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Movie Review Tuesday: Misanthropy, My Nic Cage Problem, and Abusing the Audience

Guess who watched some movies last week?

Greenberg: I loved Noah Baumbach’s first flick, Kicking and Screaming (not the Will Ferrell one; the one with Olivia D’Abo wearing a retainer), but haven’t seen any of his subsequent movies. This one reminded me of K&S in parts, esp. in a climactic decision made by Ben Stiller’s titular character. And that character, an emotionally crippled neurotic, could easily have been a pal of one of K&S’ aimless college graduates, still trying to work things out at the age of 40.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about this movie was its sheer naturalness. It’s rare (for me) to see performances where the characters are making decisions, where their silences are as important as (maybe more important than) what they say. Even the pontificating dialogue didn’t feel as though it was written for them. As I mentioned last week, this movie is on my Mount Rushmore of Middle-Aged Misanthropy. Greenberg isn’t “likable,” and his rants aren’t exactly “what we all wish we could say,” but his anxiety, his desperation and his frustration are so familiar to me that I found myself invested in that character far more than I expected. I haven’t felt this close to a Stiller character since Zoolander.

I was also swept up by the soulful, downbeat performance of Rhys Ifans and thought Greta Gerwig did a tremendous job of playing off of Stiller. Her character’s “millennial” (or whatever that 20-something demo is called) uncertainty of who she is and what she wants serves as a corrective for Greenberg’s decades-long unrootedness and inability to connect. Of course, it’s a love story of sorts, but it features one of the most (humorously) uncomfortable sex scenes of all time.

On the negative side, Greenberg uses a sick dog as a way to build tension and sympathy, and that felt kinda cheap. Still, I thought this was a wonderful movie, but maybe that’s just the anxiety-ridden, socially inept loner in me. I like to think we’re all a little Greenberg.

Notting Hill: We only put this on because Rhys Ifans and Gina McKee are in it. I was glad to see that Ms. McKee’s teeth were far better in In The Loop. Also, I think Hugh Grant was better looking in his About A Boy phase, skinnier and without the floppy hair. But, boy, was this a non-movie.

Matchstick Men: I have a Nicolas Cage problem. As a result of him doing such crappy movies for so many years, it’s difficult to watch him in not-necessarily-crap movies, because he carries such crap-baggage. In this case, he looked like he was treading a line between acting and the bullshit parody of himself that he trots out to pay his mammoth tax bills. His character’s OCD issues come off as quirks that they added right before filming, to show him Acting.

I watched this for a few reasons:

  1. It’s another LA-as-a-character movies, and I’m interested in how that works (that was also the case for Greenberg),
  2. It’s directed by Ridley Scott, and I like to see what nausea-inducing camera trick or cinematographic wackiness or color scheme he employs from movie to movie,
  3. It’s got Sam Rockwell in it, and I’ll watch him in just about anything.

Neat movie to look at, but not a good flick. I guess LA was significant, but the landmarks were lost on me. The plot’s long con was pretty obvious midway through the flick, esp. when the long-lost daughter with whom Cage reunites bears a stronger resemblance to Rockwell than to him. On the plus side, Bruce McGill (D-Day from Animal House) was in this, which prompted me to check him out on IMDB. With his TV, movie and video game roles, it’s possible he’s done more work than anyone else from Animal House, with the exception of Donald Sutherland.

Rockwell, of course, is great. One of my pals once told me to note how often the camera lingers on his ass in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and I’ve noticed a fixation on Rockwell’s ass in other flicks since, like Moon (which makes sense). Funnily enough, the only actor to go bare-ass in this one is Nicolas Cage. Actually, there’s nothing funny about that.

District 9: More entertaining than I expected, although the political angle was kinda lost on me. I mean, I get the “it’s Joburg, so the aliens represent apartheid” hammer, but that doesn’t really correlate with, um, apartheid. If the humans moved somewhere and discovered a race of aliens and moved them into slums, that’d make a better parallel. It’s not like the blacks decided to move to South Africa, prompting the whites to enforce a status quo. Maybe it was supposed to be about how South African mentality is subtly oriented to keep Others in slums, but it’s not like there was some way that the aliens could have been assimilated into human society; they were submental, brutally strong, and had no concept of work. They sure had cool weapons, though. What I found most interesting was how the lead actor, Sharlto Copley, started out resembling a lost Monty Python actor, and transformed into Christian Bale’s homelier brother over the course of the flick.

