The 8 Most Influential American Directors

A conversation (read: argument) with a friend (read: person I have to pretend to get along with for the sake of work) a few days ago left me Googling lists of the greatest American directors of all time.  As I scrolled through them, I was struck by the fact that there was an almost unnatural homogeny amongst the various sources. 

As I see it, there are two ways this could come about:  The first is that there truly is an objective means of measuring the quality and influence of a director and a general consensus has arisen as to the relative contribution of each artist.  This would be a valid hypothesis if it didn’t also require accepting that I was incorrect in the aforementioned argument.  The other explanation is that everybody is wrong except me.

So, in order to deceptively win an argument with someone who insisted that I couldn’t find a single online list that ranked Steven Spielberg over Stanley Kubrik, I present you my personal list of the most influential American directors of all time.

 #8) Michael Curtiz 

If you’re not a movie buff and you’re under the age of 73, you’ve probably never heard the name before, but in his 50-year career, Curtiz directed over 150 films in the US and Europe.  He was a visionary director that helped to legitimize the artistic scope of film in its early years.  His career began shortly after Eadweard Muybridge first made his little horsie-flipbook and people discovered the art of filmmaking.  His earliest known work dates back to 1912 and he continued releasing films until his death in 1962.

With such a prolific career it is inevitable that many of his titles would be less than brilliant.  The twilight of his career was marked with a number of mediocre works, but of course, when you release Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy in the same year, you have to figure it’s okay to rest on your laurels for the next couple of decades.

He also directed The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn marking him as the only director to ever make a good Robin Hood movie.  And he did it with 1938 film technology and rubber swords.  Kind of explains how Ridley Scott didn’t make this list…

 #7) Joel and Ethan Coen 

Right, right, I know they’re two people, but I’m not wasting two spots on them regardless of how often I quote The Big Lebowski.  These brothers direct together and they’re so prolific and so consistently brilliant that it’s hard to imagine any single person putting out such a fantastic library of films. 

Their tendency to push the envelope of art in comedy, their brilliant use of cinematography and soundtrack and their mistaken belief that the term “surprise ending” means that the audience will be surprised that the movie is over have built them an enormous fan base as well as mountains of critical acclaim.  Films like O Brother Where Art Thou, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona and No Country For Old Men have proven them to be beyond genre.

Incidentally, I reserve the right to move all of the living guys up the list based on future works.  After watching the trailers for True Grit, I feel like I might be bumping them up sooner than later.

 #6) William Wyler 

Another name not on the tip of the average tongue, William Wyler was a pioneer that helped to develop the scaffolding that virtually every future film would come to hang upon.  He was perhaps the second most decorated director of all time, garnering 12 Academy Award nominations for best director and winning three.  His magnum opus, the epic Ben Hur was the only film to ever win 11 Oscars until Wyler’s memory was heinously desecrated by giving the same honor to Titanic and the worst of the three Hobbit movies.

Wyler’s career spanned almost 45 years and at his death he was almost universally considered the second best American director of all time.  This was, of course, a time when the field was a lot less crowded, but the influences of Wyler’s work can still be felt today.  Roman Holiday seems to presage virtually every modern romantic comedy, Mrs. Miniver proves that you can construct a spectacular film without paying the slightest attention to historical detail and Ben-Hur paved the way for marketing tie-ins for the rest of time by selling (I swear I’m not making this up) “Ben-His” and “Ben-Hers” towels during the run up to the movie's release.

 #5) Stanley Kubrik 

Depending on whom you ask, Kubrik either stands in the pantheon of the greatest directors of all time or is the most overrated artist in human history.  Even those who would claim the latter (myself included) cannot deny the profound influence his films had on the future of movie making.

Characterized by pioneering special effects, unrivalled attention to detail and a complete disinterest in whether or not anyone actually enjoyed his stuff, Kubrik’s career was marked by controversy.  Critics either loved or hated his movies and often did both at the same time.  An early review for 2001: A Space Odyssey called it a “Big, beautiful but plodding scifi epic,” adding that the superb cinematography was overshadowed by a “confusing, long-unfolding plot.”  The New York Times called it “Somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.”

The master of the “what the hell was that last shot about?” ending, Kubrik spent his entire career proving that he could excel in any genre.  Whether scifi (2001: A Space Odyssey), horror (The Shining), war (Full Metal Jacket), bad soft-core porn (Eyes Wide Shut) or extraordinarily creepy and disturbing (A Clockwork Orange), his movies were cerebral and extraordinary.  He made only a dozen movies in his 45-year career and, with the exception of Eyes Wide Shut, managed to outdo himself with each successive release.

 #4) Steven Spielberg 

Unlike many of the names on this list, Spielberg had the advantage of having grown up loving movies.  He came into his first directorial position with an almost unrivaled understanding of suspense, pacing and story arc.  Unfortunately, all the directorial talent in the world wasn’t going to make The Sugarland Express a box office success.  Luckily for the entire movie going world, the studio saw enough promise in young Spielberg to essentially bank the entire future of Universal Studios on his next project.

