Yankees Update

Farnsworth For Pudge

The Yankees traded for I-Rod, sending Farnsworth in exchange. The outlook on an emotional level is it's a win-win-win.
Win 1. Subtracting Farnsworth and the attendant frustrations of Farnsworthness.
Win 2. Upgrading Catcher from a Molina-Moeller tandem to a I-Rod-Molina tandem.
Win 3. If the Yankees should contend against the Tigers for the Wild Card or even in the play offs, it's nice knowing their bullpen features Kyle Farnsworth.

Other than that here are some quantitative observations using Fangraphs.
Kyle Farnsworth is pitching reasonably well this year.
There are two features to his success this year, he's not letting them hit homers off him, and he has a high LOB%. Otherwise he's striking out a few more guys than league average, and walking about league average. This all translates into an ERA+ of about 113.
Looking roughly at the difference with League average, we're talking about 0.50 runs per 27 outs over average, unadjusted. If he makes 30 appearance of 1 inning each until the end of the season, we're talking about 3.3 x 0.50= 1.65runs saved above average. Hardly anything to write home about.
More importantly there are other pitchers in the Yankee system ready to step up to deliver that kind of pitching.

Ivan Rodriguez is having an all right year by his lofty standards followed by some years of less-than-stellar production.
He's been slightly lucky with BABIP, and even allowing for that, his RC/27 is bang on average. So as a hitter, he's kind of just on average with a OPS+ of 101. The big clue here as to why this exchange of average players is big is because of this graph:

The Yankees were getting way below average production from their Catcher position. With Jorge Posada out for the rest of the season, the Yankees have been gutting it out with Jose Molina and Chad Moeller, which has been detrimental to the run-scoring end of the game.
Thus, even if Pudge reverts to last year's level of production he's better than either one of them this year. That 2-run difference between Pudge and Molina in say, 150 games translates to about 30 runs, which is 3 wins better. So with about 1/3rd of the season left, the Yankees are now looking at a 1 win upgrade on what they had with Molina.

Tom Morello

Rage Against The...?

These links came in from Pleiades. Check them out:



...and this is an interesting interview:

Movie Doubles

Apropos To 'Rambo'...
The last 'movie double' I did stretched me (and credulity) a bit so I'm going to handle 2 films with at least a modicum of common concern. Today's movie double combo is 'Charlie Wilson's War' and 'Lions for Lambs'
Coming out of watching Rambo and reminiscing about the 1980s and the war in Afghanistan, it seemed appropriate to at least look at what other texts were floating around at the moment to explain the mess, so to speak.


The Fighting In Afghanistan

Afghanistan is one of those places where you grow up thinking one day they'll stop fighting. The problem is that the fighting has been going on for so long, it's become all they know. As demonised as it was at the time, the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was fueled by the constant irritation of Afghan conflicts spilling over into mother Russia over the northern border. A little like how Chechens fight on so close to Moscow is still a irritant.

In a sense, the world jumped on the Soviets because they were communists and chose to ignore why they might drive tanks over the borders in the first place. Certainly, we would not expect the Americans to drive over the border into Mexico just because of the drug trade irritation, but in the 19th century, they did, and that's how they got California and Texas. The point is, the Afghan War for the Russians started in 1980. That's more than way over half of my life that conflict has ripped Afghanistan.

If what the 'Rambo III' movie showed was a naive pro-resistance, anti-communist posturing, 'Charlie Wilson's War' reveals that the US Government was operating with about the same idiotically simple schema. So great a perceived threat was the Soviet Communism, the US government showered the Mujihadeen with weapons with which to fight the commies. They didn't quite need John Rambo, but they sure sent a whole lot of special forces types to deliver these weapons to these people to fight the proxy war. Indeed, it was this kind of ex-military bravado of Congressman Wilson from the second ward of Texas, that culminates in the Russian retreat.

The film also covers the aftermath, where Charlie Wilson is unable to secure any money to rebuild the war-torn nation - thus laving Afghanistan to the dreadful civil wars of the 1990s.
By the time the story has moved on to the present day, it is America that is now stuck in Afghanistan fighting the war that the Russians had fought. Does this remind people of something? yes, it reminds us of the Vietnam War - ad this is where Robert Redford steps in with his film, 'Lions For Lambs'. What is clear from his film is that as well-intended as it might be, America has not really come to grips with the war it is fighting in Afghanistan.

Echoes of Vietnam - A Little Digression

Just to be a little pedantic I want to run past a pet theory of mine.
My theory goes like this: The greatest threat to the US in the 20th Century was ideology, and the two main ideologies it confronted were Fascism and Communism. In fact there are indications that FDR's long presidency fomented the conditions whereby World War II took the shape that it did. In part it pushed Japan in with the Fascists, and then aggressively blocked trade in order to provoke the attack on Pearl Harbor - yes, the Day that Lives in Infamy, that FDR worked very hard to produce. Admiral Yamamoto might have been the star villain of the day, but FDR pretty much produced that show.

The end result was Japan surrendering to the USA, and thus reverting to the Constitutional Monarchy that it was as late as 1930. Japan's problem was that after Russia it was the country with the most sold copies of Marx's 'Capital' - the Bible for Communists everywhere. So part of the reason Japan lurched to the right in the 1930s was the great fear of Communism as well as the Russian threat to the north. Which explains the Manchurian state as a project to create a buffer state.

Anyway. With the defeat of anti-communist, Fascist Japan in 1945, the USA had to become guarantor for Japan's security in exchange of Japan giving up arms 'forever' in its 'Peace Constitution' as written by MacArthur's GHQ. It was a very clever move by Shigeru Yoshida, because it produced three key results. Japan was able to be America's ally without providing arms or lives; Japan no longer had to confront Communism by itself in the Far East, that job fell to the USA; and Japan prospered economically as a result.

So the pay off of my big theory is this: the USA was fighting the Vietnam War on behalf of Japan.
That's it.
Had WWII not taken shape the way it did and Japan sided with the West, then Japan would have kept its military presence in South East Asia. It would have fallen to Japan to combat Communism in the wake of France pulling out of Indochina, not America. Instead, America got it self dragged into the slip-stream of the evacuating French, and ended up having to expand the war bit by bit - legitimacy be damned.

The logical extension to my theory is that the War in Afghanistan for the US is a war that it inherited from the Russians in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet State, just as it had inherited the Vietnam War from a vacated power in the Far East.

Still Fighting In Afghanistan

The natural question that begs to be answered is, "why are we still fighting in Afghanistan?"
Neither of these films actually come close to addressing the issue in any adequate way or form. It is clear that for both these films and film makers, Afghanistan is a phenomenon in the Husserl sense. It's out there and our cognition struggles to come to grips with it. It's just not manifestly real enough - instead it is understood through the distorted looking glass of the media. Afghanistan may as well be on Mars or in Narnia for most Americans.

'CWW' delivers on to the fact that the war in Afghanistan from the Afghan perspective is a religious war. It is Julia Roberts' Texan fundraiser character who believes in a crusade against the God-less Communists that lobbies Tom Hanks' rather sardonic, secular Charlie Wilson in supporting the Afghans against the Russians. It is also the Allah Akbar/God is Great chant that convinces Ned Beatty's Arms Committee chief to back Charlie Wilson.

Perhaps what gets lost in the shuffle is that the Afghans were willing to shake hands with the capitalist Christian 'Great Satan' in order to defeat the Godless Communists, and that alliance was never going to endure history. It's a little disconcerting that Charlie Wilson went to help these people and he reduced the help down to sending more weapons. The whole operation to Afghanistan has ballooned into the great black market for arms in Northern Pakistan, and continues to destabilise the region; but the film is incredibly *light* in discussing those issues.

In 'LFL', Afghanistan is like the surface of the meteor in 'Armageddon'. It is dark with blue light onto black edgy rocks, with deep snow. Two stranded soldiers US soldiers fight to the death with Taliban fighters we never get to see face to face. No glory-gore of Rambo IV here; just a prosaic tragedy. What's even sadder is that the best discourse the film has to offer as to why they are in Afghanistan is delivered by Tom Cruise, who says with the same Scientology-Stare to Meryl Streep "Do you want to win the War on Terror, yes or no?"
When Streep's character prevaricates, he thunders "It's a very simple question, Yes or No?"

It actually reminded me of the way he said "There'll be no more of this spectator-ism. You're either in the game or get out of the stadium!" in that horrible Scientology video that did the rounds. I think Tom Cruise's credibility as a human being took a huge hit with that interview.
Anyway, it's clear that 'LFL' is saying they don't really know why the USA is in Afghanistan, and that what it is trying to do there."

