What It Is, My Man, and What It Will Be...

If you are the sort of person who is nice and polite and checks back regularly with websites you enjoy and wonders sometimes why a website for which you retain a particular admiration doesn't update more frequently, then this post is for you.

Of course, I would not dare to presume that my humble website might be counted amongst those sites for which you hold particular admiration, but on the off-chance that it is to be counted within that group, then please let your eyes drift downward.

I have not posted on The Cinema 4 Pylon since July 10, and that post was Part 1 of what was meant to be a multi-part excursion into the world of straight-to-video action thrillers, a genre which I have largely avoided in recent years. The post was triggered by an impromptu and cheap DVD purchase in a Wal-Mart in my then just-completed holiday trip up to my home state of Alaska, and there was never meant to be a two-month gap between the first part and even the merest mention of the second part.

The last thing I posted before that was on the day after I returned from my trip to Alaska on July 7. It too was Part 1 of what was meant to be a multi-part excursion into something completely different, this time into a personal history of Disneyland and how my sense of the place was completely warped by a seemingly innocent children's book in my youth. The Part 2 and the Part 3 to that Part 1 were already written by that point – in fact, were written even before I left for my Alaska trip at the end of June – but I started to rethink the piece after I posted Part 1, and so has now been sitting in limbo until I have time to revisit it again. But it is the same story as with the first Part 1 I mentioned... it was never meant to get to this place.

So, why have I not been posting on here?

Well, a myriad of reasons. I can give those reasons in a list, but such lists turn into excuses, and then it just becomes a case of lying to myself. Basically, what I am saying in the end is that the Pylon became less important to me than everything else in my life. 

That isn't true, of course: the Cinema 4 Pylon is meant to be a representation of my mind, and my mind is all that I have going for me when all is said and done. What has happened is that I split that mind into too many fragments in recent months, and some of those fragments have taken on a life of their own unexpectedly.

THE SHARK FILM OFFICE

Most important to me of late has been the success I have been having in getting The Shark Film Office to finally take off its water wings. The Shark Film Office has been around since 2006, but I just never committed to it back then, and kind of wrote it off altogether, especially when I went through my darkest period a few years ago and almost completely stopped writing. When I turned the engines back on the Pylon last September, however, I then followed suit on my animation blog, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc. Once the Cel Bloc was up and running again to my satisfaction, I started to think seriously about The Shark Film Office and whether to revive it or not. There was a moment or two where my cursor hovered over the "Delete Blog" button (I, of course, had saved out all of my text elsewhere), but doing so seemed to trigger something in my head. I started thinking more and more about how I would do the site if really, truly committed to the shark site.

Knowing that Syfy had a full week of shark movies coming up at the end of July with six brand new premiere films was the kicker, and just before that was the latest edition of Discovery's Channel's Shark Week, which allowed me to expand to documentary reviews as well. But something happened on Google+ for me that allowed me to rethink my whole plan. I was getting a ridiculous amount of views on my Google+ page, far more than any of my friends on there were getting, and it was all happening since I started up the Pylon again last year. I don't know what triggered it, but now my Google+ posts were showing up high in search results for any subject on which I posted, most often in the Top 10 results. Sure, I would rather that the actual articles would show up in the search results instead – but, hey, a link is a link, and these results were translating into Rik-diculous numbers of views and in turn getting people to visit my websites.

THE DYNAMIC DUO

In this mix are a couple of other projects that my writing partner and erstwhile pal, Aaron Lowe, and I have been bashing out over the past few months that have also proven to be a lot of fun and get us a little notice lately: Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron and We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King in Print and on Film.

I have written about both of these projects on this website already, and you can find out more on both by visiting the links to them above or going into my bio page. Of course, we have run into some difficulties in not just maintaining both of our own original sites (his is Working Dead Productions) when we spread ourselves out a tad thin with not just extra blogs, but also in maintaining a working life and a family life. In my case, I had been out of work for well over a year, which has allowed me a lot of free writing time and given me an opportunity to revive the blogs and get my shit together in that regard. Additionally, I have a wife who works, but our only charge is a small cat. In Aaron's case, he has a regular job and a wife and daughter, though they expanded recently with the addition of a second newborn daughter. So, now his writing is often done with baby in one hand.

We have really enjoyed the first response to our first few attempts on both sites (the first several articles for each, you might recall, were split between our respective pages before we decided to build new sites for each title), and have big plans moving forward. Aaron and I are always throwing around ideas for a podcast, either audio or video, though I seem to be the one really holding us back in that regard.

COUNTDOWN TO HALLOWEEN

Coming up first though, is the annual Countdown to Halloween in October, something in which both Aaron and I have taken part in recent years, and plan to continue this year. Countdown to Halloween is a handy site which allows people who run Halloween-oriented blogs, or blogs related to horror, toys, candy, masks, costumes, etc., to gather in one place and have people who are into any of those topics easily find websites of interest. Taking part in the Countdown gives bloggers access to badges they can display on their site and allows them to expand their audience.

I don't know what Aaron has planned for his own site, but here is what I can tell you about two of mine and We Who Watch as well:

The Cinema 4 Pylon – Semi-regular posts throughout October on various monster toys in my collection, more about monster trading cards, Halloween music posts, and a couple more editions in my relatively new The Monster's on the Loose! series, where I discuss the horror-related films, shows and cartoons that were most instrumental in developing my interest in the genre when I was but a wee lad.

Cinema 4: Cel Bloc – I have articles on several cartoons planned for October, all with spooky themes (naturally), with a concentration on Walt Disney cartoons this time. Scheduled shorts to include Lonesome Ghosts (1937), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949), Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! (1966), Spooks (1930), and Trick or Treat (1952).

We Who Watch Behind the Rows – Aaron and I are spending part of September reading Stephen King's first officially published novel Carrie (1974) and then watching the four film projects derived from it: Brian De Palma's seminal version (1976), the rather belated and unnecessary sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) with Emily Bergl, the unnecessary TV remake (2002) with Angela Bettis (who makes it watchable, of course), and the still unnecessary theatrical remake (2013) with Chloe Grace Moretz. Then we will post about all of them throughout the month of October. Sorry to tip my hand on the films, but I haven't rewatched them yet; those are just my opinions going into this process, having seen all of them before. [There is also a Filipino version of Carrie, though I doubt we will find a copy in time for this series.]

