The past several episodes of Lost have mentioned Ann Arbor rather prominently, owing to the Tree City's fictitious status as mainland headquarters of the DHARMA Initiative, that gaggle of eggheads, hippies, grunts, and thugs who have colonized the mystical Island that is really the central character of the show.
Last week, head DHARMA goon Radzinksy said of the wayward Kate, "Let Ann Arbor deal with her," as if 1970s A2 were home to some kind of sinister hippie mafia that could and would severely punish transgressives. Hey, whatever happened to peace and love, maaan?
Now even Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen and Dan Snierson are dropping Ann Arbor references in their online video recap, Totally Lost. Like, far out.
Next week is the finale of the show's penultimate season, a two-hour extravaganza entitled "The Incident." The sub Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate are on was ostensibly headed to Ann Arbor. Maybe our fair city will have another prominent cameo, although I doubt it -- I think producers Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, et al. have yet to take advantage of the state tax incentives to shoot the massive hippie apocalypse I'm rooting for.
"Let Ann Arbor deal with her!"
Chinatown at the Michigan
Last night it was a pleasure to see, for my first time on the big screen, the bona fide classic Chinatown at the Michigan Theater. My date, for all intents and purposes a native of a Los Angeles, had never seen it in any form – can you believe it? (Of course, I have yet to see any of the Godfather movies, so I'll just shut up.)
Afterward we hit Bar Louie for a post-movie drink and discussion. She enjoyed it immensely (although covered her eyes for the famous nose-cutting scene), but I know it made her homesick, too, with its various shots in and around L.A., all of which she recognized.
This amateur film geek has long been a fan of noir, neo- or otherwise, and seeing Roman Polanski's dark vision (he supposedly fought screenwriter Robert Towne over the unhappy ending) on the big screen allowed me to notice more things than I had before, giving me an enhanced appreciation for everything from the superior acting to the excellent cinematography. (Quick aside: John Huston's Noah Cross must rank in the upper echelon of all-time screen villains. He has little actual screen time, but his sociopathic malevolence touches every character in the film, one way or another, directly or indirectly.)
I'm also a fan of Polanski's work, especially his psychosexual tales of terror like Repulsion (criminally underrated and/or unknown), Rosemary's Baby, and The Tenant. (Even his less successful films like Frantic and The Ninth Gate offer something to the viewer.)
As I recall, the little-known sequel, 1990's The Two Jakes, is considered something of a convoluted mush in the hands of Jack Nicholson as director, but both of us are now interested enough to finally check it out. Hello, Netflix...
And the Smithee Goes To...
Why should Los Angeles always get all the glamor and glitz of movie award ceremonies?
Saturday night was a momentous cinematic occasion in its own right as the University of Michigan campus played host to the highly acclaimed 18th Annual Ann Arbor Smithee Awards.
The awards – named after Alan Smithee, the nom-de-shame Hollywood directors have historically substituted for their own when they wanted to disassociate themselves from the finished product – took place in Room 1800 of the Chemistry Building and featured such prestigious categories as Most Ludicrous Premise, Stupidest-Looking Monster, Worst Science, and, of course, Worst Picture.
As the award categories suggest, the nominated films are heavily weighted toward awful science fiction and horror movies, but the year of release is irrelevant. This year's nominees included everything from 1951's Unknown World (for Worst Science) to 2003's 13 Seconds (for multiple categories, including Worst Picture).
How it works is that the Smith-ka-teers (Bryan Cassidy and Greg Pearson, the two Michigan grad students who created the Smithees in 1991, and their associates) select five films for each category, clip the relevant parts of each, and show the clips to the auditorium full of B-movie lovers, oddballs, and masochists (over 200 of them this year!). The audience then votes for its favorites, using high-tech "voting packs" of recycled scraps of paper, pens, and plastic spiders provided to everyone.
I'm something of a crap film connoisseur myself, so I'm not ashamed to say I'd seen several of the nominees before in their entirety, including Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Troll 2 (1990), and Piñata: Survival Island (2002).
My date, who is an actual Hollywood veteran, got into the spirit, too, especially when we saw all of the swell snacks and beverages provided gratis – "food" such as Peeps, Pixy Sticks, cheeseballs, Oreo knockoffs, and other things too frightening to mention. I stuck mostly to the cheeseballs, but the pumpkin-flavored soda and bacon-flavored gumballs intrigued me as well. (Note to self: avoid pumpkin-flavored soda and bacon-flavored gumballs in the future.)
So which celluloid atrocity won Worst Picture? Unfortunately, we had another event to attend that evening, so we were forced to leave before the end of the ceremonies. I'm hoping to stay for the whole thing next year.
My small, poorly exposed gallery of Smithee is on Facebook.
Ann Arbor at Night
A minute-long montage from Siege Media, "Ann Arbor at Night":
Clearly not an exhaustive depiction. And shots of the Fleetwood could arguably qualify for "Ann Arbor Really Early in the Morning."
My Acting Debut
My former employer, Borders, has produced a "sweded" movie version of Janet Evanovich's first Stephanie Plum book, One for the Money.
Check it out on their site, BordersMedia.com.
Copyright and Fair Use at the Ann Arbor Film Festival
Just got back from a panel sponsored by the Ann Arbor Film Festival entitled "Remixing the Rules: Copyright and Fair Use." On the panel were two "intellectual property"* lawyers, Larry Jordan and Matt Bower, and two artists, Mark Hosler of Negativland and experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
Copyright law and its ramifications are of keen interest to me, not just because of the well publicized abuses from the likes of the RIAA suing music lovers, but because of the many questions and issues copyright raises regarding everything from art, culture, law, economics, and technology to, well, to the human condition itself.
Unfortunately, the panel wasn't particularly enlightening. The discussion did in fact focus on "fair use," the legal concept that supposedly defines when, where, and how copyrighted material may be used without permission of the copyright holder. Trouble is, fair use is such a startlingly vague and imprecise doctrine that, in practice, it often ends up being whatever some self-interested, deep-pocketed media conglomerate says it is. (Don't like that? Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lawyer to insist otherwise and hope a court eventually agrees with your view.)
I have an admittedly radical view of copyright: I've come to the conclusion it's a bad idea and ideally shouldn't even exist. (See this great book review cum essay by Jeff Tucker that somewhat mirrors my own intellectual development on this subject.)
So naturally during the Q&A I questioned the whole notion of whether ideas and words could actually be considered "property." I wanted to see the artists, at least one of whom had gone through copyright litigation over his work (Hosler), address the issue at its root. Hosler came pretty close during his talk, but unfortunately one of the lawyers jumped on my question and rambled about what the law says and this and that.
Lawyers, of course, only ever want to tell you what the law is, over and over again, and somehow make it seem legitimate just because it happens to exist or has a history of some kind. And this particular lawyer did just that. Plus he was a regrettably dull if not sloppy thinker, at different points using the non-word "copywritten" and saying that the First Amendment "gives" us the right of free speech. That was just sad.
Perhaps someday we will have a real debate over the ever-increasing absurdities engendered by copyright run amok. Until then, I recommend two great blogs that often address the issues raised by extreme copyright: Against Monopoly and TechDirt. Great reading and great food for thought.
* For an explanation of why I put "intellectual property" in quotation marks, see Richard Stallman's lucid and accessible essay on this loaded and inaccurate term.
