Chinatown, Roman Polanski, Noir, and a discussion of ART.

Guys, I have been a Noir fiend lately.

I keep going back to watch a slasher movie, but something else on my Instant Queue always catches my eye instead--Scarlet Street, The Third Man, The Stranger, Double Indemnity, the list goes on and on. Noir is like the slasher films of the forties and fifties. Low budget, not necessarily respected in its time, very, very genre-riffic (I just made up that word,)...all fantastic. Perhaps I will blog about the similarities and the importance of low budget movies sometime in the future.

Today, however, I'm going to write a bit about Chinatown, because I decided that I'd watched enough Noir that I'd understand it.

And I think, as much as one ever can understand Chinatown after watching it only once, I do.

Spoiler time.

A little summary for you--as far as I understand, Chinatown is a modern-noir, which is now almost forty years old, but that's fine. It's not shot in black and white, which is very important to the genre, as far as I can tell, but you've got the hard-boiled private eye with all his catchy lines, a Los Angeles that I fully believed was in the forties, the gorgeous, GORGEOUS femme fatale (Faye Dunaway ohmygoodness) and a murder for everyone to get tangled up in.

The standard plot was set up and followed very well, with various surprises around every turn. I suppose the trick to noir is that you have to know the surprises are coming, but you can't know what they are--right? Perhaps?

In any case, that's how this movie worked, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. There was also a big discussion about government corruption and capitalism which I was really invested in, but don't feel any need to get into here. The various societal commentary, the biblical allusions, the structure of Chinatown has been discussed plenty, and unless you're my film studies professor, we aren't going to get anywhere by me repeating all of it.

The thing about Chinatown that hasn't been discussed is the fact that it deals very directly with pedophilia and was directed by Roman Polanski.

This is something I've been trying to grapple with--when an artist has created something brilliant, but done something that our society considers evil, how much are we to separate the artist from his art? On one hand, we want to appreciate the art without it being colored by our perception of the artist, and examine its merits and its impact objectively. However, we also want to maybe see how the artist's moral ambiguities affected his work, and even just give an artist credit for something beautiful they've created regardless how much we disagree with their other actions or even the message they are sending in the work.

I addressed this issue in a play I wrote this year for a class in which D.W Griffiths was a character.  D.W Griffiths made the film Birth of a Nation, the first American feature-length film, which naturally had a huge impact on the ways films were made and distributed. Also, it was super racist and about the KKK.

And, unfortunately, except in very film-savvy circles, that's what he's remembered for, which is a shame, because he made plenty of other movies. Another, more common example in film is Walt Disney--made great movies, changed the way we see animation and television and mice, also was a Nazi.

Do we accept the fact that these brilliant men had flaws, and appreciate their work regardless? Or do we pretend that they didn't have those flaws at all? It's a difficult conundrum, especially when they directly address their asocietal (made up that word tooo) morals in their work, the way Griffiths did with Birth of a Nation or Disney did with Song of the South.


For those of you who don't know, Roman Polanski is largely considered to be a pedophile--in 1977, three years after Chinatown was made, he was arrested for unlawful sex with a thirteen year old girl, plead guilty, and fled to London. In Chinatown, it is revealed near the end of the film that Faye Dunaway's character was raped by her father at fifteen, which becomes a major plot point in the film.

It's fascinating to me that no one has discussed the similarities about this aspect of the film and how they connect to Roman Polanski's sex scandal in the seventies; the girl in the movie was in her early teens, raped by an older man after his wife died. Polanski's victim too was just a teenager, and his wife was killed in 1969.

However, the director is much more associated with the main character than with the character of the father--the background of Jack Nicholson's detective is that he failed to save a woman in his previous career in Chinatown and as a result, she was killed, and he became rather despondent and apathetic. This lines up fairly well with Polanski, who cites not being at home the night his wife was murdered as his biggest regret and says that it left him pessimistic and with "eternal dissatisfaction about life."

Perhaps it is out of respect for Polanski and the film that nobody has made this connection, which would be, in my opinion, the best way to deal with the situation. The crime he committed was a mistake, and the worst of his character, while this is one of the most brilliant things he created, if not the most brilliant. Hopefully, years from now, it will be looked upon as such, and hopefully someday we can look at other artists' work the same way.

Happy Halloween! Here is a rant for you.