We have not discussed plans for a Halloween film or two on Visiting and Revisiting, but that may be because it is hard to find horror films that neither one of us hasn't seen already. The next film we plan to cover there is Miracle Mile, which we will hopefully get to in the next week or two.

BACK 2 THE BASE

The robustness of our combined plans, of course, are always going to be hampered and/or enhanced by what we do personally. Speaking for myself – and really, I probably shouldn't even be that bold – I have told you all of this without relating to you the good fortune of recent weeks: that I have started to pick up freelancing work. Yes, this means money, which is alway a good thing to have, but it has also meant a reduction in the amount of free time that I have at hand lately. It started out small, as a mere handful of hours that has blossomed into a great many more than I was anticipating, and it has been nice to be able to work completely from home and at my own pace. And now a second project has landed in my lap at the same time, so I am now having to learn how to balance this along with everything else. But I feel productive in a societal and monetary sense again, and this will helpfully keep the wolves at bay for a short period.

In the end, I will be posting here on the Pylon again regularly, I just need my schedule to align with my goals a little more. For now, blog-wise, I remain focused on the shark site online, but there is another contender for my time of which I have yet to speak except to a small handful of individuals. Even with this utterance, I hope that they shall remain mum as to its details in the public venue, especially in response to this posting.

I have committed myself to a personal writing project offline that will hopefully turn into a completed book over the next year's time. Knowing that I am a few months into the project will also give you another idea as to why The Cinema 4 Pylon has suddenly been relegated to second class citizen status within the universe of its own creation. More details will be released in coming months. Or not at all, if the entire thing goes kablooey on me. In which case, forget you ever read this...

RTJ

Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron... the Website!

http://visitingandrevisiting.blogspot.com/

Last October, my pal Aaron Lowe and I started a series of pieces on our respective sites called Visiting and Revisiting. The concept was that one of us picks a film with which he has a long history, but the catch is that it has to be a film that the other person has never seen before. Hence, one of us is revisiting the film, and the other is visiting for the first time. Then we discuss that film at great length.

We split the first five films we reviewed (and a special edition Oscars post) between The Cinema 4 Pylon here and Aaron's site, Working Dead Productions, and pretty much trusted that if people liked what they read that they would take the time to jump from one site to the other, back and forth, to finish the next portion. And, for the most part (as far we can tell from site stats), they have. But we talked about someday building a separate site for Visiting and Revisiting and letting the column live on its own.

That day has come... We finally decided to give the V&R column a site of its own, mainly because it was easier to have one place to send readers, rather than splitting each article up between two sites. As of today, our brand spanking new Visiting and Revisiting site is live!

Our first Visiting and Revisiting discussion on the new site is about Jean-Claude Van Damme's star-making, martial arts tournament fighting "classic," Bloodsport (1988). Bloodsport has been a favorite of mine since back in the day of its video release -- when I must have watched it about fifty times -- but that I hadn't watched for many years since I fell out of seeing Jean-Claude's films in the late '90s. And Aaron? He somehow missed out on the film totally, though he has pretty good reasons why. Well, we are both caught up now, and you can read about our reactions to Bloodsport in Part 1 by clicking here.

Part 2 of the Bloodsport discussion will be posted on Wednesday morning, and this Friday, we will have a Top Five or Ten post that relates in some way to Bloodsport, where we list our favorite films in a particular genre, etc. We have also transferred all of the old Visiting and Revisiting articles to the new site so that everything is in one handy-dandy, convenient storage facility. Eventually, we will add some other features to the site that you may find interesting as well.

Mostly, we hope you will enjoy all of it! See you over there!

http://visitingandrevisiting.blogspot.com/

Visiting and Revisiting: Starcrash (1978) Pt. 1

"What in the universe is that?!" -- Stella Star (Caroline Munro), Starcrash

This is Part I of a two-part discussion about Luigi Cozzi's 1978 Italian "rip-off" of Star Wars, Starcrash. To read the second part of this article, visit my pal Aaron Lowe's Working Dead Productions website at http://bit.ly/1Ro6vqH.

Rik: Considering that we very nearly flirted with the heavens in our last discussion regarding Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life [Wandâfuru raifu], I am crashing us right back down to earth by making us jump over to a "Z" picture like Starcrash. But when I found out that you had never seen the film, it seemed like perfect fodder for our Visiting and Revisiting column that we share across both of our websites. For the uninitiated, in Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron, we hold a prolonged discussion/dual review about a film of which one of us has a long and possibly intimate history but that the other one has never seen previously.

There is no point in my life where I could admit, after having seen it, that I thought Luigi Cozzi's Starcrash was what most would consider to be a "good" film. Despite some fun and often very silly effects, crazy set design, and a mostly game cast, the Italian-made Starcrash betrays at every turn its third-rate inspiration (and often outright burglary) derived from practically every science-fiction and fantasy film that ever came down the pike, but most especially the original Star Wars film, released to great and never-ending acclaim the year previous in 1977.

However, there was a point where I truly believed that Starcrash was going to turn out to be a great film. In the years of 1978 and 1979, long before the internet, the primary way that a young movie fan such as myself got all fired up for films that were yet to be released, outside of trailers shown at the movies and on TV, was through movie magazines. In my teen years, I was a huge fan of the later years of the original run of the highly influential Famous Monsters of Filmland. Around the same time that I was discovering Hammer horror films on late night TV and other science fiction classics on an afternoon matinee TV show, I had begun an addiction to Famous Monsters. I had no way of knowing that many of the articles were merely reprints of older material, but there were also articles about upcoming films. So what did I care when they were written? All of it was new to me, and I lapped it up like the aspiring horror novice that I was. Other magazines caught my eye -- titles like Starlog and Fantastic Films -- and unlike Famous Monsters -- which was cheap and pretty much newsprint -- these other mags were slick and in gorgeous full color with loads of photographs.