Let's face it, we live in a time when the First World is facing two ugly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as seeing the multitude of conflicts in Africa and elsewhere; and Tom Cruise's central metaphysical concern is building a five-panic-room house in Colorado for the day Xenu attacks Earth.
Err... right, Tom.

In any case, it's not entirely clear why the Americans are there but for repeated references to September 11. I don't think that is all there is to it, so I don't know why we choose to dumb ourselves down by thinking that is the case. By the same token, the film does a bit of disservice to itself there.

Cryptic Title

Just what does 'Lions For Lambs' Mean? you might ask.
It's a reference made in the film that explains it is how WWI Germans saw the English Army - that their soldiers were brave as Lions, but the Generals were like Lambs.
I'm not so sure the simile works at all. it's not that the USA command is meek. It's more like it's Blind to circumstance, Deaf to criticism and decidedly tactical when it probably needs to be thought more broadly strategic terms.
The film only delivers half the point. The big point it does deliver is that Tom Cruise really is an acting light weight when played against to Meryl Streep. He's simply awful in this film - a bit like a lamb sent out to face a lioness.

Hollywood Liberalism

The GOP always complains that Hollywood is pro-Democrat. This is from the party that boasts Clint Eastwood AND Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Still, you do kind of understand. Hanoi Jane and all that; the Hollywood mob seem incredibly keen to say no to war even though they keep making fiction filled with the stuff.

What's really galling about 'CWW' is how the film celebrates the Soviet defeat with innocent joy and yet totally fails to face up to the failure of managing Afghanistan after that moment. The film simply rolls up a quote from Wilson that says they "completely fucked up the End Game". It's a little disingenuous to leave it at that, given the size of the fiasco. And it's not something I'm willing to lay at just George W. Bush's feet, but also to his father George Herbert Walker Bush who did plenty for Gulf War I but failed to see the missed opportunities, as well as Bill Clinton who did mostly nothing of lasting importance.

The point is, it's a bit on the nose to say it was "their fault". It was collectively, all our faults we chose to look after our backyards instead of addressing real, serious problems that were emerging out there. The wide-eyed "Oh boy shucks" of 'CWW' is totally not what the doctor ordered.

'LFL' fares a little better in that it is willing to discuss the notion of winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, but it's spoken by Tom Cruise's character Jasper Irving, who thinks he's going o accomplish this through winning some battles. So in the end, nobody comes up with a concrete plan to do that; they simply disagree with more fighting. I can see why the GOP might object to Hollywood liberalism.

For my part, I'm not sure more fighting is the answer. If anything they need to come up with a strategy for demilitarising and disarming these people. And Armies can be handy for that. In any case, it's clear that the writers in Hollywood can barely get their heads around conceiving of the war in Afghanistan as an extension of "9/11"; what chance have they got of seeing the war as part of the great counter-colonial struggle in that part of the world? In neither film do the film making teams offer any concrete alternatives to the fiascoes going down in Afghanistan.

It's easy objecting to a war, and an unpopular war at that. It's another thing to conceive of how to extricate the First World from the mess that is Afghanistan. In that sense the Hawks are right to grumble about Hollywood for taking the easy shots without offering an alternative option. To date, it's been send in Iron Man, send in Rambo, send in a couple of young actors to play soldiers.

On Robert Redford

Before Tom Cruise was the pretty boy of Hollywood that could sell schlock with his smile, there was Robert Redford. Robert Redford the actor was such an All-American boy it seemed like he was caste from a mold. The blond, blue- eyed visage, the controlled, mellifluous voice, the bolt-upright posture, the glance, the smile, all added up to the definition of a Hollywood Movies Star.

Since then it's actually remarkable how few men have actually stepped into that mold. As it turned out, they really haven't been able to make another one of these guys. Perhaps America has moved on, and perhaps even the demographic has moved on. After all, how hyper-Aryan -looking could you get beyond Robert Redford?

An yet Redford has continually made films that are against the fascist impulses of America. My favorite performance by Redford is possibly his work in 'All The President's Men' where his understated delivery underlined the gritty realism of that picture. He never got histrionic with that role, while Dustin Hoffman was let loose on the Bernstein character like a hungry hound.

The most problematised role for me is actually his part in 'The Natural'. He was simply too old to have played that role of Roy Hobbs - he looks stiff and ungainly, and you never quite buy the time line of events as a result. In any case, I still like the film and it's not like he ruins it for me; but I do remember sitting alone in the dark watching the film thinking, "this is kinda wrong, no?"

I recall being at AFTRS, and they showed 'Out of Africa' as a case where a star can distort the script. The contention was that having cast Redford against Streep, they had to expand that role to accommodate his star stature, an that this resulted in a bad script. While I never liked the film all that much, I always thought it was a great move to have Redford in it. It was interesting to see he cast Streep to play the journalist. in 'LFL'. It certainly evoked a lot of memories. It even occurred to me that they sure haven't found more where he came from.
He means well, and he's shown spine, and that's a whole lot better than many who earn stardom in Tinseltown. The last Redford sequence in 'LFL' where he puts on the jacket and ushers out the kid almost seems like a goodbye note to the audience.

Yankees Update

Yanks Trade For Marte & Nady
I always have a brush with Damaso Marte at some point in the season when a reliever goes down and/or I need to get my WHIP down. He's a a useful pitcher for strike outs and rate stats. I recently jetisoned him in favor of another pitcher but most seasons, I pick him up for a small period if but to collect on Holds or improve rate stats. In his good years, his K/BBis great, and his HR/9 is reasonably good. Unsurprisingly, the Yankees went out and landed him and Xavier Nady in a trade with the Pirates.

Xavier Nady is another player that I always flirt with at some point in the season. He has bursts of great hitting and then long patches of mediocre hitting, Having decided Pittsburg was not his thing, he started this season on fire, and made himself trade bait. It's sort of weird these players are around to be traded like this because they're both very useful pieces. Perhaps the question is, why did the Pirates have them when they don't need them? Whatever the case, Nady is having a career year with an OPS+ of 142.

The big caveat with Nady is that his BABIP is at a career high, and way above the average. This makes me nervous in the long run. His RC/27 is largely based on his BA of .330. He is to all intents and purposes, a League average hitter with a career OPS+ of 102 - which is a valuable commodity in of itself - but not terribly exciting. The really interesting thing about his last 3 years is that his LD% has been climbing steadily, which may be accounting for his spike in BABIP. His ISO is .200 the last two seasons so he has some pop. He's a valuable bat to pick up for the Yankees.

For such bounty, the Yankees gave up Jose Tabata, Russ Ohlendorf, George Kontos, Phil Coke. The interesting names in there are Tabata and Ohlendorf. Tabata was the Yankees' No.1 Position prospect coming into the season, but has been disappointing. He also developed some attitude/behaviour issues which probably hastened the exit. He still has potential, but the Yankees had to give up something good.

Ohlendorf of course came to the Yankees in the second Randy Johnson trade; which is to say, the echoes of the disastrous 2004 off-season are still reverberating in the organization. While Randy Johnson pursues his 300wins out in Arizona, the Yankees have somehow converted parts of that trade into more usable pieces.

UPDATE: The pieces going have been adjusted. It's now Karstens and McCutchen instead of Coke and Kontos. It's good for Karstens because he's really caught in the gridlock of RHPs in the Yankee system. Steve Goldman would be happy the 'scary fly-ball guy' is elsewhere.

So Much To Blog, So Little Time - Part 2

The Credit Crunch
Pleiades has been sending in some interesting stuff relating to the film industry of late.
One of the more interesting side-effects of the current credit squeeze is that banks in Europe are pulling out of cinema.

A slew of film projects are expected to be forced on to the backburner because of tough new funding terms set by Wall Street banks.

One senior executive at a big Hollywood studio, who declined to be named, predicted that the increased cost of financing the film industry would lead to fewer films being made, particularly by smaller, independent companies.

“Deals are hard to get done right now,” he said. “This is just how the banks are dealing with uncertainty. They are being very cautious.”

Although a number of the leading studios, including Fox, Universal and Disney, managed to raise funds before the credit crisis began, many independent film-makers are believed to have had less luck.

The executive said: “Fewer films is not necessarily a bad thing - people have only so much money to spend - but what you will see, increasingly, is film companies going to India and the Middle East for their funding.”

New York investment banks have become a key source of funding for Hollywood only in the past five years. However, studios such as MGM, Fox, Universal and Sony quickly began to rely very heavily on Wall Street for the financing of new films.

