Ever since it’s beginnings in the early 50’s, televsion has been locked into battle with cinema for supremacy in the viewer market.  Movie attendance dropped significantly once the first TV screens made their way into living rooms across the world, but that only inspired Hollywood to invest in new technologies that helped to push the medium into new and exciting territories, like the introduction of widescreen and surround sound, and in turn audiences came back in large numbers.  Over the course of this new cinematic revolution, TV more or less became standardized, and in some ways reduced because it was still restricted by the still primitive technologies that made television broadcasts possible.  There was just no way to compare the experiences of seeing Gilligan’s Island  on the small screen with seeing Ben-Hur (1959) on the giant wide screen.  Cinema was the mature artform, and television was just light entertainment.  But, with recent advances in digital photography and high definition home presentations, television has now reached a maturity point where they can now once again compete with the cinematic experience.  Noticeably in the last decade or so, we’ve seen television redefine the rules of storytelling and deliver some of the most groundbreaking and buzzworthy narratives ever seen in the medium.  Sitcoms have have dropped the obviously fake canned laughter and instead gotten their laughs through the single camera format.  Hour long dramas have likewise moved outside the soundstages and have taken us on journeys to the far reaches of the world, and even beyond. And now it’s even common to see a network show that has a substantial CGI effects budget. All of this, combined with some of the recent implosions in tent pole filmmaking, has led to an era where the best minds and talent in the industry are now looking to Televsion as their desired destination. And no TV series right now has challenged the cinematic experience more than HBO’s megahit, Game of Thrones.

Adapted from the novels by George R. R. Martin, and produced by creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones is perhaps the most cinematic TV series made to date.  It has generated a following of fans around the world, including yours truly, and has generated an enormous amount of revenue for the cable network.  And now in it’s fifth year, the show has taken the unprecedented step of promoting itself on the largest screen possible, courtesy of the IMAX format.  Airing a television series on a movie screen is not unheard of at this point.  Fathom Events has done the same thing for several years now, playing classic episodes from popular TV series in the past in order to mark an anniversary or special date.  There was also a special simulcast recently of the 50th anniversary event for the BBC series Doctor Who.  But HBO’s choice to put Game Of Thrones in IMAX theaters is a major step towards showing how far television has come, and it really makes a statement about the kind of regard the network has for the show.  By doing this, HBO effectively is saying that their show can indeed compete with the big dogs on the largest format possible and indeed even be more worthy than some of the other films that have been given the IMAX treatment.  By making this statement, we are now seeing a true testament to the maturity level that television has reached, showing that it is no longer just a simple form of entertainment, but a place where real art can be created.

But, the real question is, did the presentation really do what it set out to accomplish. I was fortunate enough to take in the show at my local IMAX theater for this one week only engagement, which I saw as worth the ticket price even though I had already watched most of the show itself when it first aired.  The showing was made up of the final two episodes of Season 4 (the most recently aired) and it included a teaser trailer at the end for the upcoming Season 5.  The two episodes in question were called “The Watchers on the Wall” and the season finale titled “The Children.” Both are excellent edpisodes and they each featured some of my favorite moments from last season.  But, what struck me most about the IMAX presentation is how it benefited one more than the other.  While “The Children” has its epic moments, it was obviously the more subdued of the two episodes, relying on quieter character moments over spectacle. “The Watchers on the Wall,” however, was a bit of a revelation on the IMAX screen. When I first saw this episode on TV, I was a tiny bit underwhelmed by it.  It never felt like it was big enough to match the moment that it was depicting.  Now I understand why; my 42-inch TV screen wasn’t big enough to convey the moment effectively. When projected on the nearly 100 foot IMAX screen, the episode really came to life, and it gave me a much better appreciation for the episode.  I immediately felt the difference when the screening showed that first wide angle shot over the show’s monumental Wall, as well as the first time you see a giant riding a wooly mammoth.  It was clear from that point exactly why HBO made the choice to bring Game of Thrones to IMAX; a first for any TV series.  It’s because no other TV series could do justice to the format.

Overall, the screening was an absolute success, and my hope is that it’s just the beginning. While I’m still a believer in the special experience of watching a movie in a theater, I am also aware of the fact that some of the best filmmaking happening right now is on TV.  And Game of Thrones is just one of the many example of TV shows that have pushed the bar in recent years. Indeed, I believe that this is just the beginning for screenings in IMAX theaters.  While I doubt you’ll see the likes of Mad Men in IMAX, I do see other epic scale productions like AMC’s The Walking Dead or BBC’ Doctor Who making their way to larger formats.  But, it has to take a certain kind of show to make that transition. Most of the TV series of the past are unfortunately restrained by the limitations that they have had to work with. Even epic productions like Star Trek are still bound by their broadcast standard look.  Really, only TV series crafted under the more cinematic standards of recent years could hold up on an IMAX screen, and even still, it has to have the right kind of vision behind it. It’s a very recent phenomena of TV series that are able to hold up visually with their big screen counterparts.  HBO led the way for that transition with their visually spectacular shows of the past like The Sopranos, Deadwood and Rome and even they had to mature their looks over time. The TV shows of today are built on the shoulders of these groundbreakers and they continue to refine the look of modern TV, even pushing production quality into unexpected areas like video streaming.   And with tent pole productions becoming increasingly less reliable as investments, it seems logical that theater chains would look to popular TV shows as a way to draw in the crowds.

For many years, it would have been seen as impossible for a TV show to match up against a big screen movie.  But, the tide has changed considerably as TV shows have become the safe haven for creative freedom and experimentation while movie studios have largely tried to play it safe.  Up until this time, the seperation was very different.  TV shows just didn’t have the budgets to compete.  They were only filmed on cheaper film stock and the idea of preserving them for longevity was seen as laughable.  Even TV shows that managed to gain enough notoriety that they spawned a movie adaptation were also cast aside into a niche category.  For many years, if there was a movie adaptation of a TV series, it was usually a comedy meant to mock the outdated conventions of the original show, like The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) or Starsky and Hutch (2004).  The only films in that time that managed to make the trip to the big screen with any sliver of dignity and faithfulness to their original form were the films in the Star Trek franchise (some better than others) and 1993’s The Fugitive, which actually was honored with a Best Picture nomination.  Nowadays, more and more TV shows are given respectful big screen translations; sometimes even shepparded there by their original creators like 1998’s The X-Files or 2005’s Serenity.  Televsion has also benefited from even more film to TV translatisions, showing that some stories can even prosper in a longer story format.  Big screen classics like Fargo, From Dusk Til Dawn, and even characters like Hannibal Lector have made it successfully to small screen and have shown that the medium can indeed support stories and characters that have already proven themselves on the big screen.  All this has shown the increasingly blurred line that separates film quality from TV quality.

Another sign of this change is present in the fact that more and more talented people are choosing to steer their careers into TV broadcasting.  Before, television work was looked down upon by A-listers in the industry.  In the early days, you moved up from television work into and never looked back, unless your career was in a down turn and it was the last option left to you. And indeed, the early years of television production was a great incubator of the great filmmakers of tomorrow.  Directors like Stanley Kramer, Arthur Penn and Steven Speilberg all got their start working on TV shows, as well as many future groundbreaking writers like Paddy Chayefsky or Charlie Kaufman.   Now while many people who start in television still move on to movies today, there is also a growing trend among filmmakers who are going from the big screen to the little screen in order to satisfy their creative tastes.  Case in point, David Fincher’s recent forays into TV production.  Thanks to his clout as a director, he managed to get the hit series House of Cards onto the small screen, with award winning stars like Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright on board as well.  Actors are also going back and forth between film and television, with none of the disdain they would have shown for the medium in the past.  Game of Thrones in particular has an especially large number of cast members itself that balances their film careers with their work on the show.  He stigma that television has had in the past is gone for most people in the industry, and now some will even look to it as a more desirable avenue to pursue than a film career.  Imagine if the same had been true in the early years of television.  Can you imagine seeing the “Duke” John Wayne headlining a weekly drama or Jerry Lewis producing a sitcom. This is certainly one of the biggest signs of television’s maturity as an entertainment art form.

But, the one big thing that still separates cinema and television is the level of production that it receives.  Even with all the ambition that TV producers put into their shows, their budgets will still fall short of the big productions, and it sometimes shows in many of the visual effects.  Even a show as highly budgeted as Game of Thrones has to make due with what HBO is able to allocate them.   Sometimes they pull it off, while other times you can’t help but feel that a moment falls short.  The Battle at the Wall seen in the IMAX showing of Thrones is a perfect example of this compromise that the show’s producers had to deal with.  You can tell that they were trying their hardest to make it feel like a big moment, but even they had to cut corners and downplay the moment from how it originally appeared in the source novel.  But what helps the show in the end is not how sharp or big it looks, but rather how they utilize their effects.  And honestly, the makers of Game of Thrones us their visual effects with more care and effectiveness than most blockbusters.  It’s giving the production the illusion of grandeur and making the production feel even stronger and more epic than its budget would have you believe.  They do this by putting the emphasis in the performances and then storytelling, which in turn makes the imaginary world of Game of Thrones feel even more real to the viewer.  And given that the show presents a continuing narrative in a serial format, it has actually made the show feel all the more epic.  I was actually stunned by how small The Lord of the Rings trilogy felt the last time I saw it, because it’s 12 hour plot line now feels dwarfed by the nearly 40 hours we’ve spent in the world of Game of Thrones; and were not even at the halfway point yet.  That is a testament to how well a TV series can overcome its budget limitations and even surpass its big screen competitors.

So, my hope in the future is that we see more of this mingling between television and cinema.  Yes, some of the allure of cinematic filmmaking is being lost in the process, but that’s only because television has upped it’s game and has met the challenge. In some odd way, this is something that could save a fledgling movie market, at least from the vantage point of theater owners.  Watching something epic in your own living room has advantages, but there is nothing quite as great as watching the same show on the biggest screen possible. And there’s nothing bigger than IMAX.   Game of Thrones is the perfect test subject for this experiment, and I feel like the experiment was well worth it in the end.  My hope is that HBO does the same thing next year, and that other networks with epic scale shows like AMC, FX, and Showtime follow suit.  It of course has to be the right kind of shows as well; just like with the movies, you need spectacle on screen to justify the larger format.  Another good idea would be to not have to wait for the whole run of the show to be over, and instead maybe consider simulcasting the broadcast of the show when it airs on the big screen.  The complications of that could be troublesome for both theaters and the studios,mbut you never know especially if demand is high enough.  I for one welcome the competition between cinema and television.  Competition between the two mediums allows for a more diverse set of choices for the viewer and it allows for many production companies and producers to take chances.  As of now, HBO and Game of Thrones are setting the standards high for Hollywood and it’s already leading the market to reevaluate how to present certain projects.  But, no matter how you watch the show in the end, quality comes from a great story, and having the gumption to make it work.  And as a result, any size screen will do.

For as long as there have been movies there has been the desire to tell stories that depart from the norm and venture into sometimes dangerous new territory.  And whenever we see a movie that intentionally means to provoke a response, that response will usually manifest itself as a backlash from those who don’t like it’s message or content.  But whether or not the response the movie gets is positive or negative, the one thing that ‘s for sure when a film courts controversy is that it gets everyone talking about it.  What is amazing today, in our social media driven culture is that controversy can now become a viable marketing tool for a movie to run on.  Even if you have a movie that is drawing scorn from a large amount of people, it still boosts the exposure of the product, especially if it becomes controversial to the point of being headline worthy.  But the question remains whether or not a movie demands to be seen once it becomes a hot button issue.  Are we compelled to see what all the fuss is about or should we ignore the hype and stop feeding the beast?  Like most things, it really comes down to the product itself, and whether or not it can stand on it’s own amid all the noise.  But the fact that not only does controversy help put the spotlight on the film but actually helps it to gain much more success than it would have normally is really something interesting in the industry.  One other interesting outcome of this is finding out whether the controversy is warranted in the first place.  Sometimes a movie is just ahead of its time and looking back on past controversies can sometimes make them look ridiculous in hindsight.  It’s a cycle played out all the time in Hollywood, and even though it happens often, we can still be surprised by the extent of a movie’s impact on our larger culture, or at least the established order it can shake up.

This is something that we are currently seeing played out in our cinemas now with Clint Eastwood’s new film American Sniper.  In my review of this movie a couple weeks ago, I highlighted the fact that the film took a rather polarizing figure in our recent history of war and used him as a focal point for a larger examination of the life of a modern American soldier.  Understandably, basing a movie on the life of a controversial figure like Chris Kyle was going to ruffle a few feathers in both our pop cultural and political world, and sure enough, the last month has been a firestorm of everyone putting in their own two cents about the movie.  Interestingly enough, the critiques of the movie have run pretty much down party lines, albeit with a couple open-minded voices actually breaking from the predictable opinion.  Since the movie’s release, we’ve seen critics attack this movie as being right-wing propaganda and racists to Muslims, while others on the opposite side view it as a strong endorsement of American military might.  My own opinion is that neither extreme is true, and that the movie is an intriguing character study of a flawed but talented soldier in combat, and how that experience is indicative of many more like him trying to come back to a normal life at home.  But, what I find the most interesting about the movie is how much the controversy has fueled it’s box office numbers.  It broke all sorts of box office records for the month of January and is continuing to dominate headlines in both the entertainment and political world.  In this case, I think that the movie accomplished something good by being controversial, because it’s gotten everyone talking about important issues like the responsibilities of war and how we treat our wounded soldiers.  And it also offers up a picture of war that can’t be so easily defined by conservative or liberal talking points.