When I read those magazines and saw my first images of Caroline Munro dressed up in leather as Stella Star in the movie Starcrash, I knew instantly that I just had to see this picture. As a not quite teenage boy chock full of raging hormones, I was already deep in adoration over Ms. Munro. She was among my earliest crushes, and ranked pretty highly at that. I had already seen her on the movie screen in such films as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, At the Earth's Core, and The Spy Who Loved Me. In that last film, she was way hotter than Barbara Bach, but Bond dispatches her without a second thought while he makes off with Bach in his submarine car.) That Caroline was usually quite scantily clad in these parts made her all the more memorable, and like any youth in his near-to-early teen years, I was smitten. Starcrash summed it all up for me. I just had to see this film... but not just for Caroline. The images I saw in the movie magazines not only showed her in wonderful, lascivious detail, but also shots of the spaceships, and a giant robot chasing our heroine, and a lightsaber battle against two other robots. Even then, I knew it was clearly ripping off Star Wars (which I had already seen three or four times), but I didn't care. If Starcrash could get even somewhat close to replicating the style of the far superior film, then that would be all I needed. And Starcrash also had Caroline. How could it possibly be bad?

In 1979, after months of wondering whether I would ever get to see this film (we were not quite to the moment where video madness would change everything for me), Starcrash was released in America. Luckily, the film actually showed up in Anchorage, Alaska -- my hometown, though I grew up in a nearby town called Eagle River (to this day, it pisses me off to be told that Eagle River is merely a suburb of Anchorage, especially since there are 14 miles of unconnected wilderness between the two locations) -- and I went on a frantic campaign to get my family to go see Starcrash. My mother knew exactly why I wanted to see the film, but she was fine with me being all pervy about an actress twice my age. She drove us to the Totem Theatres in Anchorage for a night at the movies. In those waning days of the cinema double feature, Starcrash was paired up with Future World, which was also exciting to me since I had only recently seen Westworld on TV, and Future World was its direct sequel. But my mom opted to see another film that I don't remember, only that the second bill feature for that pairing was Old Dracula with David Niven. My brother Mark chose to go with my mom, and my youngest brother Chris stuck with me. But not for long, as it goes, as Chris grew bored very quickly with Future World, which we saw first, and I had to escort him to the other screen to leave him with my mom and Mark. (I remember being angry then, just as I would be today, that I missed a couple minutes of screen time to perform this task of familial responsibility.)

And my reaction to Starcrash? I was dumbfounded. The movie that I was sure was going to be a masterpiece was nothing but complete crap. Trying to show my mom that I had made the right decision that day and they were all fools for watching the other films (hey, Old Dracula is still no treat) I feigned joy openly at what confronted me in the theatre that day. Inside me, however, I believe it was the first time in my memory that I was actually sorely disappointed in a trip to the theatre. Seeing a movie in a theatre, even though the frequency went way up in my teen years, was still something of a novelty to me, having grown up in a smaller town outside of Anchorage where there were no real movie houses. I cherished every chance I got to go to the movies. (This is probably why I remember most of my visits so sharply.) But then it happened... Future World was nowhere near as cool as Westworld, and even then, the sense of being caught in an inferior, dull rehash swept over me. And after that debacle, Starcrash thoroughly broke my heart...

Aaron, I will relate the details of my initial disappointment at the film throughout our comments to come. But first, knowing that you have never seen the film before, I've been wondering if Starcrash has ever even been on your radar leading up to this moment. Had you heard of Starcrash before or did I hit you from out of deep space when I asked you about it?

Aaron: It’s quite possible that I had heard of Starcrash before, since, like you, I grew up reading a variety of film magazines, chief among them Starlog. Though of course I would have been reading about it as a reference point, or possibly a retrospective piece. To this day I’m an avid reader of books about film, video guides, and retro cinema websites, so it’s almost certain that at some point the title Starcrash had entered into my personal orbit. And yet the first time I actually remember hearing about the film was when you mentioned it to me, and I recall picturing one of those cheap Mill Creek sets of films that have fallen through the cracks in the United States copyright code. Then you mentioned Marjoe Gortner had a prominent part in the film, and I knew I had to see it. I’ve had a small fascination with this odd, middling actor ever since seeing the documentary about his child-preacher background and career as a revival preacher (titled simply Marjoe) that led to his brief moment of fame in the late ‘70s (though he continued acting until 1995).

So when you gave me with the Blu-ray this last Christmas, the packaging alone surprised me. Scream Factory has a bad habit of creating packaging that promises much more than the films can deliver, but even knowing that I was amazed by the design, and the smorgasbord of extras that were included. It appeared as if I had completely misjudged the level of quality Starcrash achieved, and the cult that had grown up around it. I remember I watched it pretty quickly after receiving it, maybe a day or two, but certainly on my next full day off work it was the first thing I popped into the Blu-ray player. I’ll get into my own reactions to the film as we go along as well, but at the time the only information I had about the film was gleaned from the painted cover it came wrapped in. I didn’t even read the plot description; I wanted to have a fresh experience with it.

Rik: Let's get to the basic plot. Starcrash concerns the adventures of Stella Star, a space-crossing heroine who zooms around in her starship alongside her companions, the strangely super-powered Akton (as Aaron mentioned, former child evangelist turned actor, Marjoe Gortner) and her robot bodyguard Elle (played by Munro's then-husband, Judd Hamilton). Like Han Solo, Stella is a smuggler and on the run from the law, but she is given a chance at clemency by the Galactic Emperor (a greatly slumming Christopher Plummer, who apparently did the part so he could spend time in Rome) if she will help him recover his missing son and also seek out the source of the weapon of mass destruction that the evil Count Zarth Arn has been using in his attacks on the Emperor's fleet. The Count is played with mustache-twirling sliminess by none other than Joe Spinell, a character actor who appeared in the first couple films in The Godfather and Rocky series. Spinell later gained film infamy for his role in the ultra-gory, female-scalping, horror epic, Madman (which also co-starred Caroline Munro).