It is, of course, necessary that I write a blog for Halloween.
Clearly I've been neglecting my ponderings on  horror films lately, at least in a formal written out form. Worry not, friends, there is no shortage of heated debates about slasher lore and, now, the local ghost stories here at college. And I know, that, since it is Halloween, I can no longer ignore this blog that was once so well nurtured.

Normally I would write a review of a horror movie, or a general overview of some Halloween movies, or a rant about fake scary movies that they play on ABC family, but I'm going in a different direction.

It doesn't make sense for me right now to review one of the approximate BILLION scary  movies that are on my list of things to watch, because the majority of them are themed with other holidays; specifically, the next movie on my list is Rare Exports, a Christmas-themed thriller, and the next is April Fools, a terrible, terrible slasher. My Netflix Instant Cue opens with New Years Evil and Graduation Day, and, before on the nonsense with Netflix, those two were quickly followed by My Bloody Valentine. Even right here on this blog I've reviewed Black Christmas and Terror Train, both of which take place in the end of December.


There are a whole slew of slasher films that take place on other holidays, specifically Christmas. And, as you probably figured out, there is a lot of controversy over these films. In fact, you may have found even yourself feeling a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of mixing the gory death of teenagers that we love so much on Halloween with the happiness and coziness of Christmas.

A little background: Halloween is considered by many to be "The Father of Slasher Movies." It was wildly successful, making $60,000,000 in about two years with a budget of $320,000. Obviously, great formula: spend relatively little money, make a lot more money, and make a great film. America at the time was ready for it, and, thus, an innumerable amount of movies were made.

The concept was so simple that hundreds (?) of eager indie film makers jumped on the opportunity. Just get yourself a fake knife, some corn syrup and food dye, some cheap, hopeful, young actors, a creepy place, and you've got yourself a film (I know, I've done it). All you need now is a plot, or a theme of some sort--and, riding on the success of Halloween, many manymanymany of the people making these movies decided on a holiday.

Christmas is maybe not the most obvious of all the holidays to choose for a movie whose action is based around the murder of "innocents," but for some reason it became very popular. Movies like Silent Night, Deadly Night, Don't Open till Christmas, Christmas Evil and Silent Night, Bloody Night didn't seem to do any better or worse than other films. Perhaps because the movie that I consider to be the "Mother" of slasher films, and just as good as Halloween, also played a part in the beginning of slasher movies. Perhaps, we can take the cynical view, and say that the producers, directors, and writers were trying to cash in on the controversy that came from making these films, which were often considered a direct assault on family structure and Christianity (don't forget about the New Right shenanigans that were happening in the eighties). Perhaps there are enough angsty people who just need to watch a slasher movie at Christmas to dispel the anger that comes from spending time with laughing children and consumerism. Maybe--and let's go with this one, for the hell of it--the juxtaposition of the violence inherent to slasher films mixed with the happiness that is considered to be inherent to Christmas creates a more shocking and therefore effective film.

The real question is, why are people so accepting for a violent movie on Halloween and so ready to scorn a movie that takes place on Christmas? Christmas Evil, made in 1984, which directly references Carpenter's film in the tagline ("You made it through Halloween, now see if you can survive Christmas"), made approximately two million dollars, with a budget of about one million, in comparison to Halloween's sixty million dollars worldwide. I'm not going to pretend that Halloween isn't a much, much better movie than Christmas Evil, or that the shock value was already wearing off at that point, but still. Fifty eight million dollars is a lot of money.

I think it's an interesting cultural phenomena that we sequester a time of year to be scared, or, rather, to let ourselves be scared. Clearly this intentional fear is part of our culture--scary movies make millions of dollars all year round, not just at Halloween. Would it be better to accept it into our every day lives, like the many hardcore horror movie enthusiasts and self-proclaimed members of the goth subculture that already do? Or, is Halloween, like horror movies, a safe place to keep it so we can live our lives pretending that death and fear are not present?

This has been a Halloween blog post.

Preview of my wall in college...what i've done instead of actually packing.

These are the pictures I've decided need to go in the frames I bought to hang on my wall in at Bennington....I tried to go for a creepy, inexplicable old picture feel, of things that happened in the past for which the explanation is lost...but with signifcant amounts of editing with the help of Picasa. Also some Battleship Potmekin references (at least that's what I was going for,) with the selective color, which all came out being orange/yellow without my realizing it.

