Film – Page 33 – REAL VIRTUALITY

Blogging the Avengers Fan-Screening in Berlin

I can’t believe I got so lucky. I actually won two tickets for the fan screening of The Avengers tomorrow in Berlin. So I will actually see my most anticipated film of the year a week and a half before the rest of Germany! Thanks so much.

I will try my best to capture the experience in this blog, as much as I am allowed to. I’ll bring my camera and audio recorder and use the train ride back to Mainz to write/edit/post something for this blog.

If you are also at the screening and would like to meet up for a chat about the film afterwards, tweet me!

UPDATE: The post about the screening is in German and it’s here.

“Film Weekly” – An Obituary

When I visited my first real film festival as a professional writer, the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2008, I saw Oscar Nominee Richard Jenkins a few feet away from me and couldn’t have cared less. I was looking for someone else and when I finally spotted him, I was so star-struck that I didn’t dare to talk to him. Good thing I ran into him a second time – and this time I managed to chat with him for a bit. The man was Jason Solomons, a film journalist for “The Guardian” and he had been in my ear for over a year, every week.

Jason was the host of the Guardian’s podcast “Film Weekly”, the first podcast I listened to regularly, and one of the best film podcasts around, as far as I am concerned. In an internet world, where the geeks – and the loud films they like – have increasingly taken over power, “Film Weekly”, Solomons and later co-host Xan Brooks gave off a cushy scent of old film journalism gentry and art house sensitivity. I first discovered the show in an episode on Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (via the now defunct blog “Cinematical”) and was immediately hooked.

I almost never agreed with Jason’s and Xan’s assessment of more mainstream films, especially animation, and I found the way Jason conducted some of his interviews to be rather unnerving (witness, for example, how he almost drives David Cronenberg mad, by insisting on discovering what’s “cronenbergian” about him). On the other hand, here were journalists who had the power of a publication like the “Guardian” behind them, who could be autonomous and irreverent without too much press junket fanboy-ism.

They led me to art house gems I would hardly have discovered without them, featured big stars as well as small indie newcomers and had English accents that were easy on the ear. At about 30 minutes, the show was exactly the right length, and not as long-drawn and chatty as some of the other efforts on the net (like Filmspotting and the /filmcast).

It’s really too bad, that Solomons and Brooks hosted their last show a week and a half ago. Their company gave no real reason for the cancellation except “limited resources & belts being tightened, as well as the desire to push the Guardian’s multimedia in new directions”. A video show will follow later this year. While video might generate more clicks in this day and age, it’s also hard to enjoy it while you’re going for your weekend run and takes a lot more active commitment to watch regularly. I, for one, will probably stop consuming the “Guardian”‘s film coverage now. I hope I will have the opportunity to run into Jason or Xan at a film festival again to tell them how much I miss their show.

John Carter and Company: Hype, Expectation, Forgiveness

Disney

Andrew Stanton’s latest film John Carter is the talk of the town. It cost somewhere between $250 and $300 Million and it didn’t actually make that much money on the opening weekend – at least in the U.S. There is hope that it might become a slow grower and eventually make back its budget, but in the industry’s eye, it can be considered a flop. Many critics also didn’t like it. They felt it was all over the place storywise, campy and simply not interesting enough.

It’s a misjudgment, however, to think that nobody liked John Carter. For one, I liked it, even though my best friend didn’t. I sided with Matt Zoller Seitz and the other half of the critics (on Rotten Tomatoes) who forgave the film its faults and its crappy marketing and simply let themselves be entertained.

The film’s opening weekend controversy, to use a big word, got me thinking. Thinking that maybe forgiveness is the only way to deal with films like John Carter, that it should be the sentiment with which we enter the theatre and which we should dial up when we review the films in our heads later on. Why? Because a film of the John Carter kind will never ever please us, if we’re not prepared to forgive.

First of all, what do I mean by “the John Carter kind”? I’m talking about films that come with attached baggage from three sources: 1. expectations from those that know and love the source material; 2. expectations toward a director with a certain credibility or track record; and 3. hype generated by the singularity and finality of the event, supported by marketing.