Since the credit crisis erupted last year, investment banks have increased the cost of lending for the studios and, in some cases, banks have pulled out of film finance altogether.

The suggestion is that they will be back, once the market terms are right, but in the short term it augurs badly for the reformed Australian film bureaucracies' plans because they were counting on that money to be there.

Eulogies For Indie Cinema
Here's another one from Pleiades. It's in an e-mail so I'm just going to post it up whole:

"Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling."
Mark Gill , CEO, The Film Department
Keynote Speech
L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference
6/21/08

Good morning.
Last week, an old friend who is a director called to catch up. It almost seemed as if he was seeking reassurance. "You good?" he asked.

My answer was simple: "How good can I be? I work in independent film."

He laughed. And then he wondered aloud: "Do you think maybe Chicken Little was right—I mean, about independent film." Leave it to a director to hope Chicken Little might be a cinephile. And again, my answer was simple: "Yes, the sky really is falling."

The last thing I heard him say was "I have to go throw up now."
Unfortunately, he's not alone in that feeling these days.I know I don't have to repeat all the ways that the independent film business is in trouble. But I'm going to do it anyway—because the accumulation of bad news is kin of aweinspiring:

1: Picturehouse and Warner Independent have been shut down.

2: New Line's staff was cut by 90 percent, and the survivors were sent to hell…I mean… Burbank .

3: Paramount Vantage was folded into the mother ship (this one may not be all bad news, by the way, but it still scares the hell out of independent film people).

4: Sidney Kimmel shrunk his company in half.

5: ThinkFilm is being sued for not paying its advertising bills, even as the unions repeatedly close down their David O. Russell production with the prophetic title "Nailed" for failure to meet weekly payroll.

6: Another five companies are in serious financial peril. And those are only the ones I'm sure of.

7: The $18 billion that Wall Street poured into Hollywood over the past four years has slowed to a trickle, and shows no signs of being replaced at even remotely the same levels from any new source.

8: There's a glut of films: 5000 movies got made last year. Of those, 603 got released theatrically here. And there's not room in the market—as there used to be—for even 400 of those. Maybe there's room for 300. So everything else just dies. Most of these pictures are preordained flops from independent distributors who forgot that their odds would have been better if they'd converted their money into quarters and taken the all-nigh party bus to Vegas.

9: Advertising costs have radically outpaced inflation even as media delivery of audiences falls through the floor. So movie companies now enjoy the privilege of paying way more to be far less effective marketers.

10: Movies now routinely fight with really compelling leisure alternatives that nobody in the last great era of cinema—the 1970s—even imagined: from ipods to Xboxes to tivos to you tubes to the radically improved behemoth that is cable television.

11: The international marketplace may be growing dramatically, but all of that growth is eaten up by studio movies, a couple dozen top independent films, an burgeoning local language productions. Everything else we make in this country doesn't sellfor less—as it has for the past 20-plus years. Now, most American independent films don't sell at all overseas. I've never seen more depressed people in my life than I did in Cannes last month. The phrase "worst market ever" could be heard from every corner. a lot of film market veterans were musing about never coming back. It's that bad out there.

12: One entertainment industry banker I know believes another 10 independent film financiers will exit the business in the next year. I think he's low. And finally, just for bad luck:

13: The average cost of an independent film released theatrically in North America shot up dramatically last year (not as much perhaps as the 60% the MPAA reported for its member companies, but a lot nonetheless). And this of course makes it a hell of a lot harder to break even or squeak out a small return and stay in business. Aside from that, everything's great.

We've heard "the sky is falling" in the movie business before—notably with the introduction of TV, home video and DVD. On all three occasions, the business survived. And DVDs arguably helped grow the worldwide movie-viewing habit considerably—even as they threw off a ton of cash. But this time, at least as it relates to independent film, the sky really is falling.

The marginally good news is it won't hit the ground everywhere. The strongest of the strong will survive and in fact prosper. But it will feel like we just survived a medieval plague. The carnage and the stench will be overwhelming. Of course, it's fashionable to bitch in the independent film world. It's what we do. We brood. We wear black. We drink too much coffee, followed by too much alcohol. And we bemoan a future devoid of real culture, homogenized to death by unfeeling conglomerates, and increasingly determined by ADD-addled 14-year-olds with nothing but internet porn and Grand Theft Auto on the brain.

The Major Studios

Every now and then we get tempted to look over the fence to where the grass is greener. We're human. We can't help it. We see all that cash rolling into the major studio coffers,and we secretly covet it. But it's not so easy for the big boys anymore either. The average cost of a major studio production is $70.8million, and the average marketing budget in NorthAmerica alone is $35.9 million. In other words, there's an average of more than $100 million at risk every time they get up to bat. And if they're going to lose $75 million or more, they know it by 2 p.m. Los Angeles time on opening day.

As the press has chronicled ad nauseum, the major studios have been forced largely to embrace the world of the tentpole movie—the big budget spectacle that tries to be for everyone. In market research terms, they call it the four-quadrant film, meaning it appeals to all four demographic quadrants of moviegoers: men and women, over and under 25. In economic terms, this means a movie that invariably costs more than $100 million, and on occasion more than $300 million.

The amount of effort and cash devoted to these tentpoles—and the enormous rewards that follow when they work—has radically altered the focus of the big studios. And generally speaking, these films don't have to be great to work. They have to be just good enough. It's the last place in the movie business where the old habits still apply, where the phrase "execution dependent" doesn't matter so much. Hollywood has spent a lot of time and money making films that are at best mediocre and then hoping for marketing to save the day. We can blame a good movie for this very bad habit. "Jaws" ushered in the era of wide-release marketing-driven movies. It lasted for more than 30 years. A lot of bad films got made under the theory that quality didn't matter. But it's not working like it used to.

Here's why: fooling the audience is getting harder for the major studios in the age of blackberries, instant messaging and cell phone texting. Good buzz spreads quickly, bad buzz even faster.

A tentpole movie has to be truly atrocious to be victimized by this. But for any movie smaller than a tentpole, the bar has been raised. Good isn't good enough anymore. It used to be that a film with a nice performance, a cool look and a broken story could get through. Not any more. Unless you're making a tentpole, your movie now has to be very good—in the eye of its intended audience.

I may have liked "Juno" and "The Bourne Identity." My female colleagues loved "Sex in the City." And there was a big, happy audience for the last "Halloween" movie. In each case, the intended audience got what it wanted: a movie that satisfied them.

We're entering an era where the only films with any chance for success will be the $100 million-plus tentpoles, and reasonably priced films of some perceived quality.

I've had far too many fight-the-power wannabe filmmakers cheer this vision of the future, which they believe will usher out the bloated, soul-less big studio retreads and usher in a new democratic era of access to moviemaking fame and glory for all.

Lots of people are drinking this Kool-Aid. Fifteen years ago, the Sundance Film Festival got 500 submissions. This year, they received 5,000. Virtually all of these are privately financed. There's only one problem: most of the films are flat-out awful (trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years). Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.

It's not enough to have access to the moviemaking process. Talent matters more. Quality of emotional content is what matters, period. In a world with too many choices, companies are finally realizing they can't risk the marketing money on most movies. Here's how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year—generally with budgets under $10 million—maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That's one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure. OK, so now that I've battered you into severe depression, let's move on to the hopeful part of these proceedings. The famed film editor Walter Murch (of "Apocalypse Now" and "English Patient" renown) likes to say there are only two important elements of any movie: the beginning and the ending. And the beginning isn't really all that important.

With that in mind, I promise, by the end of this talk, you won't want to slit your wrists. There actually are some hopeful signs amid all the carnage. Those terrible odds for movies under $10 million? Ironically, they get far better if you spend more money. All the financial data I've looked at—and it's a lot—clearly shows that the sweet spot is between $15 and $50 million. But that has a lot to do with being able to pay professionals who know what they're doing to create quality emotional content that has a market. And it has a fair amount to do with the prices that international distributors can afford to pay in the top 12 countries, which is what gives financiers enough comfort to commit capital.

I can hear my nauseous director friend now: "So what are you saying: should we all just quit?Not at all. I'm saying we have to do better. Much better.

The sky may be falling, but in the end, it isn't going to hit the ground. We will be left with a little breathing room. And the question will become: what will succeed in this much narrower space? I believe that a fair number of people—call them what's left of the theatrical audience if you like—will always need to get out of the house: in part because they enjoy the benefits of a communal experience.