The filming of Jaws was both comic and tragic by all accounts.  The filming ran more than 100 days over.  The script was being written on the fly, often the day before scenes were being shot.  The shark-bot worked about once every forty three times they needed it to.  By the time they wrapped, Spielberg’s career hung in a precarious balance.  The movie would have to be more profitable than any that came before it to save him.  And, of course, it was.

Most significantly, Spielberg proved that you could make an ingenious film without confusing the crap out of your audience a la Kubrik.  Where Kubrik showed that an artistic film could be commercially viable, Spielberg proved that a commercial film could be a work of art.

 #3) John Ford 

John Ford spent his career defining, both through his work and his personality, what it meant to be a director.  With a still unrivaled four Academy Awards for Best Director, Ford is perhaps best known now as the guy who stole Orson Well’s Oscar for Citizen Kane.  If this were a list of the greatest directors in American history, I would have reserved the top-spot for him.  Remember when I said that Wyler was universally accepted to be the second best director of his day?  John Ford is almost universally recognized to hold the ultimate place.

A reasonable argument can be made that he was the most influential director as well.  He more or less invented the genre of the American Western, guiding John Wayne through the best films of his career including The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach and the greatest movie to ever begin with a Q, The Quiet Man.

John Ford was the Spielberg of his day, capable of churning out commercial action flicks right alongside the most sophisticated dramas.  Films like The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was My Valley and The Informer challenge audiences without frustrating them and remain significant and infinitely entertaining even six decades after their release.

 #2) Alfred Hitchcock 

It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Hitchcock invented cinematic suspense.  He was a virtuoso in the art of manipulating the audience and pioneered many of the standards of tension building that are used today.  There are few American films that do not owe some credit to Hitchcock’s brilliance.  The humor of North by Northwest, the suspense of Notorious, the horror of Psycho, the visual perfection of Rear Window, the jaw dropping reveal of Vertigo and the unbridled fun of The Birds are still valid metrics by which to measure modern films.

Hitchcock surrounded himself with brilliance and managed to wrestle career-defining performances out of some of the best actors of his day.  Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart and Leo G. Carroll all exhibited their greatest work in Hitchcock films.  Ingrid Bergman also exhibited her 2^nd and 3^rd best work for Sir Alfred.

On a personal level, Hitchcock was a labyrinth of childhood issues and strange phobias, which likely explain his knowledge of how to invoke fear in his audiences.  His genius was recognized early in his career and though he never earned the respect owed him in terms of Academy Awards, he remains one of the most recognizable figures in Hollywood even 30 years after his death.

 #1) Buster Keaton 

In his radiant and often tragic career Keaton worked in virtually every type of entertainment known to man.  He began in Vaudeville, worked in film both before and after the advent of the soundtrack, worked in television, radio and on stage as well.  He was a consummate entertainer and perfectionist whose brilliance becomes more and more apparent as the art of filmmaking evolves.

Keaton is best known, of course, as the star of farcical silent films like The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Sherlock, Jr as well as a litany of some of the best comic-shorts of the silent era.  Many mistake him for a mere slapstick virtuoso, but the revolutionary nature of his work as a director cannot be overstated.

When Buster Keaton entered the world of film it was in it’s infancy and the comic genre was buried under uninspired, low budget nonsense.  Keaton recognized the size and scope of movie making better than any director of his day.  He not only knew what was funny and entertaining, he also knew how best to present it in the cinematic medium.  A master of large props, use of space, special effects, stunt work, shot-framing and pacing, Keaton managed to create some of the greatest works of art ever captured on film despite the fact that he relegated himself strictly to the comic genre.  It is hard to imagine that any of the films of today will prove as timeless as the works of Buster Keaton.

 Notables Not Mentioned: 

Orson Wells – While he tops many lists and might well have directed the single greatest example of American film, a single great movie does not equal a great director.  His career essentially ended with Citizen Kane and thus, despite the unparalleled genius of this work, he doesn’t make my cut as one of the most influential directors of all time.

DW Griffith – I hesitantly admit that I’m simply not familiar enough with his work to know where he would properly fall on my list.  He consistently ranks near the top of other “most influential” and “greatest” director lists and thus I feel obligated to research him further.  I reserve the right to stick him in somewhere as a something-point-five at a later date.

Martin Scorcese – If I were making a list of the 9 most influential American directors, he’d have made the list, so I would feel bad not including him here.

Tim Burton – My wife wanted me to mention Tim Burton, though I don’t really think he belongs anywhere near my list.  But she’s my wife and I love her so I at least gave him an honorable mention.

Daren Aronofsky – While it is too early in his career to list him alongside John Ford, Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock, he is clearly one of the most promising and trend setting directors working in Hollywood today.  His dazzling (if wholly depressing) works challenge the limitations of film and it seems likely that someday he will work his way onto not only my list, but every rational ranking of history’s best directors.

A Single Woman – I’m troubled by the fact that even after noticing this discrepancy and scrounging to find a female director worthy of mention, I could not.  The Academy Awards were almost 100 years old when they finally got around to awarding a woman the best director Oscar.  It remains one of the most sexist positions in entertainment.