Good way to turn important memories into art, yes?

A Treatise on Harry Potter

I was five years old when I read the first Harry Potter book, and to this day I picture Hogwarts as the house in which it was read to me; the house belonged to my friend, and it was a significant part of my childhood. It was an amazing house, and reading The Sorcerer's Stone in her yellow-painted bedroom of the three-story, renovated barn is one of the many happy memories I have from the house.

For a long time every book release was quite a bonding experience for her and her mother and my mother and I. When she grew out of it, it became an event that some other close family friends of ours and my brother and I did together, and it was the only time we'd get together. Book, and later movie releases, were bright spots in my mundane summers, where I could have an excuse to sit down and read for a week straight then reunite with childhood friends and stay up late talking and reading and analyzing every aspect of the series.

I was, for sure, as obsessed as anyone--and it's easy to see why. Harry Potter defined much of my childhood, and even to this day, as an "adult" to some degree, who can recognize the literary and filmic downfalls of the franchise, I cried when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two in Imax 3D closed with a three-shot of Ron, Hermione, and Harry. For me, and for thousands of other people in my generation, Harry Potter has been a constant--as, for the class of 2011, who started Kindergarten the year the first book was released and who just graduated, has been school. The painfully obvious tagline--"It all ends Summer 2011--" poetically punctuates not only the end of a series I have grown up with, but the end of my time living in the little town where I was born and going to school with the same group of people.

Regardless of my emotional connections to the story, I wasn't as psyched about this release as other people were, and until I was actually sitting in the enormous IMAX theater, after having waited in line for an hour when I could have been home doing something productive, I didn't care to see the film at all--in fact, I never saw Deathly Hallows Part One. People have been going on and on about how a huge chunk of their childhood is ending, about how a little part of them died, about how it is, in fact, all over, and how much of an effect that is going to have on their lives.

For me, that feeling has long passed. While a lot of people--especially those a little bit younger (current sophomores, my brother's age,) who were five when the first movie came out--have grown up with the films as much as with the books, if not more, definitely see the movies as entirely a part of Harry Potter, I still can't.  I felt the way so many people are feeling now when we got the seventh book at midnight, and when I closed the back cover at one in the afternoon the next day. Equally poetically, it was the summer before I began high school--in a parallel to the story, I was ready to move on.

Of course, not many other people were--HP continued to define our generation, most clearly shown in a pep rally skit performed by my class, the theme of which was, of course, Harry Potter. I saw the sixth movie at midnight, and I, like everyone else, still find the best way to explain many things is to use Harry Potter analogies. ("you know, he said it like...like Ron says to Hermione in the sixth book," or, "Maybe the little boy at the end of Turn of the Screw wasn't killed, it was just a Harry Potter kinda thing," or, "The only parallel to the rise of Hitler is Voldemort.") All in all, though, the franchise and the fandom became sort of a nuisance to me. I have things to do. I am a grown up lady and I won't bother myself anymore with this nonsense.

Not true, of course. But my cynicism of all things enjoyed by the masses has led me to be a lot more critical of the series, and, in turn, the movies.

Part of the brilliance of Harry Potter  is that, for my generation, the books aged with us perfectly. The Sorcerer's Stone is like a gateway book to a lifetime of reading for so many young kids, and The Deathly Hallows is a dark, dramatic, and complicated fantasy. This brilliance also becomes a bit of a downfall for the series, and especially for the poor characters. There's a massive disconnect that comes in the end of the fourth book. The first three stories are whimsical, spooky, and fantastic for children. There's a clear good vs. evil, the plot follows a formulaic, episodic model that's already familiar to the audience (summer, school, Halloween, Christmas, Spring sports, finals, and so on.)

By the end of the fourth book, I was eight, and kind of ready for the shock of an almost main character getting killed by the big bad guy. By the fifth, I was ten, and, even though it was traumatic, almost ready for the angst and death that marks Order of the Phoenix. Almost. What had been a fun and whimsical tale set in a fun and whimsical location was suddenly a story of political intrigue, of abandoned houses and prophecies and such, but still sprinkled with fun and whimsical things like pixies and bogarts and the like. Harry's frustrating and inexplicable angst was somewhat incongruent with the stories we knew.