Clearly, only the better films will succeed in the theaters of the future. Certainly the number of releases will drop—by half or more. Probably everyone other than the folk who work on tentpoles will be paid less. The words "theatrical necessity" will take on greater and greater meaning. Probably a lot of theaters will close.
But I think the best theaters showing the best films will always have an audience. And the rest of the films will have their premiere in Walmart, or on your cell phone. Interestingly enough, in this Darwinian new future, there will absolutely be a premium

for good films on tv, pay per view, on-demand, internet—or whatever that large pipe that goes to all of our houses will be called.Why do I know this? Because one of the big research companies conducted a study recently which gave viewers on-demand everything. No more schedules. No more appointment television. Just tune in anything—any movie, any TV show—at any time. And guess what: the best stuff won out. Hands down. In a nutshell, the audience is sick & tired of the atrocious but all too familiar version of television on a schedule: 500 channels to choose from, and nothing to watch.

Some of this is purely a function of demography. There actually is a growing audience for quality. *It's not hard to figure out why: the baby boom is aging. And as they do,their tastes mature. But they don't behave like their parents at the same age. They are smarter, more active, have more disposable income. And because of pay cable, home video and DVD in particular, they've become much more movie literate — and more sophisticated in their tastes. *Traditionally specialized films accounted for 5-6% of tickets sold. In the last few summers, it's been over 10% on average. And that's the season when Hollywood is supposed to dominate and indies are supposed to cower in the corners, waiting for the arrival of fall.

*And to back that up, for the first time in the roughly 20 years I've been looking at this data, more than 10% of the audience now is telling pollsters they prefer independent films. We also know there's an opening for quality based on data from the good folks at Netflix. Yes, they rent plenty of tentpole movie dvds, just like everyone else. But they also have the most accurate collaborative filtering technology I've seen. Type in 50 movies you like, and Netflix will tell you—with remarkable accuracy—what other films you will like. This is how a relatively obscure film from 1974 became the most popular picture among Netflix's six million subscribers: because it's really good. The movie, by the way, is "The Conversation."

I keep telling the Netflix people they should start sampling audiences on Friday nights outside movie theaters, so we'll all know by Saturday if people whose taste we share like a movie. But of course they're probably rightly worried about their biggest suppliers, the major studios, who are terrified that the audience will find out even sooner just how bad "Speed Racer" is. Yeah, like we couldn't tell just from being forced to watch the trailer. The result of all these changes—especially the catalyzing effect of lower costs and high technology—is very good news for people who care about the quality of cinema, singularity of voice, resonant themes, and all the other things that today can rarely be found outside independent film.

It all comes down to what a former glove merchant named Schmuel Gelbfisz said more than 50 years ago: "Make Fewer Better." This isn't by any means the most famous Goldwyn-ism. In fact it isn't even on most of the lists alongside such classics as: "An oral contract isn't worth the paper it's written on"; "A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad"; and "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them!"

But for my taste, "Make fewer better" is the one Goldwyn-ism that should never go out of style. If we give the audience fewer and better movies, we might even create a virtuous cycle. People might start saying: "Hey, the movies are good again." They'll start going more often, tell their friends…you get the idea. So how do we get to "Fewer and Better"? The studios have already done it. Disney once released 47 movies in a year. This year: the number will be 12. Warner went from 35 to 20 in less than 10 years. The rest of the majors have also slimmed down. Now of course anybody can reduce budgets and the number of films they make. That part is easy. The hard part is quality of content—or, well, taste. How the hell do you improve that?

The cynic's view—encapsulated in the famous dictum of Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman—is: "Nobody knows anything." Meaning: Nobody knows what will work. It's hopeless to try to inflict taste on the movies. Give up immediately. If that were entirely true, we should just shut down the business right now. But of course this isn't entirely the case. There are changes we can undertake that will make a difference. Odds are that most of show business won't make these changes until they're in serious danger of going under—which is …any day now. Anyone who changes sooner will have an enormous advantage. The single biggest change should be to only make movies that we absolutely love. Not ones we like. Not ones we need to do as a favor. Not the ones we do because they seem like a good "piece of business." Not ones we do because we think, hope or wish that "the kids" will like them. Not the knock-offs of the ones that worked at the box office last year. In a word, we should only pick the films we're passionate about—and that have an audience. Another way of articulating this is: we need to thread the needle twice: once for quality, and then for audience demand.

Let's talk about quality first.

As simple as it sounds, it all comes down to a good story, well told. And that's a lot harder to do than it is to say. But not as hard as Hollywood would have you believe now—in an era where until very recently aiming high was considered an effete eccentricity. Or where, as the New York Times recently put it, "quality is considered a genre." It's a show business cliché that "it all starts with the script." This is usually uttered by some semi-literate, mouth-breathing, prada-wearing, 24-year-old hipster poseur who wouldn't know a good story if it hit him in the head. We could spend an hour or two just on the topic of what makes a good script.
But not today. In the most reductionist fashion: tere's the holy trinity of structure, character and dialogue, of course; the crucial if more ephemeral notions of authenticity, voice, theme, and tone; and the imperative for originality of utterance and perception. In the end, all of this has to add up (seamlessly if possible) to something that moves us — to the quality of the emotional content. It doesn't matter if we're talking about thrills, laughs, tears, or an adrenaline rush. What matters is that we are engaged and, ideally, emotionally transformed and satisfied.

In a world increasingly dominated by numbers—financial, technological and most importantly the finite number of hours in a day, our very human desire for contact, meaning and emotional transformation isn't going away. It's growing. Those who remember that will survive and most probably win. By the way, notwithstanding my 10-year-old son Jack's question: "Dad, why do movies suck so much?" our quality control isn't as bad as it could be, and this has enormous implications for our not following the music business down the toilet.

Here's why: when the music business went from tape to digital, they nearly doubled the wholesale price of an album, and proceeded to pump out albums that have very few good songs. Like one or none. When the movie business went from tape to digital, we dropped the wholesale price per unit from $65 to $10. And everyone said: "Oh my god, they're killing the business. Our profit margins are ruined." Well, the margin was smaller, but sales exploded. The studios made tens of billions of dollars on the difference. And consumers mostly like what they're getting. So much so that movies are the second-highest rated consumer value for the money. Behind only chicken. Not so for albums, which are so far down the list you can't find them.

The next big change will be when we start shooting movies to mobile devices in a big way. The wholesale price will drop again—probably to $3 per unit. But we'll sell so many more of them that revenue will explode all over again. This has very favourable implications for getting past piracy problems that helped kill the music business: the charge for downloading a film will land on your phone bill. And the moviemakers can hold the phone companies accountable (whereas now internet providers duck and hide when we try to pursue them for what amounts to transfer of stolen goods).

So now you're probably wondering: if all this money is going to flood into Hollywood in a few years, why can't we get some of it for independent film and just keep on doing what we do? The answer, in a word, is marketing. Or, how do you get noticed in a world of endless possibilities? And that brings us to the second crucial threading of the needle: for audience demand. The first and most important thing to remember is that two-thirds of the tickets are sold outside the U.S. now. So if you're making a film that only appeals to Americans, start cutting your budget now. Or better yet, make one that the whole world can embrace. This is mostly about subject matter. The rest of the world doesn't care about westerns or American sports movies. I've gone out of my way to tell people we won't make them. And yet, no matter how many times I say this, it still doesn't seem to stop some people with a passion to get their story told. Not too long ago, a producer called me up to tell me the true story, circa 1890, of cowboys and Indians in the Arizona territory who put down their weapons to play a friendly game of baseball. I offered to scalp him. After you get past subject matter, the next most important factor is "who's it for." Women of all ages. Men under 25? The dating audience 18-34. Please don't tell me "everyone" unless you have a $100 million budget. And then I like to think about the rest of the audience demand question in the way that we analyse titles. A good title should have many of the attributes that a movie needs to embody now: Succinct & Descriptive: the film has to lend itself to brief encapsulation. A high concept is no longer the thing that studio movies do and independent films shun. In this age of info overload, it's crucial for every picture to have this. Without it, your odds shoot through the floor. *Distinctive: not the same story we've heard five times before; something that at least takes the cliché and twists it; not something we get too much of somewhere else in our lives (Exhibit A: Iraq movies; who wants to see more of that mess? We already get too much of it every day in the news media).

*Provocative: something that cuts through the clutter, stands out, gets attention; not "So then Phoebe sat by her mother's bedside, suffering in silence for eight weeks." Give us incident, conflict, excitement, ideally something that hits a cultural nerve. *Memorable: this is essentially an accumulation of the other traits, or sometimes altogether separate. It's the avoidance of cotton candy. The possibility of resonance. Something sticky. *Not too dark: these are very dark times, for audiences the world over. Audience enthusiasm for dark films is as low as I've ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. But the one I hear almost nobody articulating and everyone feeling is this: in the western industrialized world, wages haven't even remotely kept up with productivity demands, and that stresses us out.