And I had one gigantic problem with this flick: the storytelling model. District 9 spends its first 20 minutes carefully setting up a documentary model. Everything the audience sees is framed by a camera; we’re watching news footage, interviews, security cameras, etc. Then, it’s just dropped. We get a scene of two aliens scavenging through a trash pile, and the point of view is omniscient. The movie haphazardly flips back to documentary / reality TV style, then returns to omniscient mode when it needs to show scenes that couldn’t possibly have been “documented.” Once again: if your storytelling model can’t encompass the entire story, then you need to change either the story or the model. At the very least, the movie should have broken into chapters: this one is documentary style, this one is natural. They could have worked with the tension between the two modes that way, showing how the story changes from a “reality TV” mode to “what’s really happening,” but it’s clear that the documentary style was poorly thought out and just used to make some sort of point that I’m clearly missing. Probably about apartheid.

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What It Is: 8/16/10

What I’m reading: I finished Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, the Scott Pilgrim comics, and The Playwright, a comic written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell. I enjoyed The Playwright a lot more than I enjoyed Campbell’s last big comic that he wrote himself, The Fate of the Artist, and it was a much more satisfying book than the ill-conceived adaptation of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I need to go back and re-read The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to see if I was judging that one too harshly. Anyway, I also re-read Wilson, which I enjoyed just as much as I did when I read it in May, and went back to Matt LaBash’s essay collection, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader, but that’s partly in the interest of clearing off my nightstand. I haven’t thought about what book I want to commit to next.

What I’m listening to: A random mix of singles and albums, none of which are coming to mind right now.

What I’m watching: Greenberg, Notting Hill, Matchstick Men, and District 9. I’ll try to write about them tomorrow.

What I’m drinking: Whitley Neill and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Visiting their golden retriever cousins in Connecticut, then taking a long greyhound hike the next day up at Wawayanda state park.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! Amy managed to get Monday and Tuesday off, so I tweaked the remainder of my vacation schedule to match that, but I think we’re just gonna stay in and do some house stuff and otherwise try to take it easy.

What I’m happy about: Learning that one of my pals is the subject of a new Paris Review Writers at Work interview. And clearing out a shelf and a half of books by admitting to myself that I will never write a novel about the epistemological implications of the Enigma machine and what it means to decode something. Even though it means I have to give up on using the title Tales from the Cryptanalyst. Which I still think is awesome.

What I’m sad about: One of the people on our grey-hike learned she has throat cancer and is getting what sounds like pretty aggressive radiation treatment.

What I’m worried about: What I may find when I’m cleaning out the attic today.

What I’m pondering: How you separate the questions, “What is the meaning of life?” and “Do you believe in an afterlife?”, both of which were posed to me by another person on our grey-hike on Sunday. She’s “conducting an informal poll,” as she put it, on the former question, and it struck me that it’s difficult to talk about that without making assumptions about the latter question.

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Update. Or Downdate. Whatever

I’m sorry I haven’t written. I’m usually good for a What It Is post every Monday morning, and I was trying to go with a movie review every Tuesday. But I didn’t watch any movies last week, and I found myself flat-out uninterested in writing anything about What I’m Happy About or What I’m Sad About.

I don’t feel depressed, just uninterested in writing. Maybe the act of composing this post will work that out a little. There are other things I’m interested in writing, some of which I can’t share just yet, some that would just take a ton of time and work to write. But I feel like I’m running short on time just now. I’m a bit ahead of the game on the September and October issues at work, but then my big conference is looming, and that always fills me with anxiety.

I don’t know what to share with you, my non-existent public. I’m quite immersed in that Andy Warhol book by Bob Colacello, for reasons I can’t quite put into words. I’m fascinated by the intersection of art, fashion, business and celebrity that Warhol in that era (1971 until his death) represents, but I’m also compelled by the workaday-ness of Colacello’s experiences. Everything — the Concordes to Paris, the nights at Studio 54, the conversations with Liza — is part of the work. And yet the surface of the work was playfulness.

