In Anthony Lane’s article in The New Yorker this week (last week? I’m never really sure how magazine publication dates work), he repeats the growing party line that 3d is the undeniable future of movies. Now, I haven’t seen Avatar, or honestly, any of the other 3d movies in the last couple years that are such great shakes, but the truth is I have very little interest in doing so.

I’ve tried to formulate a real reason why I have such an aversion to 3d, and some of it undoubtedly has to do with the subpar, gimicky versions Lane mentions that always manage to give me a headache thanks to the regular glasses I always wear. Beyond that, though, it seems inessential, a distraction that costs more (both in actual consumer costs and time, effort and production costs) than it’s really worth.

In this, I feel like Rudolph Arnheim who argued that the introduction of sound represented a cheapening of film art. It was already great, he argued, and it certainly didn’t need any talking to make it work. Today, that argument seems (is?) laughable. Take something as early as M. Even that early after the introduction of sound, it’s crucial in how the story is told.

So the question is: is 3d sound or is it 3d the last time? The circumstances of 3d’s introduction practically repeat its last great period — a new home entertainment system was threatening to usurp Hollywood, so the studios needed to do something to stay relevant.

Despite the hype and the investment by everyone from studios, theaters, tv manufacturers and the early-adopting consumers who are about to plunk down for a 3d tv, I honestly don’t believe, that it’s really going to catch on in any long-term sense. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I am, I fear that it’s less because we’re about to open the undiscovered artistic potential of the z-axis and more that our cinematic culture is reverting to what Tom Gunning called the “cinema of attractions.”

In fact, the only real use I can see of 3d is as a weigh-station on the road to a true holodeck, which, obviously, would be awesome.

I’m not actually sure what this study really proves. Essentially, they claim that recent blockbusters are better at mimicking the ebb and flow of attention spans, but as Professor Blough always said, “Correlation does not mean causation.” It could be that the editing in recent blockbusters is better at tapping in to some sort of natural human rhythm, or it could just as easily be that editing styles over the last 70 years have trained our attention spans to respond to them.

Regardless, the author’s closing point is the most salient: just because it follows the formula doesn’t mean we’ll like it. It’s the same as the much-vaunted three act structure. It seems to me that the primary benefit of both three act structure and this 1/f editing style are to make a movie go down smoother. And, to be very clear, there’s nothing at all wrong with that. There are times when you want the filmmaking to get out of the way. But there are also times when going against that can be particularly useful. Take for instance, Birth. I’m not sure whether or not its editing conforms to that formula, but the experience of watching it feels like the editing is a little off. Shots go on just a smidge too long. Scenes feel a little unbalanced. The whole effect is mildly unsettling, which works perfectly for a story that’s supposed to unsettle the viewer. It’s all just further proof that, contrary to what Gizmodo’s headline says, there’s never going to be a formula for a perfect movie.

Is the world ready for a suicide bomber comedy (suicide bomedy)? Almost certainly not, but it looks very funny.

Also, new trailer for the upcoming season of Lost. I think we can all agree that it’s not marketing hyperbole to call this the television event of the year. I mean that’s just true. It’s a fact.

And now it’s time for me to ask a borderline heretical question: when all the shouting (and also plane crashes, kidnappings, sex in polar bear cages and ghost sightings) is done, will Lost be, on balance, a better show than The Wire?

I think the answer is probably no; The Wire’s characterizations were incomparably richer and the emotional wallops stronger (oh man, that scene of Avon and Stringer by the river at the end of Season 3; everything about Season 4), but The Wire’s seasons feel more tightly self-contained. Obviously, they built on each other, but they don’t feel of a piece with each other in the same way that Lost’s do.

The principal weakness for Lost, to my mind, is that they didn’t negotiate to do fewer episodes each season until Season 4 (with Season 3 kind of falling between since that was the writers’ strike season). Once they were able to do more concentrated season arcs, with fewer wasteful digressions into unimportant elements of uninteresting characters, the quality of the show really picked up. And with the cohesion of a single, big story coming to a close with the force of an unravelling mystery, it creates almost as much sheer joy as The Wire ever did.

