The Way of the Future, The Way of the Future, The Way of the...

I saw part of Back to the Future 2 on TBS today (remember when sequels had numbers at the end of their titles?). Noticed something (besides how much over-acting there is). There's a scene where, in 2015, a big holographic shark advertising Jaws 19 terrorizes Marty in the street. "Shark still looks fake" he says. Well, yeah. It's a CGI image straight outta the 80's. He'd probably think different if he saw Poseidon or Lord of the Rings or any movie made a decade before 2015. It's useless being a prophet. Did anyone in the 80's imagine that in twenty years a worldwide communications system would allow half the world (the connected half anyway) to learn about anything, buy anything, and say anything (including this nonsense) they wanted? Whenever I think about the future, I always think about the cars that have breathalyzer tests hooked to their starters. A car that doesn't start until you blow into it? The future is now, dude. Maybe there is something to that singularity stuff.

I also think it's funny that when Biff takes over the world in the 80's, he's essentially a 70's oil billionaire. Even when people imagine the present, they're imagining the past.

The Flaming Lips: At War With the Mystics

I can see why people were disappointed with At War With the Mystics. Not that it's a bad album, but it's not the album critics wanted. By the time YouTube reached it's eleven hundredth video of Wayne Coyne walking over the audience in that hamster ball, the Lips' psychedelic space freakout sound was way too popular with the non-musical fantics that the only what the Lips could appease its fans would be to release an audience killing fuzzy psychadelic guitar pop album the kind it used to make in the early 90s (this goes same for Radiohead). And when The Wand was released last January, it seemed like it would be just that. But, like Woody Allen, the Lips ended up making the album they wanted to make, whether their fans like it or not. My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion is a good example of the non-The Wand songs on the album. Radiohead have been fighting off the Pink Floyd comparisons for years, but if any band warrants the comparison, it's the Lips. At War With the Mystics is a soft album, sacrificing big hooks (except on a few tracks) for melodic expansiveness, which is weird, because much of the album is taken up by political fight songs. It's good music to dream to.

Screenings for Critics

I turn on the radio in the car and the big news item of the day is Ford dropping car production by 20%. I guess this qualifies as bad news. Although not implicit in the story, it basically means that car manufacturing workers are basically getting screwed again. More job cuts, pay cuts, and cut cuts (in worker's wrists). It also qualifies as good news because they're mostly cutting SUV and big truck lines because people can't afford 10 miles per gallon.

This story might seem disconnected from the idea of screening films for critics, but I thought it was actually a neat parallel to the film screening situation (more and more movies nowadays aren't being screened for critics). Mike D'Angelo gives pretty much the most clearheaded take on the whole ordeal. He basically says that, simply, people don't really pay attention to the critics, except for small art films, so it's a waste of time and money for the studios to even bother with costly screenings. The only justification would be to make the critics happy (although I'm sure most critics are happy to not have to see Final Destination 3). Just like the only real justification Ford has to keep making SUVs is to give its workers a job. Of course, this doesn't really excuse the studios (for making crappy movies) or the car companies (for cutting jobs while giving CEOs hundred million dollar bonuses), but it does speak to the reality of the world today.

One point I'd like to add to D'Angelo's is that, while critics aren't very good at affecting the box office of dumb horror and action flicks, they are good about affecting the buzz on other types of movies. But I think what most people miss is that critic reviews are just one cog in the machine. There's also festival reports, articles, blog buzz. The film publicity machine is populated with parrots. A one sentence blurb in a festival report (like say "Marie Antoinette underwhelmed Cannes audiences") can turn into the generally held perception of a movie once it's been repeated by a hundred publications ("Marie Antoinette, biggest bomb of the fall movie season,") By the time the critic who wrote the blurb gets around to actually stating his feelings in depth when writing her/his review of the movie come release time, the bad buzz snowball is too loud to be heard over. It's why publicists get paid so much.