The three criteria are certainly true of John Carter. Many people love the source material, they have read the books as teenagers (I haven’t). Andrew Stanton is a respected director, who created Finding Nemo and Wall-E, among the more unconventional Pixar-Films (and two of its Oscar winners). And the long list of trials of bringing John Carter to the screen for twenty and more years certainly also made the fact that it finally happened very momentous.

So with all that expectation (and the amounts of money mentioned in connection with the movie), could John Carter do anything else than fail? Yes. It could have been a Lord of the Rings, a Dark Knight or an Avatar, tentpole films of the last ten years that somehow managed to meet the expectations set in them, were lauded by critics and audiences alike – despite obvious weaknesses.

But what if we forget about the expectation and the money for a moment? What if we forgive Andrew Stanton his major error of trying to tackle a property that is clearly something that you might enjoy as a child but raise your eyebrows at, when you’re an adult. In all seriousness: John Carter is not a bad movie by a long stretch. It’s heaps of illogical fun with charismatic leads. It builds a rich world that for all its preposterousness feels somehow believable. And it sustains several mysteries for much of its running time. People were willing to forgive Avatar its cheesy exoticism and enviromentalism (and possible racism). They were willing to forgive The Return of the King its many endings and endless battle scenes. I am willing to forgive John Carter its convoluted story and superficial worldview – and just enjoy the movie.

And I hope that forgiveness will be on my mind, when The Avengers roll around soon.

Navel Gazing – Part 3: Blogs

I like to know what’s going on in the world, but generally I’m fine with having a cursory overview of the most important events. This is different in my more specific fields of interest – film, media, music and cultural trends – and I have come to depend on blogs for most of my information in these fields.

Like with everything else, I use Netvibes to organize my feeds and I would be lost without it. The widget mode allows me to see all feeds with one look and lets me decide if I want to read every item, pick out single ones or just mark the whole feed read. This mode of operation also allows me to give feeds different amounts of room according to how often they post new items and how important I find them and also allows for easy cycling in and out of feeds, e.g. when they stop updating or start boring me.

I have organised my feeds in five tabs: film, music, media, “cult and culture” (a term I borrowed from my college newspaper’s miscellaneous section) and “people”, which means private blogs of people I know. Let me take you through those tabs.

Film

As I’ve already mentioned in my last entry, my main blog for keeping track of everything film has become /film. It’s not as good as my earlier key medium, Cinematical, mostly because of its limited (geeky) scope, but it’s okay for keeping an overview on Hollywood filmmaking at least (I’m thinking of switching, maybe to something like “The AV Club”. Any other suggestions?). For arthouse cinema, I rely on the “Film Weekly” podcast discussed in the last episode). In support of /film, I follow the only German film blog worth following, NEGATIV, but I mostly just skim the articles. Because they are opinion leaders in Germany, for some strange reason, I also follow Die Fünf Filmfreunde, who mostly post trailers. PARALLEL FILM is the blog of German filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler, the only German filmmaker who blogs (the sorry state of the German film blogosphere is a topic for another post or post series).

There are three academic film blogs whose authors I respect and like. Dan North wrote one of the best books on digital aesthetics four years ago (get it here) and he irregularly blogs about sci-fi, puppetry and Naomi Watts. I am especially fond of his Build Your Own Review category. The Film Doctor posts good linklists every weeks and writes delightfully snarky reviews (“The Artist: When Homage becomes Fromage”). And David Bordwell really needs no introduction. He’s easily the most interesting academic film blogger around.

For some (very rarely updated) fun, I follow Adam Quigley’s Tumblr.

Music

I have a problem. I actively enjoy a genre of music that is one of the most reviled among music journalists: prog rock. I also don’t care much for many artists and styles music journalists regularly hype. And I find the kind of writing about prog rock that does exist mostly quite dull and old-fashioned. So I only read three music blogs in support of my wekly dose of the “Music Weekly” Podcast: The Guardian Music Blog for its occasional interesting theses about the music industry and columns like “The Indie Professor”; Eric Pfeil’s Pop-Tagebuch because even though I don’t share his taste, he is a very funny writer; and Jem Godfrey’s (Frost*) blog The View from the Cube, because I’ve grown so used to it.