Only those closest to him knew how determined and thorough this project was, because Andy deliberately made everything he did seem effortless — and meaningless. He liked to turn everything, including himself, into a party joke, partially to hide his true intentions, partially because it was the only way he could deal with life. He expected us to get the joke and simultaneously to take it seriously. It was noting more or less than he expected of himself. We were all walking a tightrope, and Andy’s rope was thinnest and highest of all. “If I think about things too much,” he told me many times, “I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”

I watched Greenberg, the new flick by Noah Baumbach, last night. During my drive down to Flemington today to meet a potential advertiser, I realized that four of the pieces of narrative art I’ve enjoyed most this year are Greenberg, Wilson, Louie and The Ask. It’s like I’ve assembled a Mount Rushmore of Mid-Life Misanthropy.

And I still have 5 months till I turn 40, a birthday that I steadfastly refuse to believe is a significant marker in my life.

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Ad It Update

A day after I finished my ramble about how advertising tends not to get mentioned in articles about The Future Of Magazines, I read the following passage in Holy Terror, Bob Colacello’s “insider’s portrait” of Andy Warhol. Mr. Colacello ran Interview magazine for about 11 years, shortly after its launch.

Selling advertising also helped me become a better editor: It forced me to focus on what kind of readers we wanted and how to get them, to see the magazine as a complete process, with editorial feeding circulation, circulation feeding advertising, advertising feeding editorial, rather than separate parts working against each other. That didn’t mean doing everything the advertisers wanted, though we did a lot, and Andy would have had me do more. It did mean that a certain kind of reader led to a certain kind of advertiser and vice versa. And in explaining the magazine’s editorial policy to advertisers, I was also formulating it for myself — defining it in sharper, clearer terms, giving it direction, identity, finding not only its niche in the market, but also its place in the culture. There was another thing I liked about selling advertising: Success could be measured in dollars and cents, pages and half pages and quarter pages, and like Andy, I was soon counting them and measuring totals against the previous year’s. I liked the feeling of building something from the ground up.

As an editor who is involved in the advertising side of a magazine (trade, not consumer), this entire piece resonated with me. Except my boss doesn’t wear an outrageous white wig and invite me to parties with Bianca Jagger.

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Ad It Up

I enjoyed this article about Condé Nast’s new digital publishing guru/savant, Scott Dadich. (Well, I was filled with resentment and curmudgeonism at first, especially when I read that he’s only 34 years old, but I got over that quickly and decided to read the piece on its own merits, rather than in terms of my failure.) Mr. Dadich’s colleagues praise him as a magazine visionary, focusing on his work in building a digital version of Wired. That success led to his new role as executive director of digital magazine development at Condé Nast, where he’ll try to repeat that magic and simultaneously re-engineer the publishing workflow. Over the course of the article, I also appreciated his willingness to rethink what a magazine is once it’s freed from its physical constraints, and to convince executives to take him seriously.

“The only reason magazine design looks the way it does is because it’s the literal, physical limitations of two pieces of paper,” he said.

“With this,” he said, gesturing to an iPad sitting on a couch, “we wiped the slate clean. We have one pane. We have these many pixels. We have this proportion. How are we going to use it and how are we going to tell a story?”

It’s an interesting question he raises, and I’m glad that Condé Nast is going to let him pursue it, but I don’t think it’s the one that’s going to “save publishing.” It’s all well and good to develop a whole new idea of what a magazine is, and add all sorts of content that isn’t available in print to build a different consumer experience, but that doesn’t answer the flipside-question: who’s going to pay for it?

And if you search through that article, you’ll find that there isn’t a single instance of the word “advertiser.”

What the magazine industry allegedly learned from the plummeting ad sales that accompanied the recession, is that they’ve been giving their magazines away too cheaply. For years, they used cheap subscription rates to draw in readers of certain demographics that they could then sell to advertisers. When advertisers pulled back in late 2008 and throughout 2009, publishers were stuck mailing magazines to subscribers at a pittance. When Newsweek went up for sale, the dossier indicated that it had $40 million in subscription liabilities (as in, that’s what it owes subscribers for future copies). It sold for a buck, plus assumption of liabilities and a sincere desire not to fire half the staff.

