Logan, X-Men, Avengers & Levers

I love movies, I love De Palma & Kazan, I love Welles & Bergman, and I love these US Big Machines with Jedis and Superheroes too!

Yesterday I watched Logan, a Wolverine movie, and I was amazed by its… tone.

First, it’s been directed by James Mangold, who made the hilarious and perfect Knight & Day, the great Walk the Line, the stressful Identity, and more : this little jewel of Copland.

Good, very good director.

Logan is a surprise for Mainstream X-Men like movies lovers : it’s dark, complex, much more violent, risky, and full of great ideas.

It’s not as easy as “I broke the toys”, though Charles Xavier is old and Alzheimerized, though Logan is not “repairing himself” that much.

That movie sweats intelligence in every scene. The diner is perfectly played. The horses scene is delicate. The casting is marvelous (the albino, the little mutant girl).

 

It brings me to this pattern :

When you have big success with mainstream big things, like Star Wars, Avengers, how do you move forward?

 

One good thing is to pull out big show-offers and smart pants makers to entrust these big projects to… good directors, who made personal intelligent things before.

• Give Logan to the man who made Cop Land.
• Give Rogue One to Gareth Edwards who directed Monsters.
• Give The Last Jedi to the man who directed Looper.

 

But one can see something happening : Levers Choice.

Marvel tried these :

1. Reboot the thing, like they did twice with Spiderman. And why not?
2. Get bigger. From Iron Man to the last Avengers with dozens of heroes…
3. Butter up idiots & geeks with vulgarity and puns : Dead Pool (it worked!).
4. Drive to complexity, more adult themes & concerns : Logan.

 

Well : it’ll be interesting to follow…

Thanks for reading!

 

“Don’t lose your inner child and stay a child… from time to time, OK?”

– I wanna watch Thor Ragnarok!
– No : tonight it’s Stalker, by Tarkovsky…
– Oh noooooo… Pffff…

 

ONE

“Don’t lose your inner child” seems a splendid advice. The spirit of childhood is almost a superpower!

Everybody understands that : the capacity to marvel, curiosity, a genuine sense of happiness, love of simple things, ability to lose yourself into an activity, gathering ideas like shells…

I hope you kept it. And if you don’t, your own children can show you : you just have to watch them play, together or alone, 100% focused…

“Garder son âme d’enfant” (to keep your child’s soul”)

 

TWO

But there’s a difference between keeping your inner child and… staying a child in your head. Refusing to be an adult. Fleeing responsibilities. Bottle-feeding mainstream teen medias, which makes you an obedient larva…

You’ll be a perfect consumer!

 

THREE

Don’t lose your inner child, AND grow up as an adult, using this spark in your eye. From time to time :

1. Explore Arts you don’t know
2. Stay away from mainstream entertainment
3. Be autonomous in your search
4. Stop “reacting” to medias all the time
5. Let your “cultural comfort zone” behind
6. Study and draw maps about what you’ll explore
7. Draw your own path
8. Try adult things

 

– Yes, but I wanna watch Thor!
– OK, but tomorrow, it’s Tarkovky.
– Okey! Can we read some Garfield in bed?
– Nope : we go on with this Manet biography.
– Pffffffffff…

(Yes, it was a dialog between me and myself. Yes I watched Thor yesterday, and Stalker today. So there!)

 

Thanks for reading!

STALKER is a treasure: an invitation to go on a mental ride with a poet and philosopher. A film that makes you wonder more about yourself yet without making you anxious. The few existing films like STALKER are the reason why cinema is called “art”! (IMDB comment)

 

 

When your comfort zone is in Mainstream Children Marketing, you live in PARADISE

Why do I feel a slight nausea when I see BB-8 with a Santa Claus Hat or the death star covered with snow?

The concept of Comfort Zone is useful. Inside this (we all need that, right?), we’re easy and happy, like a sleeping baby. We have all we need, that’s COOL. You absolutely don’t have to explore the outside : it’s unknown, maybe dangerous, blah blah blah, and you could discover things…

If you’re an adult and you love Harry Potter, Disney, Star Wars and all the marketing around it (Pop Figures, Lego, etc) and you have plenty of money, I see you live in total and uninterrupted paradise. For your own happiness, you just have to visit stores. Then, as a good target you are, you’ll go from one “Oh! Ah!” to “Woaw that’s cool! I want it!”.

EVERYTHING there is ready for you and for your bliss : Lego Star Wars Advent Calendars, Harry Potter Hogwarts Houses Goodies (scarves, tee shirts, etc), Disney Consumer Products (you’ll find plenty of elements of their targeting processes on the web, for example here : https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-strategy-walt-disney/ ). I told you : it’s paradise!!

Happiness in idiocy is exactly what the system needs from you. Consent, obedience, servitude.

