Greenberg, actor Greta Gerwig

Nexflix and Disney and Money, Oh My!

Just a quick check-in on the latest way Netflix is throwing its money at the future.

Financial reporters, who are still thinking that every little thing Netflix does is magic, talked about the deal as though Reed Hastings pulled a rabbit out of the hat after levels of conversation about Netflix overspending for content grew at a digital conference this week.

Funny.

About $200 million a year, for one year, to stream ABC, ABC Family, and Disney Channel reruns. Hmmm…

So what does this tell us? It tells us that $17 million a month is more than Disney is making from ads and the early stages of subscriptions on Hulu. It tells us that Disney is at least a way from launching its own digital delivery platform. And it tells us, yet again, that Netflix is anxiously trying to settle its position in the industry before the wheels come off.

We don’t know, by the way, whether Netflix is even getting exclusive streaming rights for this big (for 2011) price tag.

We do know, however, that Netflix is now paying as much to stream television reruns from one multi-platform company as they are for the feature film streaming rights for Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate combined in the EPIX deal.

We also know that the more companies Netflix pays these exorbitant prices to, the more unhappy all of their other partners become. This would be the time for someone – Chris McGurk? – to fortify Blockbuster and to steal every one of the indie streaming deals Netflix currently sports. Because the Studios Streaming Through A True Third-Party Bubble (as opposed to building a brand like Hulu, that might bring together multiple brands, but which they own themselves) is going to make the DVD Bubble look like it lasted forever. Unless Netflix triples its already quite large customer base or gets the base they have to pay more for streaming, competing for content on price is not a viable long-term option for the company. It’s not complicated. It’s just math.

If Netflix were to do deals at these prices – which might be low in a couple of years – with just half the studios and broadcast/cable networks… and remember, this is just for re-runs and streaming films that have been in the post-theatrical marketplace for months… acquisition costs alone would be around $1.5 billion a year. Even at 20 million subscribers (and increase of 50%) at $8 a month, the gross revenue is just $1.9 billion. And that’s still just half the content and still just re-runs and still not exclusive. And scarier… the price might be low. Because if you are paying $15m a year to Disney per film title – not a deal that exists, but where roughly things are headed – how long will indie distributors settle for 5-figure annual deals? And the people who are die-hard Netflixers… the cinephiles who love the depth of non-mainstream content, no?

Disney is taking the money and running. Smart.

And Hulu? Just sit tight. If you start trying to compete with Netflix on price, you will be brought down even faster, as you don’t have the subscriber base and loyalty as a paid outlet. But Netflix can’t take on all of the industry at these prices. And when they have to start cutting bait, others will be the beneficiary. And if Netflix isn’t very, very careful, they will get caught in a deflated bubble – since digital inventory lasts exactly as long as the contract – and go down in a blaze of glory.

More likely, they will be bought by Sony and facilitate their digital future.

But I love that people think all this spending is a sign of strength and inevitability. Did I ever tell you the story about when AOL was allowed to eat Time-Warner? You see, they had this amazing stock price and…

12 Weeks To Oscar: The Battle Of Black Swan

THE LOVED/DESPISED – This one is the Battle of the title of this column. Black Swan. More than any film in the race, aside from Inception in its moment, Swannie is The buzz film. “I can’t believe they did that!” “But was she the one or was the other girl?” “Oh my GOD!” “I can’t wait to see it again!” “Worst film of the year!” (That last one is a direct quote from an Academy voter.)

Question is, is it Over-60s who will be the ones who hate it and make it impossible for it to win? Or will the buzz and some surprising box office make them stop and think about it again?

The rest….

The Social Network, actor Justin Timberlake

Non-Review – The Tourist

How does this happen twice in one year?

The script for The Tourist is better than the script for Knight & Day, but both were completely workable ideas with completely workable screenplays and each had two major movie stars who could absolutely deliver on the core idea of these films… retro Hitchcokian/Wilderian thrillers with a sense of humor and fun roles for their stars.

And both fail to deliver because both films picked the wrong director.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made a great film in The Lives of Others. It is intimate and smart and demanding… which is not only the opposite of what The Tourist is, but is the opposite of the intent of The Tourist. It’s palpable from the first scenes of the film… something is amiss… the film is like watching a woman in a very tight pencil skirt trying to trudge through 2 foot deep mud while showing no signs of the difficulty on her face. What the HELL are they up to? It’s not Mission: Impossible (or Salt). It’s not really a drama. And if it’s meant to be mysterious, perhaps they needed to have something real to unravel. And then Depp shows up… in a comedy performance. He and Jolie work haaaaard to try to make it work. But this terrific director… uh… how to put it…

They had a romantic thriller that might well have starred Cary Grant and Grace Kelly… light on its feet… airy… funny… and they hired a German director!!!!

