Month: December 2005

Mark Cuban thinks it’s very important. Of course, he has invested heavily in high definition video content and distribution.
There’s a huge audience of people who like sports, and movies about things that explode dramatically. Presumably those are the people for whom “quality” means more pixels.
For me, long tail access and convenience are many times more important than better pictures. I could get by with crappy little pictures for a long time, if I could find the niche content that I care about.
I wonder about the size of the respective markets for mass market content with really pretty pictures, and niche content with ordinary pictures. Probably both very big. Probably the important business insight is to forget that there were once one-size-fits-all tv and movie markets.

Lovely and Amazing is loathesome and hateful. The characters are narcissistic and vapid and masochistic, and dull while they’re at it.
In Mostly Martha, the chef tells off her philistine customers, which puts her on thin ice with her boss who has to weigh aggravation and respect. Martha can be a jerk, but a complicated jerk with redeeming qualities.
In Lovely and Amazing, a wannabe artist shops her overpriced crafts to LA boutiques and tells each of the proprietors to fuck off when they turn her down. She has an early school-age daughter, and the most interesting story she has to tell in any social situation is her natural childbirth, followed by her story about being homecoming queen. Her actress sister asks her boyfriend to critique her body, and then berates him for not taking seriously her anxieties about flabby upper arms. She needs to get a pair of dumbbells and stop whining.
The matriarch of the family has a crush on her incompetent plastic surgeon. Her one redeeming feature is her close relationship with an adopted daughter. The movie manages to undermine that by exploiting the various possible stereotypes about an upper-middle-class Jewish woman adopting a black girl; from awkward moments about sunscreen, to hair-straightening, to a taste for fast food. The grownups, black and white, are too busy being awkward about the situation to actually be parents and mentors.
The adult women characters are all linked with cold, disapproving, deceitful men. The attempt at romantic redemption is the wannabe artist’s fling with a 17-year old. At least they share a level of maturity.
I didn’t get the feeling that the film-makers had a distance on their material. The movie is an exaggerated version of real life, with more socially clueless and floridly insecure characters facing the same traps.
Why did this movie just make me mad, when I thought that Sideways was darkly funny? The self-destructive characters in Sideways were more self-destructive — one was an alcoholic, and one was a philanderer headed toward marriage. They were further along in unsuccessful artistic careers; one was a several-time unpublished novelist, the other a soap opera romantic lead past his prime.
Maybe because the movie was more literate, in structure and dialog and pictures. Maybe because the characters showed some passion along with their self-destruction. Maybe because the characters didn’t have kids, so their idiocies did not seem as cruel. Maybe because the movie took the characters’ deceptions — of women, of themselves — more seriously.

My favorite scenes in Mostly Martha the “take your neice to work” scenes. A driven head chef at a Hamburg restaurant inherits the care of her eight-year-old neice after her sister dies in a car accident. When a babysitter finds the bereaved and hostile little girl impossible, Martha brings her to the restaurant in the evenings. The girl experiences rosemary and truffles, watches the complex choreography of dozens of gourmet dishes in progress, is charmed into eating by her aunt’s boisterous culinary rival, and learns to help out in little ways.
Other excellent restaurant scenes:
* the new Italian sous chef comes in and charms his all of his new co-workers with music and a playful style that contrasts with Martha’s high seriousness.
* Martha’s ubergeek hostility to restaurant customers – when a customer complains that the foie gras is raw, Martha replies that it is “perfekt”, cooked at 140 degrees Celsius for 3 minutes.
* Watching Martha’s boss, a tall, blond, imperious fifty-something restaurater, tolerate her prima donna employee
* The showdown: when Martha is unwilling to overtly accept Mario’s presence, he offers his resignation with the restaurant crew watching tensely; when his boss says she wants him to stay, he replies: “It’s your restaurant, but her kitchen”.
Of lesser excellence, the “opposites-attract” romance between the extraverted Italian and the chilly German; fortunately the movie ends before the battles over toothpaste tube hygiene and music volume; they win the “movie couple most likely to be divorced” award.
Interesting contrast between the adoption love story in Mostly Martha and King of Masks. Both movies have a gruff artist conveying their art to an adoptive child; in the Chinese movie, the older and younger characters take on bonds of obligation, and the love between the characters cements the obligation; in the German movie, the older and younger characters make a choice, and the love between the characters cements the choice.

King of Masks is a heartwarming fable set in 1930s China about an aging street performer searching for a male heir to learn the family art. Shower is a heartwarming modern fable set in 90s Beijing, where the elderly proprietor of a traditional bathouse has a retarded son who helps with the business, and a non-disabled son who’s busy making money with a high-tech, low-touch version of the family business in south China.
Yi Yi is a bittersweet novelistic film in late 90s Taipei, where the grandmother is in a coma following a stroke. The doctors advice the family to speaking to her in the hope of stimulating a recovery. Her children and grandchildren confide in their mute elder; the confidences reveal crises in the lives of the various family members.
All three movies are about breaks in the passing of tradition across generations. The distance is greatest in the movie set in modern Taiwan, where the grandmother is mute for most of the film, and her descendents are forced to make their own way through the dilemmas of faith, purpose and love.
The themes are kin to the “generation gap” that affected modernizing US culture, with more affection and nostalgia for the changing old ways.
For Peterme who wants recommendations, I thought Masks and Shower were well-crafted and affecting; and Yi Yi was fantastic.

Loved Amores Perros. It gets compared to Pulp Fiction for superficial reasons (interwoven stories; black comedy; violence; first scene is a suspenseful car ride with a a bloody victim in the back seat), but has little in common. Where Pulp Fiction is ice cold, Amores Perros is passionate; it’s dark humor comes from nuances of heartbreak. Pulp Fiction is post-modern nihilist; the outcome is defined by genre. Amores Perros is more post-Catholic; the outcome for each of various characters is one part accident; and one part the fatal outcome of decisions.
Didn’t like Y Tu Mama Tambien so much, for much the reasons as the various Amazon reviewers who didn’t like the movie. The teenage boys were doofuses. The famed sex scenes didn’t do much for me. The bleak background scenes of Mexican countryside with occasional pompous voiceovers attempted to instill social relevance to a movie which would be better off honestly shallow. The final plot twist with the female character isn’t believable, and gets the storyteller out of the need to forsee the the consequences of the story.
I wish I had more film vocabulary to describe visual styles. A film class someday? Maybe some books or DVDs.