Will some films get made that defy all of these conventions? Yes. Will a couple of them go on to achieve enormous success and acclaim? Probably. The romantic in all of us hopes for David to triumph over Goliath, for the visionary individual to beat the system. Scratch a successful person in Hollywood , and they'll tell you about their movie that did this. I happen to have quite a few stories like this. The best is probably this: In its April 2005 issue, Premiere magazine famously intoned: "What was Mark Gill thinking when he paid $1 million for a French documentary about a bunch of penguins?" What I was thinking was very simple: "we can fix it, and it will be emotional." So we did. Yes, I did save that article. And yes, I am happy that the magazine subsequently went out of business.

Here's the problem with that brand of romanticism: the odds of it happening to any of us with any reliable frequency are extremely low—and getting much worse. As some famous wag once said: "You can die of encouragement in Hollywood ." I frankly don't want to be responsible for your death. Instead, let's just tell the truth… If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you're going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up. If you're looking for a cool lifestyle, you're in the wrong business. If you want work-life balance, go get a government job.

But if you really want to make movies — even after all the unvarnished bad news I've dumped on you today—then by all means do it. For starters, by whatever legal and moral means necessary, come up with a great script. How will you know if you have one? That's easy. It's the day you stop chasing talent. Because everybody—from the directors to the actors to the editors and costume designers—starts chasing you, and will show up and make the film for a
little — or a lot — less.

And if we do it for less, we can afford to make something that's not a moronic, homogenized piece of lowest-common-denominator drivel. If we get all of that right, the sky might fall further than we like, but it won't hit the ground. And the independent film business—leaner, harder-working, but still wearing black and drinking too much caffeine—will indeed survive.

Thank you very much.

So there you go. On a related tangent, I want to briefly go over my own thinking on this phenomenon.

Some years ago, I got into a conversation with a guy who was the reader at Fox-Icon in Sydney. I explained to him that the whole Indie cinema thing predicated on screen numbers exploding (this was back in the late 1990s) was a crock. What I told him was that the market wasn't going to grow exponentially because the demographic wouldn't support it. There actually isn't the time for people to watch exponentially more films.
"You're crazy, he said. Build it and they will come. "
"Yeah but," I told him, "if everybody builds them, *they* can't go everywhere at once."

Imagine your average cineaste. In those days of being single and dating, I used to go see 2 new films in a week. I was in the business, and on some weeks, rent a whole bunch of DVD so releases I missed. So in any given year, I think I watched around 80-120 films without thinking much about it, and in some years I watched 200-300 - but that was during my time I was at film school. I had a lot of time to give to cinema back then. So in any given year I would watch 100 or so new films.

I'm anomalous. Most of the market watches fewer than 50. But let's be generous and say the way people watch is different , so the effective *reach* of the cinema is 100 films a year per cineaste - and I'm being extremely generous here. I think it's more like 20 movies per annum.

The thing about it is, if there were suddenly 1000 additional new product, people would still only physically have enough time for the 100 or so - short of going back to Film School. So in a sense, the market is competed for from the top 100 films, not from the bottom 500-1000 films. People don't work up the market, they pick the most prominent film and work their way down the list.

What this means is that the visibility of your film is probably more valuable than the actual content. Sure, there are variations and variance in individual viewing habits, but it really matters what is in the Top 100 marketed films, because that is what determines the shape of the market. (So far this decade, the shape it is in, is more comic book movies with recognisable, colorful, dynamic characters, but that's another story. )

If you applied the 80/20 rule, it's easy enough to see that 80% of the market is the 100 films each year. The other parts of the market will only ever account for 20% gross. So making an Indie film is always going to be a losing proposition knowing you're going in the latter bucket of films. In other words, you could duke it out all you like for the scraps, but the upside of an Indie film is a miraculous breakthrough by accident - which dos happen with the frequency of winning lotto. Otherwise chances are, it's going to remain unwatched.

The flip side of that is that the only game worth being in is going to be the top end studio product, and these films will always account for the 80% of revenue in all of cinema's forms.
When I explained all of this to the reader at Fox -Icon, he looked at me and said, "you're fucking crazy. People will ALWAYS watch GOOD movies."

I rest my case.

So Much To Blog, So Little Time

Clem Burke, Drummer Of Blondie

Clem Burke was one of those drummers people should talk about more. That's him with the distinctly Mod Tee-shirt on the left. He's actually a Keith Moon-inspired drummer for Blondie, which explains the shirt, I guess. Anyway, more recently he's found he needs to train like an athlete to keep drumming that way.

"He loses up to two litres of fluid in a performance, which is similar to a runner going out and doing 10,000m," Dr Smith said.

Burke burned 400-600 calories an hour. His heart rate averaged 140 to 150 beats a minute, though it could rise as high as 190 beats - equalling that of Cristiano Ronaldo in a Premier League football match.

Restoring the honour of the rock drummer has been a labour of love for Dr Smith, a lifelong Blondie fan. In 1998, as he was finishing his PhD, there were rumours the band was about to reform.

He wrote to Burke that summer as a fan and as a sports scientist who had worked with professional football players and British Olympic boxers. They met at Wembley Arena, where Burke agreed to let Dr Smith follow him around on tour.

"There is a lot more to it than having a beer and walking on stage for two hours," Burke told The Times. Even if that was how he used to do business, "at this point in my career, I'm conscious of needing to be prepared".

He does not think, however, that he is the only one who requires the services of a sports scientist. "Rock and roll music is in middle age now," he added.

Burke needs to stay in peak physical condition and can sometimes suffer from joint pain. "Jacuzzis, saunas, massages, all that is incorporated into the life of the modern drummer," he said.

I'll believe that. The guy drums like a maniac!

Radovan Karadzic, Psycho-Despot, Psychiatrist, Poet, Musician
In recent days, Radovan Karadzic has been captured. He's going to be sent to the Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity. While I don't condone what he has done - he was persistently the most obstinate asshole in the whole Bosnian War and gave us the obscenely nuanced term 'Ethnic Cleansing' - it has to be said I don't know if you could punish a man enough for such crimes anyway. Quite apart from my misgivings about the International Court in Hague and the tenuous nature of the legal grounding of the such, I do think Kardzic deserved to go to that trial much more so than Slobodan Milosevic who may have been the wrong pollie in the wrong spot, who backed the wrong guy - Radovan - at the wrong time in history.

Karadzic also was a psychiatrist - as well as a poet, like his fellow 90s comrade-in-bad-dude-ness, Saddam Hussein. His works bore titles such as 'Let's Go Down To The Town And Kill Some Scum'.

Karadzic saw himself as something of an artist, a view shared by few others, performing as a troubadour, writing children's stories and folk songs. He published poetry rife with prophetic, if not apocalyptic, visions; among the charmless titles were The Morning Hand Grenade and Let's Go Down To The Town And Kill Some Scum. He was jailed for fraud but used his contacts to get his job back.

As the shadows of war loomed over the fragmenting Yugoslav Republic, Karadzic surprised everyone when he emerged as Slobodan Milosovic's proxy, using extreme nationalist rhetoric of a kind not heard in Europe since the Nazis. A new term entered the lexicon: "ethnic cleansing". Karadzic, a central figure in the destruction, conducted the siege of Sarajevo, shelling the hospital where he had worked, killing colleagues and patients.

In 1995, Karadzic was indicted by an international war crimes tribunal, making him the first doctor so indicted since the Nuremberg doctors trial in 1946. In 1993, the American Psychiatric Association passed a motion condemning Karadzic for "brutal and inhumane actions … because, by membership and training, Dr Karadzic claims membership in our profession".

What was Karadzic the psychiatrist like? His colleagues said he provoked psychotic patients and his work was ordinary. When a psychopathic patient with a knife rampaged through the ward, Karadzic retreated to his room, leaving a nurse to disarm the patient. He constantly regaled colleagues with grandiose plans; for example, he would write the definitive textbook on depression.

Radovan Karadzic (I keep mistyping it "Krazic"! That must tell you something) on the other hand was a curse-able cur, a cunt-deluxe. Turns out the guy was a musician too.

There were many stories being told yesterday about the man the locals knew as Doctor David, psychiatrist holistic health guru and mystic. But one winter's night in particular was passing speedily into folklore.