While there are plenty of female directors working now, often times they are relegated to doing “chick flicks” and fluff pieces.  Few studios are willing to trust female directors with their big money franchises despite the brilliant works of directors like Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow (even though Tarantino should have gotten her Oscar).

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

8 Things We Pay For... Even Though They're Free

I think it’s safe to say that America has an international reputation for opulence, even wastefulness.  While this reputation might be overblown or at the very least not universal amongst our populace, it is easy to see how we leave that impression on our foreign visitors.  In many areas, Americans show enormous frugality.  But these areas are easily overshadowed by the fact that we use more fuel than the entire European Union (about 500 million people) and almost three times as much as the billion people in China.

The lavishness of our culture reached pandemic proportions when people started buying things like designer clothes; items that were valuable only because other people knew how much they cost.  We’ve become a culture where many of the people are perfectly content to go broke in an effort to look rich. 

I fear the people who finance rims may be beyond saving, but the more rational among us are hardly immune to absurd consumerism.  We buy Tylenol despite the fact that it is molecularly indistinguishable from a generic substitute.  We buy $100 sunglasses churned out of the same factory that makes the $8 pair.  We buy product that are scientifically proven to be useless.  Heck, sometimes we even pay for things that are free.

 #1) Bottled Water 

This is the first one you thought of, too, isn’t it?  I stare loathingly at a bottle of Aquafina even as I reflect on how stupid a trend this is.  I know that the taste of most tap water is indistinguishable from any name brand.  I know that in blind taste tests people generally rank the tap water above the Evian.  I know that only an idiot would pay for a bottle of water in a store that had a drinking fountain.  And I reflect on how stupid it is as the cashier counts out my change.

Advocates of bottled water will tell you that they can tell the difference (they can’t).  They will tell you that bottled water is healthier (it isn’t).  They’ll tell you that bottled water is safer (they’re wrong).  They’ll tell you that it’s a healthier choice than soda (so is horse urine, but I’m not paying for it).  Meanwhile we happily dole out 500 times the money we would spend by filling a Nalgene bottle at the tap before we leave the house.

 #2) Your Credit Report 

Alright, so I’ve mentioned this one before.  I still see Ben Stein shilling this concept with a bunch of gopher puppets that have been conscripted into this scam without the intellect to know better.  I wish we could say the same about Ben Stein.  Well, if we judge him only by the film “Expelled”, perhaps we can.

Of course, you can easily obtain your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com, which is actually free.  It is, after all, personal information about you that companies pass around like a misplaced 7^th grade love poem.  The law requires that all 3 credit-scoring services allow you a yearly review of your credit score so that you can verify the accuracy of the information.  If you don’t trust websites, you can even get it via snail mail at no cost to you.  I'd provide the address, but if you don't trust websites, you aren't reading this anyway.

 #3) ATM Fees 

The whole concept of paying for money is innately insane.  Compounding the frustration is the fact that it’s your money to begin.  Just to irk you further, the little screen reminds you every time and shows you exactly how much your lack of foresight will cost you.  You sigh with one palm over your face and the other slowly moving toward the “I accept” button in a slow-motion push of shame.

To make matters worse, unless you’re a drug addict or a New Yorker (two categories that frequently overlap), virtually anything you want to buy can be purchased with the same little card you used to get swindled by that smirking, monochromatic thief of an ATM.  The few dollars seem harmless at the time, but for the average account holder they easily counterbalance the pittance of interest their money earns by being in a bank in the first place.

 #4) Pets 

If there’s one thing better than a dog, it’s a frighteningly inbred dog.  In America, we like our dogs and cats one cousin away from polydactylism.  It is easy to see why an animal lover would be willing to spend $2400 on a purebred dog that’s qualitatively no different than a mutt they could rescue from imminent death at a shelter for about $50.  Wait, I’m sorry, did I say easy to see?

The very concept of buying a pet is foreign to me.  I recall as a child that pets would often create smaller, duplicate versions of themselves and that it would be quite a hassle trying to pawn these pets off on people.  Many of the things we waste money on are understandable because they have the potential to appreciate in value, but it’s hard to imagine this holding true with biological property.

 #5) Consultants 

Sometimes they call themselves “efficiency experts”.  Other times they go by the name “management analysts”.  Other aliases include anything that ends with the word “consultant”.  These people are like motivational speakers in that the only thing that makes what they’re saying valuable is the fact that you’re listening to it.

Studies estimate that companies and governments waste billions of dollars on outside consulting firms that do no more and often much less than they could have done internally.  The notion of wasting money on a person whose job it is to find the places where your wasting money is obviously flawed.  If the first words out of his mouth aren’t “fire me”, you have to start questioning his integrity.

These unscrupulous predators often go after the small, family run operations that can least afford to be swindled by them.  If Donald Trump wants to flush money away on Feng Shui consultants (and he did), I suppose that’s better than using the money to shellac another dozen toupees.  There is no real accreditation for consultants and most of what they offer can be found in a few good books on management.  You don’t even have to pay for the books.