At the outset of the film, the Count uses his weapon on a Galactic starship, which explodes from the attack, but not before ejecting three escape pods, one of which might contain the Galactic Prince Simon (David Hasselhoff... yes, that David Hasselhoff). The pods each land on a different planet, and so Stella and her crew skip from one to the next. They will encounter subzero temperatures, internal betrayal, Amazon warriors, barbarian cavemen, sword-wielding robots, and attacks by the Count's minions. Can they save the Galaxy? Did they save the Galaxy for you, Aaron?

Aaron: Well, here’s where I tell you to brace for disappointment, because I did not enjoy Starcrash on my initial viewing. Even in an ironic fashion, I found little enjoyment out of the film. Stick with me here, because I think I’ll bring you back around in a minute. On my first attempt at watching the film I kept falling asleep, and I had to restart the movie in order to give it a fair shake (I figured I owed it, and you, at least that much). But in the end, I found myself mystified by your excitement for the film, and surprised by the lavish, lovingly prepared 2-Disc Blu-ray set you gifted me with. The film not only felt near-criminally derivative (and not just of Star Wars, but almost every major sci-fi/fantasy work you could think of), but also very slapdash in its presentation. The care that went into designing some of the sets and spaceships didn’t quite mask how threadbare they looked upon construction, and plot-wise, events seem to just occur with no sense of drama or forward motion. There’s no real cause and effect in Starcrash. While ostensibly the plot boils down to ‘save the Emperor’s son and stop Zarth Arn from deploying his horrific weapon,’ those two acts come across as fairly unrelated. Instead we follow Stella, Akton, and Elle from location to location, event to event, and it’s all fairly lifeless and lacking in forward momentum. If you go back and watch the original Star Wars (which was clearly the template over which Starcrash was laid, though Luigi Cozzi would claim otherwise), it’s easy to notice how incident-free it is, how relatively light on story. And yet it has a simple unifying goal and a strong sense of drive that Starcrash is lacking, though more ‘things’ happen in that latter film.

So I didn’t like the film, but I was curious as to what had given the film such a warm place in your heart. Beyond, of course, childhood nostalgia and the overall effect Caroline Munro had as she helped usher you from child to awkward hormonal teenager. To that end I began digging into the movie’s special features (I said it before, but it bears repeating; the presentation of this film on Blu-ray is opulent to a ridiculous degree for a film that might otherwise be called inessential), and one special feature in particular really hammered it home for me: Joe Dante’s commentary for the trailer. Joe Dante used to edit trailers for AIP, and the last trailer he ever put together was the American trailer for Starcrash. He talks a bit on the commentary about how Starcrash is not a very good film, but that it has some really neat visuals, so he decided to focus solely on the visuals and cut together a two-and- a-half minute music video featuring wordless clips from the movie set to John Barry’s score. Suddenly it all seemed to click, and hearing Joe Dante speak about the visual merits of the film while seeing a procession of cherry picked images made me realize that perhaps I had been ignoring the film’s true merits. [Editor's note: Here is the trailer below, shown on the Trailers from Hell YouTube channel, featuring comments by Eli Roth. To hear Dante's commentary, you will have to check out the DVD or Blu-ray...]

On a second viewing, Starcrash performed much more admirably. I’m in agreement with you that it will never quite meet the qualifications for ‘good,’ but it certainly met the requirements for ‘fun.’ I started paying closer attention to design elements, color schemes, references to older (and often better) sci-fi films. Little details stood out, like that weird revolving hallway on the imperial ship in the beginning of the film, where you walk into a room, hit a button, and wait for the room to do a 180 degree turn so you can continue on your way. Why not just remove the middle man? We see people enter from both sides, and it doesn’t appear to be a security measure. It’s just one of those additions that are supposed to make everything look more futuristic. What could be cooler and more futuristic than a hallway with a slow-moving Lazy Susan in the middle of it? Once I stopped worrying about story or plot or even acting, everything became much better. That sounds like very faint praise indeed, but a fun bad film is still better than a boring good one.

One thing I did both times I watched the film was play ‘spot the Star Wars analog,’ which was never a very hard thing to do. Some of them are really obvious, like the always-worrying robot companion or the trademark-taunting name of the villain, Zarth Arn. You mention the similarities between Han Solo and Stella Star, but I initially felt that Akton would be the Han Solo figure, since he has early dialogue about being a simple smuggler, and what could be seen as an oblique rejoinder to one of Han Solo’s most famous character traits from the first Star Wars. When Stella and Akton are about to make a particularly risky move, Stella wonders aloud what the chances of success would be, and Akton begins to rattle off a detailed list of all the possible outcomes and the exact probability of their occurrence. It could just be a coincidence, but I like to think that the film is making an intentional swipe at Han Solo’s ‘never tell me the odds’ line. But then, of course, Akton turns out to be more of an Obi Wan Kenobi figure, with a very vaguely defined set of powers derived from his religion.

Part II of this discussion can be found on Aaron's blog, Working Dead Productions, by following this link: http://bit.ly/1Ro6vqH.

A Visiting and Revisiting Special: Boycott the 2016 Academy Awards? Pt. 1

There is a good chance that very few people in the Western Hemisphere, and a good many of them beyond, don't already have an opinion about the lack of artists of color in the Academy Award nominations this year. Whether luck of the draw or the system being broken and needing a good fix, having two years in a row where several prominent performances by non-white actors and actresses have gone unacknowledged by the Academy looks pretty bad to most people that care about these things.

My writing partner, Aaron Lowe (Working Dead Productions) and I have decided to discuss this topic in lieu of our usual back and forth conversations on a particular movie in our Visiting and Revisiting feature that we split between our respective websites. To put it out front, we are both Caucasian and male. My politics are outspokenly liberal (though I believe that a centrist position is the best way to get things done in Washington), and Aaron identifies as "pretty strongly liberal" (his words). 

So, you are not going to get a William F. Buckley Jr. vs. Gore Vidal-style point-counterpoint here. What we wanted to do was actually think through the problem and see what lies at the heart of it, determine whether a large-scale, knee-jerk reaction boycott would do any good, and see what possible solutions there could be so that not only are all sides appeased, but that the situation rights itself for the future.