Media

When I was a media journalist, I had two tabs filled with feeds and added new ones almost every week. After I changed jobs, I kept only the blogs of the people whose opinion I generally find worth reading, no matter what they write about. In addition to the german opinion leader in the field, BildBlog, they are: Stefan Niggemeier, Katrin Schuster, Jeff Jarvis, Ulrike Langer and Christian Jakubetz. Also on my media tab: The Guardian Critic’s notebook. Reflecting now, maybe this tab needs a bit of a shake-up soon.

Cult and Culture

This tab holds the best of the rest and everything else that captures my interest for a while or for longer. A sort of hobby-horse of mine is linguistics and I always get my fix at Language Log. I’ve started to read its German equivalent, Sprachlog, but while I like the topics, I can’t stand the precocious tone of its author (one of the problems with blogs). Two blogs keep me updated on Geek culture, German heavyweight Nerdcore and Geekologie, which is infested with crude humour, but funny nonetheless. And then there’s four bloggers, who stand on their own. Sascha Lobo, a very disputed figure in the German blogosphere but I tend to agree with him; Lukas Heinser, who generally writes about pop culture in an amusing way, even though (once again) I don’t share his taste in music; Michael Marshall Smith, who used to be one of my favourite novelists, but has turned kind of sour, which makes for some interesting blogging sometimes; and finally, Georg Seeßlen, an influential German film/culture critic who has good ideas but always carries them a bit too far into convolution – I watch his blog with morbid fascination.

I read lots of other blogs as well, but I don’t read them regularly. I don’t follow their RSS-feeds, even though I like or respect their authors or their topics. There is only so much stuff one person can read in a week. Luckily, the internet has found ways to let the most interesting posts from those blogs float to the top. One of them is aggregators like Rivva, which I mentioned last week. The other one is soial networks, the topic of the next episode.

Navel Gazing is a multi-part blog series about my personal media consumption habits, meant as a case study and a moment of self-reflection on account of Real Virtuality’s third birthday.

Andrew Stanton on the Hollywood System

Andrew Stanton is my favourite director from the Pixar stable for several reasons. The first one being, of course, that he made my two favourite Pixar films, Findin Nemo and Wall-E. But there is also something about his personality that I like. He seems a little bit more honest and candid when he talks about the work he does, without John Lasseter’s grandfatherly, all-knowing attitude and Lee Unkrich’s pasted-on smile. He is the only Pixar person I know who has talked openly about the effects of all that great work at the Pixar dream factory consuming your private life, for example (there may have been others, whose interviews I didn’t read. Feel free to correct me in the comments).

In a recent interview for his next (and first live-action) film John Carter, which looked boring at the first teaser and appears ever more exciting the closer its release gets, he talked to /Film about the challenges of working outside Pixar, in the live action studio system. Once again, his observations are quite interesting, if a little high on Pixar praise, which seems to work without the Hollywood unions:

It’s interesting to see the system and how the live-action system works. It’s based on a lot of things that maybe made sense in the day or decades ago or are holdovers from the studio system. It’s unionized and there’s a lot of rules that don’t make a lot of sense logically. Pixar has none of that. I realize that one of the reasons it’s Nirvana is that we didn’t realize how a movie was made and just used — god forbid — logic. We figured that if we made a movie the way it should be made, that was the way they were being made. Our system is very logical and we keep improving upon it. We criticize ourselves and we have post-mortems every movie to improve the system.

Out here, nobody questions the system. It’s just the way it is with all its faults and everything. We don’t have unions. Steve was very smart. He said, “Let’s give them why there was unions. Let’s give them great healthcare. Let’s treat them extra special and there’s no reason to have that.” There aren’t these weird byproduct rules that actually cause problems in one area when they think they’re helping another. We have a very clean system, Pixar. After you’ve worked in that, it becomes very obvious how things should work and very obvious how things don’t work the right way here. I get a little frustrated at the haphazardness of it.