 #6) Books 

It’s easy to forget about them since the advent of the Internet, but there are still libraries.  They still have books and everything.  I know because I still occasionally have to use the restroom in a public area.

But libraries, as great as they are, no longer have the monopoly on free books.  Websites like http://www.paperbackswap.com/ offer an easy free, unending supply of literary entertainment.  Those who own e-readers are probably already aware of the numerous sites that offer free classics (legally) and original works by struggling authors (trust me, go with the classics).  If you can stand staring at a computer screen while you read (and clearly you can), tens of thousands of books are available (legally) online as well.

 #7) Identity Theft Protection 

It’s easy to imagine how this scam came about.  Seeing the readiness with which people would pay for their free credit reports, companies decided to just go the whole 9 yards and offer identity theft immunity.  Industry leader LifeLock stoked consumer fears with a commercial proudly displaying their CEOs social security number and promising that he could do so with confidence because he was protected by LifeLock.

You probably haven’t seen the commercial recently.  By some strange coincidence, they stopped airing it at about the same time the judicial system demanded that they do so .  They were forced to retract all the promises that LifeLock could guard your social security number or magically thwart all attempts at identity theft.  They weren’t forced to admit that the pittance of a service that they do offer is entirely made of things you could do quickly, easily and without a penny of cost.  To save LifeLock the effort, I admitted it for them.

 #8) Exercise 

Gold’s Gym proudly announces to prospective franchisees that the fitness industry in the US is worth more than $17.6 billion dollars a year.  From diet pills that don’t do anything to diet books that take 120,000 to say “eat less” to a litany of increasingly laughable late night, call-now attempts to get you to pay for push ups, the fitness industry thrives in these United States.  I have to tell you this because you’d never guess it by looking at the American populace.

As a nation, the more we spend on fitness, the fatter and more out of shape we get.  This trend has held true for more than 40 years and shows no sign of abating.  Clearly Americans need more exercise, but just as clearly they need to spend less to get it.  This one has been stuck in my craw ever since I watched my sister-in-law drive to a gym two miles from her house to walk on the treadmill for half an hour.

Do you have a weight set in your home?  If not, do you have anything heavy?  I’m guessing you do.  Do you have arms?  Legs?  That’s pretty much all the exercise equipment you need right there.  All the nautilus machines and resistance bands and Tai-Bo classes in the world won’t get you any more of a workout than rearranging your living room furniture or cleaning your garage.

The equations in exercise are pretty simple.  For losing weight, it is simply “calories consumed minus calories burned”.  Structured aerobics won’t burn off fat any quicker than washing the dishes or taking the stairs.  For building muscle the only two factors that matter are regularity and reaching full muscle exhaustion.

The worst offenders are the gyms.  They sucker you into an annual membership before you lay down your first drop of sweat.  They offer you a sauna because anything that uncomfortable must be healthy.  They offer you a personal trainer that will bark at you like an underachieving drill sergeant.  They will work out a personalized training program by adhering to old wives tales and urban myths.  They will offer you the worst possible types of exercises, ones that are both tedious and limited to only one or two muscle groups. 

To the credit of the personal trainers, most of them actually think that the things they tell you matter.  They will tell you “high weight, low reps” or “keep your elbows locked” or “what are you, a freakin’ cheerleader?” and they honestly think that it helps.  It doesn’t, of course.  The duration or weight or method of breathing or order of exercises effects muscle growth only in the slightest.  In fact, it is arguable that there is no difference whatsoever provided that you reach full muscle exhaustion.

Despite the availability of all of this information online (I don’t exactly kill myself on the research end here), the businesses above continue to thrive.  I’m afraid to calculate how much of my income is actually wasted and my nightmares are tormented by images of Thoreau in a grave somewhere, perpetually rolling over.  I imagine “desire” suddenly listed as America’s chief export. 

In summary, there was a time when I thought that we should fight back against the perception that we are an opulent society.  Now I realize that it’s better than admitting that we’re just stupid.

An Open Letter to the English Language

Dear English Language,

First of all, let me say that I’m a huge fan.  I’ve been speaking you for most of my life and love the way that you incorporate the descriptiveness of German with the flow and beauty of French without all the vocal gymnastics of Spanish.  I love the fact that even as a native speaker of more than three decades I’m still encountering words for the first time.  I love the fact that you offer three hundred and eighty different ways to say ‘good’, each with its own miniscule variation on meaning.  On a personal level, I also really appreciate you ensuring that my name remains second only to aardvark alphabetically.

There are, however, a few issues that have been gnawing at me for years.  In the past I’ve simply assumed that you, being a language spoken by more than a billion people worldwide, know better than I the needs of communicative discourse.  The older I get, the more I come to realize that these problems might simply have been overlooked.  You have a quarter million words to keep track of, not to mention all the proper nouns, punctuation, grammatical structure and onomatopoeia.   Given all of that, it’s entirely possible that you’ve simply missed a few minor corrections that could make you a bit friendlier to new speakers.