That night, there was a jamming session on the gusle, the one-string fiddle played across the Balkans to accompany epic poetry. Dabic turned up to listen and was eventually persuaded to join in. Those present that night shook their heads yesterday in disbelief at the memory. There was Radovan Karadzic, their hero and icon, playing the gusle for them under his own portrait, and no one had a clue who he was. It was the stuff of legend.

Raso Vucinic, a young Serb nationalist who had been playing the gusle that night, was burnishing a tale he would one day tell his grandchildren.

"He was wearing a black hat and a black coat and he was standing at the threshold, listening," Vucinic said.

"'You young players are the greatest treasure of the Serbian people,' he told me. 'Sing with and through the gusle. Speak about the Serb traditions. Hold the banner of our glory high.' And he would write down the lyrics of our songs about the war in Bosnia."

Then the white-haired old man was finally persuaded to pick up the gusle and play. He refused to sing, but the regulars insist he played beautifully. They held the instrument up for photographs yesterday. It was carved from elm with a large eagle at its head, and portraits of national heroes on its body, including one of Vuk Karadzic, a 19th-century champion of the Serb language and one of Radovan's forefathers. In the Madhouse bar, it was fast acquiring the attributes of a priceless relic.

And that's the weirdness of life staring right back at you right there and there.

Umm... Aliens Exist According To Apollo Astronaut

Here's something rather disturbing. I would have put it on the Space Freaks Weblog, but I think it's a little too woowoo, so I'm putting it here instead.

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'

He said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as theirs and "had they been hostile", he warned "we would be been gone by now".

Dr Mitchell, along with with Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, holds the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes following their 1971 mission.

"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real," Dr Mitchell said.

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.

He told the astonished Kerrang! radio host Nick Margerrison: "This is really starting to open up. I think we're headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving in that direction."

Mr Margerrison said: "I thought I'd stumbled on some sort of astronaut humour but he was absolutely serious that aliens are definitely out there and there's no debating it."

Officials from NASA, however, were quick to play the comments down.

Joys of joys, somebody who might know, coming out with this stuff. I wonder if he's having a laugh before he shuffles off his mortal coil or if he genuinely believes this stuff. Curious, in any case.

Have You Bought My Album yet?

Some people have started to buy my album. 3, in fact. I need to sell 20 to break even, so... what are you waiting for? :)

Yankees Update

What Do You Know? 3.5 Games Out
Stumbling into the All-Star Break, the Yankees were 6.5 games behind the Tampa Bay Rays and 6 behind the Red Sox. While you wouldn't want to bank on things with 62 games left, 6.5 games out looks terrible on paper - in spit of what earlier incarnations of Yankees have accomplished in recent season and of course 1978.

Coming out of the All Star Break, the Yankees have been firing on all cylinders. The 11 straight wins at home is a high that hasn't been accomplished by a Yankee squad since 1998, so clearly there's something to be said for this squad when it is firing. The good news ends there. The bad news is that Posada won't be catching any time soon because of his shoulder which means, they're stuck with Jose Molina at catcher; Sidney Ponson is not going to be so lucky going forwards; there's still no help coming for the offense with Matsui out of the picture for a little while more if not for the rest of the season.

Robinson Cano is hitting .562 and they've swept the Oakland A's and the Minnesota Twins. Considering just how unlucky Cano (and Melky) have been with BABIP relative to their career levels, it's not surprising that Cano has been displaying a bit more form in July. To that extent, even Melky Cabrera has been more productive in July.

Even more amazingly, 'Cooked Moose' is now back from the dead and is sitting on an AL-leading 13wins for the seasons after today's win over the Twinkies. It's kind of mind-boggling that his ERA is as a very low 3.26, and he's hardly walked any one all year.

Moose In The Raw (Uncooked Moose, As It Were...)
This is a snapshot of Mike Mussina's season:

His HR/9 is down. Don't know how he's doing it, but he's keping the sluggers off balance.

His K/BB is at his career peak levels. He's doing this by striking out fewer guys, but walking hardly anybody.

His BABIP is actually worse than average. In other words, he's not been benefiting from the less than stellar Yankee defense this year. Which is scary, but it indicates he's pitching as well as at any point in his peak years, just without the velocity to his fastball.

The really interesting thing is that he's giving up fewer fly balls and more grounders and liners - a trend that's been continuing since 2006, but he's making it work. Even his FIP is below 4.00.
There's every chance Moose will get 20wins this season, and if he does, it will sure shut up a lot of people who insist a pitcher needs to have a 20win season somewhere to go in.
Go Moose!

Richie Sexson!?
I forgot to mention the Yankees picked up the DFA-ed Richie Sexson. It's not as sexy a move as his surname suggests. The guy was hitting close to the Mendoza line out in Seattle as their resident Boo-magnet so his DFA was sort of a mercy-killing. Since arriving, he's been adequate. He reminds me a bit of Kong - a.k.a Dave Kingman of old. A Righty bat with TTO tendencies, but Baseball reference lists Albert Belle and David Ortiz amongst similar hitters - so much for similarity scores. The weird thing about his career is that his K/BB has been all right for most part of it including this year.

Also, his BABIP suggests he was really unlucky last season and his luck hasn't improved much this season.

Those dips in his BABIP in 2004 and 2007 coincide with him posting .233 and .205 BA in those years. In years where he's hitting his norm, he's about a .265 hitter with a.340-370 OBP. A productive guy.
Therefore if Sexson works out, Cashman is a sharp guy, if it doesn't... well what the hell were we all expecting here? He's Richie Sexson.

Where To Now?
So... as of today, they are 3.5 games back on the Rays and 3 behind the Red Sox as they go to Boston. It's hard to say whether they really are ready to compete for the AL East, but the form guide would say the Yankees are red hot now, ready to make a move.

If the Yankees can take 2 of 3, then they would be showing they're serious as contenders, but it seems every time the Yankees have played the Rays and the Sawx this year, they've been edged out. The Al East really is a jungle and unless the Yankees can go back to beating up these teams with regularity this year, they're really on the outside looking in this year. God forbid it should become a seasonal trend.

UPDATE:

In a moment of whimsey, I screen-shot the google-earth shot of the current Yankee stadium. There's no sign of the new one going up, but on a moment's flash I thought, "better get that while it's there!

Obituaries - The Australian Film Industry

A Doco On Australian Genre Movies!
There's a film doing the rounds that chronicles the genre film days of the Australian cinema. Yes, the on that would occasionally make some money, but above all, the politically-correct cadre spent a hysterical amount of energy burying. I hope they're happy with the industry they have now. Here's an article here sent in by Pleiades.

THE official history of Australian cinema records that the modern industry flourished in the 1970s on the back of new interest and investment from prime ministers John Gorton and Gough Whitlam.

A clutch of well-received art films by directors who would become respected Hollywood figures, such as Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce and Peter Weir, consolidated that investment.

The reality, of course, was more complex and, for some, a little more embarrassing. The '70s also generated a raft of genre films that were culturally regressive, provocative and occasionally very successful.

The Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple films are the best-remembered commercial beachheads for what became a fertile period for soft porn (including The Naked Bunyip and Pacific Banana), action (The Man From Hong Kong), horror (Dead-End Drive In, Patrick) and thriller films (Turkey Shoot, Road Games, Long Weekend).

Many were atrocious, particularly in the '80s as mediocrity flourished under the 10BA legislation that allowed film investors to claim a 150 per cent tax concession.

But most were ambitious and, despite their narrative shortcomings, they often recouped their money or played well overseas.

"Whether these films are good or bad, there's certainly an energy you don't find in a lot of contemporary Australian cinema," says Mark Hartley, the director of a loving, frenetic and very funny paean to this forgotten period of Australian cinema, titled Not Quite Hollywood.

"There was an enthusiasm and a can-do attitude in them that possibly doesn't exist today," he says.

Hartley's film is an exercise in can-do. The Melburnian's energy and scholarship excited the interest of some early investors but notthe Film Finance Corporation, which rejected funding for the film despite its historical significance.

"The FFC was a major, major stumbling block," Hartley says. "I could be totally wrong but I always got the sense we were suffering the same fate these films do, that we were still being seen as a documentary that wasn't necessarily worthy enough.

"It's not the public's reaction to these films that has remained; what has remained is the critics' reactions, which were scathing. When you talk to anyone who saw them or worked on them, they're fond and not embarrassed by these films."

Sometimes it just makes you want to cry when you think about the opportunities lost.