As long as you’re smiling with this new Falcon Millenium Lego or this Avengers Captain America doormat ($86 51 + $4.49 shipping on Amazon, today) or this very cool Disney/Pixar Cars 3 Ultimate Florida Speedway Track Set ($179.74 & FREE shipping – 36 customer reviews), you’re OK. Life is a beauty! There are “822 results for Toys & Games : “Jack Skellington” on Amazon. Havem all?

“Come on! Live with your time!”

Yes, well : NO. I have another comfort zone, which is, in culture, I hope, a little larger. I’ll watch the new Star Wars for sure, and Blade Runner 2049 was great, but this week I read an interview with Lenny Bernstein about the Rite of Spring, tweets by Taleb, articles by Serge Daney or Pasolini, talked about dreams or creativity about Valéry (poet), realism (or not, cf Sorolla) in Zorn’s paintings, Sander’s links with Walker Evans (photographer), or symbols analyzed by Durand (anthropologist who liked Bachelard). Tonight I’ll probably watch… The Servant, by Losey. A good way to think about this, right?

And I’d hang myself if I had to watch cartoons while I coffee in the morning!

Argh! Bloody hell! I just realized that my comfort zone was… to expand mine.

Lazy me.

Trapped. Me moorings awweeeee.

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

 

The problem with Google…

My first Internet connexion? 1993. At this time, no Chrome, no Firefox, no Google, and a VERY slow modem (my first was a 33.6 kbit/s, with its delicious Krooooiiiii noise at the beginning).

What we call the “Web” was a big mess, Netscape (the browser) was crashing every twelve seconds, and to try to find things, you had to use Lycos or AltaVista. Both were pretty inaccurate. One great source of informations was the Usenet Newsgroups.

Google appeared in 1998 with a simple and great idea, which I just found in the wiki page :

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

Well, therefore, everybody used Google, which is very easy to understand : if you wanted to find the best page about canoes in California BEFORE Google, good luck! Results were a total mess, and the one you needed was lost in dozens of other things…

 

But AltaVista and Lycos had this : the ability to LOSE you in the web, on little hiking paths. You were constantly discovering little diaries, unknown collectors, fascinating people gathering infos on many subjects, smart web pages… Almost all searches were adventures… because, precisely, or thanks, to the “no ranking”.

This leads to a well known dial :

 Tout gain s’accompagne d’une perte – Every gain involves loss

 

Today, with Google and Facebook, we all navigate on highways. Most of the time, if you want to navigate on unbeaten tracks, you have to jump out off Google and find links pages, forums or… newsgroups (who use them today?).

 

Or this great answer to this little question : “How to discover new websites?”

https://www.stumbleupon.com/

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Every bookstore is the result of its clientele

One day I saw an interview of a celeb journalist and TV show presenter, a person I like very much, directing good shows and a pretty good interviewer herself. She was asked why TV was so full of trash. I saw her face changing, she was really upset, then answered something very surprising : TV broadcasts were so bad because “It’s what the audience wants!”.

She continued on this mode, telling something like “If people were watching operas, literature documentaries and great movie classics, all trash TV would broadcast in front of nobody, then would disappear for ever, then we would have great TV everywhere!”.

Her anger was noticeable, and that’s why I remembered it clearly. When smart people complain, you listen. Then, you wonder, right?

Because of course this all seems to be too good to be true, and it’s easy to counterattack. People watch trash TV because it’s prepared and broadcasted to them, etc.

 

So, there’s a balance here to find. After counterattack I have to admit that we all have a responsibility here, nonetheless. It’s like when I hear someone complaining about dense traffic… from a car. I have to answer to this person that he is a brick of it.

In some countries, if you are stuck into a traffic jam, you get a ticket! Which, in a way, is fair : you’re a part of it, it’s your fault!

OK, there’s a balance to find…

 

I work in a bookstore, and I’m confronted with this “structure”. The axiom could be :

“Every bookstore is the result of its clientele”.

You can be appalled, but it’s true. For a part, at least.

Yeah, there are other dials to watch. You need to have serious booksellers on board. And you often have to sell tons of “best sellers” on end displays… to be able to present entire tables of great books (your choice) in the store. Etc.

In a serious bookstore, all kind of books are bought then presented on tables and shelves. Employees, then, watch (weekly) closely the sales, then books are reordered. Never sold volumes (for months) are a bit dirty or torn, and therefore sent back to editors, and this is it : little by little, the customers, by the way they act and buy, model and form the store.

You just need a year or so to adjust, understand and change your store to adapt to your clientele. If you have an architecture school a street away, your architecture department will grow, you’ll have rare books, theory books and even anthropology books for the thinkers around. A visitor will pass and will be in a awe : “Oh wow, what a great architecture choice you have!”. Yessss it’s thanks to the bookstore employee, but mainly because he found the clientele, too. It’s a dance, a tango.

There’s a balance to find.