 #1) Apostrophes

Perhaps no other punctuation is so thoroughly abused as the apostrophe.  Hand written signs all over the nation waste ink with misguided strokes forced to improperly denote pluralization.  Contractions are left unbounded, apostrophes occasionally follow words that end naturally in ‘S’ with no real reason or purpose and promising minds are thwarted by the indiscriminate way we suspend the possession rule when it comes to ‘it’.

Lord only knows why this punctuation is so maligned.  Perhaps it is too much to ask it to serve both possession and contraction.  Perhaps the fault lies with the letter ‘S’ and the ease with which a sibilant can be added to nearly any word.  Whatever the cause, the result is devastating to linguistic nit-pickers the world over.

 #2) The Semi-Colon

I mean, what’s the point of these weirdos to begin with?  Too timid to be a period, too self righteous to be a comma, the semi-colon is nothing more than a segregationist among interrelated clauses.  Who cares if the clauses are not conjoined by a coordinating conjunction?  Could they not then be two separate sentences?  Is “I went to the store to buy cereal; I was told they were out” be any harder to understand if we replace the semi-colon with a period?  Was there an ‘and’ shortage that started the whole semi-colon thing?

In addition to separating independent clauses, the semi-colon is also called upon to link clauses that contain either transitional phrases or conjunctive adverbs.  But by the merit of transitional phrases and conjunctive adverbs they are already linked.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you the definition of either transitional or conjunctive (you are the English language, after all).

Finally, the semi-colon is brought in when listing phrases that contain internal punctuation.  In this case, the semi-colon has been reduced to a “meta-comma”.  Sure, from time to time this is needed, but it’s hardly deserving of it’s own punctuation.  We could just as easily use a mathematical approach and double up commas the way equations often double up parenthesis.

I suppose a valid argument can be made for keeping the semi-colon, though I think we should seriously rethink the rules of usage.  At the very least, you might want to consider moving it to a less prominent part of the keyboard.

 #3) All the homophones

I cannot begin to comprehend the pressure of being a language.  Keeping up with colloquial usages, emerging slang terms and liberal pronunciation must be an unending challenge.  I would not bring up the homophones except that I think it might make things easier on you as the language and us as the speakers.  Words like “to/too/two” and “they’re/their/there” seem to throw everyone for a loop now and again.

There are two ways to go about solving this problem.  The hard way would require establishing new words for separate meanings.  Not only would this entail the creation of a number of new words but it would also lead to inevitable (and potentially bloody) fights over which homophone gets to keep it’s original pronunciation.  Which version of “to” gets grandfathered in?

The other and far easier solution is to do away with the whole homophone concept altogether and switch them all to homonyms.  In context, it’s usually pretty easy to tell if someone means “he’ll”, “heel” or “heal”.  So why not adopt a uniform spelling as well?  Clearly the idea of not confusing people at all seems to go against the mission statement of English, but couldn’t we at least replace the existing confusion with a newer and more uniform confusion?

 #4) Silent Letters

This is just a stupid idea.  I know, I know, you were young and all the cool languages were doing it, but now that you’re older and more mature I’m sure you can abandon this fad with grace and dignity.  Think about the blank stares children respond with when teachers first explain that some letters are just there for no reaon but the aesthetic.  They are unpronounced, useless and there isn’t even a firm consensus on why or when the letters will be silent.

Perhaps we could come up with a single silent letter.  Instead of useless ‘K’s at the beginning of words and vestigial ‘E’s at the end we could develop a symbol that is pronounced silently.  We could replace all of the silent letters with it and then pronounce it all we want.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the word “Knight” only half of the letters directly affect the pronunciation.  Which brings me to my final issue:

 #5) GH

I’m not a big fan of those letters in conjunction.  They can’t be pronounced phonetically with any recognizable sound.  Most of the time we use them as silent letters (the cheerleaders of the alphabet) but sometimes, seemingly on a whim, we pronounce the ‘G’ but not the ‘H’.  Other times we say “the hell with sense” and pronounce them as an ‘F’.

I, as a writer, speaker and grammar-fascist, appreciate the beauty of a language that looks as though it was created by a person desperate to catch up in a game of Scrabble, but all of the other languages are laughing at you (except French, which is currently on strike).  I tire of hearing the language I love mocked and ridiculed so openly and I think that with only a few of these minor adjustments we can mitigate the laughter.  We can also insulate the people who hand-write signs at local businesses from displaying their stupidity so openly.

I honestly don’t think we can fool the gas station attendant for putting up a sign that says (I actually saw this once): “This window closed due too whether”.  I think that the honest fault lies with you, English language.  No disrespect intended, but you knew that there were problems and have done nothing to fix them.  Linguists have tried to develop mnemonics like “’I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ unless sounded like ‘A’ as in neighbor or weigh”, and still you thwart them with words like weird, ageing, theist, protein, seismology, either and marbleize (and the 1600+ other English words that don’t conform to this ‘rule’).

I’ve defended you for years, English.  I’ve been your uncompensated promoter and enforcer for much of my adult life.  All I ask in return is a small token to symbolize that we are in this together.  Barring that, I’d like you to remove one of the ‘A’s in aardvark so that my name can come first.

