atmosphere is one of pervasive evil and constant tension--dark, relentless and thick with the same divine air of doomed romanticism to which Carroll's followers are in thrall. The cultists are acting on a plan worked out by a brilliant mind over an extended period. Many of them have been living phony lives as strategically placed "sleepers" for years, just waiting to be activated so they can carry out their part in Carroll's grand scheme. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. The viewer is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they are, at all times, out there somewhere, plotting and carrying out something bad. Integrated into the narrative are tight, economical flashbacks, presented as the memories of the various players in the tale. They're never gratuitous digressions--they're always triggered by events in the present and flesh out the characters, filling in their respective backgrounds. Prior to its premier, a major selling-point of the show was that it marked the television series debut of Kevin Bacon and as Ryan, he's as rock-solid as he's always been, but the show sports a top-shelf cast all the way around.
Not everything about THE FOLLOWING's freshman season worked though. After a great opening salvo of episodes, it made some wrong turns and, for a time, lost its way.
One of the downsides of attempting an open-ended killer thriller is that the less plausible elements that crop up in most such tales--elements that, as long as they aren't overly distracting, can be regarded as a minor flaw in an otherwise good feature film--can become cumulative in a serial. THE FOLLOWING is a fantasy and contrary to the assertions of some mouthy internet critics, it need not hew to documentary realism, but when it comes to putting an audience on this kind of roller-coaster, a great deal of care should be taken to avoid letting things go too far off the tracks in terms of believability, and, unfortunately, this care wasn't always present. The first major credibility hole was blown through the show in the 6th episode ("The Fall"). Overall, it's a great piece of work but its conclusion sinks it like a stone. The background is that a trio of cultists have kidnapped Carroll's son Joey, swiping him from his mother's home, and have been holding him in a remote farmhouse. When, in this episode, its location is uncovered, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies move in, completely surrounding the place. Ludicrously, the cultists are still able to escape with both the boy and relative ease (though one is badly wounded). This led to a tidal-wave of complaints among internet reviewers about the comic incompetence of the feds on the show, which snowballed to the point that anything that could even remotely be interpreted as less than omnicompetent behavior by law enforcement was used to prop up a growing caricature of THE FOLLOWING as a show wherein cretinous cops who couldn't catch a cold in a blizzard were an integral part of the premise. A large number of the complaints that emerged from this were legitimate. An even larger number were not. The damage was done though. That caricature became, from that point, the prism through which a lot of viewers saw the series.[3]
An even more serious misstep occurs in the very next episode, "Let Me Go," wherein it's revealed that Carroll's cult is communally camped out in a sprawling mansion! As bad an idea as that is on its own, given their activities, the cultists, when filing out of the house to welcome Carroll (who has escaped from prison a second time), are absurdly vast in number--far more followers than is either remotely plausible or necessary. THE FOLLOWING is essentially a personal revenge story. Joe Carroll isn't just angry at Hardy for catching him; he's burned that Hardy struck up a brief romance with his ex-wife Claire after his arrest. It became serious. Hardy resists relationships. Claire loved him and became the love of his life. He gave her up for what he thought were noble reasons but he still loves her and Carroll hates him for it. Carroll put together his cult to enact revenge on Hardy, to murder innocents and make Hardy feel responsibility for it, to make Hardy absolutely miserable. To break him. Carroll is even making a book of it--"our sequel," he calls it (he refers to the horrible missions with which he assigns his followers as "chapters"). When Carroll is revealed to have an entire army camped out in a huge mansion, this immediately suggests there's something much bigger in the works, that we're no longer seeing the intimate story of personal revenge it had been up to that point. The fundamental nature of the tale is altered and it's revealed to be a different one, one to which viewers have no connection and in which they have no investment.
Worse still, the writers continued down this path in subsequent episodes, yet that much bigger event to which they make such a show of building never happens and its substance, if there ever was any, is never revealed. Cultist Roderick, who is, at the time, Carroll's right-hand man, urges Carroll to order the cult to begin this larger scheme, whatever it is. He stresses this, tells Carroll the people assembled at the compound have given up everything for him, that they're quite anxious to get started, that delay is causing a morale problem. The cult is revealed to be involved with nut-right militia people who are providing cultists with paramilitary training. The cult is stockpiling weapons and explosives. As all of this is playing out over multiple episodes, none of it seems connected to anything we've been shown--a fact even the characters are made to comment upon within the story--and as the story continues, none of it ever is connected either. The FBI finds and seizes a cult training compound and whatever grand plan of which it was supposed to play a part is a plot thread that is just sort of allowed to peter out. Were the series' writers simply burning through screentime with all of this? Were they toying with ideas, and unsure of how to proceed?
The latter seems a strong possibility, as the writing, during this stretch of the series, became quite spotty in general. The period from about episodes 10-13 is the nadir of season 1. The series still manages some great--a few even masterly--moments, but it becomes very unfocused, generally mediocre and often quite stupid--mostly a chore, to watch, rather than the joy it had been earlier. The final two episodes, though encumbered by the baggage of what came immediately before, right the ship, to an extent, and are much sharper. A good cliffhanger to end the season.
So THE FOLLOWING season 1 is sort of a mixed bag. It can be dumb, uneven, wildly implausible and even dull. At the same time, it has an intriguing premise, a rock-solid cast, it's well-paced, features lots of twists of plot that keep the audience guessing and its technical merits are uniformly superb.