But, while American Sniper is the hot button issue of now, it’s not the first movie to stir up controversy, nor the first to have been the beneficiary of added exposure.  Cinematic history is full of movies that pushed the boundaries of taste and socially acceptable behavior.  In the early days of Hollywood, the standards of violence and sex had yet to be established, so for many years filmmakers were free to push boundaries all the time.  Even studio made movies had openly frank movies about violence (1931’s Scarface) and sex (1933’s Baby Face), but that all came to an end with the establishment of the Hays Code, a restrictive set of guidelines set up by religious figures in conjunction with studio heads in order to “clean up” the loose morals of the movies.  For the decades that followed, Hollywood would play it safe and movies became a lot more sanitized and morally righteous in the years after.  Restrictions on depicting violence loosened during the war years, but even still, approval by committee had to be given.  In the 50’s, the McCarthy trials also made the studio system weary of political messages in the films as well, which led to an unprecedented era of censorship in the realm of film-making.  And naturally, when restrictions become too much of a burden, it inevitably leads to a backlash, and for many years Hollywood started to fall behind as necessary controversy existed outside of the industry, rather than being guided within.  It wasn’t until the late 60’s, after the Hays Code and the Blacklist were abolished did we see an era where free expression and new ideas become a big part of the cinematic experience again, at least for a time.

During the tumultuous 60’s and 70’s, when Vietnam and Watergate dominated the headlines, Hollywood was finally embracing filmmakers who had ideas and stories that could shake up the world and even change it for the better.  One thing that came about in this time was the creation of the Ratings system, conducted by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), a corporation set up for the specific purpose of determining the appropriate audience for any select film based on it’s content.  Sort of a self governing body, the MPAA took the power out of the government and studios hands to determine if a movie should be seen or not based on it’s content and instead left that determination up to the customers, giving them the information based on the rating upon it’s release.  In the beginning of this new system, Hollywood didn’t prejudge movies by their ratings, and instead celebrated the changing attitudes that were starting to become popular at this time.  Even movies slapped with the highly restrictive X-rating (which banned any audience members under the age of 17 from seeing it) were celebrated; director John Schlesinger’s X-Rated Midnight Cowboy (1969) even won the Oscar for Best Picture that year.  But, even though hot button movies were embraced in this time period, there was also an inevitable backlash as well.  Religious groups organized to the point where they could put pressure on the studios once again, and the MPAA’s ratings system became less of a suggestion for audiences, and more of a standardized label that segregated movies away from each other.  In the 80’s and 90’s, it began to matter a lot more whether you were saddled with a PG or R rating.  And in this time, controversial movies began to stand out that much more.

But do filmmakers set out to make their movies controversial and do they really use that as a way to boost their production’s exposure?  For many, I don’t think that filmmakers really want their movie to be seen as controversial.  Provocative, yes; but I don’t think they have the intention to draw criticism onto themselves.  For a lot of filmmakers, their choice of project is more about the story they want to tell and their belief that people will indeed want to hear it.  Controversy will sometimes arise when the filmmaker runs into a wall of rejection when their tastes run contrary to a whole select of people, usually those who share different worldviews than the filmmaker.  What may seem rational to one will seem radical to another, and the storm raised between one and another is what fuels the controversy around any given movie.  This usually comes down to three certain areas of contention, which are politics, religion, and standards of violence.  Probably the most effective way to really push a few buttons in Hollywood would be through tackling religious doctrine.  The film industry is primarily secular, with a few religious camps present as sort of a niche market, but if a major filmmaker chooses to take on a religious subject head-on, it usually ends up drawing the ire of some.  I’m of the belief that religious themed movies can be worthwhile if they have something interesting to say; which unfortunately very few of them do.  But, when experimental filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Darren Aronofsky tackle biblical tales in unconventional ways, it suddenly makes their projects much more explosive, because of how their breaking from an established order of things in Hollywood, both spiritual and secular.  Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) stands as one of the most controversial movies of all time, but that’s less because of it’s religious stance and more of because of how it affected different groups politically.  Even still, controversy got it exposure it definitely wasn’t expecting.

Whether expected or not, once a movie becomes a topic of discussion, it drives more people to want to see it.  Sometimes  it happens because of the movie’s content, and sometimes it just happens out of nowhere.  I’m sure that Seth Rogen and James Franco never thought that their silly buddy comedy The Interview would become so controversial that it would get pulled from the cinemas before release, but once you draw the ire of an international body intent on publicly shaming you just because you used them as your point of ridicule, you suddenly become on of the most controversial movies of all times.  And usually it’s just the timing of the controversy that matters the most.  Your movie may intend to push a few buttons, but unless it’s relevant to the times we live in, no one will really care.  Some controversial movies of the past now feel tame, and that’s usually because of the loosening of social standards on violence and sex in the years since.  Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1971) was so controversial in it’s time, that it was banned in the United Kingdom for decades for having inspired rising gang violence in that country.  Seen today, after all the violent movies that Hollywood puts out today, Clockwork Orange doesn’t have the same kind of shock factor, unless you count the unsettling eye torture that Malcolm McDowell’s Alex goes through later in the film.  But it’s notoriety was definitely fueled by it’s early explosive reputation.  And it’s button-pushing movies like this that have indeed moved society in a different direction that helps to make it’s content more acceptable.

With the market changing rapidly and Video on Demand becoming a new, profitable venue for film distribution, many have to wonder if there is any reason to go to the movie theater anymore.  The way that Hollywood answers that question is to make movies that are more than just an afternoon diversion and instead turn them into all out events.  It’s the reason why we still see movie productions with massive budgets nowadays, because the studios need their tent-poles in order to draw in the big crowds.  While there are many standout epic productions made every year, very few of them live up to their potential, and in turn that has led to a lot of concerns about whether the studio system can sustain the rising costs of making “big” movies year after year.  For most films, a substantial budget can certainly help, especially if there is a visionary director keeping things under control on the set, but sometimes it doesn’t matter how much the movie costs.  Sometimes its the presentation that matters the most.  The one thing that makes or breaks an epic film is how well it is paced and structured in the end.  All the visual pastiche put on the screen won’t matter if there is no momentum to the story, or even if there’s too much.  Epic scale is only effective if it is given the right amount of purpose behind it.  Sometimes, if the story is able to support it, an epic movie can hold our attention for a very extended period of time, but if the foundation is flimsy, epic length can end up working against the film too.  And in order to be profitable, movies of epic size have to be available for multiple screenings as well, so time restrictions can put pressure on a film’s production, and that may also end up compromising the movie’s overall effectiveness.  There are many factors that may influence a film’s run-time, but in the end, you either end up with a small story that can feel enormous or a big story that can feel small, and how well that works in the movies favor is based solely on how well the filmmakers have used the time given to them.

When film-making first started to become a popular art-form, it was usually limited to simple productions that would run for a single reel at most (which is roughly 20 minutes of run-time).  No one in the turn-of-the-20th Century thought to take cinematic storytelling into a longer format, because in that time, cinema was just seen as a sideshow act meant to entertain passers-bys with short, amusing vignettes of life.  It wasn’t until the emergence of D.W. Griffith that we began to see the beginnings of feature length story-telling.  And not only would Griffith show the world that you could tell a screen story in a lengthier format, but he would do so with what is widely considered the first Hollywood blockbuster; the epic scaled and controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915).  Nation dwarfed every film that came before it, running at a staggering 3 hours in length.  And yet, by pioneering the use of inter-cutting between multiple stories and defining the look of epic scale staging (particularly in the battle scenes), Griffith’s picture was able to sustain audience interest over that incredible length of time, and it’s influence is still felt today.  Unfortunately, the film’s racist message mars it’s reception today, and it should be rightfully condemned, despite it’s importance.  Griffith’s even more ambitious follow-up Intolerance (1916) continued to redefine the rules of cinema, cross-cutting between four different time periods connected by a common theme, and it still captivated audiences for over 3 hours of run-time.  But, as Hollywood would define itself in the years after, film-making became more standardized, and studios imposed more restrictions on the length of their movies, choosing nice compact 90 minute crowd-pleasers, over the grandness of a Griffith epic.

In the peak years during the studio system, epic length became more specialized to certain productions.  In those years, a big movie had to be an event, so as to stand out from the regular matinee fare.  Producer David O. Selznick accomplished what he believed to be the epic to end all epics with his grand scale production of Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel, Gone With the Wind, making a movie that defined the genre as a whole.  At nearly four hours in length, it is remarkable to see how well Gone With the Wind is able to sustain it’s size and scale.  It never once looses audience interest, and that’s largely due to assured film-making that never wastes a single moment.  For years afterwards, Wind would be the gold standard for all Hollywood epics, and it wasn’t until the mid 50’s that we would see another film that came close to it’s epic length.  With the advent of television, Hollywood began to relax it’s tight restrictions on film length.  A new practice began to emerge in these years, taking a cue from Selznick’s presentation of Gone With the Wind, which was called the Roadshow feature.  This was a special kind of theater engagement where a film was presented much like a stage production would be; with specially written programs given out to audience members, and the movie would begin with an orchestrated Overture, as well as having an Intermission halfway through.  The inclusion of an intermission was especially helpful for movies at this time, because it helped to justify the longer run-times of epic length movies, making the 50’s and 60’s a Golden Era for the 3 hour epic.  In this period, we saw many of the best examples of epic length productions, like Ben-Hur (1959, 211 minutes), Spartacus (1960, 195 minutes), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962, 217 minutes); all unbound by time constraints and were all considered more than just a movie.

But, once the era of the Hollywood epic came to a close, mainly due to a rise in more intimate and smaller scale films from the New Hollywood of the 70’s, epic length became more about what was called for in the story.  Epics still existed, but they were more exclusive and dictated more by what kind of story the filmmaker wanted to tell.  Sometimes this would lead to some of the most unexpected of epics, including ones that took up a very short amount of screen-time.  Robert Altman, for example, managed to redefine the meaning of epic by creating movies both large and small, but still always grand in ambition.  Sometimes he could accomplish this with a modest sized film like M.A.S.H. (1970, 116 minutes) or a epic scale one like Nashville (1975, 160 minutes), both of which feel both big and intimate, largely due to out-sized performances by his large cast of actors.  Francis Ford Coppola on the other hand, made some the eras grandest cinematic achievements, each with epic lengths to match that ambition like The Godfather (1972, 177 minutes) and Apocalypse Now (1979, 153 minutes), and yet he still managed to do so with the more intimate film techniques of that era.  New Hollywood epics would largely come to define the rules of epic film-making that we still see in practice today, especially with the rise of the blockbuster film in this period.  This included the end of the Roadshow presentation and the beginning of epic scale action flicks that could give the audiences the size and scope they wanted in only a fraction of the time.  And in this blockbuster era, we see more and more examples of how a movies length can impact the effectiveness of it’s story.

The odd byproduct of the blockbuster era is that now we are seeing movies that never would have been given a large amount of screen-time in the past, but are now bloated up to epic size and length, mainly so that they can fulfill the expectations of a tent-pole release. Sometimes this can be a blessing for a film, but that’s only if the filmmakers use their time well.  Other times, we end up with movies that run about 2 1/2 hours, but only feature about 90 minutes worth of story.  Excess is a big problem with epic movies today, which comes from the mistaken belief that bigger always means better.  Sometimes it ends up making what could have been a good film into an underwhelming one, because if the story doesn’t engage the audience all the way through, all the unnecessary action is just going to feel tedious.  That’s often a case of adapting something from one medium to another.  If you have a lot of story to tell, like with Gone With the Wind, than you’ll find it easier to fill every moment of your movie with interesting material.  But, if you’re expanding beyond what’s already there, then you run the risk of wasting people’s time with things and ideas that don’t matter in the long run.  There’s a reason why How the Grinch Stole Christmas works so much better at 30 minutes than at 2 hours in length.  A movie’s length must consider what works best for the momentum of the story.  Sometimes just using the essentials is the best method.  But, if the director has enough good ideas and can execute them well enough over a lengthier period of time, then the opposite can also be true.  This is primarily what separates the Christopher Nolans from the Michael Bays.