Sincerely,

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

PS I appreciate the whole irony thing, but when you spell phonetically with a ‘PH’ it’s almost like you’re intentionally screwing with us.

A Message to Movie Pirates

It might be unfair to blame Johnny Depp for the rise in online movie piracy, but he certainly has a hand in making the whole “pirate” image cool.  Just look at the hacker geeks of Pirate Bay who try to twist profiteering and theft into Matrix-like mystique.  Just look at the whole “pirate underground” that try to fool themselves into thinking that by cracking DVDs and stealing the intellectual properties of others, they are somehow “sticking it to the man”… or whatever cool people now say.

Selective reasoning excuses most people from the “harmless” act of downloading a movie here or there.  Indeed it’s hard to find an article online that does not apologize for the vice of being too lazy and/or cheap to hit up the Blockbuster vending machine.  Even at the caveat that it is blatantly illegal they blame the industry for failing to keep up with the technology and offer the same convenience that free, instantaneous downloads offer.  This despite the fact that the home entertainment industry has now surpassed space travel in the rate of technological advancement.

But ask the Bit Torrent Bandit and they’ll tell you that the movie industry is crooked and only a fraction of the money goes to the people who actually made the movie… as though somehow giving nothing is nobler than giving too little.  They’ll argue in pretzeled logic to say that the industry is actually aided by the increased exposure to new directors and actors that illegal downloads offer… as though people who like the new director they just stole from would do any more than illegally download the rest of their movies.

Copyright laws and enforcement tactics struggle to keep up with the advancements in technology.  Vehement opposition to any efforts to further police the Internet stall progress on meaningful legislation.  Even in a tepid political climate the problem is almost unsolvable through legislation because the technology moves quicker than the legislative process.  Meanwhile the movie industries of the world are losing billions annually.

We’ve seen this play out before, of course.  Newspapers are almost fully antiquated and the news industry struggles to find a way to redefine itself.  The recording industry has seen sharp drop offs and sought new avenues of profit in the twenty-first century.  Freelance photographers find themselves in unending wars with unscrupulous bloggers who just go to Google Images and grab whatever they find.

The new market in music has been hailed as a new era of choice, demolishing once and for all the gatekeepers that stood between the fans and the bands and broke the backs of the payola promoters.  Many point to the new venues the Internet has offered for the visual arts and weigh the cost of copyright infringement a small price to pay for it.

But the same advantages don’t translate to movies.  A beautiful photograph takes one dedicated photographer who is either skilled, lucky or some combination of the two.  A good song takes an inspired songwriter, a handful of musicians and, with modern technology to assist, very little in the way of professional help in mixing.  The man-hours involved in the creation of these works of art are invisible in the shadow of the effort that goes into the making of a movie.  To craft a two hour film hundreds of people devote thousands of hours over months if not years.

Perhaps more importantly, the creation of a great film takes the convergence of at least a few brilliant minds.  A single songwriter and a great melody can overcome a bad bassist and crappy mixer, but even an ingenious script can’t shine in the hands of bad actors.  A brilliant director will always be limited by the abilities of their set decorators, make up artists and costume designers.  For a true work of art to emerge, a dozen or more artists must work together and at least as many egos must be juggled.  An incredible amount of work and resource go into the creation of even a mediocre film.

The savvy Internet Pirate has an indifferent response.  “So what?  Let the budgets of those actors and actresses drop.  Dig into the pockets of those bazillionaire producers.  It’s all a crooked institution to begin with.”

The MPAA has tried to illicit sympathy by reminding us in Nancy-Reaganesque PSAs that when you steal a movie you’re not just taking from the celebrities.  You're also stealing from the key grip and the caterer.  Somehow depicting the broken souls who were sucked into low paying jobs by an industry that promised them fame and delivered them manual labor failed to inspire the national “Aw-shucks” moment they were hoping for.

But perhaps there is a better route altogether.  Forget about the investors in the films themselves for a moment and consider what these Bit Torrent Buccaneers are stealing from you: Explosions.

Illegal downloads are on the rise, which means that movie budgets will soon be on the decline.  No reasonable argument can be made to the contrary, though the superheroes of geekdom certainly find unreasonable arguments when confronted with that fact.  Money is being lost.  When you download a movie you aren’t stealing from that film, but rather the one that the production company makes next.

This means fewer explosions, fewer space battles, fewer car chases, shorter fight scenes, less computer animation and less 3D.  Many film buffs are salivating at this, but be forewarned: The artsy Oscar pictures will lose their budgets first.  The movies that only do well with the critics are kept afloat by the big budget blockbuster.  For every Last Station there is a Snakes on a Plane to thank.  It will be harder and harder to afford an exemplary cast and at the same time budget constraints will limit the number of takes a filmmaker can afford.  The need for faster turnaround will harm every aspect of filmmaking from preproduction to post.