Its greatest strength, though, is that it manages to get on screen one scene after another of remarkable power, intensity, audacity, originality, ugliness, even, at times, brilliance. The series, at the outset, had a real edge to it, one it never entirely lost. You saw things on it almost every week that had never appeared on a mainstream television screen. At one point, the trio of cultists who have taken Carroll's young son send the boy's mother a video wherein they're gleefully teaching the child to kill things. The three, Jacob, Emma and Paul, are the subject of much attention and find themselves in a twisted love triangle. Jacob's big, embarrassing secret, which he's concealed from his murderous girlfriend (Emma), is that he's never killed anyone. When Paul, who is in on this secret, feels left out after Jacob and Emma reunite, he kidnaps a girl from a local convenience store and ties her in the basement for his own convenience. It's quickly decided she must go, and Jacob, being a virgin, is assigned the task of carving her up. He just can't bring himself to do it and releases her instead. The other two hunt her down as she tries to escape but rather than finishing her off, they simply tie her in the basement again for Jacob to kill later. Jacob finds Emma and Paul in the shower together. "We're not giving up on you," Emma assures him, and they share a group hug beneath the warm spray. A wonderfully twisted moment.[4] Jacob later does finally get to kill someone, but it isn't someone he'd have ever wanted to kill and it provides another incredibly powerful emotional--and transgressive--scene. Ryan gets his share of these big moments as well. His background, as filled in via flashbacks, reveal him to be the kind of tormented Romantic hero Carroll says he is, perpetually surrounded by death. Cursed by it, even. He gave up the love of his life because, he says, he thought he'd be a perpetual reminder of the period of madness through which she'd just passed with Joe Carroll. The real reason, which he never directly admits, is that he gave her up because he feared being close to him would doom her. Something as simple as a moment wherein Claire is trying, rather desperately, to talk Ryan into letting her make some breakfast for him is invested with a remarkable degree of depth and feeling after their relationship has been explained. Even when the series was scraping bottom, it threw in a remarkable series of flashbacks of Ryan, as a teen, witnessing his father's death at the hands of a junkie who was robbing a convenience store. What young Ryan did about this (and has never revealed to anyone) is another jaw-dropper moment. These scenes appear throughout the series and become the things one remembers most of all from this season.
The strengths of THE FOLLOWING are significant. In my view, they outweigh its legitimate weaknesses, though after that rough patch of episodes I'm not sure how strenuously I'd argue against someone who disagreed. Its future is questionable--one of its legitimate weaknesses is that the current storyline probably won't prove sustainable over a long haul of many seasons, particularly after the events of the season finale--but if this can be said to be a new Golden Age of Television, THE FOLLOWING has done enough to earn a slot among the age's noteworthies. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck.
--j.
---
[1] Though not all; see ELEMENTARY on CBS and HANNIBAL on NBC--both currently matched against one another on Thursday nights.
[2] Among the best of current tv are AMC's HELL ON WHEELS, MAD MEN, and, most especially, BREAKING BAD (perhaps the single best thing television has ever produced), the History Channel's VIKINGS, and A&E's BATES MOTEL.
[3] The show never hits that extreme a level of implausibility again, but there were far too many moments that abused the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief.
[4] Paul and Jacob are revealed to be bisexual and their sexuality is used as an example of their twisted, evil nature, which is a typically negative portrayal of queerness. THE FOLLOWING later redeems itself, though, by making the viewers care about them and feel for them when their situation turns bleak.
The series tells the dark, very much film noir tale of former FBI hand Ryan Hardy, who, back when he still worked for The Man, once apprehended a brilliant and vicious serial killer named Joe Carroll. Carroll had been a professor of literature specializing in Romantic writers and particularly obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe. He modeled his crimes on his interpretations of Poe's work. Hardy caught him in the middle of an attempted murder and managed to save the intended victim, but in their confrontation, he was grievously wounded. Grafted to a pacemaker as a result, he left the bureau, authored a bestseller about the case and took to combating his personal demons with demon rum. A decade later, Carroll escapes from prison and the bureau ropes in Hardy as an adviser. He manages to catch Carroll again, but only after the killer has managed to murder the last victim of his original killing spree--the one Hardy saved a decade earlier. It turns out Carroll has been spending every waking moment of his captivity devising his revenge on Ryan Hardy and he's been developing a cult following from prison, building a sort of twisted religion around Poe and attracting, via the internet, a coterie of killers, crazies and miscreants for the purpose of carrying out his plan.
As that basic outline suggests, THE FOLLOWING is, conceptually speaking, very derivative. There are big, meaty chunks of Thomas Harris in the stew ("Red Dragon", "The Silence of the Lambs" and their screen adaptations), along with bits of flicks like SE7EN, COPYCAT, IN THE LINE OF FIRE, even James McTeigue's recent Poe flick THE RAVEN. The lifts are reflected in every physical aspect of the series, from the direction to the editing to the musical choices. It would, however, be wrong to simply dismiss THE FOLLOWING as just some rip-off. The series is the creation of SCREAM scribe Kevin Williamson, who always offers up appreciative tips of the hat to the genres in which he often works. THE FOLLOWING uses a few worn items from the toolkit of the better killer thrillers but the tale it tells is its own. The real question in judging it is, how well does it work?