Rambo

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'The Abortion of Cool'

I've Finally Put Something Out

Self-Publishing always gets this look down people's noses. It's a condescending, smug, patronising look that makes you shrink back into your hole. Somehow if you can convince a publisher or a label your stuff ought to be in print and get them to take financial risks, then your material is somehow more worthy than if you took your own risks.

I don't know that self-published stuff is always so bad, even considering McGonigal's poetry and whatever else that's been vanity-published. What iCompositions has revealed to me is that plenty of people have material lying around - it's actually hard to get to the market place. This is true in books, music, films, videos; I've spent most of my working career in the production end, I should know.

I've met publishers who were more interested in shagging their cute blonde editors than actually *gulp* reading my manuscript; and I've met label guys who are just so high on coke, their sentences are unintelligible; and I've met studio executives who had the courage and conviction of a sparrow; and I have workd for a guy who used to produce and direct market his own stuff to the market he thought was there. The lessons are there if you choose to look at it.

I sort of think that the validation given by the intermediary corporation is nice on the one hand, but it also means they get their snouts into the trough of your creativity. It's the old, "what's the label done for us?" question that has plagued vexed, tormented and humiliated musicians for a long time. Why can't the musician shoulder his/her own risks and get a product out? The ambivalence about all this has actually paralysed me from actually doing something with the pile of music I've produced.

And so we come to the internet age where making one copy of a CD is somehow viable, provided you do your own work. Anyway, seeing that I won't be looking for that record deal, then it seems obvious I ought to at least try this thing out; and seeing that I've never been sure how many of you out there might want an album by me, I've held off on going down this path, but I'm finally at a point where I feel it's worth investigating this path.

'The Abortion of Cool' is now available from lulu.com.
Do yourself a favor and buy it! :)

Movie Doubes

What's Violent And Goes Smash In The Dark?
Just continuing on with the weird project of connecting 2 films that seem impossible to connect... The only thing that connects these films is the fact that I saw both this week.


Connecting some thinking on these two films is going to be hard, but here goes:

The Strong Do As They Do - 'The Incredible Hulk' and 'Mongol'

If you had to think of one thing that connects the incredible Hulk and Genghis Khan, it has to be violence and display of strength. After all, it was very difficult to reason with the Mongol Hordes that streamed out of the steppes in the 13th century, as it is probably difficult to reason with a main character who gets two words of coherent dialogue in a movie: "Hulk!" "SMASH!"

Gone are the meditation on such topics as "with great strength comes great responsibility", or "Truth, Justice and the American Way." It's just a smash-fest in The Incredible Hulk, so much so that you think the violence of being a medieval Mongol is entirely acceptable.

It's a tough sell, selling the Hulk, I think. At its best the story of the Hulk has its strongest antecedent in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", yet the profound origins of the story are always given short shrift. Once the Hulk manifests out of the Bruce Banner rage, he is such a pure expression of infantile rage that any hope of articulating something falls out of the picture pretty quickly. The character of Bruce Banner and the Hulk are only in theory two aspects of the same persona. So the comic book and old TV stories simply concentrate on the action - and th action is always destruction.

This problem in story-telling continues into The Hulk's movie excursion. The funniest moment in the new Hulk movie comes early. Ed Norton's Bruce Banner futilely tries to tell his Brazillian tormentors to back off, in a badly executed Portuguese. He tells them not to make him hungry because they won't like him when he's hungry. It's a cute moment that reference the old TV series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno.

In contrast, Temujin (who later becomes Genghis Khan) is by comparison quite garrulous compared to the Hulk. In a film with little dialogue but each and every line weighted with meaning, Temujin as played by Tadanobu Asano seems like a hard-boiled stoic character. Nobody really says much, which lands the film in line with the fine tradition of Russian Cinema where characters rarely are talkative. Neither film is interested in smart dialogue, although in the case of 'The Incredible Hulk' it is severely limited by the character.

What is fascinating about 'Mongol' is that Temujin is shown to lose and lose again, but he keeps coming back. The film is relatively disinterested in mechanical details such as locks or chains or horse-riding equipment, instead it is deeply interested in how emotionally stark the existence of a young Mongol warrior might have been. As an exploration of the nature of strength it is quite incredibly I might add, a compelling re-telling of Conan the Barbarian. Indeed, the plot points are very similar. Both Conan and Temujin are made to become men early when their fathers are slain before their eyes. They are both then sent into servitude, bot have stocks placed around their necks, both go on to become strong warriors, both then go on to become great kings, but that story is not told within the film.

Instead, both The Incredible Hulk and Mongol are deeply concerned with what characters do in tests of strengths instead of what they say. The Hulk protects a woman, but he smashes everything else. Temujin protects the woman he loves, but he comes to rewrite Mongol customs. Strength itself becomes a cipher for understanding something else.

Making And Remaking

The Incredible Hulk comes to the screen in the footsteps of the 2003 Hulk movie directed by Ang Lee, starring Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly. While the Hulk afficianados dis-endorsed the earlier film, I have to say it has a lot going for it as a film. Ang Lee's study of family relationships casting a long shadow which turns into repressed anger, is a fine, Freudian interpretation of the Dr. Jekyll story.

While I always find the first film in Super Hero film series tedious because they have to go through the problem of telling how the hero comes into being, the 2003 Hulk movie deftly navigates through the emotional curves of that story. While the core fans of the Hulk may dislike its explorations of the family, it's actually a well-crafted movie about people which happens to feature the Hulk.

The reboot remake of the current Hulk movie actually rushes through the origin story as a montage at the start, which is nice - I'm actually a little sick of Act 1 action where the main character waits to get bitten or irradiated or discovers he's from another planet, or whatever else creates the hero; so that is refreshing.

The problem is the rest of the script. The current Hulk must be one of the least articulate, least emotionally considered films I've seen in some time. the dialogue is flat out awful. It's like a 12 year old directed something written by a ten year old. The scenes between Liv Tyler and Ed Norton ring false, and leave you feeling very embarrassed for the actors. William Hurt is unrecognisable as the fine actor that he is, as he tumbles through the film with bombastic line after bombastic line. yes, it's a comic book movie, but why would you cast William Hurt for this dross? If iron Man was over-cast and worked because of it, this film fails to deliver the same effect simply because the script is too awful.

'Mongol' too is like a hero movie that dwells on the making of the hero. Genghis Khan wasn't always Genghis Khan. When he was Temujin, he was just a vulnerable little squirt who is every bit a victim of circumstance as the next Mongolian. The whole movie seems to show us that Genghis Khan was a four time loser before he even found his feet as a minor chieftain, and the only explanation the Mongols had for his ascent was that it was destiny.

Oddly enough, there was a huge Genghis Khan movie made by the Japanese only last year. A lot could be said about comparing the two Genghis Khan movies. Both 'Mongol' and 'The Blue Wolf' derive their sources from 'The Secret Histories of the Mongols', but 'Mongol takes a great deal of license with what happened to Temujin between when he was 25 and 35. It's in this part that the film takes on a sword and sorcery feel. In any case, Genghis Khan who is a cultural hero to the Mongols and Chinese and a feared conqueror to most other nations, is shown not to have been autochthonus. He was a product of his time and place.

What is surprising is that there have only ever been about 5 movie renditions of Genghis Khan, including the immensely awful John Wayne vehicle 'The Conqueror' I touched upon the other day when discussing 'Indy Jones 4'. There is also a 'Genghis Khan' starring Omar Sharif. I have an ever-so-vague recollection of this film, and a memory of it being oddly misshapen, thank to a largely English-Lawrence-of-Arabia kind of casting. In that sense 'Mongol' is a huge breakthrough in that at least the Russians cast Asians in these roles.