This is, incidentally, yet another reason US tv should take a page from British tv and set out to tell stories that have predetermined endings. Then we might have a chance to rival the single greatest 45 minutes of television entertainment I’ve ever seen — the last half of the BBC’s The Office Christmas Special.

(h/t: daily dish & videogum)

I used to really like Neil LaBute. Well, that may not be the best way to phrase that. I thought In the Company of Men was an amazing gut-punch of a movie, and I thought Your Friends & Neighbors, while not nearly as impressive, was a good expansion of the same sensibility into more of an ensemble piece. And though I haven’t seen it since it was first in theaters, I thought Nurse Betty was a huge leap forward for him, marrying his misanthropy with a story of hope to great effect. He was the kind of writer/director who I thought had something going on, and I was looking forward to where he would go next.

But ever since then, wow.

I was willing to write off Possession as a noble attempt to expand his pallet in directions that he just couldn’t handle, but The Shape of Things was a disaster, a sub-par “return to form” script ruined by the stage-bound affectations of a cast that had been performing the play together for too long. I haven’t even been interested in seeing his last few films (especially The Wicker Man — why anyone would want to remake that abomination is beyond me). And then I saw this trailer for Death at a Funeral. Maybe that title is familiar to you. I thought it rang a bell, but then figured it might be just one of those titles. It wasn’t until near the end of the trailer, when the gay lover arrives, that it clicked. This movie came out two years ago. The trailer is even built almost exactly the same.

It’s just a disappointment. Have we really accelerated the remake wheel to 1940s era speeds? And if we’re going to remake something, is it really enough to do essentially a joke for joke remake of a movie with black American characters instead of white British ones (and Peter Dinklage in both)? Lazy.

In other news, I am not the least bit interested in seeing the new The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but I am excited to see my subway stop (that production essentially shut down for a week) featured so prominently in the trailer.

I haven’t read it all – or even all that much of it – but this represents a truly heroic weirdly obsessive level of commitment.

h/t: Tori

I just watched: Die Hard, Love Actually & Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

So, I think we can all agree that the best Christmas movie of all time is Die Hard, right? Good.

Here’s the thing, though: I can’t think of Alan Rickman as anything but Hans Gruber. Can you? Can his mom? This works to his advantage in the Harry Potter series, but in something like Love Actually where we’re supposed to think of him as someone’s husband, it’s just kind of incredible. He’s great in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but the whole time I keep thinking “Why does this funny, depressed little robot sound like Hans Gruber?”

I was at the gym a little while ago (that’s right – I work out), and I caught about a half hour of Hackers. I was struck by how little about Matthew Lillard’s performing style has changed in the 15 years since that movie came out, and for some reason it got me thinking about how an actor’s professional choices impact his future. (Please remember I was at the gym, which it not exactly conducive to thinking the deepest, philosophical thoughts).

For actors, this works two different ways. The first is the most obvious: actors are associated with certain roles. That’s the situation that’s at work in something like Unforgiven, a movie that probably depends over-much on the iconography of Clint Eastwood, and I’m willing to grant that it’s what’s probably happening with Rickman (I actually think there’s something about Rickman’s voice, especially, that makes him a natural fit for a villain, but if we get into that we’re well on our way to a weird “you can’t do that” kind of casting discussion that I don’t want to have, so I’ll let it go). This is also where you get into the potential value/danger of casting against type, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen broken into a systematic argument of why it works sometimes and not others, but it’s clear that it paid off big time in something like Meet the Parents.

The second way is something most of us would acknowledge about our own careers, but have trouble recognizing in actors: the work you do in one job actually trains you not only for the next job you take but for the jobs you’re even qualified to do in the future. And, for some reason, that’s kind of the feeling I started to get about Matthew Lillard while watching Hackers. If a director needs a particularly mannered performance, he pushes the actor that way, and especially if it’s early in the actor’s career, it helps normalize that performance. Suddenly, watching his hair tied up into these sort of pseudo-dread/braid things, playing up the most ludicrous, mid-1990s stereotypes of hacker culture, the years of Lillard’s hammy mugging started to make more sense.

depressing domestic drama + early MTV style = marketing genius

BTW, the sticker in the bottom right lets you know there’s a bonus CD inside with tracks from a-ha, Echo & the Bunnymen, INXS and Erasure. Score!