You know what? The model of advertisers subsidizing cheap subscriptions isn’t changing. Major consumer publishers haven’t buckled down and started raising subscription rates to anywhere near cover price, despite their professed need to build up that revenue source. How do I know this? A few months ago, I subscribed to Esquire (a Hearst mag, not Condé) for two years at the cost of $10. That price doesn’t even cover the postage for more than an issue or two, much less pay for the writers, editors, sales staff, back-office personnel, real estate and other overhead. Sure, that’s anecdotal, but you can find that subscription on Amazon; today it’s at $8 for two years. In fact, here’s an image from an e-mail that I received from Amazon this very morning:

subscription-rates.jpg

(Note the rates at the top of each column.)

Now, there are magazines out there that don’t discount heavily for subscribers. I have subscriptions to both Monocle (75 GBP/year for 10 issues) and Fantastic Man ($40/year for two issues); the latter puts virtually no magazine content on its website, while the former decided to make a newspaper edition of itself this summer. The only thing further from an iPad version would be if they chiseled an issue in stone. Neither mag is mass market (Monocle does seem to be popping up on a lot of newsstands), but neither one seems to be posting multimillion-dollar losses every year.

I don’t know if Mr. Dadich avoided talking about advertising, or if the writer, John Koblin, or his editor chose to focus on the design/re-think to the exclusion of the advertising model, or if no one thought it was worth discussing.

Mr. Koblin does point out that, following the wild success of the first iPad issue of Wired, the second issue’s sales-figures haven’t been made public. The first ish sold 102,884 copies at $4.99 each. Apple takes a 30% cut from all app sales, so Condé Nast was left with $359,373.81 in circulation revenues, plus whatever ad money it brought in.

That math’s not in the article. There’s a reference to “new revenue streams, much of it from the digital experience,” but that’s the about it for the business side of the business.

I don’t think most journalists like to write about how their own sausage gets made, nor how ad dollars can subtly dictate editorial content. The New York Observer, which published the profile of Mr. Dadich (as well as an interesting story on the recent decision of Khoi Vinh to quit his role as design director of nytimes.com), was allegedly losing $2 million a year before it was bought by a young real estate magnate. And that was in 2006, prior to the advertising apocalypse of 2008-??.

The whole “sexy new model, never mind the money” vibe of the article actually puts me in mind of another Condé Nast property: Vogue. I meant to write about The September Issue when Amy & I watched it a few months ago. It’s a documentary about the making of the 2007 fall-fashion issue of Vogue, which clocked in at 840 pages. The movie does a wonderful job of showing the tensions and rivalries that exist at Vogue, and beautifully sets up Grace Coddington as a sort of “better sister” to the iconic Anna Wintour as they work on the biggest issue in history.

Here’s my big problem with the movie: You can’t put out an 840-page magazine unless your advertising staff posts mammoth, record-breaking sales. We get a brief scene of a pep talk by publisher (which basically means “head of sales,” for readers not involved in publishing) Tom Florio in the beginning, but zero mention of all the pages of ads that have to be sold to justify that giant page-count. That’s a story too, and its omission speaks volumes (to me, a paranoid).

So don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that Condé Nast is trying to rethink magazines for the tablet computing era. I hope Mr. Dadich manages to develop non-traditional ideas for more magazines as they go digital, while keeping them from simply cannibalizing the content of their websites. Also, it’s awesome that design guys are getting their due.

But at some point the sales guys are going to have to figure out a way to get advertisers and their agencies on board, or all that groundbreaking technology and design in the world will go for naught. After all, as messed up as it sounds, the biggest business success in the past 10 years has been Google, a company that makes nearly all its money by . . . selling little text ads on search results.

Reading material

New York Observer: “The Savior of Condé Nast: Scott Dadich Is The New It Boy of the Mag World”

New York Observer: “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Design Director Khoi Vinh Leaves The Times at Paywall Altar”

Slate: “So, You Bought the New York Observer: Unsolicited advice for new owner Jared Kushner”

The Awl: “Nick Denton: On the Web, Female Trumps Male, Youth Trumps Age”