And in season 1, it worked pretty damn well most of the time, which is no small accomplishment. While the series legitimately takes critical lumps for its conceptual cannibalization, the fact that it's being done as a single story in the serial (as opposed to episodic) television format does make it bold and even original. Pulling off a killer thriller in weekly installments is a daunting task. It's never been done before. It has never even been attempted. These sorts of stories work as features because filmmakers can put an audience on a roller-coaster, send them for a brief, white-knuckled ride, then, like any other roller-coaster, it reaches the end of the track and it's over. An open-ended series operating under the same rules is a roller-coaster that theoretically never ends. THE FOLLOWING tries to keep viewers on the edge of their seats in as close to perpetuity as it can manage, working at a much more intense pace than most television. Mirroring its noir roots, the atmosphere is one of pervasive evil and constant tension--dark, relentless and thick with the same divine air of doomed romanticism to which Carroll's followers are in thrall. The cultists are acting on a plan worked out by a brilliant mind over an extended period. Many of them have been living phony lives as strategically placed "sleepers" for years, just waiting to be activated so they can carry out their part in Carroll's grand scheme. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. The viewer is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they are, at all times, out there somewhere, plotting and carrying out something bad. Integrated into the narrative are tight, economical flashbacks, presented as the memories of the various players in the tale. They're never gratuitous digressions--they're always triggered by events in the present and flesh out the characters, filling in their respective backgrounds. Prior to its premier, a major selling-point of the show was that it marked the television series debut of Kevin Bacon and as Ryan, he's as rock-solid as he's always been, but the show sports a top-shelf cast all the way around.
Not everything about THE FOLLOWING's freshman season worked though. After a great opening salvo of episodes, it made some wrong turns and, for a time, lost its way.
One of the downsides of attempting an open-ended killer thriller is that the less plausible elements that crop up in most such tales--elements that, as long as they aren't overly distracting, can be regarded as a minor flaw in an otherwise good feature film--can become cumulative in a serial. THE FOLLOWING is a fantasy and contrary to the assertions of some mouthy internet critics, it need not hew to documentary realism, but when it comes to putting an audience on this kind of roller-coaster, a great deal of care should be taken to avoid letting things go too far off the tracks in terms of believability, and, unfortunately, this care wasn't always present. The first major credibility hole was blown through the show in the 6th episode ("The Fall"). Overall, it's a great piece of work but its conclusion sinks it like a stone. The background is that a trio of cultists have kidnapped Carroll's son Joey, swiping him from his mother's home, and have been holding him in a remote farmhouse. When, in this episode, its location is uncovered, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies move in, completely surrounding the place. Ludicrously, the cultists are still able to escape with both the boy and relative ease (though one is badly wounded). This led to a tidal-wave of complaints among internet reviewers about the comic incompetence of the feds on the show, which snowballed to the point that anything that could even remotely be interpreted as less than omnicompetent behavior by law enforcement was used to prop up a growing caricature of THE FOLLOWING as a show wherein cretinous cops who couldn't catch a cold in a blizzard were an integral part of the premise. A large number of the complaints that emerged from this were legitimate. An even larger number were not. The damage was done though. That caricature became, from that point, the prism through which a lot of viewers saw the series.[3]
An even more serious misstep occurs in the very next episode, "Let Me Go," wherein it's revealed that Carroll's cult is communally camped out in a sprawling mansion! As bad an idea as that is on its own, given their activities, the cultists, when filing out of the house to welcome Carroll (who has escaped from prison a second time), are absurdly vast in number--far more followers than is either remotely plausible or necessary. THE FOLLOWING is essentially a personal revenge story. Joe Carroll isn't just angry at Hardy for catching him; he's burned that Hardy struck up a brief romance with his ex-wife Claire after his arrest. It became serious. Hardy resists relationships. Claire loved him and became the love of his life. He gave her up for what he thought were noble reasons but he still loves her and Carroll hates him for it. Carroll put together his cult to enact revenge on Hardy, to murder innocents and make Hardy feel responsibility for it, to make Hardy absolutely miserable. To break him. Carroll is even making a book of it--"our sequel," he calls it (he refers to the horrible missions with which he assigns his followers as "chapters"). When Carroll is revealed to have an entire army camped out in a huge mansion, this immediately suggests there's something much bigger in the works, that we're no longer seeing the intimate story of personal revenge it had been up to that point. The fundamental nature of the tale is altered and it's revealed to be a different one, one to which viewers have no connection and in which they have no investment.
Worse still, the writers continued down this path in subsequent episodes, yet that much bigger event to which they make such a show of building never happens and its substance, if there ever was any, is never revealed. Cultist Roderick, who is, at the time, Carroll's right-hand man, urges Carroll to order the cult to begin this larger scheme, whatever it is. He stresses this, tells Carroll the people assembled at the compound have given up everything for him, that they're quite anxious to get started, that delay is causing a morale problem. The cult is revealed to be involved with nut-right militia people who are providing cultists with paramilitary training. The cult is stockpiling weapons and explosives. As all of this is playing out over multiple episodes, none of it seems connected to anything we've been shown--a fact even the characters are made to comment upon within the story--and as the story continues, none of it ever is connected either. The FBI finds and seizes a cult training compound and whatever grand plan of which it was supposed to play a part is a plot thread that is just sort of allowed to peter out. Were the series' writers simply burning through screentime with all of this? Were they toying with ideas, and unsure of how to proceed?
The latter seems a strong possibility, as the writing, during this stretch of the series, became quite spotty in general. The period from about episodes 10-13 is the nadir of season 1. The series still manages some great--a few even masterly--moments, but it becomes very unfocused, generally mediocre and often quite stupid--mostly a chore, to watch, rather than the joy it had been earlier. The final two episodes, though encumbered by the baggage of what came immediately before, right the ship, to an extent, and are much sharper. A good cliffhanger to end the season.