With due respect to Germans who have a gift for light comedy… seriously… I loved Mostly Martha, but even that director would not be the right fit for this material.

Oy.

And Knight & Day? James Mangold has delivered big for pretty much every movie star he has ever worked with. Nominations and good box office all over the place. And K&D wasn’t a disaster, financially or creatively. But it needed a light touch that the director of Walk The Line, Girl, Interrupted, and Copland was not the right guy. I have come to like and appreciate Mangold more and more over the years. But funny? No.

It reminds you of how delicate good movies are. And how really talented people can be just the wrong people for a particular project.

The script for The Tourist is, I think, better… but I think Knight & Day is the better film. But both films could well have been great fun for audiences… romps that would be watched over and over again… the kind of films that make you smile – and stop – when you remote past them on your cable/satellite when they get there, just for a moment, and then dragging you in.

But they aren’t. Sigh.

127 Hours: Below The Line Superstars

Director Danny Boyle and Production Designer/Costumer Suttirat Larlarb

Cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak

Sound Designer Glenn Freemantle and Composer/Songwriter A.R. Rahman

The NC-17

We can engage in a discussion… or not. But it seems like it might be a good time for a brief look at the NC-17 and it’s subtext.

First, there was the X. Jack Valenti – former head of the MPAA – was forever making excuses about “an adult rating” by noting that “X” was not owned by MPAA, so they could not control the use of it, allowing it to be blurred with “pornography.” (make your own definitions within all air quotes offered)

Still, he refused to get MPAA and CARA serious about a rating that would restrict serious films with material meant for adults to an adult audience.

And then, the NC-17.

Now, keep in mind… MPAA IS The Major Studios (and the faded MGM). It makes choices based on the vested interest of those studios.

CARA owns NC-17. And the only real protection from “porn”… and it is a real one… is a big fee for submitting a film. Would there be any commercial benefit to having an NC-17 for a film that is a bunch of scenes strung together around implants and Viagra-enhanced members? None that I can think of.

But what NC-17 does do, starting with Henry & June and for the last 20 years in which fewer than 20 films have been released with the rating, is restrict the boundaries of films that studios intend to release. There is no question that any restriction on viewership will reduce audience, even if only in a marginal way. But dollars are dollars. If NC-17 worked, some filmmakers would insist on having the freedom to go out with an NC-17. With a string of commercial failures (high domestic gross, $20.4m for Showgirls), any studio can make the argument that NC-17 is just not a viable option. And indeed, virtually every film made for studios and aimed at adults restricts the filmmaker to a R-rated cut.

The argument of where the line is… that’s the kind of argument that Jack Valenti loved. Because it wasn’t about what is really happening, but about some undefined sense of morality in a group of parents. And as he always said, CARA is about the parents. And so, it is. And the truth is, for the most part, CARA works.

Do they allow for violence in a way they do not allow for sex? Absolutely.
Do they use their power against indie distributors more freely than they do against their member studios? Absolutely.
Should any filmmaker be forced to make their movie “more adult” in order to remove material to get the rating they are really after without losing their real darlings? Absolutely not.

Is it censorship? Not really. Commercial censorship is a choice. If your financial stake does not force you to worry about the rating, good on you. If it does, you have made a choice and there are some uncomfortable realities that come with that.

But it’s a damned shame that we don’t have – and never had – an adult rating that works for filmmakers and distributors. I don’t know that there would ever be a $100 million grossing NC-17 film. But I think some work with serious sexual themes that are not primarily exploitative would be a worthy goal for a small slice of the filmmakers working in this art form. Let the audience decide what kind of work it will support.

But corporate thinking tends to be about contracting, not expanding. Same as it ever was…

Review – True Grit (2010) (Spoiler-Free)

True Grit is a true Coen Bros film. Its answers breathe in its seams.

The movie opens with a quotation from Proverbs 28:1. Well, half of a quotation.

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth”

That’s a western.

The rest of the quotation, which they chose not to include… “but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

That’s a Coen Bros movie.

