Niche sub-genres that have and haven't taken off

Cross posted from Yellow Bunting

Genre is a useful tool for classifying films and a good way to attract certain audiences to certain films. Sub-genres and Hybrid-genres are a way for directors and writers to come up with new ideas and unique pieces of work. Sometimes then they accidently kick off a (usually short lived) trend:

Cowboy-Ninja Films

What’s cool? Cowboys are cool. What else is cool? Ninja. Therefore cool squared is personified by films like Bunraku (Guy Moshe, 2010) and The Warrior’s Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010). Both genres share similar themes such as honour, revenge, redemption etc and in both these cases at least, makes for some striking visuals with The Warrior’s Way evoking a steampunk-esque aesthetic while Bunraku favouring a comic book/puppet theatre inspired look.

Terminal Illness Rom Coms

The perfect valentine’s date movie. Or not. 2010 and 2011 saw the release of Love and Other Drugs  (Edward Zwick, 2010) and A Little Bit of Heaven (Nicole Kassel, 2011). One starred Anne Hathaway and the other Kate Hudson and each played a woman who was dying from an awful terminal illness but found love. So that was nice.

For painfully obvious reason neither film was terribly well received though A Little Bit of Heaven got it far worse. Possibly because of the absence of Anne Hathaway.

Victorian Department Store Melodramas

Oh how the big wigs at ITV must have been kicking themselves when BBC broadcast The Paradise last year. Their own series Mr Selfridge looked like a rip off in comparison. Despite the fact that The Paradise is derived from a novel from Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (albeit with all of Zola’s ideas on Hereditary personality deficiencies within a screwed up French family, the very thing the series was written to demonstrate, removed) novels and Mr Selfridge is based on the establishment of (guess where?) Selfridges department store on Oxford Street  the two share a staggering number of characters and plot devices. Eccentric, brilliant owner whose ideas are scoffed at but eventually proved right? CHECK. Young naïve sales girl with hidden talents for retail? CHECK. Men throwing themselves at her from all directions? CHECK. Rich bitch in fabulous hats skulking around and manipulating everyone? CHECK. Swooshing skirts. CHECK.

NOTE: I am aware that being set in 1906, Mr Selfridge should properly be termed an Edwardian Department Store Melodrama, but that aside, all the other glaring similarities between the two still stand.

Films based on board games

Battleship I’m looking at you. But it may surprise you to learn that another classic family favourite, Cluedo, was turned into a film in the 1980s. Clue (Johnathan Lynn, 1985) stars Tim Curry as butler who brings together a group of eccentric and chromatically themed characters in a case of blackmail and murder. It is wonderfully tacky and gloriously cheesy and comes complete with three different endings, only one of which makes sense but don’t think too hard about that. It was poorly received but has become a cult classic.

Horrifyingly it is being remade by Gore Verbinski.

Review: Hugo

I love films about films, heck I'm a huge fan of films being self referential in general but this gem of a movie was especially good.

Picture from here

Review: The Hobbit (Spoilers)

The Lord of the Rings trilogy were the defining films of my childhood. It was the first time that I was aware that movies were actually made rather than just being there. It also later introduced me (via the extensive DVD extras) to the nuances of film making and probably sent me down the path I'm on today.

So you can imagine my reaction to the news that they were going to film The Hobbit. On Sunday I finally got my chance to go and see it! Warning: There be spoilers ahead.

Poster from here

Personal Hero: Alice Guy

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

In the early years, when filmmaking was still new and being developed as an art form, there were more women working in the industry than there has ever been since. In fact less than 10% of film directors working today are women and that drops to 6% for Hollywood directors.

There has only been one woman in the history of cinema to own and manage a film studio and this was between 1910 and 1914. That woman was the Grandmother of narrative film, Alice Guy.

Born in France, Guy worked as a secretary for Léon Gaumont, a renowned photographer. Gaumont had made his own movie camera after a visit from Louis Lumière, one half of the Lumière brothers. Up until this point film had just been used as a device to document but Guy saw potential for something greater. She was allowed to experiment with camera as long as she didn’t neglect her work. What resulted was one of the earliest (if not the earliest, though it is hard to date these early films) examples of narrative cinema, a 50 second film titled La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy):

This was the first step in a career that saw Guy write, direct or produce over 700 films in 25 years, even when she was pregnant with her children she was still making 2-3 films a week. When titled La Fée aux Choux premiered Gaumont relieved Guy of her secretarial duties and put her in charge of his filmmaking division. She later established her own studio in New Jersey with her husband, Solax Studio, which at the time was one of the most powerful studios in the world.

However, history was not kind to Guy’s memory. The studio went bankrupt after her divorce and the rise of Hollywood as a more cost effective place to make films. The studio was auctioned off and Guy returned to France in 1922 but she never made another film despite the fact that she was beginning to venture into another fledgling medium – sound.  Gaumont made no mention of Guy’s role in developing his studio or even the medium itself when he wrote an account of his company in the 1930s despite Guy’s protestations. She was effectively edited out of the history of a movement she helped to kick-start. It even took until the 1950s for own country to honor her for her services to filmmaking with the Legion of Honor, France’s highest, non-military award.

Photo from here

Though she ceased making films, Guy continued to write about them and worked for International Film Service and we can only wonder at how she would have made use of the multitudes of technological advances that were introduced to the film industry after 1922.

Alice is Guy is an important figure in the early years of cinema not just because she is a woman but because the codes and conventions of cinema today have their beginnings in a whimsical experiment from a woman who realized before anyone else that a story could be told with a medium that many others thought would not see out a decade.