So THE FOLLOWING season 1 is sort of a mixed bag. It can be dumb, uneven, wildly implausible and even dull. At the same time, it has an intriguing premise, a rock-solid cast, it's well-paced, features lots of twists of plot that keep the audience guessing and its technical merits are uniformly superb.
Its greatest strength, though, is that it manages to get on screen one scene after another of remarkable power, intensity, audacity, originality, ugliness, even, at times, brilliance. The series, at the outset, had a real edge to it, one it never entirely lost. You saw things on it almost every week that had never appeared on a mainstream television screen. At one point, the trio of cultists who have taken Carroll's young son send the boy's mother a video wherein they're gleefully teaching the child to kill things. The three, Jacob, Emma and Paul, are the subject of much attention and find themselves in a twisted love triangle. Jacob's big, embarrassing secret, which he's concealed from his murderous girlfriend (Emma), is that he's never killed anyone. When Paul, who is in on this secret, feels left out after Jacob and Emma reunite, he kidnaps a girl from a local convenience store and ties her in the basement for his own convenience. It's quickly decided she must go, and Jacob, being a virgin, is assigned the task of carving her up. He just can't bring himself to do it and releases her instead. The other two hunt her down as she tries to escape but rather than finishing her off, they simply tie her in the basement again for Jacob to kill later. Jacob finds Emma and Paul in the shower together. "We're not giving up on you," Emma assures him, and they share a group hug beneath the warm spray. A wonderfully twisted moment.[4] Jacob later does finally get to kill someone, but it isn't someone he'd have ever wanted to kill and it provides another incredibly powerful emotional--and transgressive--scene. Ryan gets his share of these big moments as well. His background, as filled in via flashbacks, reveal him to be the kind of tormented Romantic hero Carroll says he is, perpetually surrounded by death. Cursed by it, even. He gave up the love of his life because, he says, he thought he'd be a perpetual reminder of the period of madness through which she'd just passed with Joe Carroll. The real reason, which he never directly admits, is that he gave her up because he feared being close to him would doom her. Something as simple as a moment wherein Claire is trying, rather desperately, to talk Ryan into letting her make some breakfast for him is invested with a remarkable degree of depth and feeling after their relationship has been explained. Even when the series was scraping bottom, it threw in a remarkable series of flashbacks of Ryan, as a teen, witnessing his father's death at the hands of a junkie who was robbing a convenience store. What young Ryan did about this (and has never revealed to anyone) is another jaw-dropper moment. These scenes appear throughout the series and become the things one remembers most of all from this season.
The strengths of THE FOLLOWING are significant. In my view, they outweigh its legitimate weaknesses, though after that rough patch of episodes I'm not sure how strenuously I'd argue against someone who disagreed. Its future is questionable--one of its legitimate weaknesses is that the current storyline probably won't prove sustainable over a long haul of many seasons, particularly after the events of the season finale--but if this can be said to be a new Golden Age of Television, THE FOLLOWING has done enough to earn a slot among the age's noteworthies. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck.
--j.
---
[1] Though not all; see ELEMENTARY on CBS and HANNIBAL on NBC--both currently matched against one another on Thursday nights.
[2] Among the best of current tv are AMC's HELL ON WHEELS, MAD MEN, and, most especially, BREAKING BAD (perhaps the single best thing television has ever produced), the History Channel's VIKINGS, and A&E's BATES MOTEL.
[3] The show never hits that extreme a level of implausibility again, but there were far too many moments that abused the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief.
[4] Paul and Jacob are revealed to be bisexual and their sexuality is used as an example of their twisted, evil nature, which is a typically negative portrayal of queerness. THE FOLLOWING later redeems itself, though, by making the viewers care about them and feel for them when their situation turns bleak.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
SCREAMs and Scream Again And Again
In the success of SCREAM, there was a lot of irony to go around. The slasher subgenre had virtually consumed the larger horror genre in the 1980s but it had gone into decline as that decade had progressed and by the end of the Reagan era, it was, in effect, dead and gone. By 1996, it had been dead and gone long enough that a fellow named Kevin Williamson could come along and write a loving homage to it, one that thoroughly deconstructed it and, by doing so, killed it for good and provided it a far better epitaph than it ever deserved. That was SCREAM. After the film suffered an embarrassingly poor opening weekend, word began to get around. It took off like a rocket and the film that should have ended the slashers brought them, instead, roaring back to life for a few more years.
"Life," there, shouldn't be read to suggest there was any real vitality in what followed. The slashers had, as a rule, been creatively bankrupt from birth and the trend set off by SCREAM was more about trying to ape the elements--and, hopefully, the success--of SCREAM. One of those elements, the one on which I'm going to narrowly focus here, was SCREAM's poster artwork. For a long time, I've had the idea of putting together a series of posts on the general degradation of the art of the movie one-sheet. In this era of Photoshopped "big faces" posters, even calling this an "art" anymore often stretches the meaning of the word to the breaking point. It's often--and correctly--noted that, in Hollywood, nothing succeeds like success, and any successful film is liable to see its poster artwork copied at some point. SCREAM, however, features what is probably the most copied artwork in the history of cinema. The knock-offs began appearing almost immediately, and have continued for over 16 years, as of this writing.[1] Their subjects quickly moved beyond the mere SCREAM-sploitation pictures; SCREAM knock-off posters were used for all manner of horrors, for sci-fi movies, action pictures, war dramas, even comedies.