The sixth book continued with the drama, but at least still at Hogwarts, to some degree; the seventh book could be part of a completely different series. There are two ways to look at this: one, the audience got to old for the fun and whimsy, the universe got so big that there had to be an epic fantasy/war book in order to get things wrapped up, and Rowling wrote the book long after the directors of the films had switched from the lighthearted Christopher Columbus to much darker directors and was being influenced by the style somewhat. This is one of many criticisms, and opens up a discussion about the simplicity of the plot and characters and the simplistic, unchallenging writing, the dependence on a franchise and strong fanbase, and the lack of vitality that the story has.

Alternatively, one can look at the entirety of Harry Potter as following a similar pattern--if with a more Disney ending--as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or Greek Tragedies, or Film Noir--because, by the seventh book/movie, the entire world of the three main characters has completely crumbled. As in Things Fall Apart, the majority of the first part of the story is marked by episodic plots controlled by specific dates, dotted with dramatic adventures that make the characters grow some, but in the end, it is an outside force that the characters feel they need to singlehandedly defeat that entirely destroys their way of life.

This is an emotional moment for those of us who are emotionally attached to Harry&company. It mimics our own realization that the world is not necessarily all whimsy and fun, and somethings things to fall apart entirely. Ultimately, the whimsical, wizarding setting of the series is incidental; the stories are about death, what happens after death, dealing with the after life and with mourning; it is about a group of non-muggles who are still mortals, who cannot beat death even though they have infinite luxuries of magic and such. This is philosophically somewhat simplistic, but it hits home for the audience of adolescence who, developmentally, are realizing the idea of mortality themselves. Not only that, but it emphasizes the fleeting nature of adolescense and school; no matter how dramatic it may be, you may only be one white page labeled "epilogue" or one black screen titled "19 years later" away from a pleasant adulthood. Harry's life reflects our own in many ways, and while he says the well acted line that so easily could have been cheesey, to Voldemort, "Let's finish this the way we started it--together!" he says to us, the crazy high schoolers who so many times have banged our heads against a keyboard in sincere imiation of his puppet self, chanting "angst, angst, angst, " who grew up with JK Rowling and Harry&Co fixing our problems:"Let's finish this, the nonsense battle with the world that is puberty and public education, the way we started it way back on the first day of first grade--together!

Overall, the movie itself greatly exceeded my fairly low expectations. IMAX 3D was much more impressive than I expected, and I can now see it as being a tool for innovation in cinematography rather than a novelty tech toy. The combination of light and dark  and long and close-up shots was much better and more balanced than the usual (dark field. dark castle. black dragon. Emma watson. Field. Dragon. Castle. Emma. More Emma. Some castle. Field. Castle. Emma.) They didn't dwell too long on many things, the movie didn't feel drawn out as some of the others in the series do. Helena Bonham Carter had to act like Hermione, which was brilliant. The battle scenes and the epilogue, were, dare I say it, better for me in film form than in the book--again, possibly because Rowling had the films in mind when she wrote the seventh book (all the unecessary description in the epilogue does make it read somewhat like  a script.) The casting for the whole franchise is quite brilliant. I really enjoyed the whole audience clapping when Ron and Hermione kissed, and when Molly Weasley yells, "Not my daughter, you bitch!" I wasn't  even too bothered by the fact that Daniel Radcliffe is 22 and not 17, and that Harry Potter is the most pretentious character in modern film.

Actually, Harry Potter's pretentiousness did bother me, some. I suppose that's something that also plays to teenagers developmental tendency to be as egocentric as a four year old--three characters, your age, who probably fill enough types that you can relate to at least one of them, who are literally the center of the universe. The movies, especially, are very Harry-centric. Fair enough, he is the eponymous character, and, again, the center of the whole wizarding world. But still, there are some scenes--such as snapping the elder wand in half and throwing it into the lake as his average friends stare in disgust--where his haughtiness is just overwhelming. My favorite part of the movie may very well have been when Neville stepped in after Voldemort had allegedly killed Harry and said something along the lines of, "The forces of good don't simply cease to exist because Harry Potter is dead, you guys..." and everyone was like "wait, what....oh yeah! Stuff happened here before the kid was born too!" (Even though, to be honest, as soon as Voldemort said, "I've killed Harry Potter!" I really wanted  Radcliffe to just stand up and yell something like "Think again, bitch! Avada Kadavera!" [or, Voldemort style, ahhvahdah kadahhha!"])