1. Do you believe that the actions (to this point) of the Academy point to systemic racism, or do you feel that the list of nominees from the past two years is simply "the luck of the draw," given the fact that there have been past years where persons of color were nominated and even won?

Rik: When I wrote this question, I used the term "luck of the draw," but of course, I know it really doesn't come down to that at all. There is a nomination process that has been long in place, and it relies on the placement of nominees on each ballot after they first determine a "magic number" for each category, which itself is based on the total number of ballots divided by the number of possible nominees for that category plus one. The term "magic number" does ultimately denote a bit of luck because the selection of nominees does depend on the order in which the ballots get counted. The first candidate that reaches the required "magic number" gets the first slot on the nominee list, and so on until all the available slots for that category are filled. First come, first served.

So, do I think that the nominations are based directly on the racism within the Academy itself? I doubt it. To be sure, the Academy, like much of Hollywood, was built and is still largely based on an "old boys" network, that is -- like much of big business in America -- still terribly, predominately white and male. Yes, the USA is (as of the 2010 Census) 63+% non-Hispanic white, but the disparity within the Academy is even larger, with an LA Times study in 2012 finding that the group was likely to be 94% white, while men make up 77% of the membership overall. I think the biggest problem is that the film industry in America itself caters mainly to the white male audience. If you have 40 Oscar quality pictures released within a year (and that is pushing it; I am just using it as an example) and only a relative few are built around non-white themes or feature lead actors of non-white origin, then it makes the reality that one of those few films will get nominated a long-shot.

This is not to discount that there could be some old school, good old boy racism at play here. Maybe Hollywood isn't quite as left leaning as Fox News and its cohorts would like the American public to believe. There probably are many older members of the Academy -- and in 2012, 86% of them were over the age of 50, with the median age being 62 years old -- who harbor ancient racial resentments instilled in them since they were younger and raised in less enlightened times. I don't doubt that there are problem many in the membership who feel that way. It would be like with any slice of America that you cut, there is going to be a certain segment that leans a certain way.

I think a larger problem (in direct response to this question) is that within that older membership, that there is a likely disconnect between themes that are interesting to moviegoers today versus what those older members might want to see onscreen. It is more likely that this white, older chunk of the Academy may not be all that concerned with seeing the far fewer films per year featuring younger (or even established) actors and actresses of color in stories that don't necessary connect to that in which they are interested. These older members also might not want to see supposedly "heavier" films about African child warriors (Beasts of No Nation) or gang shootings in Chicago (Chi-raq), and they likely don't care at all about rap or hip-hop (Straight Outta Compton). In many ways it doesn't surprise me these films got zero or little attention from the Academy. The two films with black leads and/or creators that really had a shot should have been the highly acclaimed (and justly so) sports dramas, Creed and Concussion, and only Sylvester Stallone, a white actor, was nominated between them. Old white guys tend to like sports --- especially football and baseball -- but they may have reacted negatively to Concussion's casting of their beloved NFL as a secretive, villainous organization that doesn't care about the fate of its players as long as they keep the money flowing. (Which they are, but shhhhhhhhh...)

Aaron: To answer quickly, before going on to individual points: I believe the problem lies in the people, not the system. Surely the system has allowed a certain amount of stagnation to set in, but when I went to research how someone becomes an Academy member, and how the voting was handled, I found that it was remarkably fair and balanced, in the literal meaning of that phrase, not in the Fox News meaning. Obviously, the system favors those films and individuals with the largest amount of exposure, which leads to the predictable roundup of popular crowd-pleasers, but that’s the nature of popularity contests. In reality, a contender can come from anywhere, and the system itself is, essentially, colorblind.

I tend to believe that the average Academy member is not as racist as this year’s scandal would imply, and I doubt there’s a conspiracy here where large groups of white-haired old men decided to exclude performers of color. It’s just another case of a large group of people making individual choices; choices that they maybe don’t realize are quite so exclusive. I might be giving these people too much credit, but generally speaking I don’t assume people are mustache-twirling villains. That doesn’t really come as any consolation, and in fact may be worse; if people were doing this consciously we could easily say it was wrong, but if people are doing this with good intentions, it’ll be harder to fix.

The demographic argument about the Academy –that they are older white men and stuck in their ways- rings a bit false to me. Let’s say the median age right now is 66; this means these people came of age during the civil rights movement, and they likely came out of leftist leaning film schools in the 70s; George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, for example. George Miller is in his seventies and he just made one of the most feminist -- not to mention energetic and truly wild -- action movies of all time. I know those people are outliers, but when we talk about how old the average Academy member is, it’s not as if they were raised in the antebellum South. 

But here’s another problem; people recognize and feel comfortable with what they know. There’s no big conspiracy here, but people making movies form relationships with people they get along with, and people they enjoy working with, and the entire system becomes a bit closed off and incestuous. It can be hard to break into that world. I don’t automatically assume racism when I hear about a writers’ room that is primarily white, or male, or what have you. I do assume that whoever put that room together was more interested in having a room full of people that he or she was comfortable working with than in having a room made up of diverse voices. I think that practice is being seen here, writ large. Academy members see things their friends worked on, they vote for things their friends worked on, or speak to their life in some way. And since the Academy is made up of so many older white men, you see a pretty whitewashed selection of films.

To answer another point you bring up; Hollywood is definitely not as left leaning as Fox News would like Middle America to believe. Hollywood is the very definition of capitalistic; they go where the money is. The problem is, the source of the money is changing, and the entertainment industry is incredibly slow to realize this. Look at the continuing controversies over the removal of strong female characters from the promotional materials for films such as the new Star Wars film or The Avengers. The entertainment industry just isn’t ready to accept the fact that there might be money in catering to, or at least acknowledging, a market other than 18-40 year old white males.

2. Do you think "Affirmative Action" should apply to supposedly exclusive and invite-only clubs, such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science?

Aaron: I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with the term “Affirmative Action” and what it implies. I understand the motivations behind it, and they are truly noble, but it implies (whether accurately or not) a certain amount of racism on the other side of the coin. When people talk about Affirmative Action it’s usually implied that those benefitting from it aren’t quite deserving of the help; that they’ve only been included due to their skin color or ethnicity or gender. Of course, that’s exactly what has been happening with white people for hundreds of years, but it still carries a negative connotation.