There are rare exceptions for movies that actually fall victim to the opposite idea, however.  Sometimes we see too much story told in too short of a film.  This is usually a problem found in most animated movies, which is a genre that strangely still is restricted by studio imposed time constraints.  Now, there are many animated movies over the years that have managed to tell grand scale stories in a remarkably short amount of time and succeeded; 1959’s Sleeping Beauty for example tells a very epic scale story, but manages to pack it all into a very tightly paced 75 minutes.  1942’s Bambi even managed to tell a multi-generational story in just little over an hour.  But, given the more sophisticated tools we have nowadays in animation, there should be fewer limits to the run-times of an animated movie.  Sadly most studios like Disney and Dreamworks are still insistent on staying at or under the 90 minute mark.  Now, if you’re movie is something modest like Lilo and Stitch (2002), than 90 minutes is plenty of time to tell a story.  But when you try to make a movie that introduces a complex world with a cast of a dozen or so characters, like 1985’s The Black Cauldron or 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, than 90 minutes is nowhere near enough time to build momentum for your story.  Atlantis in particular is probably one of the most clear examples of a movie stifled by an unforgiving time limit.  It never gives us enough time to absorb the world that it’s trying to create nor does it give enough time for us to gain sympathy for the characters.  The argument can be made here that if you’re going to make an epic than you should make an epic.  Going halfway only makes the end product feel hollow and uninteresting.  Pixar Animation thankfully bucked the trend by making animated movies that didn’t restrict themselves with time limits.  The Incredibles (2004) ran at a solid 115 minutes, and never once lagged, showing that animation can indeed work in a longer format.  It all shows that too little time can also work against a story’s pace, and that a film’s length must again factor in what’s best for the overall picture.

Hollywood, not one to miss opportunities, has found a way to please all sides whenever a film’s length comes into question.  When a movie makes it to home video, we will oftentimes see multiple cuts made available for purchase, enabling the consumer to decide how much they want to see of a particular film.  Sometimes it’s a decision made in collaboration with the director; Peter Jackson, in particular, has made longer cuts of his already lengthy Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies available on DVD and Blu-ray, some of which audiences prefer to the original theatrical cuts.  And then there are extended cuts of the movies that are made available after the original versions left their creators unsatisfied with the results.  These are usually called the Director’s Cut, which sometimes is a lengthier version of the film that includes scenes that the director wanted but had to cut due to time restrictions by the studio.  Sometimes a director’s cut can drastically alter the experience, like with Ridley Scott’s 2005 epic, Kingdom of Heaven, which is vastly improved in it’s longer 3 hour version.  Other times, a director’s cut changes nothing, like Oliver Stone’s multiple attempts to fix his 2004 epic Alexander, or Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, which showed that a shorter version left a better impact.  Ridley Scott in particular has often had the most interesting experience with Director’s Cuts, since both Kingdom of Heaven and his beloved 1982 classic Blade Runner are so drastically altered in their extended cuts.  Whether it adds a little, or a lot, or even subtracts from the original theatrical release, Director’s Cuts are an interesting example of how the usage of time can change the perception of a movie.  It all depends on how strong the vision is behind the story, and whether or not time restrictions benefits the overall product or detracts from it.

Overall, we’ve seen many movies over the years that either felt too long or too short for their own good.  Some audiences out there prefer movies that are quick and easy to watch, not wanting to have their whole day taken up watching just one movie.  I personally don’t mind a film’s length if it runs over three hours or more.  It all just depends on how well those three hours are used.  My two favorite movies in fact are both over three hours long, in fact; David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (217 minutes) and Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai (208 minutes).  Both are perfect examples of epic storytelling, not once wasting a single moment of screen-time on needless filler.  Watching these two movies in particular makes me wish that more Hollywood movies would display more control over the content they put into their lengthier movies.  When I think about movies that wasted their time, I usually think about bloated films like the 150 minute The Lone Ranger (2013) or any of the Transformers movies.  Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) itself ran for 165 minutes, and yet I can’t even remember anything important that happened in the plot for all that running time.  Other epic films also run the risk of bloating themselves up with self-aggrandizing character monologues, which unfortunately have become a cliche of the genre.  Sometimes it works, like the pre-battle speeches in the 200 minute long The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), while other times it comes off flat like with Brad Pitt trying to sound inspirational in 163 minute Troy (2004).  When it all comes down to it, it’s all about the pacing, and whether or not you’ve used the time you have effectively.  Movies can feel big, even at a shorter length.  But, if you’ve got enough story behind it, a longer length can prove to be better.  A great movie can come in any shape or size, but a truly epic sized one really does become something special in the end, and proves why it is indeed a great experience watching a movie on the big screen.

The holiday season is unique because no other time of the year has inspired the setting for so many movies.  Many of them are of course beloved classics, whether it be Frank Capra’s immortal It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1948), or even a more recent classic like A Christmas Story (1983).  And while most of these movies view the holiday with great reverence, there are also many Christmas movies that skewer the season’s traditions and still become classics, like 1987’s Scrooged or National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989).  The reason why the Christmas season has such a strong cinematic history is because no other holiday touches so many lives every year, especially given the more secularized multicultural festivities that have arisen in the holiday through the years.  Though still a distinctively Christian holiday, Christmas has become something bigger, affecting people of all religions and nationalities with charity, community and goodwill becoming the underlying meaning behind the festivities.  Most great Christmas movies reflect this and many of them have found great new ways of telling these same lessons to us year after year.  But, the Christmas season is also a colossal revenue maker for both Hollywood and the retail market, and sometimes those important meanings can be lost in favor of more superficial messages, aimed more at exploiting the holiday spirit rather than renewing it.  That’s why you see so many Christmas movies that end up being more bad than good, because they care only about the bottom end, and not about the deeper, more complex meanings.  And one movie this year managed to miss the mark so completely that it’s earned the distinction of being one of the worst movies of all time.

This movie in question comes from none other than former sitcom star turned fundamentalist Christian, Kirk Cameron.  His new film Saving Christmas examines what Cameron and the filmmakers believe is a “War on Christmas,” which is the common complaint you hear this time of year when holiday traditions are banned in the name of equality and tolerance.  And yeah, sometimes local governments can annoyingly overreach when they remove even the most harmless of Christmas symbols from public view, but Kirk Cameron believes that there is this vast conspiracy to suppress Christianity in America by secularizing the Christmas holiday.  That’s the fundamental thesis behind his new movie Saving Christmas, which bears the tagline, “Putting Christ Back in Christmas.”  Now, let me be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making a movie about Christmas that focuses on it’s religious roots.  Hollywood has done that for many years with movies like The Bishop’s Wife (1947).  Hell, you could even consider The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) a positive Christian-themed holiday movie.  But, there’s something horribly wrong and downright dangerous with what Kirk Cameron’s movie tries to say.  In Saving Christmas, Cameron’s character confronts a religious skeptic who rightly states that many of the traditions we now associate with Christmas have been assembled together from cultures from around the world, helping to make the holiday more secular and more inclusive.  Cameron disputes this in the movie, creating all these convoluted reasons as to why modern Christmas symbols are Christian in nature, disregarding all other cultural traditions.  Cameron’s film tries to present it’s case as a positive affirmation of faith, but it instead turns into a narrow-minded proclamation of religious exceptional-ism, as if he believes that Christmas should be exclusively Christian.

It’s not surprising that this movie has been panned across the board by critics, and I don’t blame them.  I grew up celebrating Christmas both in secular and religious ways and I gained very deep understandings of how both traditions have defined the holiday season, as well as being able to differentiate the two even from a young age.  Kirk Cameron’s movie removes that differentiation in a way that unfortunately minimizes the significance of both.  Case in point, his argument in the movie as to why Christmas trees are Christian and not a tradition usurped by the Church in it’s early years in order to appeal to Pagan followers (as History clearly states), is because Christ died on a cross, which is made of wood and therefore it is a tree.  And by his logic, that is why we have a tree in our homes during Christmas.  It’s convoluted and has no scriptural basis at all, and yet Kirk Cameron states this as being a fundamental truth behind the Holiday.  I stress this again, I have no problem with Christmas movies that have a religious point-of-view.   But at the very least, have a message that makes sense.  This is the fundamental problem behind Cameron’s movie.  His Christian world view is so narrow that it’s about starting at an end point and working backwards, disregarding any evidence that may override his claims.  For him, Christian traditions trump Christian teachings, and there’s no part of scripture that he can’t rework towards his own ends.  In Saving Christmas, it’s less about learning the lessons that Christ taught us about charity and goodwill towards others, and more about finding Biblical justification for shallow and gluttonous celebrations during the holiday season.

I may be coming off a little cranky and harsh towards Kirk Cameron and his movie, but it’s only because I view his film as something that’s deeply insulting as both a fan of the Holiday season, as well as a fan of cinema.  Not only does Saving Christmas have a rotten message at it’s core, it’s also a poorly made movie as well.  I don’t know much about filmmaker Darren Doane’s career as a director, other than what I’ve read on IMDb.  He’s certainly become a go to guy for Kirk Cameron, as he’s directed the actor’s last few movies, but I’m not sure where he stands on the film’s message overall.  He may have some directorial talent, but none of that shows up here.  The movie seems to have been assembled together with little thought for set dressing, cinematography, or even script writing.  It’s as if the concept behind the project dictated everything else, and the production was quickly slapped together in order to get this thing in theaters by the Christmas season.  Don’t go into this movie expecting to see character development or a deeply involved plot.  In  fact, don’t go into it at all.  Doane probably tried the best he could to make everything coherent, but I’m sure everything was overshadowed by Kirk Cameron’s choices as Producer.  I put more of the blame on him, seeing as he wants us the audience to know that this is his project through and through, given that the full title is Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.  But, if you’re setting yourself up for all the attention, you’re also inviting yourself into all the criticisms as well, and Cameron’s film is certainly seeing a lot of that right now.

Saving Christmas has become a landmark film in the last few weeks, not because of it’s box office success (which has been modest surprisingly, because of the help of church-based audiences), but due to how universally panned it has become.  Critical reception has been rough on this movie, with a dismal 0% on Rottentomatoes.com.  And just last week, it earned the #1 spot on IMDb’s notorious Bottom 100.  That means that it’s not just the worst movie of this year, it’s the worst movie EVER.  Yes, worse than such cinematic gems like Birdemic (2010), From Justin to Kelly (2003), or even Baby Geniuses 2 (2004).  But, I’ll give movies like Birdemic this; they’re actually hilarious to watch because of how bad they are.  Saving Christmas is just infuriating.  So, I can honestly say that no better movie is deserving of this dishonor than Saving Christmas.  Unfortunately, Kirk Cameron’s movie is not without company as far as Christmas movies go.  Christmas movies have become so abundant over the years, and very few of them are ever any good.  Saving Christmas, in it’s short time in theaters, has managed to surpass them all on IMDb’s list, so that tells you something more about it right there.  Even many Christian-centric film critics are distancing themselves from the movie, seeing as how strong the critical backlash to it’s messages have become.  But, even as repulsive as Saving Christmas is compared to all the rest, there are still a great many hate-able Christmas movies out there, and it shows that even secular based holiday fare can be rotten.

What ultimately makes a bad Christmas movie is a complete lack of understanding about the holiday spirit and more of an emphasis on the shallower aspects of the season, like focusing on the decorations or the presents.  That, or taking a traditional symbol of the season and just exploiting it for cheap gags or a convoluted message.  I can’t tell you how many different movies have centered around Santa Claus and his antics at the North Pole, and how very few of them actually present him as a genuine character, instead of making him more than an icon.  There’s also the dreaded Christmas themed comedies, which in recent years have more or less have just been trying to copy Christmas Vacation‘s formula and failing badly.  Christmas Vacation hilariously lampooned traditional family Christmas festivities, but did it with the underlying appreciation of the season and the unity of family, as oddball as they may be.  Other like-minded movies, like Deck the Halls (2006) and Christmas with the Kranks (2004) missed the mark completely by presenting no underlying message, and instead just came off as crude, mean-spirited, and superficial. Of course, one of the big problems with these bad Christmas films is that they always stress the commercial over the inspirational.  Just look at movies like the Schwarzenegger dud Jingle all the Way (1996) or the made-for-TV The Christmas Shoes (2002),  both which stress the importance of finding the right gift over anything else.  The Christmas Shoes in particular shares the same awful message with Saving Christmas, stating that commercialism is a Christian value.  Overall, there are many ways to make a horrible Christmas movie, and it ultimately comes from a lack of a moral and compassionate center.

This is especially terrible when the good message is right there in front of the filmmakers, and they refuse to actually use it.  Case in point, the truly awful remake of Dr. Suess’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), directed by Ron Howard.  The original book was a perfect expression of the Christmas Spirit, stating the need to look beyond the presents and the decorations, and instead celebrating the values of community, and the welcoming-in of outsiders.  Animator Chuck Jones brilliantly brought this story to life in his 1966 animated adaptation, which added even more depth to the character of the Grinch (voiced by Boris Karloff) by showing how the Christmas spirit changed even his cold heart, making it grow three sizes on that day.  It’s a beloved story and an equally loved animated short, both becoming standards of the season.  Ron Howard’s remake, however, strips that away by instead putting more emphasis on style over substance.  The movie adaptation devolves into merely a showcase for the art department as well for actor Jim Carrey’s comedic style (which is done under some admittedly impressive prosthetic makeup).  But the message of Dr. Suess’ story is lost midst all the Hollywood splendor.  What’s left is a movie that ultimately just rehashes all the negative aspects of the holiday, rather than stressing the good.  And most offensively, it tries to relay an anti-commercial message while at the same time trying to develop a brand for itself in a very hypocritical way.  It just shows that even a very secular take on the Christmas season can be shallow and rotten, especially when it departs from a well-laid foundation before it.