 In my opinion, the most interesting part of the series is the backstory of Voldemort--again, and seriously, it is very close to the rise of Hitler, and feels similar to study--how is it that these villians that we hold in this special, "he who must not be named" spot, in reality or literature, come to be as evil and as powerful as they are? I'd like to see a film directed more around Tom Riddle, personally. I did love in the seventh movie when Harry called Voldemort Tom to his face...that was quite the scene.

The hype is still a little much for me, but again, I do have an emotional attachment. I'm glad that, in the future, even though I won't be able to say I saw any classic bands playing live, I will be able to say that I saw Harry Potter in theaters when it first came out,and got the seventh book at midnight, and lived through a phase of fandom that was, at the time, rivaled only by Elvis and The Beatles.  And I did cry during the film, not only at seeing Ron cry over his brother's body or at the first shot of Dobby's grave, but also when Olivander echoed his line from the first story, "The wand chooses the wizard," and whenever the main theme came in, and in the last shot of the three friends holding hands.

In an emotion that, again, poetically mimics that of Harry himself as he walks into the forbidden forest, I realized walking out of the gluttonous theater that while I am sad, I am ready for this part of mys life to be over--but I also know that it will not be. Literature and film are written about in the present tense, so any day that I want to relive a sleepover in my best friends bedroom in her old house, or the night I stayed up all night with an old pal finishing the series, I can pick up one of the easiest books to read, and Dumbledore and Dobby and Voldemort will still be alive, it will still be up in the air whether Hermione ends up with Ron or Harry, and the terrible epilogue will not yet have occured.

Also, does anybody really believe that WB and JK Rowling are going to stop sitting on that comfy pile of ever-growing cash created by the franchise? I think not.

Writing in the media. What is happening.

You know what's terrible right now?
Ok, bad question. Lots of things are terrible right now. The economy and the war are terrible. Corrupt dictators are terrible. Disease is terrible. Stuff is not looking so good.

Here's what I think is the most terrible: the media.

The state of journalism right now is just sad stuff. Of course, this is why I'm going into journalism as a career--I have an incredible urge to fix it. The whole thing. Fix it all.

Really, though, every day I go into my kitchen and watch Fox News with my father, and as he's laughing at the "clever" commentary or "groundbreaking" discoveries, I just die inside. Every moment that those silly blonde women or the silly man who stands in front of the capital building in Massachusetts and yells about stuff says something else I just see the art that I love descending down the steps to hell.

My thoughts on this are stirred by a conversation I just had after I was accused of getting all my news from Stephen Colbert and John Stewart. First of all, not true. I am a regular news junkie. I get news from those two, but also my Google News Feed, NPR....Wait Wait Don't Tell Me...SNL....The Week...


You may see my problem here--five out of seven of those things are, in fact, news satires. Therein lies the question--where else am I supposed to get news? Satire is the only place where people, instead of talking about all the strange and irrelevant horrible things that are happening, talk about what is happening and how horrible all the people reporting on it are.. Everything right now is a distraction for our bigger problems--we seem to be stuck in an endless loop. Think of the biggest news stories from the past few months. The Royal Wedding? Anthony Weiner and friends? The End of the World?

Short answer--nothing important. Nothing long term. So much is going on right now, and these are the things we've decided we care most about. The big problems, everything from the corrupt medical system to the war to climate change and our depleting oil supply, is pushed into the background. Which, as far as I'm concerned, adds the media right onto that list of big problems we don't want to think about.

Until I was thirteen, I wanted to be the president of the United States. I've since decided journalists are much more powerful. Where on earth would the Tea Party movement be without Fox News or Rush Limbaugh? How many democratic bills do you think would have passed if the conservative media hadn't been so upset and critical? Everywhere we can see evidence of the media--television, specifically--being used in ways that it never has been used before. Look at the perfect case study, Sarah Palin--a governor turned vice presidential candidate turned reality show star who may run for president or vice president again. Better yet, we have Donald Trump, who the country braced itself against/embraced the idea of him as a presidential candidate, even though he has been a television icon for the past decade. Rumor has it that Alec Baldwin, a movie star, is considering running for mayor of New York--hilariously, since he himself is a political satirist. Not even to mention Colbert's Superpac, and his run for president last year jokingly, etc.