The Monster In the Imagination, The Monster In History

Both the Hulk and Temujin, while being the eponymous heroes of their respective films, are ironically seen as monsters. The rage of the Hulk is every bit as monstrous as the sacking of a city by the Mongols that we read about. Even in the Marvel Comic universe, it's actually quite hard to put a straight up 'good' or 'evil' label on the Hulk. Here's the Wikipedia write-up:

The Hulk
During the experimental detonation of a gamma bomb, scientist Bruce Banner rushes to save a teenager who has driven onto the testing field. Pushing the teen, Rick Jones, into a trench, Banner himself is caught in the blast, absorbing massive amounts of radiation. He awakens later in an infirmary, seeming relatively unscathed, but that night transforms into a lumbering grey form that breaks through the wall and escapes. A soldier in the ensuing search party dubs the otherwise unidentified creature a "hulk".[16]
The original version of the Hulk was often shown as simple and quick to anger. His first transformations were triggered by sundown, and his return to Banner by dawn. However, in Incredible Hulk #4, Banner started using a Gamma ray device to transform at will.[17] In more recent Hulk stories, emotions trigger the change. Although grey in his debut, difficulties for the printer led to a change in his color to green. In the origin tale, the Hulk divorces his identity from Banner’s, decrying Banner as "that puny weakling in the picture".[16] From his earliest stories, the Hulk has been concerned with finding sanctuary and quiet,[3] and often is shown reacting emotionally to situations quickly. Grest and Weinberg call Hulk the "...dark, primordial side of [Banner's] psyche."[18]. Even in the earliest appearances, Hulk spoke in the third person. The Hulk retains a modest intelligence, thinking and talking in full sentences, and Lee even gives the Hulk expository dialogue in issue six, allowing readers to learn just what capabilities the Hulk has, when the Hulk says, “But these muscles ain't just for show! All I gotta do is spring up and just keep goin'!" In Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics, Les Daniels addresses the Hulk as an embodiment of cultural fears of radiation and nuclear science. He quotes Jack Kirby thus: "As long as we're experimenting with radioactivity there's no telling what may happen, or how much our advancements may cost us." Daniels continues "The Hulk became Marvel's most disturbing embodiment of the perils inherent in the atomic age."[19]
Though usually a loner, the Hulk helped to form both the Avengers[20] and the Defenders.[21] He was able to determine that the changes were now triggered by emotional stress.[22]
Fantastic Four #12 (March 1963), featured the Hulk's first battle with the Thing. Although many early Hulk stories involve General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross trying to capture or destroy the Hulk, the main villain is often, like Hulk, a radiation based character, like the Gargoyle or the Leader, along with other foes such as the Toad Men, or Asian warlord General Fang. Ross' daughter, Betty, loves Banner and criticizes her father for pursuing the Hulk. General Ross' right-hand man, Major Glenn Talbot, also loves Betty and is torn between pursuing the Hulk and trying to gain Betty's love more honorably. Rick Jones serves as the Hulk's friend and sidekick in these early tales.
Stan Lee and others have compared The Hulk in these early tales to the misunderstood creature Frankenstein's Monster[3], a concept Lee had wanted to explore. Lee also compared Hulk to the Golem of Jewish myth. [3] In The Science of Superheroes, Gresh and Weinberg see the Hulk as a reaction to the Cold War [18] and the threat of nuclear attack, an interpretation shared by Weinstein in Up, Up, and Oy Vey.[3] Kaplan calls Hulk ‘schizophrenic’.[15] Jack Kirby has also commented upon his influences in drawing the character, recalling as inspiration the tale of a mother who rescues her child who is trapped beneath a car. [23]
In the 1970s, Hulk was shown as more prone to anger and rage, and less talkative. Writers played with the nature of his transformations,[24] briefly giving Banner control over the change, and the ability to maintain control of his Hulk form.
Hulk stories began to involve other dimensions, and in one, Hulk met the empress Jarella. Jarella used magic to bring Banner’s intelligence to Hulk, and came to love him, asking him to become her mate. Though Hulk returned to Earth before he could become her king, he would return to Jarella's kingdom of K'ai again.
When Bill Mantlo took on writing duties, he led the character into the arena of political commentary when Hulk traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel, encountering both the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish Israeli heroine Sabra. Soon after, Hulk encountered the Arabian Knight, a Bedouin superhero.[3]
Under Mantlo's writing, a mindless Hulk was sent to the "Crossroads of Eternity", where Banner was revealed to have suffered childhood traumas which engendered Bruce's repressed rage.[25]

All that is in a way illustrative of the ambivalence that exists around the Hulk as a character. Contrast this with this writeup of Genghis Khan in wikipedia:

Negative views of Genghis Khan are very persistent within histories written by many different cultures, from various different geographical regions. They often cite the cruelties and destructions brought upon by Mongol armies. However, other authors cite positive aspects of Genghis Khan's conquests. Genghis Khan is credited with bringing the Silk Road under one cohesive political environment. This allowed increased communication and trade between the West, Middle East and Asia, thus expanding the horizons of all three cultural areas. Some historians have noted that Genghis Khan instituted certain levels of meritocracy in his rule, and was tolerant of different religions.[citations needed] In much of modern-day Turkey, Genghis Khan is looked on as a great military leader, and it is popular for male children to carry his title as name.[17]

Traditionally Genghis Khan had been revered for centuries among the Mongols, and also among other ethnic groups like the Turks, largely because of his association with Mongol statehood, political and military organization, and his historic victories in war. He eventually evolved into a larger-than-life figure chiefly among the Mongols.
During the communist period, Genghis Khan was often described as reactionary, and positive statements about him were generally avoided.[18] In 1962, the erection of a monument at his birthplace and a conference held in commemoration of his 800th birthday led to criticism from the Soviet Union, and resulted in the dismissal of Tömör-Ochir, a secretary of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee. In the early 1990s, when democracy was established in Mongolia, the memory of Genghis Khan with the Mongolian traditional national identity has had a powerful revival. Genghis Khan became the central figure of the national identity. He is now a source of pride for Mongolians with ties to their historic roots. For example, it is not uncommon for Mongolians to refer to Mongolia as "Genghis Khan's Mongolia," to themselves as "Genghis Khan's children," and to Genghis Khan as the "father of the Mongols" especially among the younger generation. His name and likeness are endorsed on products, streets, buildings, and other places. His face can be found on everyday commodities, from liquors to the largest denominations of 500, 1000, 5000 and 10,000 Mongolian tögrög (₮). Mongolia's main international airport has been renamed Chinggis Khaan International Airport, and major Genghis Khan statues have been erected before the parliament[19] and near Ulaanbaatar. There have been repeated discussions about regulating the use of his name and image to avoid trivialization.[20] In summary, Mongolians see him as the fundamental figure in the founding of the Mongol Empire, and therefore the basis for Mongolia as a country.
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In Iraq and Iran, he is looked on as a destructive and genocidal warlord who caused enormous damage and destruction.[24] Similarly, in Afghanistan (along with other non-Turkic Muslim countries) he is generally viewed unfavorably though some groups display ambivalency as it is believed that the Hazara of Afghanistan are descendants of a large Mongol garrison stationed therein.[25][26] The invasions of Baghdad and Samarkand caused mass murders, such as when portions of southern Khuzestan were completely destroyed. His descendant Hulagu Khan destroyed much of Iran's northern part. Among the Iranian peoples he is regarded as one of the most despised conquerors of Iran, along with Alexander and Tamerlane.[27][28] In much of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Hungary, Genghis Khan and his regime are credited with considerable damage and destruction. Presently Genghis Khan, his descendants, his generals, and the Mongol people are remembered for their ferocious and destructive conquests by the region's history books.

So there you have it. I think the relative difficulty both characters are having in the marketplace is a result of these ambivalences. On the one hand, there is the fascination with the total destruction channeled through anger that we see in the Hulk, but also the abjection towards the loss of reason. Then there is the legacy of Genghis Khan who is at once a great builder of nation as well as destroyer. If it's impossible to make a film about Adolf Hitler casting him in a positive light today, then it is not surprising that it is hard to pitch the character of Genghis Khan as a positive protagonist today, 800 years later.

In some ways, it can be argued that no matter how well you could make a Hulk Movie or a Genghis Khan movie, there's an upper limit as to just how much acceptance there will be for it in the marketplace. That doesn't invalidate these ventures as films - just contextualises them in a rather shallow, unreflective marketplace.

Violence Fetishism
As meditations on violence go, neither film offers any terribly rewarding insight. It has to be noted that in both films we see directors who are intrinsically interested in violence as both films dwell on the moment of impact or moment of slashing in a way that is totally in line with action cinema since the advent of 'first-person-shooter computer games. While I do like a bit of biffo on the screen, I sort of wonder when we're going to move out of this current fetishising-of-violence phase and go back to a more stripped down portrayal. There's too much glamour in the destruction in both films, and not enough weight to just who is getting killed. An extreme version of this film was '300', but it's actually quite widespread.

If the Hulk smashes something, should we really be feeling an aesthetic delight in how things disintegrate? if the Mongols hack and slay in slow motion and we see th spurts of blood, should the director really be dwelling on those moments than say, the moment when he is given a key to unlock his shackles? It's really not a moral question or even an ethical one - it's an aesthetic one, and therefore more poignant to ask than if it were moral or ethical. Do we really like our violence portrayed this way?

In my next installment, I'm going tackle the fourth Rambo movie, so stay tuned. :)