There’s a split of responsibilities in front of trash TV, in traffic jams, in poor supplied bookstores. Suppliers, of course, but audience too.

Do you meet this structure too, in your job, in your life? Don’t hesitate to comment, here.

 

We have an old idiom in France, about couples : “L’homme propose, la femme dispose”. It’s something like “the man proposes doings, the woman makes the choice” – I’m sorry for the translation, it’s almost impossible to do it, but you got me, right? Tango.

 

Thanks for reading!

(Really sorry for my English today. Have a nice day!)

 

Logan, Arthur and Motoko

I am a movie lover, un “cinéphile“. I read a lot about movies. I own thousands of DVDs and Blu-rays. I love Orson Welles, John Ford and Elia Kazan. I love Losey, Bergman and Miyazaki. I BUY movies. I’m able to spend a year to explore 1961 in cinema history (yes there’s a Wikipedia page for that). I’m able to watch all Tennessee Williams movies adaptations in a month, just for the extraordinary pleasure of… oh forget it.

But I download them too. A lot. I watch, and if I like I buy. I’m old school. I don’t have Netflix nor an Apple TV. I want the discs, the bonuses, the sleeves. Les galettes : the “epiphany cakes” (yesss we say that, for movie discs). Makes sense, right?

It’s August, so I found many American mainstream movies to download. Fast and Furious number 39 (or whatever), or Alien Covenant (I wanted to watch is again, because it’s a bad, wrong movie, but also because of Scott, Giger/Böcklin, the “two notes flute in the echo” music, and the stress before the shuttle explosion).

By the way, I wrote to the actress behind the voice of Mother, in Covenant. Great work!

I left 3 movies on the side, because I was sure it was shit.

Logan, King Arthur and Ghost in the Shell. All of them had bad trailers. Logan smelled “I want to end this character violently”. Arthur really smelled like duck-billed platypus shit. And watching Scarlett Johansson exploding a window 6541 times in slow motion on Facebook was enough to keep me away from it (talk about bad e-marketing -> another article).

All of them took me by surprise.

But beware : I’m NOT talking about Kitano’s Hana Bi or Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (I can’t wait to find these in Blu-ray). Don’t even talk about Heaven’s Gate, Single Man or Fanny & Alexander (I have the Blu-rays, thank you). I’m writing here about mainstream movies, to eat with popcorn and have fun with.

Logan surprised me because it was more violent, tragic, or let’s say “less stupid” than some other X-Men I watched (I watched them all). I like these superheroes movies, but here I was surprised and wondered about the audience targeted by it. So what : Adult geeks? I don’t know, but I loved it. The Wolverine girl, Xavier in his chair, powerful but dying, the cross-to-X at the end, it awed me.

I was really ready to laugh sarcastically at Arthur. But Ritchie made Snatch and the Sherlocks, and I loved U.N.C.L.E., so I tried… And I found it brilliant! Smart and fast, funny at times (I LOVE when Ritchie plays with dialogs/possible scene, like when Sherlock Holmes will fight), and so powerful (ohhh Excalibur). A good evil character (hello Jude Law), a mage… A good one!

I will forgive everything to Jude Law since he played in My Blueberry Nights.

Ghost in the Shell climbed greatfully towards the spider-tank scene (I own the anime movie, and I needed to know what they’ll do with the tank). The face to face with mother ending crushed me. The sound is great. Kitano is perfect. Binoche is fantastic (strong, fragile, alive). What a great surprise!

Well, I’m thankful. I read today something like “Even if it’s bad, it’s OK if it’s made with the heart” – I don’t remember where : Gide or Valéry? All of them were made with some heart.

Then I wonder how to blog about Logan : what are and what could be other branches in the almost totally kryptonitelic ridiculous tree of Superhero Movies? About Arthur : what’s the drive in Ritchie : a casualness, a “I allow everything, shut up” energy? About Ghost in the Shell : how to make a robot alive? How to adapt a fucking Japanese cartoon with elegance? How to convince Scarlett Johannsson to play that?

 

After all this, you will ALWAYS need to clear your spirit from special effects, Excalibur’s devastation, jumping in an invisible electronic device, or fake claws. I suggest an Ingmar Bergman’s movie : Winter Light. Or just one quote of this movie instead :

“God does not speak because there is no God. You should learn how to love, instead of praying”.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Reasons why some people reject modern #Art

Nathalie Heinich is a French sociologist. She studied the reasons why people disliked modern art. Here’s a part of her list. What will you do about it?

Values in the domain of modern art rejection :

• It’s disgusting, unpleasant
• It’s not beautiful
• It’s not art
• It’s meaningless
• A child could do the same
• It’s made to get noticed
• It’s made to make money
• Lack of inspiration
• It’s not serious
• It’s dangerous
• It’s obstructing the pathway
• It’s useless
• It’s unpopular, incomprehensible
• It’s racist, sexist, obscene, cruel

Thanks for reading!

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