So, unfortunately like every other genre, Christmas movies have their own fair share of terrible entries.  Also unfortunate is the fact that Hollywood seems so keen on making even more holiday “classics” every year without ever attempting to actually make them good.  The Christmas season has it’s own attractive power, and Hollywood seems more content to exploit rather than renew the holiday spirit with anything new or original.  Kirk Cameron seems to believe that his film is reclaiming a part of the holiday spirit, but I think his movie only adds to the problem.  Christmas movies at their best touch the lives of people from all walks of life, filling them with universal feelings of hope and joy.  Kirk Cameron only wants to reclaim the holiday for Christianity and ignore the multi-cultural contributions that have made the holiday so special to our modern society.  What I find so peculiar about Cameron’s movie is how poorly it even sticks to it’s own principles.  We see Kirk Cameron blast attempts to take the holiday season out of the public square, and yet by arguing that everything about the holiday should have a religious basis (even the things that don’t), he is actually trying to take the holiday away from even more people.  Whether he likes it or not, Christmas is multi-cultural and a secular holiday in today’s culture, celebrated by Christians and non-Christians alike in all parts of the world.  And I think that a Holiday that links everyone together in a positive way like this is something worth celebrating.  Cameron thinks he’s being uplifting by championing the “Christ” in Christmas, but he instead is choosing to be greedy about the holiday, which is decidedly un-Christian.  And that’s why his new movie is not the present you should be opening up this Christmas season.

Festivities of the Thanksgiving weekend usually start off with a hearty dinner with family followed by socializing at either the movie theaters, or getting oneself damn near killed at the local shopping mall for Black Friday deals.  But, there’s also a long standing tradition that continues to be strong over the extended holiday weekend, and that’s the special holiday sports match-ups.  While no means crucial games in the long run, certain professional teams schedule these games for the sole purpose of exposure.  While most TV shows go on hiatus for the Thanksgiving weekend, sports programming fills that void with their special broadcasts and are able to be watched by not just their faithful fans, but also by anyone tuning in with the rest of their family.  Whatever is planned in everyone’s own Thanksgiving celebration, it’s highly likely that a good many households in America have managed to makes sports entertainment at least some part of the holiday.  And if it’s not a live event that becomes a part of the season, audiences can still get their sports fix from the world of cinema as well.  Indeed, Sports movies have become a beloved genre of film on it’s own, and many of them are released and/or watched more often this time of year than any other.  But, sports movies are in fact surprisingly varied the more you look at them as a whole, and have become beloved entertainment no matter the time of year.

Sports themes and subjects can be found in a whole variety of genre pictures.  It’s a sub-genre that isn’t as restrictively defined as others and you can easily lump a film from a whole bunch of different genres that would fit within this category.  There are sports movies that  can fall under the banner of historical films, or counter-cultural films, or even romantic comedy.  Hell, there are even sci-fi movies themed around sports.  It’s such a loose definition that some even wonder if the Sports flick should even be considered a genre at all, due to this broadness.  There is one thing for sure, however, and that there are some movies that can be described as nothing other than a sports flick, and that’s because they follow the sports movie “formula.”  That formula often involves a band of underdogs coming together, united by a common goal, and overcoming the odds in order to achieve greatness.  Sometimes, this formula is even whittled down to achievements by one gifted athlete who’s the hero of the story.  And while many sports movies do attempt to stand out from the rest, few actually do stray from the formula.  But, with a formula as common as this one, it also leads to a lot more repetitiveness.  One of the things that does plague the Sports movie genre a lot is the lack of genre-defining standouts, instead letting the formula itself be the most recognizable factor.  There are some all-time classics in the genre, but there are a lot more imitators that don’t quite rise up to the challenge and instead bleed into the background while trying to play it safe.  This is what often separates the good from the bad in the Sports genre, and given how the scales have tilted more in the favor of the negative mostly, it only makes the good ones stand out more.

First of all, let’s look at what makes a good Sports movie work.  Just like any other genre of film, it ultimately comes down to the strength of the characters and the story.  If those elements aren’t there, then the formula won’t work, and all you will be left with is a story that’s just going through the paces.  This unfortunately happens to many Sports movies, many of which don’t put the focus into the right  places.  A common problem is that many sports movies put the mechanics of the sport first, and then consider the story second, thinking that audiences won’t notice and get swept up in the in-game action.  This has been true with running through the paces movies like The Replacements (2000) or The Sixth Man (1997).  It won’t matter how gimmicky you make the situation; unless audiences care about the characters and what’s going on, it won’t matter how well the sports action is shot.  Formula is a crutch for some inexperienced filmmakers and it’s often why many of them turn to sports movies as a way to make their films look more impressive than they really are.  Sports events are filled with a lot of pageantry and drama, but that doesn’t always translate into a good story.

Human drama and competitive drama are two different things, and if you can manage to make both work together effectively at the same time, then you’ve achieved something.  Unfortunately for most sports movies, there is always that disconnect.  Even attempts to make compelling human drama can go haywire if it feels insincere.  Let’s compare this in two movies about high school football; Varsity Blues (1999) and Friday Night Lights (2004).  Varsity Blues is the lesser of the two because of the in-authenticity of it’s emotions.  It’s heavy-handed in it’s human drama and flashy in it’s depiction of it’s on-field action.  Friday Night Lights on the other hand treats it’s subject with a lot more restraint.  It still has the human drama throughout, but it’s better integrated with the action on the field, making both feel just as integral to the overall story.  It’s that balance that ultimately makes the sports movie formula work.  Had Varsity Blues not tried too hard to make their story emotional, then it might have felt more authentic.  Instead, the movie appealed more to the teenage soap opera crowd (which makes sense considering who made up the movie’s cast) and felt less like a film about the heart and soul of Football, which Friday Night Lights captures much more perfectly.  In that film, you get a better sense of how the different characters lives are intertwined and motivated by the sports they play, and how much winning means to them.  You see this in their struggles at home, sometimes showing kids dealing with abuse, and also in how the head coach (played by Billy Bob Thornton) can unite a team around all this turmoil and make his players believe they are winners.  That helps us the audience feel more involved once the players take the field and snap the ball.  It’s that balance between story and action that ultimately helps to make the good sports movie stand out.

If there is a Sports genre that has had a better track record than the rest, it is the Sports biopic.  Athletes are often the great legendary heroes of our modern age, and what better way to celebrate their accomplishments than with a film based on their life.  While these movies also fall into formula many times, they can still manage to overcome them if the true-to-life story is compelling enough.  And the history of Sports is not short of interesting subjects.  But, again, it’s all in how you go about depicting these people and what they’ve done that makes the movies work.  Case in point, a good sports movie would be the 1994 biopic Cobb, which featured Tommy Lee Jones as the notoriously brutish, and psychotic baseball player Ty Cobb.  That movie is fascinating to watch because it shows the life and career of a very flawed man whose actions feel so out of line by today’s standards that it helps us to learn more about how the sport of Baseball has evolved.  Contrast this with 1948’s The Babe Ruth Story, which white-washed the true story of a very flawed person who ended up becoming one of the world’s greatest athlete, and it inadvertently makes his life story feel dull in the process.  The more fascinating the individual, the more introspective the movie must be, and even if it’s showing the less flattering elements of a person’s life, all the better because it at least humanizes the person and makes them feel more relatable.  Sometimes using creative license even helps.  The recent Jackie Robinson flick 42 plays around with the events of the groundbreaking baseball player’s life, like the extent of the relationship he had with the team’s owner, as well as making up whole chapters of his life and career.  But, after seeing the final result, that matters very little, because what 42 gets right is the sense of Jackie Robinson the character, and the struggle with which he had to overcome.  Creative license may be a cheat, but it’s a cheat that can deliver a better impact.

This is a formula that has been very true not just for biopics, but for depictions of great sports events as well.  Sometimes, the best thing that a sports movie can do is to shed light on a great moment that happened in any particular sport, and how that left an impact on history.  These kinds of movies usually fall under the banner of the underdog story.  One of the best examples of this would be the 1986 Basketball film, Hoosiers.  Hoosiers is interesting because it doesn’t depict the story of some great professional team, or even one of the most earth-shattering upsets in sports history either.  It instead focuses on a more universal story of a small Indiana town whose High School team beat the big city school and won the state championship out of nowhere.  Doesn’t sound all that unusual, right?  Well, when you see the movie, you find that it is less about the game itself and more about the people who made it happen, which includes a coach with a shady past (a brilliant Gene Hackman), his troublesome alcoholic assistant (Dennis Hopper), and a group of working class kids who’ve been told they’ll never amount to anything.  The movie makes the final game feel much more important because of all the negative factors that have worked against these characters and it stresses how they’ve persevered against it.  It makes us root for the underdog probably better than any other sports movie ever, and it’s all because it plays upon our desires to see winners deserve their victory and challenge the established order of things.  Other underdog Sports movies do a good job of playing up the underdog formula, like Rudy (1993) and Miracle (2004), but few have made something so small feel so grandiose as Hoosiers did.

True stories seem to be the bulk of what we would describe as a sports movie, but like I stated before, sports work their way into all kinds of genres, some better than others.  Really, even at a young age, we are shown sports as an everyday element of our lives.  There are tons of family films geared to younger audiences that have a sports theme to them; although, for every charming Little Giants (1994) and Rookie of the Year (1993) that we get so often, there are about a dozen or so stupid Air Bud (1997) movies.  A great example from my childhood would be the brilliant The Sandlot (1993), which centered around baseball, but proved to be about so much more.  Sports comedies are also a noteworthy sub-genre.  Some take the sport they depict seriously, like Bull Durham (1988) and Major League (1989), becoming comedic purely through the eccentric personalities of their players.  And then there are the sports movies that savagely ridicule their selective sports, and yet still manage to be beloved by the sports’ same die hard fans.  Caddyshack (1980) mocks every conceivable convention of the sport of Golf, and yet I bet you won’t find a movie that is more commonly quoted on a golf course than it. Formula can also work as a negative sometimes with these kinds of films, which is double troublesome when the formulas of two different genres are in play.  This is particularly true with romantic movies centered around sports.  In my opinion, I see making a sports movie with a romantic plot as being the same kind of pandering towards a male demographic as shoehorning a love story into an action movie panders to a female demographic.  It feels inauthentic and cheap both ways.  This has often led to awful hybrids like Fever Pitch (2005) and Summer Catch (2001).  Though female athletes aren’t without their own classic sports film.  A League of their Own (1992) managed to appeal to audiences of all genders and did so by following all the same rules that make up any good sports movie.  Not to mention, it’s a movie geared towards woman that also features one of the greatest and oft quoted tough guy lines ever in a sports: “THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL.”

So, why do some sports movies have such a lasting resonance while others don’t?  I think it’s because of the fact that you’re trying to work two forms of entertainment together and make them feel like they’re the same thing.  We watch both to feel entertained, but experiencing the ups and downs of a movie is quite different than those of a live sporting event.  Drama in sports comes from a lot of factors.  It’s sometimes not what’s going on the field that matters to us, but rather the implications that the game means in the larger picture that we find so intriguing.  The lives of the athletes outside the sport and the baggage they carry with them can often impact our outlook on the game.  Sometimes it’s our hometown pride, or our wanting to see the smaller team undo the lofty expectations of the bigger team, in order to shake things up and make them more interesting that we enjoy.  In any case, these are things that are hard to translate into film.  Usually the success of a sports movie rests on the effectiveness of capturing that aura around the big games.  That, or they effectively use sports as backdrop for the interesting character dramas.  Overall, there are many films that fall short, but it only highlights the ones that are destined to become classics.  Though not particularly bound to the Thanksgiving season, these movies nevertheless have a customary presence around this time of year, especially when they play such a memorable role in the way it makes you value the role of sports in the larger cultural narrative.  They even serve as good counter-programming when the live games themselves become boring.  The Sports movie genre may seem formulaic to many, and continues to follow stringent genre rules more than some, but it’s also one of the most varied, and engaging of all cinematic genres.  And when done right, it can even make a happy ending feel all the more worth it.  And that’s certainly worth cheering for.

Recently I went to see a new film called Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Mexican auteur Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel) and starring Michael Keaton, who of course is best known for playing the role of Batman back in the 80’s.  The film was absolutely outstanding and will probably be near or at the top of my best of  the year list.  But, as I was watching the film, I was struck by not just the story, which cleverly derives from Keaton’s own career as an actor trying to move on after playing a famous superhero on film, but also by the technical wizardry involved in it’s making.  The film is low key and features very little in the way of visual effects, but what it does feature is some truly awe-inspiring camera work.  While not apparent in the trailer, what you’ll soon discover watching the movie Birdman is that it makes extensive use of the technique of long, unbroken takes.  In fact, the entire film is made up of long takes, stitched together so brilliantly that you’ll almost think that the whole thing was made in one two hour long continuous shot.  It’s a remarkable visual experience and it perfectly compliments the story being told, which centers around a group of actors led by Keaton’s Riggan Thompson as they put together a new play on Broadway.  Stage actors of course must put on a performance live without cuts or retakes, so a movie that let’s the cameras keep rolling reflects that same style in the best possible way.  It may not seem like a difficult thing, especially when applied to a modest budgeted movie like Birdman, but anyone who works in film will tell you just how extremely difficult this kind of technique is, because it’s time consuming and it requires a lot of things to go right all at once.  Still, it is a favorite technique for many filmmakers to undertake and an even better experience for audiences to enjoy.