Because True Grit is a movie about bold lions who are sometimes righteous, sometimes not. They pay for their self-righteousness in tangible ways that, perhaps, are not so comfortable for audiences. They leave aside their righteousness when it suits. They step beyond animal boldness, reactive and immediate, and sometimes decide to play God.

The first image in True Grit is a blur… a face, made of light, as a voiceover tells us a story about the past. Slowly, the shot comes into focus. It is a house. Mattie Ross’ house. The snow falls over the dead body of her father. Everything has a cost.

We meet Mattie for the first time in Fort Smith, far from home, seeking to settle arraignments for her murdered father. She is accompanied by a black man, a servant of some stripe, to whom she is polite, but feels, at 14, completely comfortable dismissing when she is no longer in need of him.

It’s a remarkable portrait by Hallie Steinfeld. At first, her speech is a bit off-putting. The Coens wrote the film in a kind of period dialect. I have no idea whether they were going for some kind of authenticity or not. But start with extremely limited use of abbreviation and go from there. Steinfeld is a young actor working through this stylized language. Phrases that will eventually pepper conversation include, “You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements,” “There is no clock on my business,” and “This ain’t no coon hunt.”

But Steinfeld is also playing a character who is using every tool she can to convince others that she has control of her circumstances. She’s also trying to convince herself. The journey will turn her into what she is trying to embody, for better or for worse.

The scenes between Mattie Ross and Colonel Stonehill (Dakin Matthews) are some early comic relief and a show that Mattie is already good enough at Jedi mind tricks to drive weak-minded men to distraction. The scene, while very similar to the one on the earlier film version of Grit, is dynamic in a way that the first film – in which the Stonehill role was played by the great Strother Martin – can’t touch.

If you take a look at the 1969 film, this will be a recurring reality for you. It’s remarkable how much of the dialogue seems to be exactly the same in both films, almost as though The Coens made an exercise of it. But you rarely can see a glimmer of similarity between the two movies. It is, to over simplify film history, like color and black + white. Henry Hathaway’s True Grit is basically classic filmmaking, a testament to film up until that point. The style was so often imitated in television westerns, it has lost a layer of cinematic umph. It can be a bit creaky. It relies a lot on John Wayne being John Wayne. Glen Campbell is not bad… but not very good. Even Dennis Hopper is a bit lost. (His battles with Hathaway are legend.) Only Robert Duvall raises the bar. But Ned Pepper is also one of the best-written characters.

This is Mattie’s story, 100%. But Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn is the Han Solo to her Leia/Luke. He’s funny, dangerous, and in a terribly odd way, almost sexy. He is not an anarchist. He’s a drunk and a cynic, but he has a code (left unspoken, for the most part) and he pays death no mind. He is maturity.

(ADD. 8:14a, 12/9) Jeff Bridges puts on Cogburn like an old shoe. Bridges is a very unusual performer, as he has had this quiet ease with characters for most of his career, but when he was younger, his ease was almost uncomfortable. He’s not really a straight character actor. He is uniquely himself and that singularity is the singularity of a movie star. But he fully embraces weird, Dusting Hoffman but with movie star looks. He has a grand old time here, but without ever one-eyed winking to the audience, never demanding that we love him, never trying to steal the scene. Remarkable.

Of course, there is no romantic element in a film about a 14-year-old girl and a man in his 60s. But this is not a romantic film. It’s a coming of age film. And though Leia and Han end up together, Luke’s maturity is shaped as much by Han as by Obi-Wan and Yoda. They teach him what kind of man to be while Han teaches Luke how to be a man.

On the other side is Matt Damon’s La Boeuf. Sure to be the most underappreciated – at first – performance in the film, Damon carves out a comic gem. Again, he is another character is righteous and wicked at the same time. He shows himself to be capable of terribly inappropriate behavior towards women and a disregard for morality. But he also is, at times, a real hero. In some ways, he seems to be the young Cogburn, before the challenges that truly seasoned him… and in some ways crushed parts of his personality.

One of the things I find fascinating about The Coens’ True Grit, which is not true of Hathaway’s, is the lack of any women in the film of child-bearing age, except for Mattie. I don’t mean a lack of significant female characters. I mean a void of any women 13-45 other than background players. There are two women of post-menopausal age and two girls who are pre-menstral. Is the entire film, perceived through Mattie’s eyes from the very first frame, a tale about how Mattie sees men in the world, both defining her perception and explaining it? Maybe. Ask me after I have seen it a few more times.

