Archives for December 2003

A reader writes, apropos of my posting on the box-office “failure” of Master and Commander:

The thing that always occurs to me when I read about the “failure” of
some ambitious new film is this – how much of the cycle of fast consumption
and a very narrow definition of success sets up failure as an inevitability?
I’m not phrasing this correctly. Modern movie “success” is predicated on
getting butts in the seats right away – and that’s not how adults see
movies, for the most part.

Who has time? You’ve got to work, and clean the house, rake the leaves, fix
the toilet, make time for your spouse and children, or friends and family,
find a babysitter – or wait for your married friends to find one – go to the
gym, feed your mind and spirit in whatever fashion pleases you – arts, news,
theater, athletics, cooking, sex, all of the above. Going to the movies is
terrific, but not really a communal act and as such falls a little further
down in my list of priorities – and I suspect I’m not alone here. Does
Hollywood know this?

Maybe it is different in the city, where there is a more logical flow from
theater to restaurant to conversation, but out here in the hinterlands, you
go, and then you stand in the parking lot dragging out the moment before you
go to your separate cars and depart. Maybe you go to dinner after, but by
the time you figure out where, get into your separate vehicles and drive
there, the immediacy of the experience has changed. Everyone lives 20 or 30
minutes away from each other, so it is not that easy to travel together –
and the babysitter dollar factor can not be discounted. I also think there
is a 9/11 aspect to movie going, just in terms of where people prioritize
their time these days.

When the success or failure of a movie is measured in weeks and instant
gratification dollars, most films (adult or otherwise) disappear from the
multiplex before I can see them. The perfect exception is My Big Fat Greek
Wedding – which, I know, had a tiny budget – a terrific, funny film.
Because it was slow building it got to hang around for a while, giving adult
people with complex scheduling challenges a chance to find the time to see
it, recommend it and sometimes see it again. I probably don’t understand the
economics of cinemas well enough, but it just seems to me that the “failure”
of a film is, in many cases, less about its ultimate audience, its ultimate
financial and critical achievements, and more about who’s willing to rush
out and see it right away. And since that definition of success is skewed
towards exploding things and the people who rush out to see them explode, a
catch-22 emerges. What’s wrong with a slow building success? Is it somehow
un-American? Or something to be less proud of? I really don’t get it – the
elevation of immediacy over the celebration of quality. And the lesson
seems to have been lost on the movie business, particularly when it comes to
so-called adult oriented movies.

This summer I had hoped to see the documentary Spellbound – it played in the
next town over for a week. I barely knew it was there before it was gone –
and I just don’t understand how that’s good marketing, or marketing that has
any understanding of the demands of daily life. Movie advertising focuses
on the opening week and then peters away to make room for the next
thing….Over half the space in the multiplex is devoted to only one or two
films, with everything else crammed into the leftover spaces, with more
limited show schedules….bragging rights dependent on opening grosses, not
total grosses. It encourages the production of shoddy, cheap and exciting
movies, endless sequels and safe bets, which will make a lot of money right
away and then disappear without leaving any kind of lasting impression and
sets up a cycle of expectation where there is no room for any other style or
approach.

Gosh, I’m cranky today. Reading about the film industry definition of
success always pushes my buttons, particularly after having sat through
Matrix Reloaded (I refuse to see Revolutions on the “fool me once”
principal). Master & Commander was very expensive, true, but I don’t doubt
it will make money – ultimately. Foreign rights, DVD, and the audience that
will read the reviews, hear their friends say good things and go see it as
long as its in the theater. I don’t know if that will qualify as success
by current standards, but I think its pretty OK. Let’s check again in a
year.

To all of which I have just two things to say:

(1) This explains why I look forward to the day when (as I argued in my original posting) “the adventurous indie flicks of the not-so-distant future…find their audiences not in theatrical release, but via such new-media distribution routes as direct-to-DVD and on-demand digital cable.”

(2) Thanks for writing. I couldn’t have put it better if I’d stayed up all night.

A reader writes:

I thought I might as well add my comments about the
opening of minds to symphonic music and your reader’s
observation
about instrumental lessons being a crucial
but missing element in American schooling.

As a former full-time piano teacher and a present
part-time piano teacher, I can vouch for the fact that
many parents provide private piano lessons for their
sometimes unwilling children. Most study for a year
or two until they nag their parents to let them quit.
Sometimes I wonder if they find the lessons
uninteresting, not fun, or not informative. A large
majority of parents tell me that they have to fight
with their children to get them to practice and they
soon tire of the frustration.

Who or what is to blame for this sorry state of
affairs–teachers, parents, television, computers,
technology games, too much homework, too much
participation in sports? I certainly do not have the
answer for you. But I can tell you that achievement
at the keyboard by beginning students varies from
dreadful to excellent. If I can produce one
proficient student, why can’t I reach all of them? Am
I competing with too many other distractions for the
attention of the very young? Somehow the Twinkle
Variations for beginners seem quite quaint in this age
of technology. Few are willing to invest time and
effort in learning to play the piano, and it grieves
me that I may be causing some students to actually
“dislike” music by asking them to “think.”