What I've assembled here is just a little survey of this phenomenon. It is by no means, comprehensive--the subject is so enormous, I doubt anyone even could prepare one that covers it all. What's here is sufficient to make my point.
When SCREAM first appeared right at the end of 1996, this line of fresh, young faces decorated the artwork one found in the can at one's local movie house:
It was obvious that just about everything about SCREAM--except the fact that it was good--weighed heavily on the creators of this next picture (among them, SCREAM's own Kevin Williamson) when it turned up later that same year:
In 1997, SCREAM 2 also turned up. Copying itself, it would, itself, be often copied:
Some versions, such as this French one, removed the line of faces--I include it because it, too, is copied later:
This little sci-fi thriller also appeared, with a very appropriate title, insofar as its artwork is concerned:
The following year, 1998, someone took MIMIC up on its title:
The ad guys trying to get out the word on THE BRIDE OF CHUCKY had seen the poster for SCREAM 2:
The poster for the 4th entry in the LETHAL WEAPON series SCREAMed:
"Life," there, shouldn't be read to suggest there was any real vitality in what followed. The slashers had, as a rule, been creatively bankrupt from birth and the trend set off by SCREAM was more about trying to ape the elements--and, hopefully, the success--of SCREAM. One of those elements, the one on which I'm going to narrowly focus here, was SCREAM's poster artwork. For a long time, I've had the idea of putting together a series of posts on the general degradation of the art of the movie one-sheet. In this era of Photoshopped "big faces" posters, even calling this an "art" anymore often stretches the meaning of the word to the breaking point. It's often--and correctly--noted that, in Hollywood, nothing succeeds like success, and any successful film is liable to see its poster artwork copied at some point. SCREAM, however, features what is probably the most copied artwork in the history of cinema. The knock-offs began appearing almost immediately, and have continued for over 16 years, as of this writing.[1] Their subjects quickly moved beyond the mere SCREAM-sploitation pictures; SCREAM knock-off posters were used for all manner of horrors, for sci-fi movies, action pictures, war dramas, even comedies.
What I've assembled here is just a little survey of this phenomenon. It is by no means, comprehensive--the subject is so enormous, I doubt anyone even could prepare one that covers it all. What's here is sufficient to make my point.
When SCREAM first appeared right at the end of 1996, this line of fresh, young faces decorated the artwork one found in the can at one's local movie house:
It was obvious that just about everything about SCREAM--except the fact that it was good--weighed heavily on the creators of this next picture (among them, SCREAM's own Kevin Williamson) when it turned up later that same year:
In 1997, SCREAM 2 also turned up. Copying itself, it would, itself, be often copied:
Some versions, such as this French one, removed the line of faces--I include it because it, too, is copied later:
This little sci-fi thriller also appeared, with a very appropriate title, insofar as its artwork is concerned:
The following year, 1998, someone took MIMIC up on its title:
The ad guys trying to get out the word on THE BRIDE OF CHUCKY had seen the poster for SCREAM 2:
The poster for the 4th entry in the LETHAL WEAPON series SCREAMed:
The I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER gang was back with a sequel (which, despite the passage of time, was not called I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TWO SUMMERS AGO):
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Steven Spielberg's unfortunate Oscar-bait movie that year, was a Frankenstein's monster creation, sewn together from pieces of much better war movies from the past, so--in what this writer would like to believe was a private joke--those in the marketing department slapped a SCREAM on it:
More from the "Class of '98":
1999, the song remains the same:
The year 2000 sees the third installment of SCREAM, and again, the franchise copies itself:
And leads to further knock-offs:
In 2001, they come large and small:
David DeCoteau made a trilogy of films called THE BROTHERHOOD and was apparently so enamored of the SCREAM trend that variants on it advertised all three, the first 2 in 2001:
And the 3rd in 2002:
And on and on:
 |
| 2008 |
 |
| 2009 |
 |
| 2009 |
 |
| 2010 |
 |
| 2011 |
 |
| 2011 |
 |
| 2012 |
Monotonous enough to make you want to, well, scream, right?
--j.
---
[1] Not so long ago and in a different life, I owned a video store. One night, I was sufficiently bored that I rearranged an entire portion of the horror section to showcase only movies with SCREAM cover art. Before I was finished, I had the better part of three shelves covered by them.
--j.
---
[1] Not so long ago and in a different life, I owned a video store. One night, I was sufficiently bored that I rearranged an entire portion of the horror section to showcase only movies with SCREAM cover art. Before I was finished, I had the better part of three shelves covered by them.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Death of An Amateur
"Y'know, many times, they say [of me] 'he's an amateur,' and I sort of say 'Thank you very much,' because that means I love cinema. It's the real meaning of the word. And this amateurism is disappearing."
The amateur who spoke those words spent 59 years making movies. I suspect no one knows exactly how many. His filmography on the Internet Movie Database lists 199 features and shorts as director, but there are so many variants on so many of his films, so many unreleased works, so many pieces of incomplete projects left scattered all over the world that any mere list is probably doomed to hopeless inadequacy. Making movies wasn't, for him, a job; it was his life. He was a director, writer, producer, composer, cameraman, actor--he could do it all, and did. For six decades, he lived, breathed, ate, slept, walked, talked, shot, and shat film. Earlier this week, he died.
Over the years, this perennial amateur, Jesús "Jess" Franco, has been alternately praised as a genius and, more often, reviled as a hack. Both are, to an extent, true. Buffs of the kind of off-the-beaten-track flicks on which he spent his career like to fight over what constitutes the precise mixture. In this era of implacable dichotomies, one finds very few middling reactions to Franco--he tends to be a love-him-or-hate-him proposition, and people tend to attach great emotion to whatever conclusion they reach. If anyone can be said to be the ultimate cult director, he certainly fits the bill.