When people steal movies online, they are stealing them from us.  I am certainly not alone in my love for cheesy action flicks that are light on plot and heavy on post-mortem one-liners.  I want to see Terminator part 9 and the eighth remake of King Kong and I don’t want to sit around and talk about the good old days when they could afford to crash a yacht into a building for the sake of making a Keanu Reeves movie watchable.  I want to see ever bigger vehicles crashed into ever bigger stationary objects and I want to see ever more beautiful Bond cars get destroyed by ever more diabolical machines.  And explosions… glorious explosions as far as the eyes can see.

And I don’t want to lose all this to a bunch of hacker geeks and lazy consumers who have convinced themselves that copyright infringement doesn’t count if everybody does it at once.  Despite its crooked reputation, Hollywood is the leading employer of artists in this country.  Movies are a convergence of arts like no other and tens of thousands of painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers and specialty performers earn their living because of the film industry.

Arts like dance, classical music and painting largely rely on government subsidy to stay viable in today’s world.  We see the cultural value of such things and choose to insulate them from the fickle tastes of consumers.  Cinema is the lone bastion of breathing, thriving art left in this country and we could already be seeing the waning edge of its golden era.

It is easy to apologize for the movie thieves.  It is easy to forgive a kid in some random dorm room uploading a movie he would otherwise never have bothered to see.  It is easy to lose sympathy for the hard-hearted media moguls that charge you $13 to see some crappy remake of an old crappy television show.  It is easy to overlook the losses as movies continue to set box-office records with movies that offer nothing but headache inducing special effects and plots that could fit on the head of a pin.

But a valid argument can be made that American cinema represents a cultural investments in art unprecedented in world history.  Each year dozens of spectacular works of art can be found sifting through the sea of drivel that makes up the annual Hollywood offerings.  They may be the minority, but movies have the power to shape our cultural values, draw our attention to the inequities of the world, challenge our preconceptions and unite us under our common humanity.

Every time a movie is stolen from the wild, wild web the potential of future film is diminished.  As the budgets shrink and the returns dwindle, you can expect whole genres to disappear and you’ll likely see them go in order of importance.  Documentary films will suffer first with experimental films right on their heels.  Proven sellers like sci-fi, comic properties and low budget romantic comedies will hold out the longest but even they will visibly suffer in a short time.

Until a radical shift is made in the way that Internet piracy is policed, all we can hope to do is plug a few holes in the ship.  We can’t stop it from sinking through grass roots activism, but we can slow it down.  The first and most obvious step is to stop downloading movies without paying for them.  A number of providers are fast at work making it easier and easier to view movies legally and pay only nominal fees or monthly service charges.  By using these legitimate services you are sending a clear message to the film industry to keep investing in ways of making legal digital transmission easier.

But the most important thing we can do is to change the social stigma of Internet piracy.  These hackers are hard at work trying to make themselves look like cool freedom fighters so clearly image matters to them.  By shooting down the self-serving arguments about corruption in Hollywood and the evil specter of the MPAA we are deflating their public persona.  By reminding them that they’re just a bunch of profiteering computer nerds that weren’t athletic enough to go into real crime we can counteract the hacker “mystique” they so desperately cultivate.

And if you’re not swayed by the arguments to keep cinema alive, consider one other vital front in this battle.  The freedom of the Internet is largely dependant upon finding viable solutions for copyright infringement.  If everyone who protested measures like COICA put equal effort into finding ways to clamp down on piracy, perhaps such draconian measures would not be necessary.

8 Tips for Choosing a Halloween Costume

Halloween is not normally my favorite holiday.  Thanksgiving is built around home cooked meals and passing out halfway through the Dallas game and as a devoted NFL fan I cannot claim any other holiday as my favorite.  But this year Halloween has had the decency to fall on a Sunday and will thus compete for my affection equally with Turkey day.

Halloween offers us candy, creepiness, costumes and women dressed in far less clothing than is seasonally appropriate.  There are only two things that fall in the negative column when it comes to Halloween: The flood of bad horror movies that crowds the box office and the whole process of choosing, acquiring and assembling a costume.

But hey, that’s why you hired me.  I’d like to offer a few tips that I’ve picked up over the years that should help guide you through the whole ordeal…

 #1) Be Original 

I wonder if anybody will go as one of those anorexic Smurfs from Avatar.  Wonder if we’ll see an Iron Man or two.  Okay, so this advice is strictly for the grown ups.  Kids only get one day a year to dress up like Iron Man and that borders on cruel and unusual punishment by itself.  So by all means, take full advantage of the one day you get to dress as whatever flavor-of-the-month superhero is being crammed down your throat at the moment.

But adults should know better.  If you’re going to bother dressing up, you might as well not look like 3 other people at the party.  I mean… that’s the point of dressing up.  If you want to look like 3 other people, don’t wear a costume and save yourself a few bucks.

  

 #2) Don’t Overspend 

You can’t make up for your lack of originality by spending more money than the other guy.  People may compliment you and tell you that you’re the most realistic looking of all the Batmen.  It really doesn’t matter.  Deep inside they’ll be thinking that you look more like a dingle-berry that spent $400 on a Halloween costume.  Or worse, they’ll think you rented it and are presently enveloped in latex still festooned with the last guys drunken beer sweat.