The point is, the country is being more influenced by the media than ever before, I might say, and we are influenced by it quite a bit. And if the media most of us were getting was accurate or unbiased, that'd be great. If you're getting your news from the television though, which most of us undoubtedly are, it's almost impossible to do that. You can't check the sources, they are the sources. You can't form your own opinions, the opinions are right in there. Fox isn't going to cover a story of a democratic senator doing something awesome or successful, they're just going to give us twenty four hour coverage of an irrelevant sexting scandal.

And, as much as I hate to get political here (a bit late for THAT now, Krista,) there's an interesting thing about Anthony Weiner and all of his nonsense--would any of that happened if he were a republican?

The reason I watch Colbert and Stewart is because they back up what they're saying. They point out the contradictory things that the other news stations do--which makes it nearly impossible to take the other stations seriously--ironically, since they are literally the serious ones compared to Stewart's comedy.

This is my personal favorite example of a comedian backing up something that they say and contradicting the news giant's own commentary--when Stewart totally destroyed Fox news when they got mad that a senator had compared one of his conservative opponents a Nazi.

Here's where I get to my point--the most important thing, at least to me currently, about being a good journalist with a strong opinion is using your facts. Find them. Put them in your articles. Make it easy for your readers to believe that they are true, even make it easy for them to find those facts themselves. I'm all for fancy rhetoric and style, but you are nowhere, you are nothing more than an arrogant internet troll, if you don't have facts.

There is one website that I read with embarrassing regularity that is actually the best example of journalism that I think is around right now. Nowhere am I more inspired or can I learn more from for both my blogging and my more serious journalism than this site. And that site is--you ready for this?--cracked.com.

I'm not saying, of course, that you should get all your news or trust everything on Cracked, but there's no argument that they provide interesting information in an accessible, hilarious, and intelligent way. I've borrowed a lot from their style in terms of incorporating facts and pictures and captions, which you'll probably notice if you read my blog as well as theirs.

The reason they are so smart is because they do their research and they use technology to tell you about it. One of the reasons I love blogging so much as a journalistic medium is because it's so easy to just throw links into your writing to just about anything. This means that instead of having to present your facts in lengthy paragraphs about statistics that people will just skip over/not necessarily believe, or having to choose what statistics and facts are best from piles and piles of data that support the statement you're trying to make, you can just bring your readers right to the source and they can figure it out for themselves. I've always been impressed with the way Cracked does this, and they're starting to do it in creative ways: take this article for instance, which has a sentence with every word being a link to another piece of evidence. Or this one, which is a perfect example of how much they back up what they're saying with legitimate sources.

A lot of people write Cracked off as a crude humor site, which, don't get me wrong, it certainly is and totally intends to be. Because they have an excessive amount of pictures of scantily clad ladies and NSFW text, they aren't considered to be a very intellectual site. But what are you supposed to do but swear when the state of journalism is so sad that the most innovative and intelligent source of information is a crude humor site?

Perhaps the only other thing to do is get a liberal arts degree with a concentration in journalism and try to fix it myself.

Classic movies--priceless?

I just bought one of my favorite movies, one of the most influential movies of all time, Bonnie and Clyde, for five dollars. My friend and I were at Wally World, buying some blank DVD's on which to put our latest slasher creation (more on that later,) and there was a big bin of movies for five dollars--the best place for finding terrible low budget horror films, which I love. The bin was not organized in any particular way; simply a three foot wide, royal-blue, mesh cylinder filled to the brim with cheap entertainment. And buried somewhere in the pile was the classic, Bonnie and Clyde.

The good thing about this is, I now own and hour and a half of Faye Dunaway and I didn't even spend as much as I would have to buy a small sandwich. The bad thing is, this terribly important movie was tossed away into this bin and that isn't how movies should be treated.

This makes me displeased about, well, the way movies are presented to us that so many people just accept. A lot of things make me displeased about this, but this particular incident is a nice punctuation to my thought sentence that warranted a blog post about it.