This is the piano teacher’s dilemma. Should I
actually expect my students to advance satisfactorily
as in regular school, or do I just let them fool
around until they convince their parents to let them
quit? I know that the students who get the most out
of piano lessons are the ones who stay the course.
There are various reasons why parents want their
children to study piano–some for the discipline
required, some for the therapy music may provide, and
some for the joy of being able to play.

I still remember one young student who told his mother
that I didn’t care whether or not he practiced his
assigned pieces or how many mistakes he made. I was
shocked to hear this, because nothing could be further
from the truth. My hope is that each student will
take “something” away from the lessons whatever the
length of time studied. Finding a way to reach each
child is a spectacular challenge, but I’ll never stop
trying as long as I am still breathing.

But are these piano lessons actually leading any of my
students to become candidates for concert attendance
or love of classical music? I don’t know the answer
to that question either. It seems to me that the
students who reach excellence at the keyboard are the
ones who were genuinely interested in music and the
piano and who had the idea of piano lessons germinate
in their consciousness with or without encouragement
by their parents. I assume that these students would
become lovers of music even if they had never taken
piano lessons.

Music does not give up its secrets easily, but that is
part of the magic! Those of us who are in love with
symphonic and instrumental music will never stop
trying to inspire that love in others. But apparently
your reader thinks we have already failed.

I, too, wonder whether anyone who is forced to study piano (or any other instrument) gets anything out of it beyond grief and exasperation. I’ve always wondered whether there’s a better way to nudge children in the direction of dabbling in music. My own case is so uncharacteristic as to shed no light on the larger question: I started taking piano lessons in high school, after I’d already spent three or four years studying violin and teaching myself how to play bass and guitar. I did it because I wanted to, not at my parents’ behest. The drive came from within.

Presumably I would have developed a serious interest in music even if I hadn’t studied it as a boy. Or maybe not. Either way, I have no doubt whatsoever that I owe much of my aesthetic life–first as a performer, now as a writer–to Richard Powell and Gordon Beaver, the men who taught me how to play (respectively) violin and piano. Yes, I found the door, but they held it open it for me, and I bless them for having done so. What’s more, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that my correspondent has done the same thing for dozens, perhaps hundreds of children. I hope I succeed in doing even one thing in my life that matters half as much.

We don’t usually get e-mail begging to differ with an almanac entry (see below), but a reader writes:

Leaving aside the fact that being likened to the Hezbollah is a
formidable strain on one’s sense of humor, Mr. Bourdain is incorrect:
as a vegetarian, I love food. My meals are tasty, and I can enjoy
them without concern that they have caused the demise of some pleasant
creature or the injury of my health. So when he says that I am both an
enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit and an affront
to all he stands for, I’m obliged to conclude that these two things are
mutually opposed. I would invite readers of About Last Night to
consider that vegetarianism is similar to the restraint of color in the
work of Giorgio Morandi: although the extremes of sensation are not
indulged, his work is full of feeling, more so than other painters who
use every available hue.

Nice try.

Colby has some justifiably grinchy words about Christmas muzak and commerce:

as I am prepared to admit that an unusually good fruitcake might offer some gustatory happiness to a person emerging from a prolonged hunger strike, I am prepared to admit that there may be elements of genuine musical worth concealed in the Yuletide canon.

But what enjoyment remains after you pass these nuggets of quality through some antiquated synthesizer, exsanguinate them of any remaining trace of swing or lively tempo, and broadcast them through a vaporous, trebly PA into a environment clotted with reverb? If you really liked Christmas music passionately, you’d regard malls as churches of Satan. You’d take up arson as a hobby.

Christmas music in stores and malls is clearly not meant to be an active pleasure, consciously savoured by the discriminating shopper. It is one of those cases in which capitalism behaves much as its dumbest critics always argue: as a conspiracy against the public.

Read the whole thing here.

Last weekend I promised to post an interview with a young filmmaker who is on his way to Sundance with his first film. This is still in the works, but will have to wait until next week due to his understandably busy schedule. He and I have an appointment to speak on Saturday.

I’m anxious to find out more about the progress of the documentary, which I saw a few minutes of many months ago. At that time, the film promised to be a mindbending descent into a secret world of–depending on how you look at it–delight or madness. (Two words: competitive Scrabble.) But I’m especially eager to hear about the whole heady experience of being chosen for such a prestigious festival as a relative novice, and excited about the remote possibility that this man may need some arm candy in Park City.

Bear with us–you should find this one worth the wait.

Dear Terry,

Your temperature-reading of sex in the movies the other day seems to me right on the money: “I’m not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don’t think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive.” This is just what I was trying to say when I wrote here about my problems with the film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove. Here’s part of what I wrote about that movie’s sex scene (a scene not depicted in the novel, only suggested):

But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene…you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James’s moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the d

I guess I should have said so earlier, but…the quotations appearing in my “Almanac” posts may or may not reflect the opinions of OGIC and/or myself. Sometimes.

Is that sufficiently unclear?

I’m still getting mail about “A Shift in Time,” the posting in which I discussed the decline of the movie theater.

Here are three more letters that caught my eye: