Weekly Geekly Rundown for November 1, 2024
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Proper Balance Between the Promotional and Scholarly Missions of Museums
Wow! That was a long section title for this week’s Weekly Oddity, but it gets at the core tension that I want to discuss. Yesterday Anne Thompson, Editor at Large of IndieWire and one of the best film industry commentators, shared an article discussing how The Academy is cutting staff from their Archives and Library divisions as their Museum expands. The article is an important read that demonstrates why IndieWire remains an important and vital resource in the cinephile community, even if they sometimes spend too much time pondering why people like Hallmark movies and not enough time taking those films seriously for my liking.
The article highlights how the Academy’s shift in focus will have far reaching implications for the staff and hints at other damaging effects that deserve further examination and discussion. According to their website the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has four primary goals in its mission statement:
Celebrates artistry and innovation in filmmaking.
Inspires new generations to share our love of cinema and storytelling.
Preserves our global film history.
Connects film fans from around the world.
These goals are achieved through two related, but sometimes oppositional, forces. The first is to connect and inspire people by showing them the magic of film in celebration. This is the goal of the Museum side of the organization. A robust museum (and theater) can move people and inspire them to learn more about a subject. There is no substitute for seeing the Mona Lisa if you want to inspire someone to want to learn more about Leonardo da Vinci. When I saw Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 in person at the Chicago Art Institute I was moved beyond words. I knew of the painting from books and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but small pictures and filmic references did not prepare me for what I experienced. I was in awe and I was inspired to learn more about the history of art and in particular post-Impressionist art. That inspiration happened because of the museum. It connected me deeply with the art, but the museum merely made the connection.
The Museum is the first part in a journey of learning and even deeper connection. To build on that connection requires libraries and carefully maintained archives. These are where the deep lore comes that builds even deeper connection and inspiration. There are no redundancies in staff between museum curators and library and archive staff, they serve different roles. Presidential Museums understand this and so too should the Academy. If you go to a Presidential Museum, you will find exhibits there to celebrate the life and Presidency of the particular person. It will uniformly, with the brief exception of the Nixon Museum in the early 2010s, be a positive depiction. That’s the job of the Museums.
The mission of the archives is very different. It is to make available all of the original documents that are unclassified so that people can research and analyze the President from whatever positions they wish to do so. They are scholarly resources for historians, political scientists, campaign advisors, and future Presidents. Presidential Museums understand this distinction and it affects how they are organized. The Museum side of things are run by a Presidential Museum Foundation while the Archives are run by the National Archives, completely separate organizations. This division ensures that the political biases of the Museum staff don’t prevent real research from being done. It also allows the Museum staff to engage in hagiography to their heart’s desire without the influence of Archive staff who might want more nuance in presentations.
Like the Presidential Museums and Libraries, the Academy has a dual mission. Unlike the Presidential Museums and Libraries, that dual mission is under a single organization. This gives the illusion that the missions are one and the same and that there can be redundancies in staff, but that is an illusion that becomes readily apparent the moment a person shifts from being inspired by the “Godfather Notebook” to wanting to study it for critical and historic purposes.
You cannot study the document while it is on display and the knowledge and skills required to determine whether an item is important enough to exhibit for a time is very different from the knowledge and skill required to know who might want something for academic/professional purposes and why. They might appear to be similar and you might think they can be done by the same person, but they are best done by two individuals who work with the proper “customers.”
This was driven home to me twice. When my wife was in film school, she decided to write a detailed analysis of the classic Danny Kaye film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The movie had long been one of her favorites, but she wanted to really delve deep into the movie in order to understand why and how the film differed from the short story and the challenges the production faced. These were questions that could only be answered by accessing the Academy Archives. It was an experience that my wife cherished. The rules for access to the materials were very strict, and monitored by staff, but the access was there and she was able to learn more about the film than she ever imagined possible. Such learning could only come from the first person access to original source documents under the guidance of expert staff who knew where to guide her to additional resources that might have been labeled in an unintuitive way.
My second experience with an Archive was with UC Riverside’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I was looking for information on the origins of the Champions role playing game and the history of the Superhero 44/Superhero 2044 role playing game and the Eaton had original copies of the Lords of Chaos Fanzine that contained vital information. The games are deeply connected in ways that are only revealed when reading the actual fanzine issues, fanzines that are treasure troves of information.
I asked for the staff to pull the copies from the Archive and waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually I was told that they did not have the items. I showed the staff member, who was also a Graduate Student in Cultural Studies focusing on Science Fiction, the box number etc. that were listed and asked if they could bring the whole box so we could look and see if it was there. It wasn’t. Both the staff member and I were frustrated, but then the staff member said they would talk to one of the permanent staff to see if something could be found. A week later and the mystery had been resolved. There were minor notations that a prior employee left in the box listed in the computer that directed the archivists to a binder that collected all the issues of the zine they had. It was an act of long term and persistent detective skills, skills I don’t expect a Museum curator to have but which I am grateful an archivist had and it made me love librarians even more than I did before.
I’m very glad that the Academy is expanding its Museum. It’s a great way to introduce people to the history and magic of film beyond the mere screen experience. I also imagine that as the Museum continues it might actually be a program that draws a profit, or at least pays for itself. To that end it shouldn’t be used as an excuse to fire people for being “redundant,” rather it should be a reason the Academy is able to expand rather than contract staff. When filmmakers like Michael Mann are selling access to their own archive materials, it should demonstrate even more than ever that this is a vital and in demand service.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
This week, Luke joined with fellow Rotten Tomatoes approved critic Aaron Neuwirth on Aaron’s The Code Is Zeek Out Now podcast. Luke joined Aaron and the crew to chat about the latest Venom film and I cannot wait to give the chat a listen. Luke has made some interesting observations regarding earlier entries in the franchise and I’m eager to hear them here.
The Gray Man (2022)
The post-Halloween and pre-December film window is an odd one to pick and choose from. There are some, but not a ton, of Thanksgiving themed films and it doesn’t quite fell appropriate to discuss horror movies from the just finished Spooky Season nor the Christmas movies that will come to dominate my post-Thanksgiving viewing. I looked through a lot of Luke’s older reviews to see if something hit the vibe I wanted to convey and I found that he gave a positive review of The Gray Man starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans back in 2022.
The Gray Man is a film that I’ve enjoyed watching a couple of times and Luke’s review gave me what my November theme will be for his reviews moving forward, championing the underrated. I know that championing the underrated is a Geekerati theme in general, but it’s now the Official Luke Y Thompson selected movie review theme.
In this case, The Gray Man is a film with a borderline Rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes (45% with critics and 90% fresh with fans) and Luke’s review is overwhelmingly positive and I think rightly so. The film is in some ways a mashup of Jason Bourne (books) and an over the top Hong Kong actioner with a heavy dose of humor. It is, in a nutshell, my jam and I was glad to see that Luke liked it as well.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
What happens if you mash up Heat, Stander, and French Kiss together with a dose of John Woo’s Hardboiled? Depending on how you mixed those ingredients together, you might get something close to Mélanie Laurent’s Freedom (Libre). I’ve joked a lot about how heist movies are extremely difficult to pull off and that one large reason why is the tendency of screenwriters to include a self-insert in the story that undermines any real drama. Since Freedom is inspired by the, heavily adapted, real life robber Bruno Sulak that risk is muted, even so it’s hard to hit the right emotional tone and based on Courtney Howard’s latest review Freedom misses the mark. Since the film is available on Amazon Prime, and since the French have a strong history of likable criminals that goes back at least as far as Arsene Lupin I’ll be giving it a watch. I’ll be doing so with reasonable expectations though and so should you.
Wyrd Science had an interesting post this week that reminded me that Crooked Dice Games was finishing up their 7TV Fantasy Miniatures Skirmish Game Kickstarter this week. I’m a huge fan of 7TV and have everything from the first edition to present and almost let this one slip through the cracks. There’s also a good discussion of Cairn 2nd edition that makes me eager for when my copy arrives in the mail.
I’ll be honest. I’ve read Lord of the Rings round four times now, but during my past three readings I’ve always skipped the songs and poems. Those, and the long introductions by characters, are just not what I’m eager to read about and experience. With his latest Critical Hit Parader Matt Thompson has me rethinking that approach as he highlights some of the musical adaptations of the Lament for Boromir. Boromir is one of my favorite characters and his death is one of the most epic moments in fantasy and in skimming the lament I think I am doing a bit of a disservice to that moment. It’s time to make up for lost time and dig in with a number of inspired adaptations.
Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is one of those rich pieces of analysis that keeps me reading Frankfurt School thinkers even as I argue that Critical Theory is often very shallow in its analysis. A central component to Benjamin’s argument is that mechanization alters the meaning of art by taking away its exclusivity or “aura.” We can really see this in how we share pdfs or mp3s without a second thought to the work itself or in how some think Roy Lichtenstein “elevated” the comic art he ripped off for his paintings. That those comic books had higher levels of artifice and craftsmanship doesn’t matter because they were mass produced while Lichtenstein’s work was an individual creation, or so the argument goes.
In a recent Retroist the eponymous critic discusses a journey from the highly mechanized to the highly stylized with an essay about Thermal Paper Camera Photography. Digital phones allow everyone to be photographers, but they can make us less intentional in what we choose to capture. In doing so they reduce the power and “art” of the practice and Retroist writes about how moving to a more challenging medium has improved the art he produces. It’s a pretty cool piece.
Geoff Engelstein over at GameTek discusses how he came to acquire the rights to produce Kurt Vonnegut’s board game design GHQ, a game that is now available thanks to Geoff’s hard work. It’s an interesting tale and one that had me add GHQ to my Christmas Wish List.