The problem here is that Affirmative Action is completely unnecessary in this case. There’s no reason to invite members into the Academy based solely on the boxes they fill out on the census form. There’s also no cap to the number of members the Academy can have, so there’s no real reason to exclude anyone. There are plenty of talented and deserving individuals that the Academy is ignoring. Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs issued a statement promising to overhaul the Academy’s membership process, and actively recruit a more diverse crowd, which seems to me like a great start. They’ve done this in the past, when they tried to recruit a younger audience in the 60’s, and that seemed to work well for them at the time.

Rik: I feel Affirmative Action is still very necessary in the public and government sector. But should it be mandatory for private clubs and organizations? I'm not sure that anything should be done about that. If a particular group wants to keep their practices and meetings to an invited group only, I don't see the problem with that. But I also know I would not want to belong to such an organization if their inclusion process was based around standards that were openly racist or sexist. I know that I wouldn't want to belong to a club that was "men only," because what good is anything if there is not a chance of women being involved? (There is a certain irony that so many men brandish an oversized and often outspoken fear of homosexuality, but then really just want to hang out with other guys 90% of the time.) And what good is an organization that doles out awards to the best films within a calendar year if it doesn't have a membership that can recognize a certain portion of those "best films" because it is imbalanced?

3. What do you think would be a good, or even the best, solution towards broadening the membership of the Academy and making it at least reflect the demographic breakdown of America?

Rik: My solution for the Academy membership is to blow it up! By that, I mean make it much, much larger than it is right now (currently only 6,000+ members). I would switch it from invite-only to including all "active" members of the major Hollywood trade unions and guilds. This would include the Screen Actors Guild (including CON-AFTRA; they are combined now), the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America, the American Society of Cinematographers, the Producers Guild of America... all of them, as long as they are represented by one of the categories in which an award is given. Anyone that is a current member of the Academy but may not be active in one of the unions or guilds is allowed to remain (you have to give them some reason for living), but this will allow the Academy to include most of Hollywood's artists. Yes, it will put their membership at over 200,000 members (at least), and there will be logistical problems involved in developing a new nomination and voting process and the screening of nominated films, but that is their problem. If you want the Academy to represent the industry, then that is the quickest way.

Aaron: Honestly, that seems like such a logical idea that I was honestly surprised it wasn’t how the process worked already. Being a member of one of those unions automatically means that you are working as a professional, and have had at least one credit within the past year. I have to imagine that such an influx of younger, more diverse members would make an immediate impact.

To read Part II of this discussion, please click here.

Visiting and Revisiting: After Life (1998) Pt. 2

This is the second part of a two-part discussion about Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 drama, After Life [Wandâfuru raifu]. To read the first part of this article, visit my pal Aaron Lowe's Working Dead Productions website at http://bit.ly/1OszYhL.

PART II

Rik: I want to go back to that article on The Guardian website about Kore-eda. The interviewer asks him about After Life, and how the interviewer found it hard to think of a memory that would qualify as “heavenly”. Kore-eda’s response was “If you can’t choose, it means that you are still alive. Choose, and you’re dead.”

It rather pissed me off at first when I was watching the film and discovered that there was a character that insisted that he could not choose. I thought the character was just being contrarian or thinking himself a “cool” rebel. I thought, “What a fucking jerk,” from the very first moment I met him in the film. But when it was over, and I seriously considered whether I could choose a single memory, I realized that I would not wish to do so either. The penalty of not choosing means you are stuck in wherever this agency exists to work in what is essentially a form of the film industry. You get to have lunches with cute girls like Shiori and carry on some form of existence, where you can still create and think and dream and ponder existence? Did I mention you still get to have lunch? Seems like heaven to me.

So, I was very pleased to see Kore-eda’s response. And I think reading that response sold the film to me even more, because it wasn’t just a wishy-washy film based ultimately on a theological lesson to be learned or an idealized vision of a heavenly realm, but was really only willing to be held accountable for more existential discussions. But if the viewer still prefers to be sad that so-and-so chose this or that in the film, they can have that emotion as well.

Aaron: Thus far we’ve avoided the actual plot of the movie, but I think it’s time we delve into it a bit. Though the film follows several characters and treats them all as important and meaningful and deserving of our attention, the real backbone of the piece is the relationship between Takashi, one of the workers, and Ichiro, a recently deceased man who shares a surprising connection with Takashi. That relationship is not fully revealed until the end of the movie, although it never feels like it’s being withheld for dramatic purposes. We only see that Ichiro is having trouble choosing a memory, and Takashi seems to be taking a vested interest in helping him, but until the end the audience assumes that this is because the two are from the same generation (though Takashi seems to be decades younger, this is because he died in World War II). In fact, after World War II ended, Ichiro ended up in an arranged marriage with Takashi’s fiancé, who, it turns out, never stopped mourning him. Once again, we see something that could have been treated as emotionally manipulative schmaltz underplayed beautifully.

All three of these characters, Ichiro, Takashi, and the woman they both loved, Kyoko, choose variations of the same memory. Ichiro chooses a quiet moment on a park bench with Kyoko shortly before she died; Kyoko chose a memory of the same park bench, where she sat with Takashi shortly before he shipped off to war. Takashi also sits on the same park bench, but instead turns the camera to those he has spent the last three years with, working and resting and living. It’s a beautiful ending, one that has me smiling once again as I type, but it once again raises the question of what those memories will signify once everything else has been wiped away, and also implies a more troubling line of thought that may actually say more about me personally than it does about the film. But first, lets try to unpack the threads in this.

Does the fact that Ichiro chooses a memory of Kyoko, even though Kyoko’s memory was of a different man, alter what those memories mean? Would Ichiro have chosen differently, or felt differently about his wife if he knew she had chosen to forget about him once she moved on? And what does it say about Takashi that he chooses to forget about life entirely and remember only purgatory? In Kyoko’s memory, as I brought up earlier, will she remember that Takashi died in the war? Will she remember he was her fiancé, or even what his name was? Likewise for Ichiro: will he remember that their marriage was arranged, that she had loved another man, and that she had died before him?