I've been a big fan of his work. More than that, he's a real source of inspiration. An indefatigable work-horse of fiercely independent spirit, he could take a few rolls of quarters, some bologna sandwiches, and some pals to a location and emerge, a week later, with a mini-masterpiece. He did it over and over again. I've never been one to dismiss his lapses (which can, at times, be rather spectacular), but I have argued, for a good, long while, that his shortcomings tend to be greatly overstated and his work often significantly underrated, even by those who admire him. I still think this is the case. Even his absolute worst pictures tend to have at least one moment of the brilliance that shines through the frames of his best, and when it comes to the latter, he has scores of genuine classics under his belt.
Over the years, I've written a few articles about him and about his films. I'd written about my first impressions of his work. I'd reviewed EUGENIE DE SADE, one of his best pictures. I wrote "Figuring Out Jesús Franco," an effort to explain the amaestro to heathens who didn't get it. When the lovely and talented Lina Romay, his longtime companion/collaborator/muse, died just last year, I wrote a fairly well-received reminiscence. These are just little pieces though, narrowly focused vignettes. If they work, they convey some of my enthusiasm for their respective subjects. Doing justice to his life in the event of his death is much harder.
Film was the life of Jesús Franco. His viewfinder was his ever-voyeuristic eye, his zoom was the beat of his cinema-infatuated heart, and what it pumped through his veins for six decades was sublime and ridiculous, sweet and savage, silly and superior celluloid, even when he'd switched to video. His career was a bona fide epic, like nothing else in the history of cinema. If trying to sum up that epic in only a few words is just as much an exercise in futility as the IMDb's filmography, the movies are still there, and can tell you all you need to know.
Rest easy, you damned old amateur. This fellow amateur will miss you.
--j.
The amateur who spoke those words spent 59 years making movies. I suspect no one knows exactly how many. His filmography on the Internet Movie Database lists 199 features and shorts as director, but there are so many variants on so many of his films, so many unreleased works, so many pieces of incomplete projects left scattered all over the world that any mere list is probably doomed to hopeless inadequacy. Making movies wasn't, for him, a job; it was his life. He was a director, writer, producer, composer, cameraman, actor--he could do it all, and did. For six decades, he lived, breathed, ate, slept, walked, talked, shot, and shat film. Earlier this week, he died.
Over the years, this perennial amateur, Jesús "Jess" Franco, has been alternately praised as a genius and, more often, reviled as a hack. Both are, to an extent, true. Buffs of the kind of off-the-beaten-track flicks on which he spent his career like to fight over what constitutes the precise mixture. In this era of implacable dichotomies, one finds very few middling reactions to Franco--he tends to be a love-him-or-hate-him proposition, and people tend to attach great emotion to whatever conclusion they reach. If anyone can be said to be the ultimate cult director, he certainly fits the bill.
I've been a big fan of his work. More than that, he's a real source of inspiration. An indefatigable work-horse of fiercely independent spirit, he could take a few rolls of quarters, some bologna sandwiches, and some pals to a location and emerge, a week later, with a mini-masterpiece. He did it over and over again. I've never been one to dismiss his lapses (which can, at times, be rather spectacular), but I have argued, for a good, long while, that his shortcomings tend to be greatly overstated and his work often significantly underrated, even by those who admire him. I still think this is the case. Even his absolute worst pictures tend to have at least one moment of the brilliance that shines through the frames of his best, and when it comes to the latter, he has scores of genuine classics under his belt.
Over the years, I've written a few articles about him and about his films. I'd written about my first impressions of his work. I'd reviewed EUGENIE DE SADE, one of his best pictures. I wrote "Figuring Out Jesús Franco," an effort to explain the amaestro to heathens who didn't get it. When the lovely and talented Lina Romay, his longtime companion/collaborator/muse, died just last year, I wrote a fairly well-received reminiscence. These are just little pieces though, narrowly focused vignettes. If they work, they convey some of my enthusiasm for their respective subjects. Doing justice to his life in the event of his death is much harder.
Film was the life of Jesús Franco. His viewfinder was his ever-voyeuristic eye, his zoom was the beat of his cinema-infatuated heart, and what it pumped through his veins for six decades was sublime and ridiculous, sweet and savage, silly and superior celluloid, even when he'd switched to video. His career was a bona fide epic, like nothing else in the history of cinema. If trying to sum up that epic in only a few words is just as much an exercise in futility as the IMDb's filmography, the movies are still there, and can tell you all you need to know.
Rest easy, you damned old amateur. This fellow amateur will miss you.
Jesús Franco Manera
12 May, 1930 – 2 April, 2013
--j.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Welcome To The Tombs of THE WALKING DEAD
For a television series, a season ender is a big event. Ratings tend
to radically rise, offering a chance for greater exposure beyond the
normal fanbase, and traditionally, series creators really pull out the
stops and try to bring their A-game to the project. The problem for THE
WALKING DEAD has been that its A-game tends to look pretty much like
anyone else's third- or fourth-string. The series has all the potential
in the world and there are the occasional episodes that don't
entirely suck but in the larger context of the series, they seem to be
more like happy accidents than the result of anyone genuinely applying
themselves. TWD splits its season and, as a consequence, has had the
equivalent of five season enders to date. None of them have been good.