Ethan Sabatella recently attended the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon which had me asking two questions. First, “why haven’t I attended this film festival already?” Second, “does Ethan live close enough to Boise that we could go get a Pizza or Beer some time and chat about the things we like?”
I’ve mentioned Mark Finn a couple of times in this newsletter for his hard work in advocating the work of Robert E. Howard, but it was only recently that I realized that this Mark Finn was the Mark Finn who was the author/publisher of the Polite Society Zine I backed on Kickstarter a while back. Polite Society is an “Old School” zine that discusses how to adapt 5th Edition D&D to a roguish style of play inspired by many of the books in the famous Appendix N. It’s an excellent zine and I highly recommend purchasing it.
I’ll be basing a couple of future full length Geekerati articles on entries in Polite Society and will be incorporating some of the recommendations into my game. In particular, I’ll be writing about Alignment next week, a subject Mark writes about in Issue #2 of the zine and I’ll be responding to his “which version of Lankhmar is the best” article at some point in the future. The alignment discussion hits a lot of my “I have something to say” buttons and is one of the more balanced discussions of the topic. All I’ll be adding in my piece is some historic context as well as a recommendation that we re-evaluate what Alignment means in play. To give a hint of my line of thought, the alignment I would give the Dragonlance character Raistlin differs depending on what I view the role of alignment to be.
In 2019, The Killers did a great cover of The Smiths song This Charming Man at the Glastonbury festival. What makes it even better is that Johnny Marr played the iconic guitar riff in the performance. Brandon Flowers has a great voice and this is one of my favorite performances of this song.
Speaking of cover songs, The Warning has an interesting cover of Metallica’s classic song Enter Sandman. It reminds me of when Metallica partnered with the philharmonic for their Black Album, but has some elements that are relatively unique to The Warning. It’s interesting to watch Ale the bassist’s stage presence as she seems to be channeling a bit of Lita Ford, hair flips and all. It’s kind of like stepping back in time to my childhood.
For a trio, The Warning manages to generate a pretty big sound and it’s kind of cool to see that more traditional metal isn’t dead and has been passed on to a new generation who just want to rock.
Speaking of songs that rock. Alternative Ulster by Stiff Little Fingers is a song that hits on a lot of levels. It was an expressly political song that spoke of the pain and anger of the band’s members. I often say that Punk isn’t expressly political, that it is about DIY and rage in general. Sometimes though, that rage is political and leads to something that will last in influence.
Because it’s election season, and because it’s topical, I’d like to recommend The Shape of Things to Come by Max Frost and the Troopers. The song is one of the highlights of the film Wild in the Streets. The movie was released in 1968 by American Independent Pictures and it features a good deal of proto-punk music inspired by the political movements at the end of the 60s and the MC5. Christopher Jones, who is excellent in The Looking Glass War, plays the cult like musician and eventual Presidential Candidate Max Frost in a film that is better than I think anyone thought it would be. It was filmed as a cheap exploitation film, but it channels elements of A Face in the Crowd to be so much more. One of the reasons it is so much more is that most of the songs in the film are actually good.
You might think based on that last song that my film recommendation for the week is Wild in the Streets. Certainly you should watch it and it is very much a favorite film of mine, but it’s also the Thanksgiving season and that gets me in the mood for a particular kind of heartwarming film about family and friends with maybe a bit of comedy mixed in.
As I hinted at in the Weekly Oddity, I’m a big fan of Hallmark films and it’s because they channel, as Kristopher Polaha mentions in the IndieWire article above mentions, the kind of classic Hollywood film that doesn’t get wide theatrical release any longer. Ever since the bummer films of the 1970s, the theatres have gone through waves of realism and cynicism with short periods of saccharine. Those periods of saccharine are often met with critical derision, which I think is a shame because some of the best films ever made have classic “Hollywood” endings. These classic Hollywood endings are a significant departure from the 70s era endings and as much as I love a lot of the films of the 70s with their “70s endings,” I want a film that’s a little more cozy during the late fall and winter months. Winter is coming and I want to cuddle by the fire to a heartwarming film.
I can think of no film that warms my heart more than the Cary Grant classic Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. It’s a hilarious film that is deeper than it appears at first glance. It has commentaries about happy marriages, trust, and parenting as well as a critique of the American Dream. Elements of the film have gone on to be repeated in newer classics like Funny Farm, Baby Boom, and The Money Pit. The film was remade by Ice Cube in the film Are We Done Yet? and if you’ve watched She’s Having a Baby you’ll notice some influence there as well.
Myrna Loy is, as always, an absolute delight. She’s long been one of my favorite actors, one of my daughters is named after a character she played, and she is extremely strong here.
I’m glad you like Polite Society!
I look forward to reading your post on alignment! That is the main topic for both my soul and my game!