According to my very intelligent film studies teacher, as well as, well, film studies in general, Bonnie and Clyde is a pretty important film. A super important film. It changed how violence was depicted, it cemented the place of two legendary cultural icons, it launched Fay Dunaways career (guys, I LOVE Faye Dunaway. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in 1968,) it won too many awards to count, it changed cinema (and America? yes?) forever. It is not only a classic, it is one of the few movies that I think can be considered one of the classics. But more on that later.
Is it right for this movie to be thrown in a bin while other, more recent movies like Red Riding Hood or Gnomeo and Juliet are displayed and played on display televisions? What message does that give?

Considering how many mainstream audiences seem to feel about old movies, in that, they refuse to watch them or understand them in context, it gives the message that old movies are unimportant and new movies are important. It's amazing how many of my very intelligent friends believe that many movies coming out today are brilliant and amazing, but also refuse to watch or respect anything made before their lifetime--where, I think, many of the best movies were made.

Obviously, this is a necessary marketing technique to keep the movie industry running--arguably we should sometimes end up with a movie that has the potential to be a Bonnie and Clyde forty seven years from now, and without all the stagnant movies in between that wouldn't be able to happen.

However, classic films such as Bonnie and Clyde are a part of our culture--nearly just as much as classic literature--or, as much as I'd hate to see this, more in upcoming generations. So much so, I believe, that major cultural and educational changes in the way we look at film are warranted: at the very least, stores selling films should have a "classics" section where films like this are displayed and treated with the respect they deserve. Really, they should be displayed with other films and noted as being more important--slap Bonnie and Clyde next to Fast Five on the shelf with a note: Vin Diesel wouldn't be allowed to carry a gun if this movie didn't happen. At the most extreme level of treating these movies as culturally significant, I think film should start holding more weight in regular school curricula. Not only would this connect to literature--it is hard to find a modern cultural facet more influenced by literature than film--it would provide a basis for understanding so much about our popular culture and social culture, just as literature does. I'm certainly not saying that traditional English classes should be replaced by film studies classes, (even though I do have my own issues with traditional high school English classes,) but I think we're going to begin seeing, if we haven't seen already, film becoming an even more massively important part of our culture--it is very possibly already as important to us as books were important to the centuries before us (please, oh culture lord in media heaven, do not let films replace books.) Film is also a fantastic way to learn about history--there needs to be more emphasis on modern history in schools, as well, and there is no better way to learn about life in a specific time than to watch a film, fictional or non fictional, from then. There are so many cultural references and segments of history that I understand because I had the opportunity to take a film studies class and therefore watch a lot of great films that I may not have watched otherwise--however, not everyone has that opportunity.

Which brings me to my last point, another good thing about Bonnie and Clyde being on sale for five dollars at Wal-Mart. If movies are just as culturally relevant and important as books, then they should be readily available to everyone--even though being buried at the bottom of the five dollar film bin isn't exactly readily available. I'm somewhat appaled that this fantastic film was selling for so little while standing next to some Katherine Heigle formla film being sold for probably four times as much. However, part of me feels like movies this important should be available for free--like classics on Kindle. We are only three years away from the 100 year anniversary of the first full length feature film, meaning, I believe, if it were in book form, it would enter the public domain. It's only so long before lots of influential films gain that status--and should the same idea be applied? Should Itunes advertise free classic flims, to encourage young people to watch them? Should they just advertise them anyways? (yes.) Does making these films cheap make them more accessible or simply lower them to a status below new unimpressive films and next to low budget horror movies? Can any price be put on viewing a piece of culture that affects much of our media today? Is culture truly priceless?

I'm conflicted about it, but regardless: Bonnie and Clyde. In a five dollar bin. Seriously? Get with it, Wal mart and customers.

Also, Faye Dunaway in the sixties. So beautiful. 

MTV Movie awards.../why on earth does this happen

I haven't posted in forever, I'm a terrible blogger, etc, etc, etc.

But the MTV Movie awards just happened, and I have some stuff to say.

I did not watch the movie awards, but while it was happening I happened to look at a live feed online of what movies were winning. And I was upset.

Granted, some good things did happen--for instance, my favorite actress Chloe Grace Moretz winning Best Breakout Star as well as Biggest Badass, two things that are incredibly true. Yay! Also, Emma Stone won for best comedic performance in Easy A, and I love her and that movie as well so that was also good.

HOWEVER.  The thing that really upset me was that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse won Best Movie of the Year.

Wait: it gets worse.