Rik: I think that Ichiro keeping the memory of his wife, even with the further knowledge that she chose a memory with Takashi instead has a lot to do with the times and social setting in which he lived. Arranged marriages might seem horrific to us now, but they would have been more standard in Ichiro’s youth. Emotion was supposed to be held in check and replaced with duty to one’s family, honor, and social standing. Having grown up in this mindset, it would be (at least on the surface) easier for Ichiro to remain committed to the memory of his wife of many years, no matter her ultimate feelings for a past love.

As for Takashi, my take is that he was a very young man when he died during the war, and while he has only been at this facility for the past three years, I assume he has been kicking around doing social work for many, many more, at least 50-plus years (at the time of the making of After Life). He has spent more time in this “afterlife,” as it were, than he has living a corporeal existence. So, why shouldn’t the fact that he prefers to choose a moment in his afterlife to his rather brief existence on the planet be shocking? If he is happy in his work, is good at it, and has made great companions, why shouldn’t he?

I think it has been fairly well proven that our memories, no matter how much we cherish them, are really not to be trusted. We tend to embellish them the longer we hold them, details from other “memories” can drift in to another one, or if it is an event that we don’t recall as well as others, we can often err in the recollection in an effort to keep up a front. And the angle from which we see something, even an emotional angle, can be wildly different for other people within that same memory. I can tell you about the memory of my skipping on the stairs of the 4th Avenue Theatre ready to see Pinocchio at the age of 4, and tell you what a perfect day that was, and my mom might tell you that I was being a little shit all day long and crapped my pants as well.

Aaron: To the film’s credit, that is a concern that Kore-eda brings up in the film itself. There is a character that is caught embellishing her memories, and then another who, once she’s watching the memory being filmed, realizes she got some details wrong and finds the experience quite disturbing. Kore-eda realizes that memory is faulty, and not likely to be a depiction of absolute truth, and I think he’s OK with that. I believe that in this film’s theology, the point isn’t to depict an accurate slice of your life, but to recreate the emotional feeling you’ve carried with you all those years. Perhaps that’s what the memories do; they remind you of the feeling of being alive. But here’s where it troubles me, if I allow myself to think about this too long. Do the dead take that memory as a keepsake, as I brought up earlier, or do they live within that memory? If they live within one memory for eternity, would that begin to feel like hell after awhile, no matter how good the memory? And if all of the memories associated with that one memory are gone, what emotion can possibly remain?

As I said, it’s a can of worms that probably speaks more to my own neuroses, but if I allow myself that’s the hole I start to go down. It’s weird that I suddenly became critical of this, right here at the end, because even with those questions After Life remains a marvelous, beautiful film that fills me with happiness and, yes, a feeling of love for my fellow man. Which, sad to say, is not my default state, as I’m sure you can empathize.

Rik: I suppose it could be considered a hell of your own making in a way, wrapped up in a heavenly disguise. I am assuming that if you can only take a single memory with you – putting aside the consideration of whether you had to live forever within that memory itself -- then yes, it would be a hell, because I would then surmise that your ability to think critically would be severely stunted because you wouldn’t have access to most of your own mind. And even if you could access everything in your brain except the remainder of your memories, wouldn’t it drive you insane as you watched or lived within this memory, over and over and over again, and all the while trying to figure out what it means, and why nothing else ever happens to you? If you could still think, wouldn’t going over a single moment in time repeatedly make you absolutely batty?

The more I think about this, for this to not create such an outcome, the dead in this film – or at least the ones who choose to move forward -- are basically committing themselves to a form of supernatural lobotomy, where they are rendered incapable of grasping the meaning or understanding of something while being trapped with that single memory, drooling like an idiot for eternity.

What is your take on the relationship between Takashi and Shiori, the assistant social worker with whom he shares an unspoken bond? For the entire film, there is obviously something between them, but we don’t really get a clue how deep it might run until Shiori, upset that Takashi has decided to move on fully to the afterlife and choose a memory, throws a conniption fit and kicks and throws snow around. And just as Takashi heads to film his “memory,” she confronts him about her own reluctance to move onward, and says, “If I choose, I’ll have to forget all about this place. So, I won’t choose. I’m going to keep you inside me forever. I can’t bear to be forgotten by any more people.” It’s my favorite line in the movie, and the saddest as far as I am concerned. It also seems to me to be the moment where Takashi really realizes what he must do. Your view?

Aaron: I always felt like the relationship was a little one sided on Shiori’s part. Obviously Takashi is fond of her, and he may have eventually grown to love her, but within the period that we see he is clearly a little ignorant as to Shiori’s feelings. I’m actually at a bit of a loss as to how I would define Takashi’s character overall. He’s not exactly a cipher, he has a personality and inner thoughts, but we’re never really privy to them. We see the stuff about his former fiancé, and we see that it moves him deeply, but he plays everything close to the vest.

Shiori is a bit more of an open book, probably owing to their generational differences (though they appear roughly the same age, Takashi is around 50 years her senior). Shiori wears her emotions openly, and I believe the line you quote is probably the heart of this entire movie, and gets to the fears and concerns we have about death. Not just that we’ll be gone, not just that the Earth continues without us, but that our emotions, our love, will disappear as well. That would make Takashi’s choice at the end of the film, to remember his time in purgatory, a powerful symbol of love and caring. He’s given this group of people the highest honor you could imagine in this theological system; they will never be forgotten. When they’ve all moved on and possibly forgotten each other, Takashi will still remember them, and the emotions he felt, and the help they gave him.

Look at me… I’m all over the map with this one. Feeling unease at the system on display in one paragraph, and then arguing the opposite just a few moments later. That, I think, explains its endurance with me. Though I find myself happy after each viewing, I still find myself puzzling it over in my mind for weeks, months, or years afterwards.