The reason why the technique is such a difficult one to pull off is because of the amount of choreography that needs to happen.  It may look effortless on the screen, but what the audience doesn’t see is the stress that a long take puts on the crew and the cast.  Actors must hold their composure and hit their marks exactly so as to keep up with the pace of the camera movements.  If they are thrown off by anything, like an extra getting in their way, or suddenly forgetting their line or start to laugh uncontrollably, then the set-up must go back to square one to reset.  And every time the shot resets, it puts more strain on the crew who are trying their hardest to keep the shot running smoothly.  Imagine being the cameraman through all of this, as you have to carry heavy gear on your back and you’re also under the pressure of keeping everything in frame for an extended amount of time.  Because of the extensive amount of movement involved, most long takes are usually handheld.  And when the camera is being carried around the set, it puts more stress on the crew to stay hidden as the scene plays out.  Needless to say, there’s a lot that could go wrong while composing the scene.  Usually a lot of rehearsal is needed to pull these shots off, and when it works, it looks spectacular.  There are risks involved, however, such as the technique appearing pretentious if the material it is trying to present is not all that interesting.  That and a poorly choreographed and composed shot may just end up boring the audience rather than exhilarating them.  Thankfully Innaritu is a capable and experienced enough filmmaker to pull off the technique of long takes, and his work in  Birdman represents a great addition to a long tradition.

The technique of long takes extends back to the early days of cinema.  Buster Keaton would let his cameras roll for protracted amounts of time in order to get those amazing stunts of his fully covered.  Similar to what Innaritu does with his shots in Birdman, Buster Keaton would stitch together different shots in a way to give the illusion that everything was done in one take, which was used spectacularly in the dream sequence of Sherlock Jr. (1924).  Beyond the silent era, long takes became less commonplace, although film editing in that same period was more relaxed than it is today.  Today’s quick paced, music video style editing is markedly different than the style of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which is probably why long takes stand out so much today.  Back then, movies would play out a scene with stage-like steadiness, relying less on close-ups and fast-paced editing and letting the actors and dialogue guide the action instead.  But even with the more relaxed editing style of the period, there were some filmmakers who enjoyed making elaborate long take shots for their movies.  Probably the most famous example would be the opening shot of Orson Welles’ 1958 masterpiece Touch of Evil.  The movie opens on the image of a criminal carrying a makeshift bomb, and then pulls out to reveal the criminal running through a parking lot.  The camera then swoops across the rooftops and drops down onto a street full of pedestrians.  Once there, the camera then zooms in on our main characters (played by Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh) as they are walking down the street.  A moment later, the car carrying the bomb passes by them.  The two characters stop for a moment to kiss, but are interrupted by the blast of an explosion.  It’s at that point that the movie sees it’s first cut to another shot, which is remarkable considering all the activity that we saw in the previous shot.  It’s an amazing, groundbreaking shot that has continued to influence filmmakers to this day.

Long take shots matured in the decades since Welles, and were particularly popular with filmmakers from overseas.  The long take became a popular technique for the Kung Fu genre in Asian cinema.  Naturally, Kung Fu films wanted to showcase the amazing stunt work of their actors, so letting the cameras roll without cutting the action was the best way to present that.  This is true with a lot of Jackie Chan movies from the 80’s and 90’s.  By letting the action play out, Jackie Chan was better able to convince audiences that he was the real deal as the scenes progressively became more and more elaborate as they went along.  This tradition of long, unbroken takes in Kung Fu and martial arts movies continues to this day, with recent classics like Oldboy (2003) and The Raid: Redemption (2011).  One particular director who put his own noteworthy stamp on the technique at this time was Chinese director John Woo.  While more of an action film director than a martial arts director, Woo managed to be influenced by the films of this genre as he prepared some of the more elaborate scenes in his movies.  Probably his most famous long take is the amazing Hospital scene from the movie Hard Boiled (1992).  Although only 3 minutes in total length, this spectacular scene involves so many technical effects and precisely timed stunts that it is a wonder to behold as it plays out.  There’s even a moment where the film’s star Chow Yun-Fat enters an elevator and proceeds to continue his shootout on the next floor without interruption.  This was accomplished through a rapid fire redress of the same set that you don’t see on screen.  It just shows how some filmmakers have managed to push the technique farther than ever before and continue to raise the bar.

Today, that bar has been raised to the point where long shot takes no longer have to be complex, they have to be spectacular.  In many ways, it has turned into the ultimate challenge for directors, and only the boldest ones out there are willing to take the plunge.  Thankfully, today the tools needed to pull off the process have become less cumbersome.  Digital cameras are much lighter than their film based fore-bearers, and are less distracting to the actors as well.  Stanley Kubrick brought the Steadicam into the film-making process, when he employed it on The Shining (1980), which made it easier to follow the action on foot without having to hide any of the wiring and heavy equipment attached to the camera.  This was used to great effect with the scenes showing young Danny Torrance riding his tricycle through the Overlook Hotel’s long hallways.  Also, digital manipulation has helped to mask some of the imperfections of lengthy one-shot takes, and even gives the audience the illusion of a long take when it really isn’t one.  Alejandro Innarritu’s friend and colleague Alfonso Cuaron has included many such long takes in his movies, and often they are so complex that there’s no way to make them workable without digital reinforcement.  This is true with scenes from some of Alfonso’s most spectacular films like the Time Turner sequence in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) or the amazing 12-minute opening shot of Gravity (2013).  Both of those moments called for digital enhancement, because there was no way they could be done in reality, and yet they still look like a seamless one-shot take.  It’s a brilliant example of how to make the technique work today with new technologies and still feel like they’re worthy of the legacy.

That’s not to say that every long take shot needs to be full of energy and movement.  Sometimes the most captivating long takes are ones that just lets the action play out in real time, helping to absorb the audience into the scene and forget that they are watching a movie.  Many indie filmmakers are particularly fond of this kind of technique.  Paul Thomas Anderson in particular has made great use of the long take in his films, which he frequently uses as a way to establish a setting or a character in the most elaborate way possible.  And for Anderson, the artistry is not in the way that the camera is moving, but what is captured in the frame that matters.  You look at the long shots from movies like Boogie Nights (1997) or Punch Drunk Love (2002) and you can see all the intricate detail that’s put into the characters actions on the screen, even sometimes when it’s something they are doing in the background.  Quentin Tarantino also lets his scenes play out as a way to build character and mood, like the spectacular long take of Leonardo DiCaprio’s dinner scene monologue in Django Unchained (2012).  But one of the most amazingly restrained examples of a long take shot that I’ve ever seen in a movie was in the film Hunger (2008), directed by Steve McQueen of 12 Years a Slave fame.  In it, there is a scene where Irish activist Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) is visited in prison by his priest (Liam Cunningham) during a hunger strike.  The two men sit down for a conversation that lasts over 10 minutes and the shot is from a wide angle, with both actors occupying either side of the frame.  Amazingly, the camera holds on this wide shot for the entire scene (all 10 minutes of it) and never cuts to a close-up.  This could have failed if the dialogue wasn’t interesting, but both actors feel so natural and the lines they deliver are so well written that the moment ends up being captivating.  It’s remarkable that an un-moving camera can have such a captivating effect, but director McQueen pulled it off.

There are many ways to make the technique of unbroken long takes work in a film, and the amazing thing is how many different ways it can work.  Pretty much, you can put the technique into any film and any scene and it would still work; it’s not about where you place it, it’s just how well you execute it.  Sometimes, when a long take becomes your signature style, it’ll end up finding it’s way into any story you wish to tell.  That has been true with British director Joe Wright, who has managed to put at least one long take into each of his movies, which range from adaptations of classic romance like Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Anna Karenina (2012) to action flicks like Hanna (2011).  Probably his most famous long take shot was in the movie Atonement (2007), which was a 6 1/2 minute trek along a war torn beach, featuring several vignettes of action played out in front of the camera as it passes by.  That spectacular shot had to involve months of planning to pull off as the action pieces needed to happen at precisely the right moment in order to make it into the shot.  Alfonso Cuaron also has made the technique part of his signature style.  His most famous example of the technique is probably the 4 minute shot inside of a moving car in the movie Children of Men  (2006), which was accomplished with a specialty rig built on the roof of the vehicle and was done with almost no digital manipulation.  Cuaron continued to build upon his already amazing camerawork in that film when he made the spectacular Gravity last year, which features some amazing shots that continue on for nearly 10 minutes in length apiece.  That spectacular camerawork earned both him and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki well deserved Oscars, showing that techniques like the long, unbroken take can help to gain a skilled filmmaker the notoriety that they deserve.

Indeed, if I were to point to a film technique that I enjoy the best, it would be the long, unbroken take.  There is just something purely cinematic about it.  It displays what I think is the pinnacle of cinematic artistry, because it requires so much work, patience, and skill to pull it off.  And thankfully, with film-making tools becoming much more reliable and less cumbersome than in years past, more filmmakers are gaining the confidence towards wanting to try their own take on these shots.  This technique is even making it’s way to television, as was witnessed with an amazingly well choreographed long take shot seen in an episode of HBO’s True Detective.  Hopefully, more filmmakers look at these amazing scenes in movies and become inspired to include them more often in the years ahead.  It certainly works more effectively than the fast paced editing that you see in movies nowadays.  For one thing, I was certainly glad to have witnessed a movie like Birdman which not only made use of the long take technique, but crafted the entire film around it.  Some of it was done through clever editing or unobtrusive visual manipulation, but you can tell that there were many parts of the movie that had to have been done purely without cutting the shot.  Probably the most spectacular one would be a scene where Michael Keaton’s character is accidentally locked out of the theater while still in his underwear.  In order to get back in to perform his scene on time, Keaton  runs around the building, crossing through traffic in a busy Times Square atmosphere, and reenters through the front lobby.  In all, the shot I would estimate is ten minutes long, and considering all the mayhem he and the crew would’ve had to cross in order to get that shot done right, the end result is incredibly impressive.  The whole movie is a brilliant showcase for the long take technique and I’m sure everyone who sees it will be just as engrossed as I was.  It’s amazing to think that fewer edits in a movie can make it more harrowing, but this is proof that it’s possible.

Whenever we round out our favorite comedies of all time, the film Ghostbusters (1984) is almost certainly at or near the top of that list for anyone in my generation.  Crafted from the minds of writers and co-stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, and directed by Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters is a classic in every way, and even 30 years after it’s initial release, it is still a strongly influential comedy.  That’s because of the fact that it takes a strong concept, that being a ragtag band of paranormal scientists forming a ghost extermination agency, and exploits that premise to it’s full potential.  That and it’s just incredibly funny.  The perfect casting is also what has made this movie so beloved.  Initially conceived as a follow-up to the popular Blues Brothers film, the movie was written to star Aykroyd and John  Belushi as a pair of titular Ghost Busters.  Unfortunately, Belushi’s untimely death forced a re-imagining of the script, which proved to be a blessing.  The team was expanded to include co-writer Ramis as the exceptionally nerdy Dr. Egon Spengler, as well as Ernie Hudson as the bewildered temp assistant Winston Zeddmore.  But, the true keystone to the whole cast proved to be the addition of Bill Murray in the role of Peter Venkman, the cocky one-liner spewing hot shot that Murray was tailor-made for.  Indeed, what most people love about this movie is just how well this cast works off each other, and just how funny they all are throughout.  Murray almost steals the movie away on his own.  But, what is interesting about the movie’s legacy after 30 years is how it modernized and redefined the way dark and scary themes can work as the basis for some hilarious comedy.

Though no one would ever define Ghostbusters as anything other than a comedy, it is interesting to note that there are moments in the movie that are downright creepy, and would feel at home in any authentic horror movie.  What’s more, nothing in the movie feels out of place.  Every scary moment works, and the hilarious comedic bits fit right alongside it, sometimes even helping to punctuate the moment.  None of the transitions in tone are jarring, and it all makes the film that more of a unique experience.  That fine line between horror and comedy can easily be mishandled if the filmmaker goes too far in either direction.  Ghostbusters is expertly crafted to the point where the movie crosses that divide effortlessly multiple times.  Case in point, the depictions of the ghosts differ primarily between the frightening and the goofy, depending on what the film requires at the moment.  The scene where the Ghost Busters encounter Slimer is more of a comical scene, so the look of Slimer the Ghost is obviously more cartoonish than scary.  However, when the movie shows the heroine Dana (Sigourney Weaver) being abducted and possessed by the demon Zuul, the creature is rightfully depicted as a terrifying monster.  Whatever the story calls for at the moment, the movie adjusts the tone and the scares accordingly, and Ghostbusters always seems to hit that tone perfectly.  It even gets a funny one-liner in every now and then during a terrifying scene, like Venkman’s quip about Zuul’s “lovely singing voice.”  But even though Ghostbusters modernized this kind of balance between the profane and the light-hearted, it was still one of many touchstones in the long history of Comedic Horror.