Kristen Stewart also won for best female performance, beating out fellow nominees Emma Stone, Emma Watson, Jennifer Aniston, and Natalie Portman who WON THE OSCAR in case anybody missed that. Just to fill out the prom court in as stereotypical a way as possible, Robert Pattinson also won Best Male Performance,  over his fellow supernatural beings Taylor Lautner and Daniel Radcliffe, but also his fellow teen hearthrob Zac Effron, and, most surprisingly (though should it be?) Jesse Eisenberg. Pattinson and Stewart also won Best Kiss, (triumphing over Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, among others,) and, most upsettingly, Pattinson, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Xavier Samuels won Best Fight. Seriously? Not Chloe Grace Moretz beating the living daylights out of a grown man drug dealer? Not Joseph Gordon-Levitt beating the living daylights out of some guy while upside down? Are you kidding me?

Confession time, I have not seen Eclipse, so I don't know anything about it's merit or lack thereof, but I think it says something very strange about MTV Movie awards. With nominees including multiple Oscar winners as well as two of the most money making themes of the film decade--Harry Potter and Christopher Nolan--it's incomprehensible that Eclipse won nearly fifty percent of the awards. (38%, to be exact, 5 out of 13.)

Some questions come up, one in particular--who decides who wins these things? Who is voting? Is it the MTV audiences? Is it the washed up celebrities who attend the evening?

According to Wikipedia, the "general public" is voting through a link on the MTV website, which now is rather difficult to get to but before the show was probably on display on the  home page. So...it is indeed people who watch MTV who voted for this, but more importantly, people who spend their free time browsin' around the MTV website. ...yeah.  (Note: the nominees are chosen by some apparently arbitrary excecutives at MTV.)

Time to make grand assumptions! I know when I had time to browse around television networks websites, I was about thirteen years old. Maybe fourteen. I know that those years were also the only time in my life where I watched MTV regularly, (oh geez. Not especially regularly. I watched "Next" sometimes on Saturday mornings. I'm not proud. Don't judge me,) and the same goes for my little brother. I also know, or can infer, that it is mostly middle school girls who like Twilight so much, because, as I've said, that is when I liked Twilight.

So...can we extrapolate that MTV's main audience is, in fact, middle school girls? Yes?

Further research should be done on this subject, for MTV's sake, because they mostly advertise to what I can only imagine some statistics have shown is their target audience--college aged people, mostly men, who are not, in fact, in college. Their commercials are mostly for late-night flavored Doritos and Axe that makes you smell like you don't have a hangover and colleges that you can go to online if you pay them hundreds of billions of dollars.

We have some indiscrepancies here. The people voting for these movie things, (the "Golden Popcorn Awards) are so clearly middle schoolers, and yet MTV is perfectly successful targeting its programming towards older people. And I haven't even mentioned TV shows, but perhaps if I look into that i can find a common theme.....

On MTV on any given day (today), we have a healthy helping of "hot" and "Killer" music videos, followed by the Reese Witherspoon chick flick, Uptown Girls (on Sunday, Witherspoon one the MTVMA's equivalent of a lifetime acheivement award.) After that we get into our daily dose of teen pregnancy, with some Teen Mom followed by some Sixteen and Pregnant: Where are they now? (which I thought was the premise of Teen Mom, but whatever.) Next is what appears to be some reruns of Teen Wolf, then a re-run of the awards, then a mixture of Real World XXX, Jackass, That 70's Show,  and just a little bit more Sixteen and Pregnant until midnight.

MTV. Such classy programming for our 12-24 year olds.

The question now is, who is watching these shows? And the answer is easy, but unfortunately leads us in an unpleasant circle of teen romance: the same people who watch twilight, for the most part. Teen Wolf is an immediate Twilight parallel, which was worth giving two hours of afternoon time, and the teen pregnancy shows, more subtly, share the common themes of acting like you're an adult when you're in high school and also having terrible creepy boyfriends. Twlight fans watch MTV, Twilight fans vote for award.

Who are they? I don't know....

also, this is a pretty great and relevant article from the (I think usually) wonderful Film School Rejects. He swears a little bit but articulates his point well...MTV is catering to their target audience, which clearly has to be sixteen year old girls. Regardless, this is upsetting, because not long ago I was a sixteen year old girl and the smart ones should not have the misfortune of being surrounded by people with such dreadful tastes in pop culture and media.

In my opinion.