The world of moviemaking, since the studio system broke down — and this is my guess — lives and breathes off of triage. It lives off disaster planning. People feel comfortable in the disaster. “Oh! I know how to deal with this. This is chaos. Somebody’s on fire. Let’s run and get an extinguisher.” That is not Pixar. Pixar is planning to avoid every disaster possible.
(Emphases added)

Read the full interview over at /film.

Another Earth: How to shoot a car crash for $200

I continue to be a big fan of Jeff Goldsmith’s Q&A Podcast series. Not only because Jeff takes the time to talk so extensively with filmmakers about their breaking-in-stories and work habits (after you have listened to dozens of podcasts like I have, it’s interesting to compare them all), but also because every now and again, in addition, the conversations contain these little nuggets worth sharing on their own.

Way back in July, Jeff talked to Mike Cahill, Brit Marling and William Mapother about Another Earth. I only got around to listening to the podcast last week, but it contains an interesting tidbit. Director Mike Cahill explains, how he staged and shot the (impressive) car crash that gets the movie’s narrative rolling, for something around $ 200 (the shot is seen briefly in the trailer).

If you don’t want to listen to the whole clip, here is the gist:
– He got a cop friend to close off the highway (for free).
– He borrowed two smashed cars whose damage fit the scenes from a scrapyard (for free).
– He rented the exact same models for the driving scenes.
– He rented a cherry picker to substitute for a camera crane.
– He craned up and then locked off the shot with only Mapother’s car.
– He filmed a clean plate, a plate with Marling’s car driving through and a plate where the two cars almost touch, as a lighting reference.
– After Effects did the rest of the work.

Proves once again that you don’t need a lot of money to make a film these days, if you’re creative enough.

Download the whole podcast for more info on the process behind Another Earth.

Real Virtuality’s Favourite Films of 2011

Better late than never, this is the inevitable look back at the filmic year 2011 in an arbitrary ranking of personal favourites. Many other lists I’ve read in the last weeks praised 2011 as a year of so many great films that it was hard to narrow it down to just ten. I felt the opposite way, having a hard time to even come up with ten films that justify the label “best” or “favourite” (at least Dana Stevens felt the same way).

Note that this list goes by German cinematic release dates (hence the inclusion of some nominal 2010 films) and that many of the movies in everyone else’s list haven’t been released yet in Germany (e.g. The Artist, Drive, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hugo etc.). As always, I also simply didn’t get to see some of the films that were released and so wasn’t able to rate them, like A Separation and Winter’s Bone.

1. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

When I visit a cinema, some part of me is always out there, looking for that sense of wonder that drew me to movies in the first place: a flush of awe and excitement about the world on the screen that tingles down my spine. There have been very few films in the last ten years who managed to create this feeling. I admire Werner Herzog as a maverick film maker, but I cannot say I have really been a fan of his actual work so far. Cave of Forgotten Dreams changed this. From the moment its first three-dimensional images of the beautiful paintings in the Cave Chauvet appear onscreen, there was magic happening in the cinema and I, for one, was completely enchanted by it. Add to this Herzog’s philosophical ruminations and his quixotic coda about albino crocodiles and I came out of the theater thinking that I very probably just saw my film of the year.

2. 127 Hours

I have always admired Danny Boyle for his ability to convey his stories with visceral images. 127 Hours, the fiendishly clever construction of “an action movie about a guy who can’t move” pits about 15 minutes of visual representations of absolute freedom against over an hour of claustrophobic imprisonment. And new freedom can only be obtained by self-mutilation. The film stayed with me for a long time, even though I didn’t buy the DVD.

3. Black Swan

If nothing else, Black Swan is a stunning visual feat. But Darren Aronofsky’s film also manages to marry the seemingly sublime beauty of ballet with horror from the darkest aspects of the soul, and that’s what makes it so powerful. As usual, Aronofsky is as unsubtle about this as he can be, but sometimes cinema needs this unsubtlety to keep you locked in your seat.

4. Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s most successful film in decades didn’t really hit me until several weeks after I had seen it. Of course I laughed at the depictions of cultural icons that seem almost like a big humanities scholar in-joke parade, I admired the staging of Paris as a city and I agreed on critics’ assessment of Owen Wilson as a succesful Allen surrogate. But what really stayed with me was the film’s central thesis about the relativity of nostalgia. If every time has another time it nostalgically looks back on, because life was apparently so much better then, the converse argument can only be that we should, in fact, be looking ahead instead. This feeling of discarding nostalgia for prospect, coupled with the feeling that something big is going to happen is probably the most memorable thought that I will take with me from 2011.

5. Melancholia

Melancholia fed right into the aforementioned idea I took away from Midnight in Paris. Even though Lars von Trier’s film has enough flaws that have been mentioned elsewhere, I simply loved his intellectual exploration of “How would you react if global doom were upon you” coupled, as usual, with images designed to club you insensible to that intellectual exploration. Add to that the reading of the film as a reflection on depression, and you’ve earned a spot on my list.

6. The Adventures of Tintin

Screw the uncanny valley. I’m more than willing to let my complaints about it go, if someone presents me with a film that is simply so beautiful to look at and so well-constructed, clever and exciting. Nevermind that it is also overcrowded with story and setpieces, suffers from more exposition than the book of Genesis and might actually have worked better in key frame animation. For once, I’ll ignore all that and simply enjoy myself.

7. The Tree of Life

I cannot really bring myself to actually like this film. For many critics, the dreamlike retelling of a childhood was what made the film great. To me, this part didn’t speak at all. I grew tired of distraught faces staring into the distance while a whispered voiceover churns out platitudes. But I do admire Terrence Malick for his bombast and the sheer audacity of harnessing the power of cinema like no one else would dare to. That sequence with the birth of planets and the wacky dinosaurs? That was awesome as hell.

8. Bridesmaids

I can only repeat what so many other critics have already written: female-centric, broad and character-driven comedy that had me laughing more than any other film this year. You don’t need a long explanation why it made it onto this list. It simply deserved it.

9. The Ides of March

I saw three films based on stage plays this year. Of those, only one did not feel like a play. Instead, George Clooney renders his talkative scenes in soft images that somehow express the yearning for the honesty and beauty that the films narrative of political manipulation so aptly deconstructs. Clooney did this before in Good Night, and Good Luck, a film I also loved, and it proves to me once again, that he is a very talented director that will probably, one day, be compared to Clint Eastwood more often than he wants to. (The other two were Carnage and A Dangerous Method)

10. Jane Eyre

Cary Fukanaga’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a very classic one, but maybe that’s why I liked it. I enjoyed the starkness of the landscapes in which it is set, the quiet determination of Mia Wasikowska and the fiery eyes of Michael Fassbender, the effortless, sweeping camera and Dario Marinellis score. Maybe not a film that will be talked about in ages to come, but a moviegoing experience that somehow managed to stick with me long enough to convince me of its place in this list.

Honorable Mentions

The Guard would have been at number ten, if I hadn’t decided at the last minute to make at least one leftfield choice for the list. I probably laughed as much as I did in Bridesmaids and the film might even have the better staying power and a one-of-a-kind central character. But somehow, it just didn’t lodge itself into my subconscious strongly enough.

I enjoyed Thor immensely. I thought it was well-directed, funny and full of strong characters. Captain America, which most critics found somehow more interesting, however, I found dull and superficial. There is no explanation for these things.

Converting Hand-drawn 2D Animation to 3D is a Bad Idea

There is exactly one shot in the 3D special edition release of Disney’s The Lion King that looks absolutely amazeballs in 3D. Scar has just left Simba sitting alone on a rock in the gorge. The young lion is unaware that, on a plateau above the gorge, a grazing herd of wildebeests is about to be unleashed by the three hyenas. The filmmakers connect these two images in one crane-up, from a top shot of the rock and tree, where Simba is sitting, up the walls of the gorge, into a wide shot of the plateau (you can see the shot I mean here). In 3D, the sense of scale and menace that is built up in this reveal, is fifty times more effective and gave me hope for the future of the technology. Everything else, though, looked wrong.