Mixing the two genres together actually has been around since the early days of cinema.  Even in some of the classic Monster movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age do you see some examples of adding levity to many dark films.  Universal’s classic adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Gothic novel, Frankenstein, was a notably dark movie with very few moments played for laughs.  However, when director James Whale was tasked with creating a sequel to his macabre classic, he chose to go in a very different tonal direction by injecting a lot of camp humor into the story.  The result was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which has gone on to become a beloved classic in it’s own right.  The movie is still frightening for the most part, with Boris Karloff still menacing as the Monster, but there are decidedly more comedic moments in this movie as well, primarily with the dimwitted townsfolk who hunt after Frankenstein.  Mel Brooks would exploit that comical tone more when he made his own homage to the Horror classic, Young Frankenstein (1974), following James Whale’s own style, but removing all subtext and adding a whole lot more silliness.  This kind of campy horror would become more prevalent during the 50’s and 60’s when the B-Movie phase began to dominate the cinemas.  Just watch the works of Ed Wood and Roger Corman and tell me that their intentions weren’t to make their audiences laugh out loud between the screams of terror.  But, despite the intentions of the filmmakers, there’s no doubt that a light sprinkling of comedy helps to make the horror feel more rewarding.  That’s something that future Horror film master Sam Raimi definitely took to heart when he created his Evil Dead series of films, which skirt the line between scary and funny quite frequently.  Even today you see many films try to make that balance work, although few have pulled it off as well.

I think the reason why Hollywood has become accustomed to the idea of mixing Horror and Comedy together is because they have the same effect on the audience.  For the most part, these are the kinds of movies that must be seen with a crowd, because the reactions you get out of the theater during a comedy or a horror film is also part of the entertainment.  If a horror movie makes someone in the audience scream out loud, it will almost always get a laugh out of someone else and that usually is why most people love the communal experience of watching Horror movies.  It’s the same kind of reaction we get out of a comedy movie too, and indeed sometimes the most laugh out loud moments we’ve seen could have come from a movie that was trying to be scary.  Case in point, in Friday the 13th Part 8, there’s a scene where Jason faces a championship boxer whom he wears down by being  un-phased by all the blows he delivering.  When the boxer says he’s had enough, he asks Jason to “take his best shot,” which he does by knocking the boxer’s head off in one punch.  It’s a hilarious moment in a place you didn’t expect it, and yet it doesn’t suddenly make the movie into a comedy.  A recent film like Gone Girl also has a moment that goes from horrific to hilarious in the blink of an eye, showing just how much those two emotions work well together.  It doesn’t work all the time, and indeed it more or less has to do with how well the tone is managed in a movie.  For one thing, none of the films in the Scary Movie franchise are particularly scary; or for that matter funny.  But it has been a formula that has proven itself countless times mainly because these are the kinds of movies that are perfectly geared to drive up box office numbers.

The movies that we commonly associate with this formula are Dark Comedies.  They are not primarily built around Horror tropes, but nevertheless they revolve around darker themes like death and suffering, while still playing moments and situations for a laugh.  Again, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series is so outlandish, that you could argue that they were made to be comedies first and horror films second, especially with Army of Darkness (1992).  But subtler dark comedies also manage to present that fine line in interesting ways.  The Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996) is a great example of comedy and horror working together to create a truly memorable experience.  I mean, you had to have chuckled when you saw Steve Buscemi’s disembodied foot poking out of that wood chipper, just before you felt the dread of what that situation was actually meant.  Human behavior gone horribly awry is what characterizes most dark comedies, with movies like Mary Harmon’s American Psycho (2000) and Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things (1998) also showing hilariously over the top moments of horror on screen.  But, what makes these movies memorable is not by how outlandish they are, but by how effective they’re shocking moments elevate the rest of the film surrounding them.  Sometimes the best way to do that is to subvert the audience’s reactions, and make them appreciate the unexpected.  If you’re too predictable, and add humor or horror in places that didn’t need them, then you have confused and unpleasant messes like Jennifer’s Body (2009) or Death to Smoochy (2002), both of which didn’t know what the hell they wanted to be.

But, not all comedies need to be dark in order to have scary moments.  Ghostbusters never actually stops being funny throughout it’s entire run-time, and it underlines every genuine scary moment with something hilarious.  It’s something that I think Ghostbusters defined better than any movie before and since, and most Horror comedies today follow along a similar tone that the movie established; giving us genuine frights while never missing the opportunity to crack a joke.  If I could point out a movie of this current generation that has become the Ghostbusters of it’s time, it would probably be Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), which itself is celebrating a 10th anniversary this year.  Shaun managed to do for zombie flicks what Ghostbusters did with haunted house movies, and that’s by making a acceptable entry into the genre while at the same time lampooning it at every turn.  Like Ghostbusters, Shaun is built more around the hilarious interactions of the characters, with the horror setting used mainly as the backdrop for all of their goofy antics.  Stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost clearly have an affection for zombie movies, and their inept buffoonish characters work very well in this setting, which is depicted in a very straight forward way.  But, at the same time, the movie never falls into true horror, and is laugh out loud from beginning to end.  Plus, it’s the only movie I know of with a zombie attack choreographed to the music of Queen.  Most Dark Comedies can sometimes be mistaken as quirky Dark Dramas, but there’s no mistaking movies like Ghostbusters and Shaun of the Dead for anything other than a Horror Comedy.

So, 30 years have gone by and Ghostbusters is as fresh as ever.  Very little in the movie feels stale or dated.  Even today, it is still the highest grossing film ever made by Saturday Night Live alum, and that’s quite an achievement.  Considering that the movie started out as an excuse for the two stars of the Blues Brothers to team up again, it’s amazing to see how it has evolved since then.  It spawned a less effective, but still entertaining sequel, as well as an animated series and a lucrative toy line.  I think I remember there being a glow-in-the-dark Stay Puft Marshmallow Man doll in home many years ago, showing just how wide a range of audience this movie reached over the years, even becoming a part of the lives of the youngest viewers out there.  There have been rumors of a third Ghostbusters film for years now, which I don’t think will ever see the light of day, especially now with the recent passing of co-star Harold Ramis.  To be honest, there’s not much that can be improved upon; the original is just a perfectly crafted movie and it’s hard to recapture that same kind of effectiveness.  For one thing, Ghostbusters was groundbreaking in how it took the Horror Comedy to new heights, especially in terms of the level of it’s hilarity, and also in the scale of it’s production.  It’s easy to reach the goal, but rarely can you top it’s impact.  Shaun of the Dead manages to follow in the movie’s footsteps with it’s level of effective humor, but done on a much smaller scale with a different kind of sub-genre.  For Ghostbusters, it was a product of it’s time and became a definite touchstone that would define the look and feel of both comedies and horror movies for years to come.  It’s often imitated, such as with similar toned movies like Gremlins (1985), but few have ever managed to come close to it’s ambition.  And most importantly it still remains a great cinematic experience.  Can it be scary?  Absolutely, but in a very fun way, because after all, “I ain’t afraid of no ghost.”

Social Media has moved political movements, public event awareness, and even budding careers into places unseen faster than ever before, but what is most interesting about social media today is how it allowed the average person to have a say in what’s going on in their culture.  And there is no other place that has exploited that accessibility to an audience better than the entertainment industry.  Whenever you see a movie or a TV show advertised, it often includes a web address listed to entice you the audience to visit their home page and learn more about their product.  That or it will include a “hashtag” phrase that you can link to on Twitter and/or other social media sites to let your friends or the actual  film companies know that you are directly talking about their show.  It’s obviously a marketing ploy by film executives to generate interest and excitement over their new projects, but it also represents an interesting new trend in Hollywood, where interactivity between the filmmakers and the audience is now more closely entwined than ever before.  Social media offers a very direct link to gauge how a large group of people is feeling at the moment, and that has helped the entertainment industry figure out what are the trends that matter to which they can directly market.  Not only that, but social media also motivates large groups of people instantaneously, which is helpful if what you want to market comes out of more of the underground of pop culture, and you need to grow awareness in a quick and cheap way.  But, though films have used social media for a while now as a tool for marketing, it has only been recently that it has actually influenced the actual inceptions of movies.  And naturally, when the Twitterverse inspires the creation of a new film, it’s got to be something that is very much “underground.”

Enter renowned comedy filmmaker Kevin Smith, who’s become noteworthy not just for his canon of flicks, but for being a unique personality both on screen and on social media.  After his film career turned a little rocky in the late 2000’s, bottoming out with his horrible experience directing 2010’s Cop Out, Smith turned his attention away from Hollywood and towards a new passion, which turned out to be his weekly podcast.  What started out as a modest show where Kevin and his buddies could discuss topics freely in humorous, unhinged discussions soon developed into a vast network of multiple shows, and soon Kevin Smith’s “Smodcast” became a launching point for a new phase in Kevin Smith’s career as a filmmaker.  With a wide reaching show like his, he could promote his new projects in ways that he was never able to before, which became helpful when he decided to abandon the traditional route of film marketing to promote his 2011 film Red State.  But, what he soon learned on his podcast was that he was able to generate new ideas for stories and actually go directly to his audience for feedback, knowing that most of his fans were indeed already listening in.  This was something that happened during an episode of his Smodcast called “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” where he and his longtime producer and co-host Scott Mosier discussed a bizarre article they found online, about an ad put into a British newspaper inquiring for a new roommate to help a person with their rent and care-taking.  The catch; the new tenant had to wear a walrus costume at all times.  This of course spurned on Kevin Smith’s imagination and the whole episode of the podcast involved Kevin and Scott playing out that scenario in a hilarious but twisted way.

This was in no way different than most of the many other discussions Kevin and Scott have had on their show, but what made the episode special was the fact that Kevin saw potential in the idea.  Indeed, within the same episode, Kevin Smith wondered if he could actually make the movie that they were dreaming up on the spot.  He knew he had the means and the connections to make it happen, but what he didn’t know was whether or not he should.  So, he asked his audience to go to Twitter and let him know specifically if he should make the movie or not; all they had to do was either tweet #Walrus Yes or #Walrus No.  Not surprisingly, nearly everyone who follows Kevin Smith tweeted in the affirmative, and Smith didn’t hesitate to make good on that promise.  He quickly drafted a script, got the funding and the cast lined up in no time, and within a years time, he had a film ready for the spotlight.  And indeed, every weird thing that Kevin and Scott jokingly dreamed up on the podcast made it to the screen, in every disturbing and hilarious detail.  The final film itself, Tusk (2014) may not be anything groundbreaking on the surface, but the fact that it came from such an unexpected origin is what ultimately makes it groundbreaking.  Had Kevin Smith not put the idea up to a vote on his Twitter page, the movie would never have been made.  This is what makes the existence of Tusk so interesting because it is 100% a film motivated by social media.  It’s not just another film that uses Twitter as means for promotion.  We wanted to see this movie happen, we used social media to make it happen, and now it’s playing nationwide in our local cinemas.  Kevin Smith’s savvy-ness with social media may have given him a fun exercise in film-making, but the means to make it happen may be more groundbreaking than anyone realizes.

Back in the early days of Hollywood, the only way that audiences could influence what came out of the entertainment industry was to speak with their wallets.  If a film was bad, audiences could just ignore it, but after a while, Hollywood found a way to work around this and they used marketing tricks to make even their most inferior products sell well at the box-office.  Trends would come and go with the passing years, but whatever films were being made were still dictated by the aspirations of the directors, the producers, and/or the studios.  The audience never could have a say in what stories they wanted to see; it was merely down to the choices of whatever films were available at the moment.  Thankfully there’s so much variety out there in the film market that anyone could still find something that interests them at their local cinema, so it’s not like audiences have been cheated by this system.  But that prompt to have a say in what films actually get made has been largely been left out of the public’s hand.  Instead, the choices made by Hollywood have been more about guessing what audiences want than actually knowing what they want.  Indeed, even with social media being as widespread as it is now, it’s still difficult to gauge exactly how everyone will react to something.  Back in the early days, the studios would sometimes rely on polls and surveys to see what audiences wanted in their movies, but polling only reaches a handful of people and it’s mainly slanted one way or another depending on how the survey’s were conducted.  Also, Hollywood has made the big mistake of having focus groups and test screenings determine some of the final cuts of films, which again is relying on a very narrow margin of people to influence and compromise someone’s vision.

