Short movies are at once the most ubiquitous and the most neglected films there are, garnering little critical appraisal as objects themselves even as they’re unavoidable in everyday life.
From December 2 through 8, Culture Snob and Ed Howard’s Only the Cinema are hosting the Short-Film Week blog-a-thon.
Things are awfully quiet around here. Too quiet. And that can only mean one thing: Culture Snob is busy preparing for the “Short-Film Week” blog-a-thon, which starts on Sunday, December 2, and runs for seven days. Or it could mean that I’ve been incredibly lazy this week.
Honestly and truly, I bear no antipathy toward Robert Zemeckis, although I wouldn’t want to sit through many of his movies, and even those I like are problematic at best. But I hoped fervently that something would prevent his Beowulf from leading the Box Office Power Rankings this week.
The only connection that I could quickly find between screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and novelist Paul Auster is that they had a public “conversation” earlier this year. (The promised subjects suggest at best a superficial relationship: “the art of filmmaking, writing, and – yes – Hollywood.” How pedestrian.) This is curious to me, because Arriaga’s script for the Tommy Lee Jones-directed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is classic Auster.
When I read the initial announcement for “Short Film Day,” slated for December 4 at Ed Howard’s Only the Cinema, my heart sank. I’d been mulling a short-film blog-a-thon for months, but was hesitant to set a date because of my experience with the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon; these things are a lot more work than I’d imagined. So Ed beat me to it. But then my barnacle/parasite/moocher antennae got all tingly, and I proposed that we co-host the blog-a-thon and expand it. He agreed.
Since unveiling the Box Office Power Rankings in May, it’s become apparent that the Culture Snob system does what it was intended to do – expose crappy popular movies as the gold-plated turds they are and reward good movies that might not have as much marketing muscle behind them. But it’s still largely a disheartening experience, because it actually highlights the problems of the marketplace rather than correcting them.
I am admittedly writing mostly from ignorance, but I can’t see any way that the strike by the Writers Guild of America will succeed unequivocally. Yes, the writers that generate talk-show monologues, awards-show banter, and television and movie scripts will likely get some concessions from Hollywood, and will end up in a better place financially. But it will be virtually impossible for them to get their fair share – what they deserve.
This is what customer service is all about. Seven hours after voting closed in a poll for the next installment, we’ve published the Drunken Commentary Track for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia – and the movie’s three hours long.
Ridley Scott’s American Gangster easily won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings title, as what was anticipated to be its most serious competition (Bee Movie) did worse with both audiences and critics.