The Lion King is one of the formative films of my childhood. I saw it twice at the theatre when I was twelve and when we got the VHS, I recorded the sound track onto an audio cassette and then transcribed all of the dialogue into a sort of script. I learned a lot of English this way (I was living in Holland at the time so the film was English with Dutch subtitles) and it led to me knowing the complete dialogue of the film by heart – I still sometimes ~~annoy~~ amuse friends by reciting scenes when I’m drunk, but that’s beside the point.

The film also represents the pinnacle of what could be achieved with hand drawn 2D animation one year before Toy Story knocked over the whole industry. In Disney Animation’s Silver Age that started in 1986 with The Little Mermaid, The Lion King was the crowning jewel. By returning to one of the studio’s greatest strengths, anthropomorphic animals, in an original story, it surpassed – in my opinion and certainly in box office figures – even the achievements of Beauty and the Beast. The universal quality and appeal of The Lion King was never equalled again. Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Mulan simply can’t live up to it (not even Treasure Planet, which I am personally quite fond of). The Lion King is the best of both worlds. It uses the CAPS coloring system, it has some scenes which were supported by Pixar computations (e.g. the above-mentioned stampede scene) and CG-effects, but at its core it relies on a compelling story and strong characters animated by hand.

“Look, Simba, everything that the light touches is our kingdom.”

In 3D, thank goodness, The Lion King loses none of its grandeur. I was blown away by the sheer amazement of seeing this beloved film again on a big screen and by the fact that it still holds up (except for the hereditary power/destiny principles it perpetuates by which my leftist dispositions were slightly irked). Some of the savannah vistas also gain some impressive depth that widens the general scope of the film.

But, man, did the actual animation look crummy when it was 3D-ized. The inklines became blurry and jumpy, facial features that are slightly abstracted in the artwork – like whiskers – seemed to stick out all over the place. The actual animation suddenly became visible in a way that I just didn’t want to see. I wanted to immerse myself in the narrative, not notice every little trick animators use to draw their subjects.

I was willing to let The Lion King change my prejudices, but now my personal verdict is clear: Converting hand-drawn animation to 3D, regardless of how much computers were used in their original background composition etc., is a bad idea from an artistic point of view. So I am wary of Disney’s plans to convert more films to 3D. Although I might give Finding Nemo a shot. It’s not hand-drawn, after all.

Something Big is about to Happen: Zeitgeist and Imminent Threat in July, Von Trier and Cahill

“Another Earth”

It is never easy to analyse the time you live in at the moment. It’s much easier to look back in time to see cultural and societal threads developing and culminating. But sometimes that elusive contemporary sensibility that German thinkers once named the “zeitgeist” can be felt, especially in the cultural artifacts a society produces. The current zeitgeist seems to be that while technological progress is moving ever faster, cultural progress has come to a standstill, which in turn creates high expectations for the times to come. This is not my idea, of course. It has been written and talked about a lot recently. Someone who summarised it, about two months ago, in a way I could relate to a lot, was “Generation X” author Douglas Coupland. In an interview with a Swiss radio station, he said:

What I find exciting about the zeitgeist right now is that something big is about to happen. We all know that. We grew up with the idea that the future was something that was still down the road and we still just live in the present. But today we live in the future. Every day feels futuristic. (This is mostly a re-translation of the German translation of Coupland, so these are not exactly his words.)

Part of the zeitgeist being that “We live in the future now” felt familiar to me. I had even blogged about it before with respect to SF-films like Tron: Legacy and The Book of Eli. I had heard it before from authors like William Gibson, who have stopped setting their novels in the future because the present has caught up with them, and it ties right in with the discussion about “Retromania” in popular culture.

“Something big is about to happen”, however, is something that I heard for the first time in Coupland’s interview. It rang very true for me and I noticed that I had also encountered it in other films this year. Films that don’t necessarily count as science fiction, even though they might have some fantastic elements in them.