The reason why Tusk is groundbreaking is because it removed the guessing game part of the equation and puts the idea up to audiences before any movement can be made on the film at all.  Kevin Smith’s fanbase spoke up and indeed said that “we want this to happen,” and the rest was up to Kevin to fulfill.  He didn’t have to test screen the footage to see if it would appeal to a wider audience, or get rebuffed by studio executives who thought the idea was too bizarre to be made.  Here, thanks to the response on Twitter, Kevin Smith had the voice of the audience behind him, telling him directly that this story needed to be told.  Indeed, by letting the audience in on the process at the very beginning, you have this ability to get people behind it early and generate excitement for it before it even sees completion.  It actually works better that way than any kind of marketing, although that certainly helps as well.  And it thankfully let’s audiences know what to expect and not feel like they were duped by the studios into feeling excited for something that didn’t deserve it.  People know what to expect with Tusk, because they’ve been following Kevin Smith’s whole journey with it.  In fact, the whole lead up to the movie’s release, documented through Kevin Smith’s own correspondences on Twitter and his podcast, has helped to generate even more interest in the film.  Though Kevin Smith may have just wanted to connect with his audience for some well intentioned feedback, he may have also started a whole new trend in film marketing that studios may be following in the years ahead.

Though Tusk came about through an already built-in brand that it’s already famous creator has built over the years, it does show how some underground film-making can use social media to help gain exposure for their products.  This is something that has been growing over the last few years and independent film-making is seeing new life today thanks to new forms of crowd-source funding that has also arisen from social media.  Today, websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are allowing filmmakers who have visions that exist outside the norm find the funding they need in order to make it a reality, and it’s all made possible by getting the word out directly to the audience.  The great thing about the crowd-sourcing trend is that it puts the power directly into the hands of audiences to actually make a movie happen.  For most filmmakers, finding the funds is the hardest part of the process, so by going online and soliciting funds from the fans directly, with perks like screen credit attached of course, they are able to bypass the whole process of trying to woo less interested investors.  Though many films like these will be micro-budgeted even with strong fan response, it nevertheless will give the audience a financial say in what they want to see.  Sometimes, when the fan-base is strong enough, a film will get the funding it needs in a big way.  Take for instance the Kickstarter fund set up for the making of a movie based on the series Veronica Mars.  The Veronica Mars movie managed to raise $4 million in a short amount of time, and with that show of goodwill from a dedicated fan-base, the production team wasted no time making the movie a reality.  That’s one example where a film that could never have gotten made the old-fashioned way, due to lack of interest in the industry, suddenly became possible due to the financial support of it’s own fans.

Although there are many benefits to programs like Kickstarter to help fledgling filmmakers get the funding they need or help unique voices be heard outside of the system, there are still drawbacks to audience driven productions.  When filmmakers take to Kickstarter, they need to be sure that they are listening to their audience, and not just using the site as a means for some easy cash.  If audiences are investing in something, it’s because they want to see something very particular, and not just what the filmmaker believes the audience deserves.  Like with more high profile investors, filmmakers have to be beholden to those who invested money into their projects, including taking in creative input that those same investors suggest.  When your film comes from thousands of investors like it would from crowd-sourcing, the same should also apply.  This probably matters little when the movie that is getting funded is bringing an already familiar property to the big screen, like taking the Veronica Mars series and turning it into a film, but when the film is something new, the filmmaker owes it to their audience to include them in on the creative process.  Filmmaker Spike Lee ran into trouble recently when he took to Kickstarter as a way to fund his next film so that he could avoid having to appeal to studio investors.  The complaint from audiences came from the fact that Lee was using crowd-sourcing as little more that means to fund his movie, and that he was still going to do things his way without the input from his fans who invested their money in it.  It could be said that just by funding the movie, the audience would have already spoken out on supporting Spike Lee’s project, but even still, one has to recognize that there’s more to that process than just finding a quick source of money.

Kevin Smith’s Tusk had the benefit of coming from a filmmaker who indeed had the connections and was listening to what his audience had to say.  Though Kevin Smith’s movie may be a small oddity, it nevertheless provides us with an early outlook at how movies may be developed, produced and sold in the future.  Today, audiences now have more say in what kind of movies get made than they ever have had before, and it’s all thanks to the new advances made in social media; and also thanks to people in the media who understand how to use those tools well.  Not only are we getting filmmakers emboldened with new avenues of finding ways to reach their audiences, but the audiences themselves are beginning to also strong-arm the filmmakers into making the movies they’ve always wanted to see.  Even rumors are now influencing film-making decisions, as some people in the media are using places like Twitter to gauge public reaction to potential film ideas before they even exist.  Not long ago, word spread online that Disney was working on a third Father of the Bride movie that was centered on gay marriage.  While this caused an uproar almost immediately, it was revealed later that no plans of any kind were being made by Disney on such a project, but because the feedback on the rumor was so strong, there is actually real development now on that idea that could potentially see the light of day if the curiosity remains out there.  That’s a kind of audience power that has never been seen before, and it will probably spurn on development for movies in the years ahead that may have struggled to get off the ground before.  If there’s an audience out there for it, those movies will be made, and social media has helped to make that link between audiences and filmmakers that much stronger.  Time will tell if it leaves a lasting impact on film production as a whole.  I know for one thing is that something like Tusk could only have become a reality because of this special link.

We’ve all seen it happen before.  Something that you cherished in your youth will end up loosing value as you get older.  Trends change and so do we.  Whether it was some toy we played with or some book we read, our tastes in entertainment evolve over time as we begin to mature and explore new things, and movies are no different.  Perhaps more than most other forms of entertainment, cinema is more prone to the ravages of time and often we see perhaps one or more films become lost to time because of how poorly it has aged.  Sometimes, even entire genres are swallowed up by the passage of time, and are only revived by completely unexpected factors.  But it’s only because most films want to reach the strongest possible audience in their specific time, so these movies end up reflecting the times in which they were made, making their stories more relatable to that contemporary audience.   It’s not always the case though, and sometimes we find movies that can be so easily defined by the era they were made in.  Movies can end up being timeless given the right kind of story or the right kind of vision.  And these are the films that can still entertain decades later, while the films that are dated end up becoming curiosities of their era.  What’s interesting about this is that by looking at all the films that have dated poorly over the years, you can actually learn something of the values of the culture at the time; whether it was the whitewash optimism of the 1950’s, the turbulent psychedelia of the 60’s, the grunginess of the 70’s, the excess of the 80’s, or even the naivete of the 90’s.  Every era has it’s mark and the more closely the movies exploited these time periods, the more likely they were going to be left behind when it was over.  Thus, do we find the movies that truly are timeless as they live on in our memories long after all the others are forgotten.

Trends tend to be the motivating factor behind the movies that get left behind by the passage of time.  Mostly seen in low budget movies from any era, popular fads in the pop culture will end up motivating production studios to quickly cobble together movies geared towards exploiting the fad with little thought put into it.  That’s why you see a lot of movies that give us a glimpse of a long forgotten pop cultural benchmark as well as feature some of the most paper thin plots and terrible acting that anyone has ever seen.  A great example of this was the “beach blanket” movies of the 1960’s, which featured the likes of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in the cast and were little else than excuses to film people hanging out on the beach and singing pop tunes of the period, which I guess was a thing 50 years ago.  The beach movies of the 60’s may have hit their mark in their time, but those movies quickly went away once audiences’ tastes began to change, and the psychedelic era began to be exploited by the studios.  Every era follows this same pattern, as new pop culture trends reflect back in the movies being made.  Even trends that did evolve and improve over time are given films that have aged poorly when they run into the problem of having no foresight.  Case in point, the 1990’s movies that tried to explore the new wonder that was the Internet.  Movies like The Net (1995), Hackers (1995), and Johnny Mnemonic (1995) have all unfortunately become products of their time because they didn’t have the foresight to think that the Internet and computers would run on something other than floppy disks and dial-up service.  Indeed, the world changes around us, but celluloid is forever, and when we look back on these movies, we begin to understand how fleeting a fad in our culture can be.

But it’s not only an outdated trend that can hurt a movies reception over the years.  Sometimes it’s the progress in cinematic tools that causes a movie to lose some of it’s luster over time.   Visual Effects have always played a part in film-making, but different advances can make movies in the past feel out of date by comparison.  Stop-motion for example was a popular way for filmmakers to bring to life some of the most memorable monsters the big screen has ever seen.  Animator Ray Harryhausen became a legend in the field because of his ability to make the impossible possible with his imaginative puppetry in films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).  Stop motion was a successful tool all the way up to the 1980’s, helping to even create memorable moments in films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Beetlejuice (1988).  But once the CGI animated dinosaurs made their first appearance in Jurassic Park (1993) filmmakers pretty much abandoned the tried and true stop-motion for the wonders of digital manipulation.  It’s usually a huge 180-shift like this that can make a once classic film feel quickly dated.  Even advances in CGI over the years reflect poorly on films made at the very beginning of the era.  The Sean Connery-voiced dragon in Dragonheart (1996) was seen as groundbreaking in it’s day, but when you compare it to the more advanced and photo-realistic Smaug in the Hobbit series, you start to see the artificiality of the original character.  Indeed, CGI as advanced so quickly in the last 20 years, that movies made even a few years ago can feel out of date just because their effects are not up to today’s standards.  It’s any wonder how Jurassic Park has managed to still amaze audiences with it’s effects after all of these years.

Now while many films have succumbed to the changing tastes of audiences over time, there are other movies that unfortunately are asking to be ridiculed for being so dated, and those are the films that naively try to predict the future of society.  These movies are either bold visions of a progressive and homogenized society of the future, or are dystopian cautionary tales.  Either way, each of these movies try to showcase what the future will be with the knowledge that they have with them at the time, and sometimes even the best guesses don’t really pan out so well.  Particularly in the genre of Sci-fi do we see the most films that you can consider as dated.  Many space age movies of the 50’s thought that we would have discovered life on Mars by now, or have colonized the moon.  And remember movies like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) or the Amazing Colossal Man (1957) where it was believed at the time that exposure to radioactivity could give you mutant powers, instead of cancer.  Sometimes even a dystopian view of the world ends up dating a movie.  Even great dystopian movies like Blade Runner (1982) make the fatal mistake of trying to put a definite date on their futuristic setting.  The fact that we in 2014 are now just 5 years away from the future seen in that movie does not reflect well on how well the film imagined the future.  But then again, Science-fiction is all about letting the imagination go, so it’s one that we can give it a pass on.  But, movies like Logan’s Run (1976) and Rollerball (1975) don’t have that kind of luxury because their visions are so limited.  They’re futuristic visions are only reflexive of the time periods in which they were made, making it seem like they believed that no advances in technology or culture would be made in the intervening year.  This is primarily the reason why so many of these films tend to fall prey to the evolving tastes in cinema.

But, while some films that are a product of their era can age poorly, there are others that inexplicably live on for many years.  This mainly has to due with how well the films are made and how timeless their themes and stories are.  You can see this clearly in the lists made of all of the best films made over time.  The one thing most of them have in common is their rewatchablitity.  Movies like Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Godfather (1972), and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) can be watched over and over again many years removed from the time periods they were made because they did the same things exactly right; they didn’t try to reflect their own time periods and instead tried to remove themselves from the pack and try to be more universal in their appeal.  And most importantly, timeless films like these embody their own unique worlds and exist by their own rules.  A great timeless film doesn’t try to follow trends, nor is it seeking to try to start them either.  There are exceptions though.  The era of wartime propaganda message films in the 1940’s gave us a lot of dated and stilted films that barely are remembered years later; but out of this same pack we got Casablanca (1942), which is still considered one of the most timeless films of it’s era.  And the amazing thing about Casablanca is that it was never meant to be anything more than another product of it’s time.  Sometimes, timeless films just happen and then there are those that end up being discovered.

What is amazing sometimes is the fact that movies that should be dated end up achieving a timeless quality, partly due to the effectiveness of their story.  Another factor however is the nostalgia factor.  Sometimes we are in the mood for a movie that is clearly a product of it’s time and our entertainment values comes from how poorly the film has aged.  That, or we just want to examine how the world was viewed in a time other than our own.  One such movie that became a cult hit due to it’s very definitive vision of it’s time period was the 1982 Disney film Tron.  Tron is a poster child for 80’s cinema, with it’s blocky CGI-based environments, it’s excessive use of back-lit colors, and it’s synthesizer-based soundtrack.  Not to mention the fact that the plot revolves around the world of Arcade games.  And yet, the movie is still beloved all these years later because it feels so uniquely of it’s time.  It even spawned a sequel in 2010 called Tron Legacy, which itself smartly kept the aesthetic of the first movie while still updating the technology behind it.  Other films from specific eras have also withstood the test of time due to the fact that vision behind them is so imaginative that they end up defining themselves, and the era they came from; such as Barbarella (1968) or even Star Wars (1977).  Sometimes, even taking a timeless source material and adapting it for a certain time period helps to make a film resonate many years later.  The 1995 film Clueless is definitely a product of it’s time, and yet it still resonates years later, mainly due to the fact that the story is from a classic source; Jane Austen’s 1815 novella, Emma.  Smartly combining the classic story with a contemporary setting, filmmaker Amy Heckerling was able to make a film that felt timeless in it’s themes, but also be a commentary on the time in which it was made, thereby transcending it’s 90’s aesthetic.

