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.

A Rant of Sorts

I love film. That much should be evident. I love writing about film, reading about film, talking about film and obsessing over film but most of all I love watching film for without doing that I couldn't do any of those other things.

So what happens when I can't watch a film.

One of the films I have been dying to see this year is Cloud Atlas, released in the US in October 2012 and opening in the UK this Friday. On it's opening weekend it should be widely available right? Right!?

Picture from here

No. Firstly the shitty excuse for a cinema down the road isn't showing it at all. neither is the nearest large cinema, VUE, in Oxford. The VUE in Reading is only showing it at 3.00pm and 5.00pm during the week a tricky ask for people who are working all day.

Photo from here

This reflects how the film was marketed in the US too, little advertising and overall not pushed as much as the bigger budget Oscar contenders and it isn't unique to Cloud Atlas. Hollywood thrives on money and internal politics, often to the detriment of gorgeous pieces of work and this filters down to the audiences.

So don't expect a review of Cloud Atlas soon, it might take a while to find it.

7 Films to watch out for in 2013

Over at Yellow Bunting I posted a list of my top seven films for 2013 enjoy!

Movie Making Madames Part Four

Sometimes it can seem like all the films being churned out are either remakes or sequels. Hollywood can seem formulaic and narratively simplistic. Ever since movies began there have always been people who have wanted to try something different and so the independent film industry was born. It lacked the money and influence of mainstream film industries but it made up for that with maverick ideas and inventive ways of bringing them to life.

Picture from here 

Germaine Dulac did a bit of everything. She started her career as a feminist journalist before pursuing her passion for still photography that propelled her on to working as a film director, writer, producer and theorist as well as becoming the president of Fédération des ciné-clubs, a group dedicated to promoting up and coming filmmakers and teaching photography and film, putting many of her contemporary counterparts to shame.
Dabbling in both Impressionism and Surrealism, Dulac’s big successes in cinema such as The Seashell and the Clergyman and The Smiling Madam Beudet came before the advent of sound cinema and before Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’sUn Chien Andalou, arguably the most famous Surrealist film ever (If you’ve never heard of it is the film where Buñuel slices a woman’s eye open, it turns into the moon and he and Dali are monks… watch it).

After the introduction of sound Dulac’s career faltered and she spent the rest of her life making newsreels for Pathe and Gaumont. When she died it took three weeks and numerous re-writes before her obituary to be published, she was so controversial.

In the US, Maya Deren is the Grandmother of Indie film and the experimental director Stan Brakhage called her “the mother of us all”, “Us” being everyone who felt like giving the finger at narrative and stylistic conventions.

Image from here

I first encountered Maya Deren during my second year of university when our class was shown arguably two of her most famous short films, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which I later based my first solo project on and At Land (1944). Art films and experimental films usually get a bad rap outside of hard core film theorist circles because it can look like jumbled mess and overly pretentious. Deren thought of her films as visual poems, capturing fleeting emotions and states of being rather than events or characters. The films rely on striking images and haunting concepts to draw in the audience. Deren acted in her films but never credited herself, preferring to keep her characters as anonymous figures and her film crews were similarly simplistic. Deren worked on Meshes with only her second husband Alexander Hammid and a 16mm camera bought using inheritance money. Deren once claimed that “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick” and she was a fierce critic of the way she felt Hollywood was stifling creativity and diversity within American Cinema.

Tragically, Deren died in 1961 from malnutrition, possibly due to her drug use. A posthumous documentary was released in 1985 from footage Deren shot between 1947 and 1951 when she made multiple trips to Haiti. Divine Horsemen: the Living God’s of Haiti (1985) led to some criticizing Deren for leaving the avant-garde but Deren herself felt she needed to progress as an artist and Vodun traditions and rituals were fascinating to her. Her book of the same name is considered an important text on the subject. Sadly, Deren never completed the project and the last film released before she died, The Very Eye of Night (1958) gives us a glimpse at how her work could have unfolded.

Cross posted to Yellow Bunting

Life (especially work) has been a bit manic of late hence why there has been so little posting. My apologies for that and I can only say that things should become more regular after the christmas period!