(The following paragraphs contain inevitable spoilers for all three movies discussed)

“The Future”

Miranda July’s second feature film is even called The Future, but it’s a long way from being science fiction. Instead, it tells the story of two thirtysomethings who exist in a relationship that has reached its peak after only four years. The protagonists, played by July and Hamish Linklater, have nothing to say to each other, because they don’t progress. All high hopes for their own development have failed to come to fruition and so they spend their days in a sort of melancholy hipster stupor (a fact that made both characters extremly annoying to me). When they decide to adopt a cat a month from now, they suddenly realize that they should use the remaining days to follow their impulses. Both quit their jobs and decide to do something meaningful. July’s character Sophie wants to express herself through dancing and Jason (Linklater) joins a climate-saving iniative that sells reforestation door-to-door.

But their efforts fail yet again. Sophie begins an affair and Jason starts spending time with an old man who has been married for 60 years. Even though there is some hope for reconciliation at the end of the film, the general feeling that remains is: There is no future for Sophie and Jason. They have already used it up and have only the eternal present left to them. This manifests itself in the second half of the film, where Jason literally tries to stop time. However, while he feels that time has stopped, the moon in the sky outside his window (who has the voice of the old man), constantly informs him that time is actually still creeping forward and that Jason can’t stay in his cocoon forever.

The last time people felt they were living in the future, in the 80s, “We live in the future” quickly turned into “No Future”. The only way out, it seemed, was through the self-destruction of mankind. And indeed, Jason says something to the same effect in July’s film: “The wrecking ball has already struck”, he tells a potential reforestation customer. “This is just the moment before it all falls down.”

That big thing that is about to happen, then, is it an apocalypse?

“Melancholia”

If you believe Lars von Trier, it is. While his latest film Melancholia is mostly a reflection on depression, it also confronts humanity with a doomsday scenario that can easily keep up with Armageddon and similar films whose plot centers around the imminent destruction of earth. In Melancholia, the titular planet is about to come close to earth and most scientists believe that it will safely pass by. Only conspiracy theorists and the main character Justine (Kirsten Dunst), who suffers from depression, are convinced that Melancholia will destroy earth instead. Which, as even the opening scenes promise, it will by the end of the movie.

Von Trier spends a good two thirds of his film setting up and the last third portraying their reactions to the impending doom. Justine is content with this notion, even literally bathes in Melancholia’s light. As a depressive, she “knows” things will always turn out for the worst. Her sister Claire is filled with fear but eventually gives in to her inevitable fate. And Claire’s husband John, a capitalist conservative and a believer in science and mankind’s ability to prevail, commits suicide as soon as he learns he was wrong.

It’s easy to read those reactions as – or compare them to – interpretations of the zeitgeist mentioned earlier. We can accept it, we can fear it or we can try to hide from it. What von Trier makes clear, though, is that the Big Thing, which in his movie is a threat, will happen, no matter what. So it might be best to side with the depressives.

“Another Earth”

One other movie was released this year, which shares the feeling of anticipation I have described in Melancholia and The Future. It also shares Melancholia‘s key image of an uncanny new heavenly body in the sky above us. But Mike Cahill’s Another Earth also offers a more hopeful prospect of the time after the metaphorical wrecking ball has struck.

Cahill’s main character Rhoda is in a “no future” situation as well, although her reasons are quite different. As a teenager, she was responsible for a car crash that took the lives of a young woman and her child. The child’s father John, who was also in the car, has survived. When Rhoda is released from prison after a number of years, she has lost all ambition and instead starts a cleaning job at her old high school. Then, she seeks out John and without revealing her identity to him, offers to regularly clean his house. He agrees and she slowly brings both the house and him back to life. He eventually falls in love with her but casts her out when she tells him why she came to him in the first place.

The catalyst for the car crash, which leads to all the events that follow it, is the appearance of a second earth in the sky. Rhoda gazes at this other earth when the crash happens and she later wins a spot on the first flight to what turns out to be an exact mirror image of our planet, people and all. Because the parallel timelines have started diverging when the two mirror planets became visible to each other, there is hope that John’s family might be alive on the other earth. Rhoda eventually gives her space on the flight to John.