But what usually happens is that we don’t know what’s going to be the definitive movies of an era until that time period has passed us by.  And any attempt we make to proclaim a certain film as the best reflection of our culture at any certain time will fall under scrutiny over time.  Sometimes, a movie takes many years to be considered an all time classic, while others fade into obscurity after a brief time at the top.  This is sometimes reflective in the choices made during Awards season.  What we thought was the standout film in one particular year may end up being forgotten by decades end.  American Beauty (1999) was once considered a daring choice for Best Picture at the Oscars, but now it’s viewed as a forgettable and somewhat naive movie about middle-class malaise.  Considering that there have been so many imitators in the years since American Beauty won, that brave choice now is viewed as the safe bet, especially when you look at all the other groundbreaking films that came out that year that have gone on to become classics; like The Matrix and Fight Club.  Sometimes, it ends up working in a movie’s favor to be the underdog, because then you’re not left with the mark of the era in which you were made; that is as long as you still have that timeless quality about you.  But withstanding the test of time can also be unpredictable.  I’m sure that Robert Zemekis never thought that his small, time-travel comedy called Back to the Future (1985) would become a decade-defining movie, but it ended up doing just that.  Sometimes it’s not the awards that define a classic, but the way it touches an audience, and even the smallest and silliest of movies can end up overshadowing the most prestigious of productions when all is said and done.

That is what ultimately separates the timeless from the dated; the impact that they leave on us.  It is entirely unpredictable how well a film will age over time, but when we benefit from hindsight, we can see the trademark signs of what leads to so many movies becoming forgotten.   But, even still, the very fact that a movie has not aged well doesn’t mean that it can’t still entertain.  Indeed, the most dated of movies are the ones that enjoy the most dedicated of cult followings.  Take for instance the movies of Ed Wood or John Carpenter.  Their movies are very much cemented in their particular eras, and yet movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) can still leave audiences satisfied.  Also, there are films that transcend their eras by taking the aesthetics of the period and working them to their fullest potential.  Stanley Kubrick’s movies in particular should all feel dated, and yet every single one is considered a masterpiece of it’s era, mainly due to the un-compromised vision behind it and the timeless themes, which helps to elevate his films beyond the aesthetic.  After a while, all films will be viewed differently, because cultural tastes are constantly evolving.  Even beloved timeless movies that we proclaim about now may end up being viewed in a different way by future generations.  It’s a challenge for filmmakers, but for film lovers, exploring the past is a fascinating journey into cultural history, because cinema preserves a place in time better than any other art form.  It’s the best kind of historical time capsule and the longer that a movie withstands the test of time, the better it is observed as a landmark of our culture.

This week brought the passing of one of the most prolific and influential entertainers of the last 30 or so years.  Famed actor and comedian Robin Williams ended his own life in the privacy of his home after a long struggle with his alcoholism and depression; these factors possibly playing a role in his suicide.  What is most shocking about Robin’s death however is that few ever saw this coming.  Mr. Williams was noteworthy for his seemingly effortless ability to make others laugh and do so with unparalleled energy and charisma.  But what this shows now is the fact that even though someone may seem jovial on the outside, they may also be hurting on the inside.  Williams hid that from the world very well, so it’s probably why this tragedy came as such a shock to everyone.  While it is sad to see people in the media like Robin pass so suddenly, it does however illustrate something interesting about how we, the media, and the film industry all respond to tragic events like this.  And this is mostly due to the magnitude of the response that Williams’ passing had on everyone.  I for one can’t remember the last time that a celebrity death hit the public this hard; maybe Michael Jackson being the last recent example.  Not to say that all other celebrity deaths are less worthy of acknowledgement, but there seems to be a select few who end up standing out from the rest.  In Robin Williams case, I believe that it was a variety of factors that made his passing such a big story in the news and social media world this week; namely his lengthy legacy in Hollywood and the shocking nature of his death.  What’s more, it’s interesting how a sudden tragedy like this seems to overshadow everything else, such as the passing this same week of legendary actress Lauren Bacall going almost unnoticed.  All tragedies have their own unique responses, but how they evolve seems to reveal something interesting about the culture we live in.

When it comes to how the public responds to a sudden passing of a famous star, it seems to be almost universally the same.  Of course everyone reacts the same way when learning about someone’s demise; starting off with surprise and then branching into feelings of grief, acceptance, or even relief (if that individual was a bad person, of course).  With Robin Williams, everyone’s first reaction had to have been shock, because it was so sudden.  Social media exploded when the news hit, with people expressing their grief and sharing their condolences in real time, mere hours after the news broke.   It was our way of coming to terms with what we were feeling and sharing that with the people around us.  Strangely enough, celebrity deaths has created something new in our society which is like mass social grieving; people from all over the world uniting for a short period to communally eulogize together a person that we’ve all shared memories of.  And even though this comes sometimes from purely online interactions, it nevertheless helps us to understand just how many lives had been touched by Robin Williams, and I’m sure that his family is quite overwhelmed right now by all of the heartwarming remembrances being shared this whole week.  I’m sure that the most likely way that people dealt with Robin Williams passing this week was to find one of the many movies he made over his career and re-watch it again.  I for one looked up my own favorite clips of the man in action, but it wasn’t any particular film.  Instead, I looked up his stand-up routines from both his earlier and later career, because I felt that these best represented what he was great at, which was his boundless energy and ability to make people laugh, and it felt good to see him doing his very best work there.

Of course, when people are compelled to say something about the recent passing of a famous person in a public forum, it unfortunately also leads to some unfortunate statements whenever someone doesn’t think hard enough about what they are going to say, or don’t show any empathy.  This is complicated when a celebrity dies suddenly either by suicide or by some other unusual act.  We saw that this week with lacking in thought statements like one from Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who called what Williams did a “cowardly” act, or the Motion Picture Academy tweeting a misguided phrase like “Genie, you’re finally free,” referring to Williams’ famous role in Disney’s Aladdin (1992).   We all have a passionate reaction when it comes to issues like suicide and deaths from substance abuse.  And unfortunately, sometimes those feelings can cloud our judgement when it comes to commenting on a tragic event like this.  I don’t think that anyone intended to say something hurtful about Williams death this week, but it’s obvious that good taste had to be considered when commenting on what happened.

But sometimes when a celebrity dies in such a peculiar way, it unfortunately leads to some unfortunate speculation that has no basis in truth.  This usually happens when an actor dies in an accidental nature, like the case with actor Heath Ledger in 2008.  His accidental overdose on sleep medication led some people to believe that the actor was suffering from depression, with even more speculating that it was the result of his recent work as the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight (2008), believing that it was the role that actually killed him.  None of this speculation has any real proof, and it’s probably results from people wanting to make the actor’s death seem less random than it was, thereby adding some level of intrigue into it.  That’s not only foolish to think, but also disrespectful to the persons memory.  I doubt Heath Ledger would’ve wanted people to think that he died in such a melancholy way when that wasn’t the case at all.  It’s unfortunately a product of our celebrity culture that even when a person dies, it has to be seen as something larger than life just like the person that it happened to, other than viewing it as a result of our own common mortality.

Because Hollywood is such a huge and diverse community, it’s very common for some people to stand out from the others, and that is certainly the case when they meet their demise as well.  Like I stated before, we also lost famed actress Lauren Bacall this week at the ripe old age of 89.  I’m sure that her death didn’t go completely unnoticed this week, as there were still many out there who highlighted her career in the media.  But, news of her passing seemed somewhat muted in light of Robin Williams sudden departure.  Is that because Mrs. Bacall’s worth in the industry was less than Robin’s?  Absolutely not.  I just think it came as less of a shock to many of us given her age and the fact that she went peacefully through natural causes as opposed to Robin.  Robin Williams’ death was unfortunately the story that proved more fascinating, and as a result it dominated the headlines for much longer.  Sadly this happens to many other celebrities who make their final farewells in the midst of another headlining tragedy.  There’s this urban myth in pop culture that “celebrities die in threes”, which is attributed to the common, coincidental occurrence of famous people sometimes passing away in a very short time frame and it’s always three at a time.  Though that wasn’t the case this time with Williams or Bacall, it does illustrate the idea that sometimes the deaths of celebrities overlap, and one or more will be singled out.  There were many others in the entertainment industry who also passed away this week, but Williams and Bacall took precedence because their legacies made them standouts.  The selection of “threes” usually is just the result of us selecting three celebrity deaths that mattered the most of us, and not because they were the only three.  It’s unfortunate that more emphasis is given to a few over others, but it’s a by-product of how the business works.

If you look at what separates the reactions to Robin William’s death with Lauren Bacall’s the most, apart from how they died, it’s the generational reactions to each.  Fewer people today have grown up with Lauren Bacall’s movies in this generation.  More people in my generation grew up with Robin William’s movies, like Aladdin, Hook (1991) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1992), so we feel very attached to him as a performer, seeing as how he was a shared part of our childhood.  Many of us became more aware of Bacall’s films as we got older and discovered her work through classic film studies or through our own fascination of with her long and prosperous legacy in the business.  Nevertheless, their passing affects different generations in different ways, even when both have equally as impressive legacies.  I’m sure that as time goes along, both actors will stand apart and become honored icons in the whole of Hollywood history.  It’s just unfortunate that one becomes more iconic in the moment of their death than the other.  Perhaps that’s the one negative of all the coverage that’s come Robin Williams’ way this week; that it’s been focused more on how he died rather than what he’s left behind.  I’m sure Williams himself would’ve been very happy to see people rediscovering all the things that he did well over the years, but I also don’t think he wanted to be singled out either.  From what I’ve read, it seems like his suicide was an escape from the pain of his depression and not a desperate cry for attention.  Unfortunately, suicide does garner attention, whether or not it was intended, and that’s what has pushed him into the spotlight.  And in an industry like Hollywood where getting attention matters, it has led to this result.  I know that Hollywood attempts to downplay favoritism after a popular entertainer dies (they’ve recently started muting the audience reactions at awards shows during the In Memorium segments), but there are some things that just can’t be avoided.

Then there is the unfortunate circumstance in Hollywood when a celebrity dies with unfinished business.  Due to long gestating projects in development and production, sometimes there will be a case where an actor or filmmaker will die before their work on a movie is done.  Sometimes it’ll happen when a film is nearly complete or has barely started, which makes it easier on the production team to either put the finishing touches on the actor or director’s work, or recast them altogether.  In Robin Williams case, he had thankfully finished all of his films in progress and had yet to begun on the ones that remained on his future slate, making his film appearances complete and without complication.  There have been cases in the past, however, where a film had to work around an incomplete performance, and this leads to some ethical challenges on the filmmakers part.

For instance, on the  set of the movie Gladiator (2000), actor Oliver Reed died of a heart attack shortly before he filmed his final scene.  Not wanting to waste his standout performance, director Ridley Scott found a way to digitally impose Reed’s face onto a stand-in double for the last scene, thereby completing the film with the majority of the actor’s original work still in tact.  No one noticed the difference and saw that as an acceptable alternative.  The same cannot be true for actor Bruce Lee’s final film Game of Death (1978), which was cobbled together from an unfinished movie made before he died, with poorly dubbed dialogue and horrible super-imposed facial replacement on a double used to finish the film, and was purely done to exploit Lee’s name in the years since his death.  But probably the only time that a film actually changed entirely because of an actor’s death was when Heath Ledger died unexpectedly in the middle of shooting director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009).  Gilliam restructured the film around Ledger’s scenes and made a film that was very different in form than the one he started, thereby still letting the world see the actor’s final work and giving the film a better overall vision; with actors like Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell filling in the remainder of the movie.  Though it rarely occurs, Hollywood has to show good judgement when they work an actors final performance into a film, because it can either look like you’re honoring their memory or exploiting it for profit.

My hope is that even with Robin Williams untimely end, that it won’t cloud the legacy that he left behind.  He had an impressive body of work and it’s easy to see why the outpouring has been so strong for him this week.  While his track record in film wasn’t the most solid (1998’s Patch Adams being a particular blunder), whenever he delivered something good, it proved to be spectacular.  Apart from his slate of family-friendly projects, he was also fantastic in darker and more serious films as well, like 1990’s Awakenings, or 2002’s disturbing One Hour Photo, or Christopher Nolan’s remake of Insomnia (also 2002); and of course the role that won him an Oscar in Good Will Hunting (1997).   Also, just the fact that he was a peerless comedian made him special.  I love how he would also cop to some of his cinematic blunders and admit that they were horrible too (the dreadful 1997 film Father’s Day was one that he loved to slam often).  It just shows how clever and honest he was.  Every celebrity death leaves an impact, and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to put more focus on Robin Williams’ death over others.  He touched that many lives and the way he left certainly left a vacant hole in many of our hearts.  I just hope that when people highlight Robin Williams’ legacy this year, that they also remember other like Lauren Bacall, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Eli Wallach, and all the other great Hollywood icons that we’ve recently lost.  Some may have not touched our lives in the same way, but they all contribute something extra to the great tapestry that is the world of Hollywood.  What’s great is that all of them have left behind bodies of work that will enable them to live far beyond their time here on Earth and that is an encouraging thing to think about.  So keep their memories alive by revisiting all their best moments and follow in their example.  Carpe diem.