I picked up the August 20, 2007 issue (Vol. 170 No. 8) of Time Magazine and read an educational and somewhat disheartening article about the future of the American romantic comedy.
Belinda Luscombe writes:
Love stories are old. They're universal. Nearly everyone has one. Which makes them nearly impossible to write well. This summer has brought us License to Wed, in which a couple is nearly driven apart by their wacky priest's marriage-prep course; I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which Adam Sandler pretends to marry his firefighter buddy for health-insurance reasons; No Reservations, in which two competitive chefs fall in love; and Becoming Jane, in which Jane Austen has to choose between love and proper behavior. Coming in September is Good Luck Chuck, in which every girl Chuck sleeps with goes on to marry the next guy she meets. All of them, except the Austen, are what's known in the romance-novel business as HEAs (happily-ever-afters), and none of them are remotely stirring, although Good Luck Chuck is spectacularly off-putting. "Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh," says Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral and the upcoming Love in the Time of Cholera. "I've yet to find another one which was surprising enough to do."
But it's not just familiarity that breeds contempt for love stories. It may be actually getting harder to get people to believe in them, acknowledges Richard Curtis, writer of such indelible romances as Four Weddings and Notting Hill, because our expectations have changed. "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind," he notes. "Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental."
Luscombe mentions cultural and social changes over the last half century that may have affected the standard perception of romance and human interaction, which in turn likely makes romantic comedies harder to market. She also brings up the film Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) and remarks that it "is the purest iteration of the so-called bromance form yet. Two best friends, Seth and Evan, on the verge of graduating from high school, have to get booze, get over the fact that they're about to go their separate ways and get girls before the night is out."
At first, I thought, "Wow. Perhaps the (romantic) comedy formula is changing--no longer is it about heterosexual sexual love; maybe the next move is platonic love." But then, that kind of story could simply be a comedy or a drama. I also thought "bromance" was a pretty clever term....that is until I realized that Luscombe might be using a synonym for the "buddy film."
Luscombe briefly addresses the profit-driven facet of Hollywood that almost demands quality be sacrificed for novelty or an ingenious marketing campaign so that opening weekend draws the biggest crowds. She incorporates a reception studies point-of-view when pointing out that young men flock to the cinema in slightly higher numbers--and probably more frequently--than women. I know this article isn't (and isn't supposed to be) scientific in approach, but if there was an undertaking to investigate further whether or not the romantic comedy as a genre is truly dying or adapting to a new collective consciousness or if there simply hasn't been a really good script in a long while, more variables would have to be considered and controlled.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the public's cinema-going habits, I doubt that there could be a study scientific enough. We're talking about people's preferences in aesthetics, narrative, and ideology. However consistent some individuals' or demographics' behavior may be, there are too many "but's" in the question. Furthermore, to be more thorough, DVD rentals, purchases, and library lending patterns and tendencies would have to be examined too.
To read Belinda Luscombe's article in its entirety, please click here.
Showing posts with label reception studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reception studies. Show all posts
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Cool Reads at Senses of Cinema
I declared myself a film major at Emory University in the spring semester of my freshman year (2000). At this time, the Internet was not a reliable enough source for academic research unless A. the web site or page from which one gathered information was maintained by a credible person (professor, industry expert) or organization (a film school, a museum, a library, an official site, online news sources) or B. the professor had recommended it for consulting. Reception studies (the study of how a text is consumed, processed, and manipulated by critics and the general population; aka part of the content of MIT professor Henry Jenkins's book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture) wasn't as widespread then as it is now.
By the time I started taking film classes in my sophomore year (2000-2001), I found myself having to use the net to research the Japanese anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. By the time I graduated from undergrad in 2003, professors were more willing to accept a "Works Cited" page consisting of credible online sources. While I was in Emory's graduate film studies program (2005-2007), online research was deemed integral to the process not only because the number of legitimate cites had increased, but also because the kinds of research done--cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, reception studies--sometimes demanded the incorporation of these sources.
One of the online sources that I used many times during my undergrad and graduate careers was a place called Senses Of Cinema, an online journal maintained by academics of a variety of humanities fields. I was browsing the site today and came across two very interesting and well-written articles, one about digital video and film stock, the other about the film Blade Runner.
Of all the many discussion board entries, essays, and columns written about the former topic, this one by Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon of the University of Nebraska is the best. Here is a brief excerpt:
Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on DVD, for example, 21st century viewers realize that they are watching (optimally) a 35mm negative transferred to digital memory and then downloaded to a DVD for home use, and that the final image they watch “copies” the filmic nature of the original image, but at the same time gives only the “impression” of its original source material. But given this a priori assumption, 21st century viewers quickly move past this empirical certainty to embrace this newly digitised image as the simulacrum of a 20th century medium. There is no sadness in this and no betrayal of the maker’s original intent; it is merely a translation from one image capture medium to another.
Certainly it can be argued that this is an oversimplification of a rather knotty problem; film comes with one set of values inherently present in the stock itself (a tendency towards warmth in colour for some film stocks, or towards cooler hues in others, as well as characteristics of grain, depth and definition which are unique to each individual film matrix), while the digital video image offers another entirely different set of characteristics, verging on a hyperreal glossiness that seems to shimmer on the screen. To achieve a reconsideration of the basic states of representationalism inherent in any comparison of these two mediums is a difficult task, calling into question more than a century of cinematic practice, and a host of assumptions shared by practitioners and viewers alike.
VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins, making it possible to view a film at home with ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of existence a few years after their introduction. In the same fashion, second-run theatres were also killed off by the burgeoning DVD market, as the window between VHS and the theatrical release of a film and its appearance on DVD dwindled into nonexistence. And yet, as the public audience for 20th century cinema film becomes increasingly specialized and narrowly segmented, to the point that American Blockbuster stores no longer even bother with a token “classics” section – even such reliable standbys as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) are ignored in most of the chain’s stores – for those who embrace the past a wider range of films has become available. Often these DVDs go out of print in a matter of months, so one must purchase them immediately upon their release, as fetish objects that also have a temporal existence of their own, and a thriving bootleg “industry” exists as well, making copies of all but the most fugitive films available to the private collector.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
I've fallen asleep every time I've watched Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). David C. Ryan's, assistant communications studies professor at the University of San Francisco, piece on the 25th anniversary edition, though, is remarkable. It has the best introductory paragraph ever. Yes, ever. Here is the introduction:
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened twenty-five years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies. Most journalistic critics found the film’s tone aloof, its themes remote and its story too stark to digest. Although the film was valorised for its bold and rich production design and was praised as the cinematic phenomenon of technological artistry, Blade Runner was largely condemned and discarded as a curious and expensive debacle – full of powerful images yet plagued by inert intellectual rewards. Diverse American critics such as Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann complained that the hero’s humanism lacked depth and verve, and that the story is clouded by confusing themes. Scott, they said, was far too interested in developing style rather than content, more interested in detailing his sets than developing his script. These views were (and are) unsatisfying.
To read the rest of the piece, click here.
Because I like Senses of Cinema so much not only for research but also for enlightenment, I have included it as one of the links on the right side of the main page.
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is also a fantastic film-related site that I read just for fun. I haven't had the opportunity to write an essay that would make use of the site. It is also located on the right.
By the time I started taking film classes in my sophomore year (2000-2001), I found myself having to use the net to research the Japanese anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. By the time I graduated from undergrad in 2003, professors were more willing to accept a "Works Cited" page consisting of credible online sources. While I was in Emory's graduate film studies program (2005-2007), online research was deemed integral to the process not only because the number of legitimate cites had increased, but also because the kinds of research done--cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, reception studies--sometimes demanded the incorporation of these sources.
One of the online sources that I used many times during my undergrad and graduate careers was a place called Senses Of Cinema, an online journal maintained by academics of a variety of humanities fields. I was browsing the site today and came across two very interesting and well-written articles, one about digital video and film stock, the other about the film Blade Runner.
Of all the many discussion board entries, essays, and columns written about the former topic, this one by Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon of the University of Nebraska is the best. Here is a brief excerpt:
Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) on DVD, for example, 21st century viewers realize that they are watching (optimally) a 35mm negative transferred to digital memory and then downloaded to a DVD for home use, and that the final image they watch “copies” the filmic nature of the original image, but at the same time gives only the “impression” of its original source material. But given this a priori assumption, 21st century viewers quickly move past this empirical certainty to embrace this newly digitised image as the simulacrum of a 20th century medium. There is no sadness in this and no betrayal of the maker’s original intent; it is merely a translation from one image capture medium to another.
Certainly it can be argued that this is an oversimplification of a rather knotty problem; film comes with one set of values inherently present in the stock itself (a tendency towards warmth in colour for some film stocks, or towards cooler hues in others, as well as characteristics of grain, depth and definition which are unique to each individual film matrix), while the digital video image offers another entirely different set of characteristics, verging on a hyperreal glossiness that seems to shimmer on the screen. To achieve a reconsideration of the basic states of representationalism inherent in any comparison of these two mediums is a difficult task, calling into question more than a century of cinematic practice, and a host of assumptions shared by practitioners and viewers alike.
VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins, making it possible to view a film at home with ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of existence a few years after their introduction. In the same fashion, second-run theatres were also killed off by the burgeoning DVD market, as the window between VHS and the theatrical release of a film and its appearance on DVD dwindled into nonexistence. And yet, as the public audience for 20th century cinema film becomes increasingly specialized and narrowly segmented, to the point that American Blockbuster stores no longer even bother with a token “classics” section – even such reliable standbys as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) are ignored in most of the chain’s stores – for those who embrace the past a wider range of films has become available. Often these DVDs go out of print in a matter of months, so one must purchase them immediately upon their release, as fetish objects that also have a temporal existence of their own, and a thriving bootleg “industry” exists as well, making copies of all but the most fugitive films available to the private collector.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
I've fallen asleep every time I've watched Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). David C. Ryan's, assistant communications studies professor at the University of San Francisco, piece on the 25th anniversary edition, though, is remarkable. It has the best introductory paragraph ever. Yes, ever. Here is the introduction:
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened twenty-five years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies. Most journalistic critics found the film’s tone aloof, its themes remote and its story too stark to digest. Although the film was valorised for its bold and rich production design and was praised as the cinematic phenomenon of technological artistry, Blade Runner was largely condemned and discarded as a curious and expensive debacle – full of powerful images yet plagued by inert intellectual rewards. Diverse American critics such as Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann complained that the hero’s humanism lacked depth and verve, and that the story is clouded by confusing themes. Scott, they said, was far too interested in developing style rather than content, more interested in detailing his sets than developing his script. These views were (and are) unsatisfying.
To read the rest of the piece, click here.
Because I like Senses of Cinema so much not only for research but also for enlightenment, I have included it as one of the links on the right side of the main page.
Intuitor Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is also a fantastic film-related site that I read just for fun. I haven't had the opportunity to write an essay that would make use of the site. It is also located on the right.
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