The AV Club has been rounding up their best of everything of the decade, and this week is their week of movies. I don’t have a ton to say about most of it, though they did pick the appropriate #1 movie, and I’m glad to see someone (anyone) finally line up with me that There Will Be Blood is a better film than No Country for Old Men.

But anyway, here they are:

The best performances

Their favorite scenes

The best “bad movies” (I think we can all guess my opinion on this category)

Honorable Mentions

The best movies of the decade

I just watched: Twin Peaks Seasons 1& 2 and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

It took longer than I hoped, and at times it turned into a real slog, but I finally finished working my way through the whole Twin Peaks universe, and I have to say: eh.

There were parts of it that I super-duper loved. Obviously, the Laura Palmer murder investigation that forms the backbone of (most of) the series was fabulous, and the increasingly bizarre Black Lodge elements were great. I especially loved how they developed Windom Earle as the evil doppelgänger to Agent Cooper. Apocalyptic, Manichean struggles are pretty much my catnip.

The problem is the wild inconsistency of tone across the series. I get what they were going for. David Lynch has always been interested in contrasting wholesome, quirky Americana with nightmarish evil, and his take on the “darkness that underlies middle class America” is one of the few that I don’t find mind-numbingly banal. But here, the balance gets all out of proportion. The wackiness of Nadine’s adolescent regression; the Lucy-baby-daddy subplot; Ben’s Civil War delusions — it all stems from wanting to keep too many characters in the mix, casting about for something for them to do and seizing on the wacky elements that helped to make a dark show better (like Cooper’s aw-shucks love of pie) to do more heavy lifting than they can bear.

It’s impossible not to appreciate the fact that the show brought something incredibly unique (and I don’t mean to use unique in a pejorative sense; Twin Peaks is frequently amazing) to broadcast tv, and its pursuit of multi-threaded stories was obviously influential on so much that followed it, but I wish those amazing parts would have been allowed to shine a little more.

I certainly don’t know what the suits thought about the show, but I read somewhere that they forced the creators to solve the Palmer murder sooner than they wanted to. And in this case, I think corporate was right. The show needed to be streamlined, more focused on its central mysteries and mythologies, not the picayune setting and the characters that inhabit it. Incredibly (and not actually having anything to back this up), I can see the audience being there for the weirdness. People will put up with a lot to see how a mystery turns out. But the one thing that people can’t abide is to be bored, and that’s where I think Twin Peaks lost them.

I was a little underwhelmed by A.O. Scott’s recap of the decade in movies when I read it this weekend, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Then, I read Isaac Chotiner’s blog post about the article, and it seemed exactly right. Not only did it feel like Scott was trumpeting middling movies, it felt like he went out of his way to name-check some truly bad ones. Though I simply cannot understand the late-career veneration of Clint Eastwood’s direction (Mystic River had some fabulous scenes, but they didn’t hang together at all; and Million Dollar Baby is just awful — actually that’s not entirely correct: it’s like a good movie wrapped up inside an irredeemably terrible one that ends up being merely awful), I get that they are well-regarded by a lot of people. But A.I.? The Terminal?

Chotiner’s depressing point that movies actually seem to be getting worse these last ten years seems to be borne out. But there’s one thing that neither of them tackle: how much better tv has gotten in the same time. The same decade whose greatest cinematic contribution appears to be unearthing two overlooked French films from three decades ago also gave us The Wire, The (BBC) Office and Lost. There’s something really heartening in the fact that, even as theater quality has fallen off, the same storytelling has grown into much richer, longer forms. To wash the sadness of Scott’s anemic retrospective out of your mouth (that couldn’t even manage to mention Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Dr., Junebug or most of my other favorites), I’d suggest taking a look at the AV Club’s list of the top shows of the decade. It helps you remember that we haven’t had it all bad.