The second season ender, "Beside the Dying Fire," remains, to date, one of the absolute worst episode of the entire run. And that's saying an awful lot. Tonight's season 3 capper, "Welcome To The Tombs," did nothing to reverse this trend.
At times, TWD collapses into such a morass of ineptness that it plays like a parody of itself and that was on display quite a bit tonight.
TWD has the pace of molasses in January. Its creators talk a bullshit propaganda line about running a show where anyone can die at any moment, but when it comes to potentially alienating the audience with the deaths of popular characters, TWD doesn't take any risks, and their decision to spend all season turning Andrea into a hate-figure added up, tonight, to exactly what it always does. GINO leaves Andrea handcuffed to a chair and viciously stabs Milton, leaving the bespectacled scientist to die so he will reanimate and chow down on her.[1] Milton left a pair of pliers where Andrea can get to them though. It's a race against time, with Andrea trying to retrieve the pliers with her feet before Milton's life bleeds entirely out of him. As with most TWD races-against-time though, it turns into more of a really slow creep against time, running most of the length of the episode with--as usual with TWD--filler moments continually destroying any tension the scenario could have built. At one point, Andrea entirely halts her escape attempt to have a few minutes of conversation with the expiring Milton about why she stayed in Woodbury. Later, when she thinks he's reanimating, it doesn't spur her to redouble her efforts--instead, she comes to another complete stop and just sits and looks at him.[2]
As I said, a parody of itself.
GINO takes a Woodburian army to the prison, which serves as the excuse to unleash some loud, visually impressive pyrotechnics as they blast their way in. These looked good in the "next week on AMC's The Walking Dead" preview and that's the only reason they were included. After building to it all season, there's no big fight over the prison. Most of the prison group hides nearby while GINO and his men explore the empty facility. When the Woodburians venture into the zombie-infested area,[3] a smoke-bomb that was left for them explodes and they run from the building like rabbits. Glenn and Maggie are waiting behind cover to shoot at a few of them as they run out. They needn't have bothered--Woodbury takes to its vehicles and flees in terror. GINO and a pair of his trusted lieutenants pursue and, stopping the convoy, GINO becomes so angry his people won't fight that he guns them down himself! And so was ludicrously ended the great Woodburian threat.
Again, parody.
GINO and two of his men survive though and leave for parts unknown, leaving open the prospect of a return--something I imagine most viewers would, after this pathetic mess, welcome about as much as they'd welcome a return to Hershel's farm. Or the return of new Coke.
The episode did feature one really striking moment that hit at the heart of one of TWD's many shortcomings. During the prison attack, Carl guns down a surrendering Woodburian. Rick confronts him about this and Carl thoroughly dresses down his father, noting that their failure to deal with potential threats in a responsible manner is what results in their people being killed over and over again. He failed to kill the walker that killed Dale; Rick failed to kill Andrew, which resulted in Lori and T-Dog dying; Rick didn't shoot GINO when he had the chance, resulting in the attack that had just happened. And so on. At someone finally speaking this hard, frank, nowhere-to-run-or-hide truth, this viewer and vociferous critic of the series felt like cheering. Even more so when Rick looked as if he'd been slapped, then took on the countenance of a rapidly deflating balloon. Unfortunately, TWD has never had the stomach for this kind of matter-of-fact sentiment and Mazzara, its now-fired showrunner and the writer of record on this episode, double-stacked the deck against Carl's brutally frank words by having the incident that led to it be Carl shooting a surrendering teenager, then, in the end, having Rick take in the remaining Woodburians, mostly kids and old people (nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but it was presented as a direct and total repudiation of what Carl had said).[4]
Instead of moving everyone to Woodbury, Rick moved the Woodburians to the prison, damaged and still mostly full of zombies as a consequence of our heroes' failure to clear it.
TWD, this season, has definitely been a tale told by an idiot (more particularly, a group of them), filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing. Except without the fury. Fury requires competent pacing and was definitely a no-show most of the time. The final count: three episodes that didn't entirely suck ("Seed", "Clear", and "This Sorrowful Life"), adrift in a sea of rubbish. The story: A lot of claim-staking and brainless posturing over a prison that, as was presented, wasn't worth keeping; and a threat to it posed by a well-equipped villain who has no motive to want to do them harm other than being the designated villain (and who turned out to be no real threat at all). It doesn't add up to anything.
Except THE WALKING DEAD.
--j.
---
[1] GINO kills Milton because Milton torched his zombie zoo in the previous episode and, he says, because of that, eight Woodburians were killed by Merle, which makes one wonder if Glen Mazzara, the writer of the episode, even bothered to read the script for the previous ep. Merle was able to take out a few Woodburians because he brought an army of zombies to the meeting and shot GINO's men in the confusion that resulted. How more zombies roaming around through that situation would have helped GINO is anyone's guess.
[2] And because of the episodes in ludicrous ass-draggery, she is bitten and meets her end.
[3] Why on earth would our heroes take over a huge prison as their new home then confine themselves all season to one tiny, filthy cell-block of it while allowing zombies to roam freely through the bulk of the facility? There's a collapsed wall on one end of the compound, allowing the dead--and, more importantly, any potential enemy--free access to their home, while cutting off their only means of retreat, should they be attacked. Why on earth would they allow the existence of that breach, unrepaired and entirely unguarded, throughout most of this season? To use it as plot points later, of course! Tonight was the payoff on that.
[4] In another low point, the writers attempt to free Rick from the appalling, irremovable stain they'd left on his character by having Michonne forgive him for contemplating turning her over to GINO, telling him that considering it was the right thing to do. She even thanked him for taking her in!