Another element of this is a disconnection from the emotion of death. Yes, it was a different time. But the matter-of-factness of some of it, the recurring theme of Mattie finding herself sleeping in the presence of death, should not be take for granted. It is clearly both text and subtext.

Unlike Hathaway’s Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey), The Coens don’t bring Josh Brolin and his character into the film until it is time for confrontation, midway into the third act. In The Coens’ world, Tom Chaney is the MacGuffin. It isn’t the result of the confrontation, but the journey that matters. Of course, being the genius contrarians they are, the Coens make a “classic western” moment out of the confrontation… but it’s more than that.

This dichotomy in the film mirrors the dichotomy of the film. It does all the things it is supposed to do to be a classic kind of entertainment. Late in the film, as a confrontation develops, two characters watch and the Coens’ frame is much like a drive-in theater… a natural upside down proscenium.

But the film also, without often declaring its intentions, is subverting the genre. Retribution is not a happy thing. Cogburn knows this. La Boeuf is still learning. Mattie is a precocious child who has lost her guiding force in her father.

And did I mention, it’s hella entertaining too?

Barry Pepper kills, literally and figuratively, as “Lucky” Ned Pepper. I mentioned Dakin Matthews already. Side characters like “Bear Grit” (played by Ed Corbin), the town Sherrif played by Leon Russom, the Undertaker (Jarlath Conroy), and the dynamic duo of Emmett Quincy and Moon, played by Paul Rae and Domhnall Gleeson… all gloriously specific and odd and engaging.

And need I tell you, it’s the most beautiful damned western, probably ever. As I said before, the technology is so different; it’s almost apples and oranges. And this isn’t The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was also shot by the amazing Roger Deakins. It’s not style that you would notice. And it’s not Unforgiven (shot by Jack Green), that was beautiful and used the modern technology to its advantage, but was also revisionist, so never too beautiful, except when around dead bodies and torch light. This film is lush, but realistic. Deakins’ ninth Cinematography nomination may finally be the one he wins… too long in coming.

The Coens, dealing in some cases with the imagery of chases and gunfights which they haven’t really done before, are masters of simple elegance. There are a couple of sequences built around a small house in the middle of nowhere. The patience they show, allowing the audience to follow the action, never anxious for more, is wonderful.

I still don’t have “the answers” to True Grit. I know that each time I have seen it, I spent much of the rest of the day in no small sadness. Emotion comes late to True Grit, unless you have already seen it and are experiencing it again. But it refuses to offer the audience the out of experiencing the story through simple perspective of Cogburn. That would be a John Wayne movie. This is a Coen Bros movie. It’s Mattie. We’re Mattie.

More when people have seen the film and we can get into a good spoiler-heavy chat…

F. Murray Transformer

Bringing Anthony Breznican’s Twitter joke – “Transformers: Dark of the Moon gets a teaser. Is that an F. Murray Abraham-bot?” – to you in living color.

Blue Valentine, actor Michelle Williams

Poll du Jour: Friends Who Lick Friends

Congratulations to Blue Valentine for getting CARA to overturn one of their more stupid calls in recent history.

Amazingly, DP/30 has now interviewed three of the four on-screen receivers of controversial pleasure. And didn’t feel compelled to talk to any of them about this particular onscreen act, though I feel a Hollywood Reporter cover coming on!

It’s an odd landmark, The Year The Movies Licked Ladies. And all four films show the act expressed with very different intent and outcomes. You know, like life. But that’s just what I think. What do you think?

EDIT, 5:36p – Sorry, but I forgot a film and the voting must start again! If you want to see the original poll, click here)

Biutiful, actor Javier Bardem

Apologies

I have been neglecting my blogging recently. It’s been an embarrassment of riches. The next week of DP/30 is kinda mindblowing, I think… and the last week’s have been pretty great. But between all activities, I have had, for instance, one tricky blog entry sitting in the dock, waiting to be finished, for 3 days already. Insane. And that doesn’t even include a review of True Grit, a beautiful, complex movie that requires me to be thinking with absolute clarity when I write to do it justice.

I’m not complaining. For most, the stuff I’m turning down each week in this high season rush would be a feast. I get that. Thrilled to be overwhelmed with great stuff, but frustrated that I am not getting my daily output out.

So… apologies…

The Fighter, actor Melissa Leo

Blue Valentine, writer/director Derek Cianfrance