 #3) Be Realistic 

How many great costume ideas have gone unrealized because they would have required effort?  How many “aha” moments fizzle out in disappointment when the sheer complexity of the concept comes into focus?  How many half-finished Optimus Primes will be collecting dust while their would-be architects desperately scramble to find something other than an ill-fitting “Kick Ass” leotard on the 29^th of October?

The thing is, if you’re one of those people that go all out for their Halloween costume, you already know that.  You’ve been thinking about it since last November, you’ve been working on it since March and by now, but for a little spray paint and glitter, you’re prepared to transform into the entire cast of Jersey Shore at a moments notice (yes, all of them).

But if you’re not that kind of person, keep it simple.  If you think of something that probably won’t be at the costume shop, it better be something that can be pulled off with cardboard and tinfoil.  And not too much tinfoil… we’ll need that to cover pies on Thanksgiving.

 #4) Minimize Make-Up 

Odds are overwhelming that you suck at applying make-up, and I’m not just talking to the guys here.  I mean… we can still see your neck too, ladies.  If it’s a different color than your face, that’s kind of a dead giveaway.  I’m just saying.  But for those guys out there who are not clowns, stage-actors, transvestites, emo or Rudolf Guliani, Halloween is the only time of the year when the whole make up thing comes up.

When it does, don’t overdo it.  The more your costume relies on make-up the more time you’ll spend touching it up.  Or more likely, if you don’t wear make up every day you’ll get it right in the mirror before you leave and never think to check it again.  With a bit of misfortune you might be all the way home from the party before you realize that you spent half the night looking more like a mime than a vampire.

 #5) Don’t Wear a Mask 

Of course, many costumes allow you to forego the makeup process altogether but a full-blown mask isn’t any better.  Minutes after donning it the interior of the foul rubber visage will be damp from the 83% of your breath that doesn’t make it through the infinitesimal mouth and nostril slits.  Trapped in an increasingly wet and smelly Yoda head with your peripheral vision retarded, you will be wishing you’d gone with green makeup in short order.

Now, this obviously doesn’t count for all masks.  Half masks, facemasks, Ninja-Turtle style eye bands and things of that sort are fine.  The full size $100+ head enveloping style masks are cool, but they’re also nearly impossible to wear for long periods of time.  You can’t see or hear anything, nobody can understand you and you’re slowing dying of asphyxiation.  You’ll have to take the mask on and off throughout the festivities, ripping chunks of hair out each time, and each time put it back on its horrific odor will grow more uninviting.

Note: This one is especially important if you’re going to be drinking or doing anything else that increases your risk of vomiting without warning.

 #6) Wear a Cape 

I’m serious about this one.  It doesn’t even matter if the thing you’re dressing as doesn’t traditionally have a cape.  Who cares that Iron Man didn’t wear a cape?  That was his gross oversight and doesn’t need to be yours as well.  So what if it doesn’t make sense to put a cape on a zombie costume?  You could be going as a zombie that was zombified on Halloween while dressed as Iron Man in a cape.

This is the only time of the year that we get to wear capes and we should take full advantage.  Even the costumeless should wear capes on All Hallows Eve.  It is our best opportunity to rebel against the cape-hating oligarchs of international fashion.

 #7) Consider Warmth 

I don’t know whose cruel idea it was to stick Halloween at the end of October.  If we were voting on a masquerade themed holiday I think we’d have had the sense to put it on a pre-jacket weather point in the calendar.  For many in the southern regions (or northern regions, I know I have a few Australian readers, too) this doesn’t come into play much, but for those of us on the other side of the snow line the coming winter (or receding winter) is a major factor in costume choice.

It is a delicate balance, of course.  Something too cold and you’re covered in a costume thwarting coat much of the night.  Something too warm and you’re too warm.

 #8) Consider Practicality 

Have you ever seen somebody at a Halloween party who is in a semi-embarrassing half-costume?  He stands there in his green and yellow unitard constantly pointing to the turtle shell that completes it.  Of course, he isn’t wearing the turtle shell because at some point in the night he calculated that he would rather finish out the party with his beer belly actively challenging the might of his spandex one-piece than suffer through another minute of wearing his whole costume.

Comfort and mobility are the key issues here.  The third time your headdress pokes somebody in the eye you’re going to have to think about losing it.  Turning sideways to get through a doorway is funny the first few times and irritating as hell afterwards.  If there’s a component too big to take off in the bathroom that could be a problem you only discover after it’s too late.  If there are a half dozen spots on your body you can’t reach you can rest assured that they will itch throughout the night.

Before committing to a particular costume, get an idea what you’re going to be doing.  If all you’re doing is sitting around the house and handing out candy when kids show up (guilty), an uncomfortable, unseasonal, unoriginal, make-up heavy, immobile costume is okay (it should still have a cape).  If you’re taking the kids Trick-or-Treating don’t wear anything you can’t outrun them in.  And whatever you’re doing, the most important thing to remember this Halloween is that you have to get done kind of early because the Steelers are playing the Saints at 8:20 est.