Grading on a Curve

From my first post at Smash Cut Culture, I’ve been reviewing movies and contributing my thoughts on film-making, narrative storytelling, and media culture.

Part of the joy of writing for this platform is that I get to (try to) put aside my personal biases and look at media purely from the perspective of artistic critique. It would be pointlessly solipsistic to write, “I like this,” or, “I hate that,” and have that lazy and defenseless opinion stand in for something worth reading. After all, the goal is to actually think about a work of art as objectively as possible and then discuss its quality and value (or lack thereof) based on its own merits.

Unfortunately, all this means that artistic critique is really not a good job for people who need to be liked by everyone, and it’s also not a job for people who can’t separate themselves; their own personal tastes; or their pre-conceived biases from the subject matter at hand.

I’ve recently written scathing reviews of the films “Snowpiercer” and “The Giver”.

These movies both feature strong (some might say preachy), yet largely opposing, political messages. “The Giver” warns of the totalitarianism borne out of the desire to perfect and homogenize society through well-meaning but heavy-handed government. “Snowpiercer” attempts to be a parable about environmental destruction and wealth inequality as a consequence of unchecked private sector greed.


1400864008_taylor-swift-the-giver-lgI am biased towards one of these perspectives and could easily argue that we are already moving toward the future it depicts, and that the other worldview is critically flawed and built on a systemic rejection of reality, but I won’t go into which is which, as that would actually step on the broader point I want to make here.

If you judge a movie based on how much you agree or disagree with its message or how superficially you like or dislike its themes, you’re doing film criticism wrong.

If I allowed my philosophical or political views to sway my ability to objectively assess the quality of the films I write about, I would have only written one bad review. But that would also have done a disservice to everyone who reads my commentary, and I would be proving myself to be horribly unreliable as a critic.

Film-making is a multidisciplinary art-form and doesn’t usually live or die based solely on the message or ideology expressed in the movie. And it shouldn’t. A movie with a bad message can be a well-made film (see also: Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”). Likewise, a movie with a great message can be awful. 

 
Yet ideological reviewers often do not seem to understand this.

“The Giver”, for instance, was preview screened for many conservative and libertarian organizations, as they were (correctly) assumed to be friendly audiences for the anti-government themes in the movie. While proper reviews were embargoed for a few weeks after the screening, attendees were encouraged to write “think pieces” about the messages and the political content.

Here’s one example from FreedomWorks’ Logan Albright, titled “‘The Giver’ Brings New Life to Themes of Liberty”:

“The Giver is that rare film that successfully merges conservative and libertarian themes with superior craftsmanship and genuine entertainment. The celebration of individual differences, of emotion, of life, of freedom, and of the general messiness that is the human condition strikes deep, as we instinctively reject the placid, yet soulless, sameness of a society controlled from the top down.

The underlying message is universal enough to appeal to everyone.”


Alas, the film did not appeal to everyone.

It bombed at the box-office, earning less than $13 million dollars on its opening weekend and scoring a paltry 32% “fresh” critics’ rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The failure of “The Giver” was even a bit predictable given who made it. Walden Media has amassed a track record of adapting books to create major flops. But I would argue that it didn’t appeal to everyone because first and foremost, it was a terrible film.


the-criticIn my experience, non-liberal cultural critics spend a lot of time complaining about how few works of art, particularly film & television productions, express ideas that align with their worldviews. And they’re right. Most producers and artists in Hollywood don’t really like many ideas that fall outside the narrow confines of cocktail party-progressivism. Movies with conservative or even libertarian themes don’t get made that often.

But the solution to that problem isn’t to put on ideological blinders and trumpet any mediocre movie that says something you vaguely agree with, hoping that you can trick a bunch of people into spending their money on a film that says what you want them to hear even though it isn’t any good.

That’s little more than affirmative action for movie reviews, isn’t it?

If you care about seeing your preferred ideas expressed in mainstream culture, then you need to demand that the delivery mechanisms, like movies and television shows, are produced at the highest standards. It’s time to stop grading on a curve.

Another Take on “Snowpiercer” and the Logic in Cinema

Yesterday, at Smash Cut Culture, Patrick Lehe wrote a fairly positive teaser review of Snowpiercer in his post, “Snowpiercer” Penetrates, Provokes and Gets Political.

Like Patrick, I was intrigued by the trailer and the critical hype. A lot of people were talking about this movie as a great example of fresh and original sci-fi cinema and as a fan of the genre, I was excited.

primary_Snowpiercer-2013-1After seeing the film, however, I was tremendously disappointed. My suspension of disbelief was thoroughly destroyed early in the film and simply never returned. Consequently, I spent the baffling majority of the film wondering why things were happening on screen. It’s really hard to enjoy a cinematic experience when you are shaking your head with incredulity the entire movie.

Snowpiercer ended up being a relatively unique concept for a film without being all that good or coherent. However, instead of listing my specific, spoiler-ridden, criticisms of Snowpiercer here, today I want to talk about the importance of internal logic in cinema.

More than anything, to create a believable world that really captures an audience’s imagination, a story needs to make sense. In science fiction and fantasy stories, this is especially true, because audiences begin totally unfamiliar with the worlds and characters that the stories require them to accept. The setting and characters must be accepted realistic before an audience can fully engage in the story itself.

To be clear, what I mean is not that the story needs to exist in the real world or conform to known physical laws.

Snowpiercer-imageGreat stories can have the most fantastical spaceships, amazing technology, superhuman abilities and magical powers, impressive landscapes and strange alien beasts. They can – and perhaps should - completely abandon anything known to mankind.

But once the rules of the world, the characters, and their abilities are established, they have to be consistent and make sense throughout the rest of the story. Great writers establish a complex and rich universe: They give you the “rules”, and stick to them. And that consistency creates an opportunity to have a really character driven story that makes sense on its own terms.