In Cahill’s thought experiment, the big change that society faces is not a destructive wrecking ball at all, it might even offer a chance to begin again. This general sentiment has been a trope of post-apocalyptic scenarios for ages, but in Another Earth there is no major scale apocalypse, only a personal one. A Big Thing wakes mankind from its futureless existence and offers new perspectives on how to continue.

Personal postscript: I was too young in the 80s to understand any societal notions of Future or No Future. The very fact that I spent my earliest childhood in exactly those days (without older siblings) has made it hard for me to understand or appreciate 80s pop culture at all, while I find everything that came before or after much more accessible. But as far as I am concerned, there was a Big Change at the end of the decade. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of the country I live in might have robbed the western world of a clear antagonist (at least until 9/11) and lead the world at large into the global economic meltdown it is facing right now, culture and society in general, at least the way I see it, have benefitted from that change. If only to prove to us now that the world, and thus: the future and the zeitgeist, very probably will continue to exist.

Will The Avengers be exceptional or generic?

When the first trailer for The Avengers hit the net on Tuesday, I tweeted something which has been on my mind for a few days now: I haven’t been this excited about a film and followed every step of its development since The Lord of the Rings, ten years ago. My exclamation met with incredulity from my fellow film buff friend Carsten: “I don’t get it”, he wrote. “Looks totally generic.” And I couldn’t help but tell him, he’s right.

Others have already voiced their skepticism about Marvel’s big project. “Wired” author Erin Biba tweeted “So I guess The Avengers is just gonna be Iron Man 3 then”, and “Cinemablend” made an excellent list of 5 Reasons The Avengers Trailer Was Kind Of A Letdown: nothing new, no character dynamics, not enough characters, terrible music and the best reason: “It just didn’t make The Avengers seem as special as it is.”

Want to watch the trailer again? Here it is.

I think “Cinemablend”‘s last reason is key here, and it ties in with Erin’s Tweet. If The Avengers will really only be a sort of Tony Stark show with a couple of other guys in the background, then it will become another generic comic book movie, maybe even a comic book movie that suffers from the extra plot stuffed in for franchise reasons like Iron Man 2. And the trailer doesn’t do much to ward off that sentiment.

Nevermind that the movie turned out to be terrible, but do you remember the first teaser trailer for The Phantom Menace? It did have that “Every saga has a beginning …”-feel to it. It had Anakin Skywalker meeting Obi-Wan for the first time, it had the moment where Darth Maul unveils his double-bladed lightsaber. It definitely got me excited. The first teaser for The Fellowship of the Ring said “It wasn’t until now that the legend could finally come to life!” – even more excitement there. The Avengers trailer doesn’t even say “Avengers assemble!”. The teaser at the end of Captain America did a much better job at making this exceptional movie project actually look exceptional (not least because of the “Some Assembly Required” tagline).

The question stands: Will The Avengers, the movie itself, not the effort that went into building up the project, actually be exceptional? Something the trailer pulled into question for me is: Does Marvel see this film as a culmination? A finale of sorts to the five movies that preceded it? Or will it be just a continuation of the universe they are building? If people keep expecting the former and the movie turns out to be the latter, with too many loose ends, not at least some sense of closure and no general feeling of Big Momentness – it will definitely disappoint a lot of people.

I don’t read comic books continually and generally haven’t followed any periodical narrative regularly for some time now (I only watch tv series on DVD sets), but what Marvel has been trying to do with the building of their universe and the creation of their franchises is basically to import comic book narrative mechanics into the movie world. The first Avengers book was a decisive narrative moment in time, because it brought together heroes that hadn’t worked together before, but it was no culmination, it was a beginning – and it ultimately did feel quite generic to me when I caught up with reading it recently. In one of the last panels, one of the characters says something to the effect of “A team of superheroes, huh? We could give it a try.” Not really very momentous.

If Joss Whedon knows what he’s doing, like I hope he does, he will not make this look like Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap and the rest of them are merely giving it a try. He will make this The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For(tm), when the heroes of five movies finally assemble. And then, The Avengers will be exceptional – and not as generic as its first trailer.