Rik: There is a shot early on where we see a doorway in a darkened entrance, and the doorway is lit from the outside, but we cannot see anything clearly out there because there is a mist or fog obscuring it. We then see that week’s arrivals make their way one by one through the door. To me, the building (and the city, if indeed there is a city, in which it is located) exists out of time; perhaps in another dimension. The workers in the building arrive each morning, and we see their apartments, so we know they carry on an existence, just perhaps on another plane unearthly. They eat lunch, make small talk, and have repressed feelings for one another, in the case of Shiori and Takashi. It is not unreasonable to expect there are numerous other agencies like this, because more than twenty people die each week in Japan, and this facility seems to average about twenty entrants per week. So, it is also not unreasonable to assume there is a functioning city built around this afterlife industry, and thus.

The question is: is it an otherworldly city built on top of the city we would know on Earth? I am not really surprised by the scene where we see cars and people walking around, but the question is if they are in our world or theirs. The only other explanation that I can reason out is that the workers of the waystation and the applicants for the afterlife are ghosts and are occupying buildings that exist in our dimension but go unseen by the regular populace. It doesn’t explain how they are able to have possessions, eat, and move things around without scaring the crap out of earthly inhabitants, and since we never see any evidence of such behavior, I prefer to accept that the entire city and the movements of its occupants exists outside of our own dimension, but is an exact replica so that the workers of the agency can go out and study locations for film shoots.

Aaron: As much as my mind constantly goes to this sort of pragmatic detail, I have to remind myself that this film is an allegory and not meant to be taken literally. As much as I may want to know how something works, or if the people who pass by Shiori in the outside world can see her, I realize it’s beside the point. We know that other waystations exist, because Takashi says he worked at one until three years prior to the movie’s opening. I think it stands to reason that there are several in each major city, at least one in every small town. Probably they exist like FBI field offices, dotting the world in a frequency that matches the local population.

We could also ponder what those stations would look like in other countries, or to other religions. No one we see questions the theological implications of the film, which is of course to the film’s credit. No one seems surprised to not see St. Peter, or clouds or pearly gates. Everyone, in fact, seems to be almost expecting what he or she finds, which looks like nothing they have been prepared for by any religion. But as you mentioned earlier, the film’s lack of theological specificity is one of its greatest aspects, and gives After Life the universality that the real afterlife would hopefully have.

Rik: Here is a stray thought that I had while watching this film. All of the applicants are Japanese, but I wonder what would happen to someone not of Japanese descent if they were to die in Japan. Would they automatically go to a different way-station run by others of their ancestry? Are the Japanese waystations only for the Japanese, and so on? It might have been cool to have an American of non-Asian descent who perhaps had a heart attack on a plane at the airport end up in the waystation and not be able to comprehend most or all of what was being asked of them.

Aaron: Now that you’ve put that idea in my head I find myself excited about the possibilities of it, but I also think it would have been a bit out of place in this film. It would have pulled focus from the already large cast and possibly veered too far into comedy or tragedy. But, of course, that could just be my own love of the film balking at the idea of tampering with it.

Rik: And one more thing I have been pondering --and I am sorry to take this into the realm of comedy, when this film, while lightly humorous in moments, is not a comedy – the use of technology in the film. Ichiro is made to go through piles and piles of videotapes in trying to select one of his memories. Given that the film came out to theatres in 1998, when DVDs were really just taking hold of the film industry, was this a comment on Kore-eda’s part upon governmental facilities and how behind the times they often are in regards to keeping up with technology? I figure that whatever administration (read: supreme being) is behind the curtain, as it were, would have the capabilities of having the most up-to-date means of processing the millions of people that die each year.

And Ichiro and Takashi’s memories extend to World War II, when videotape was not yet invented. When the deceased arrived at the facility in those days, did they have to go through old newsreels of their memories? Was it silent films and then picture books before that, and matted prints and scrolls before that?

Aaron: I think you may be onto something there. I always felt the VHS tapes were just a sign of the times, and honestly I think that might still be the real reason behind things; it was probably just what came to mind when it came to filming that scene. But then, it also fits the somewhat ramshackle nature of this whole department. Everything looks a little handmade; the workers begin each day by communally cleaning their offices. They live in little dorm rooms and brew their own tea and grow their own plants and make their own music. It doesn’t seem like they have the largest or most opulent budget imaginable, and so it would make sense for them to be slightly behind the times. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were still using VHS today. 

Rik: Well, I think it is pretty obvious that I really liked this film and you are trapped in slavish devotion to it. But I also feel that as much as I enjoyed it (and have now seen it three times in the past month, though it is finally time to return it to Netflix), I will probably not revisit After Life for a good while, because I have lived in it a little too long. I find pondering such affairs somewhat uncomfortable, especially at length. However, given how much After Life and Hana resonated with me (Hana even more so), I am likely to give more of Kore-eda’s films a shot in the future, as long as I can find them. But I will add that if I can find a decently priced copy of After Life anywhere (it seems to be out of print in North America and prices currently start around $90 for a copy), then I am going to grab it. Because you never know when I, like you, are going to need to see this again. Any last thoughts?

Aaron: I think calling my love of After Life ‘slavish devotion’ might be exaggerating things slightly (though only slightly). Clearly, even after all these years and all this discussion, I’m still unsure about several things within the film, and haven’t completely made up my mind about everything. However, this is a film that always fills me with a sense of enormous well-being, of joy and warmth and love. Hirokazu Kore-eda became a name to watch for me after this film, and I’ve been following him ever since, eagerly tracking down his newest releases (several of which remain unavailable in North America). A couple months ago I was lucky enough to see the North American premiere of his newest film, Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary in Japan), after which he gave a short Q&A. He came across exactly as you would expect him to, based on his films. He was thoughtful, generous in his answers and time, and funny in a subdued manner.

I have no advice of where to go next in pursuing his filmography; I tend to think they are all worth at least one viewing. Through his filmography ‘humane’ does seem to be the most apt word to describe him, as his affection for his characters works to leaven even the most depressing aspects of his films. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed this film, and even more glad that you’ve enjoyed at least one of Kore-eda’s other works. I look forward to discussing them all with you in the future, even though we may not document those discussions for posterity.

Rik: And we shall leave you with that. Check back with us in the near future for a Visiting & Revisiting discussion of the super-schlocky 1978 Italian sci-fi "masterpiece," Starcrash aka The Adventures of Stella Star!