At times, TWD collapses into such a morass of ineptness that it plays like a parody of itself and that was on display quite a bit tonight.
TWD has the pace of molasses in January. Its creators talk a bullshit propaganda line about running a show where anyone can die at any moment, but when it comes to potentially alienating the audience with the deaths of popular characters, TWD doesn't take any risks, and their decision to spend all season turning Andrea into a hate-figure added up, tonight, to exactly what it always does. GINO leaves Andrea handcuffed to a chair and viciously stabs Milton, leaving the bespectacled scientist to die so he will reanimate and chow down on her.[1] Milton left a pair of pliers where Andrea can get to them though. It's a race against time, with Andrea trying to retrieve the pliers with her feet before Milton's life bleeds entirely out of him. As with most TWD races-against-time though, it turns into more of a really slow creep against time, running most of the length of the episode with--as usual with TWD--filler moments continually destroying any tension the scenario could have built. At one point, Andrea entirely halts her escape attempt to have a few minutes of conversation with the expiring Milton about why she stayed in Woodbury. Later, when she thinks he's reanimating, it doesn't spur her to redouble her efforts--instead, she comes to another complete stop and just sits and looks at him.[2]
As I said, a parody of itself.
GINO takes a Woodburian army to the prison, which serves as the excuse to unleash some loud, visually impressive pyrotechnics as they blast their way in. These looked good in the "next week on AMC's The Walking Dead" preview and that's the only reason they were included. After building to it all season, there's no big fight over the prison. Most of the prison group hides nearby while GINO and his men explore the empty facility. When the Woodburians venture into the zombie-infested area,[3] a smoke-bomb that was left for them explodes and they run from the building like rabbits. Glenn and Maggie are waiting behind cover to shoot at a few of them as they run out. They needn't have bothered--Woodbury takes to its vehicles and flees in terror. GINO and a pair of his trusted lieutenants pursue and, stopping the convoy, GINO becomes so angry his people won't fight that he guns them down himself! And so was ludicrously ended the great Woodburian threat.
Again, parody.
GINO and two of his men survive though and leave for parts unknown, leaving open the prospect of a return--something I imagine most viewers would, after this pathetic mess, welcome about as much as they'd welcome a return to Hershel's farm. Or the return of new Coke.
The episode did feature one really striking moment that hit at the heart of one of TWD's many shortcomings. During the prison attack, Carl guns down a surrendering Woodburian. Rick confronts him about this and Carl thoroughly dresses down his father, noting that their failure to deal with potential threats in a responsible manner is what results in their people being killed over and over again. He failed to kill the walker that killed Dale; Rick failed to kill Andrew, which resulted in Lori and T-Dog dying; Rick didn't shoot GINO when he had the chance, resulting in the attack that had just happened. And so on. At someone finally speaking this hard, frank, nowhere-to-run-or-hide truth, this viewer and vociferous critic of the series felt like cheering. Even more so when Rick looked as if he'd been slapped, then took on the countenance of a rapidly deflating balloon. Unfortunately, TWD has never had the stomach for this kind of matter-of-fact sentiment and Mazzara, its now-fired showrunner and the writer of record on this episode, double-stacked the deck against Carl's brutally frank words by having the incident that led to it be Carl shooting a surrendering teenager, then, in the end, having Rick take in the remaining Woodburians, mostly kids and old people (nothing wrong with that, in and of itself, but it was presented as a direct and total repudiation of what Carl had said).[4]
Instead of moving everyone to Woodbury, Rick moved the Woodburians to the prison, damaged and still mostly full of zombies as a consequence of our heroes' failure to clear it.
TWD, this season, has definitely been a tale told by an idiot (more particularly, a group of them), filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing. Except without the fury. Fury requires competent pacing and was definitely a no-show most of the time. The final count: three episodes that didn't entirely suck ("Seed", "Clear", and "This Sorrowful Life"), adrift in a sea of rubbish. The story: A lot of claim-staking and brainless posturing over a prison that, as was presented, wasn't worth keeping; and a threat to it posed by a well-equipped villain who has no motive to want to do them harm other than being the designated villain (and who turned out to be no real threat at all). It doesn't add up to anything.
Except THE WALKING DEAD.
--j.
---
[1] GINO kills Milton because Milton torched his zombie zoo in the previous episode and, he says, because of that, eight Woodburians were killed by Merle, which makes one wonder if Glen Mazzara, the writer of the episode, even bothered to read the script for the previous ep. Merle was able to take out a few Woodburians because he brought an army of zombies to the meeting and shot GINO's men in the confusion that resulted. How more zombies roaming around through that situation would have helped GINO is anyone's guess.
[2] And because of the episodes in ludicrous ass-draggery, she is bitten and meets her end.
[3] Why on earth would our heroes take over a huge prison as their new home then confine themselves all season to one tiny, filthy cell-block of it while allowing zombies to roam freely through the bulk of the facility? There's a collapsed wall on one end of the compound, allowing the dead--and, more importantly, any potential enemy--free access to their home, while cutting off their only means of retreat, should they be attacked. Why on earth would they allow the existence of that breach, unrepaired and entirely unguarded, throughout most of this season? To use it as plot points later, of course! Tonight was the payoff on that.
[4] In another low point, the writers attempt to free Rick from the appalling, irremovable stain they'd left on his character by having Michonne forgive him for contemplating turning her over to GINO, telling him that considering it was the right thing to do. She even thanked him for taking her in!
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