So, believability really matters.

Science fiction and fantasy stories have the potential to talk about big ideas and create grand allegories for humanity and really say something about people in a way that few other genres can accomplish, but they can only do that if the audience buys into the universe as it’s presented.

The real beauty of the genre is that when it’s believable, it’s perfect for creating compelling stories about deep-rooted facets of human nature in a way that is totally outside the real-world human experience and frees an audience to look at an idea from a fresh perspective.

Pan's Labyrinth's Pale Man
Pan’s Labyrinth’s Pale Man

Brazil shows the absurdity of overwhelming bureaucracy. Blade Runner wrestles with the ethics of cloning and questions the nature of humanity. The Iron Giant shows us that violence is a choice, and xenophobia is often more dangerous than seemingly scary monsters. Pan’s Labyrinth uses fantasy and escapism to viscerally express the terror of living as a little girl under fascist Spain. Big Fish tackles the nature and significance of exaggeration vs. truth in creating distance in the relationship between a father and son.

Snowpiercer is a film that desperately wants to say something about class and economic inequality, but I found it to be so ridiculously unbelievable and silly as a story that the message can’t be taken seriously either.

Considering how many science fiction and fantasy genre films are written to be allegories about humanity and modern social issues, you’d think that writers presenting a social message would take believability a lot more seriously with their films.

Most science fiction and fantasy genre movies ignore this important point.

A few logic cheats are fine, of course, but the problem with writing that lacks coherence is that, as a viewer, it eventually becomes very hard to ignore major lapses in consistency. The more audiences question the veracity of a sequence of events given what they’re told of a character’s motivations, or the world those characters inhabit; the more audiences get taken out of the experience of the story itself.

Bong Joon-Ho
Bong Joon-Ho

For me, that’s exactly what happened when watching Snowpiercer, to the point where instead of thinking about social issues like class stratification, I was running a play-back in my mind of the several dozen sequences in the film that made absolutely no sense.

A science fiction movie especially lives or dies on the audience buying into the vision of the film. And once you’ve lost your audience, it’s very hard to regain their interest.

Maintaining believability and respecting an audience’s suspension of disbelief is crucial for any story-teller trying to build a world that feels real; and that kind of reality is absolutely essential for audiences to actually buy into the allegory as it’s presented.

Anyone who wants to use story-telling to present big ideas about society and human nature should probably keep this in mind.

Bong Joon-Ho, I’m looking at you.

“Snowpiercer” Penetrates, Provokes and Gets Political

If you are a fan of the science fiction genre, then you probably became elated at the sight of the first trailer for Snowpiercer.  Although the trailer itself does not reveal too much, it tells us genre nerds just enough of what we need to know to become intrigued.  The set up is rather simple.

In a post-apocalyptic world, this little known phenomenon called “global warming” has taken mass effect, actually doing the exact opposite of warming the globe.  The entire planet has essentially been plunged into a new ice age, now covered in a freezing layer of snow and ice, making it uninhabitable.  Almost the entire population of Earth has been wiped out, and the few remaining survivors live aboard a futuristic train called…you guessed it…Snowpiercer.

DISCLAIMER: Spoilers ahead. Real life, major spoilers. Read at your own risk!

So now we have a somewhat intriguing, if not slightly lopsided, set up of our world.  Then comes the deep stuff.  Inside the train (the exact length of which is never specified) the varying cars are divided up by social class, the lowest of which reside in the tail-end of the train.  Naturally, the privileged live towards the front of the train.  The train is said to run on a “perpetual engine” that can never die, and said engine was created by the mysterious Wilford, a God-like figure whom is worshipped by those on the front of the train, and utterly loathed by those on the back.  Social allegories galore!

unnamedOne determined young man named Curtis (Chris Evans), living in the tail-end under the mentorship of an old man named Gilliam (John Hurt), is sick of his life feeding on nothing but gelatin-like protein bars (revealed to be made of something rather unmentionable).  He wants what the privileged have (Sushi).  He dreams of forcing his way to the front.  He initiates a rebellion with the help of some of the tail-enders, consisting of an excellent ensemble cast that includes Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell and Ewen Bremner.

In order to make it through, they take into captivity Mason (Tilda Swinton), a bureaucratic cult-leader type who represents those from the front of the train and perhaps bows down the lowest to Wilford.  As the biggest source of comic relief, she is by far one of the most dynamic and entertaining characters and Swinton’s performance made the film that much more watchable.

As the group of scrappy tail-enders force their way towards the front, we as the audience are immersed in some truly magnificent action sequences and cinematography. For such a contained setting, director Bong Joon-ho was able to get very creative with the camerawork.  Not to mention the frozen world outside is very well done, creating a landscape that looks truly terrifying.

Upon reaching the very front of the train, where the perpetual engine presides, Curtis is finally able to confront Wilford (Ed Harris). Without spoiling too much, it is revealed that Curtis was essentially fooled into leading the rebellion, to be used as a sick way of population control for those in the tail-end.  As stated by Wilford, natural selection doesn’t work quickly enough on the train.

qdb0lpeziftf2pyc1zwdI will force myself to stop at this point, as there are many more twists revealed within the final act.  However, with all the aforementioned criticisms about a one-sided viewpoint being driven throughout the storyline of fairness and equality, the film is quite an experience in itself and it uses a lot of symbolism for life and redemption. As films go, it has a solid story and extremely well-written characters.  Of course, the ensemble cast never ceases to entertain amidst the 2-hour-plus runtime.  I never once found myself wondering when it would end.

All in all, “Snowpiercer” is definitely worth a view.  Although it was only given a limited theatrical release, it will be available on as of this Friday, July 11th.