The filmmaker and writer Nelson George has a new piece in the New York Times called [“Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow”](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/movies/black-and-white-struggle- through-hollywoods-rosy-glow.html). It is a short but sprawling report on the flimsy handling of the American civil rights movement in Hollywood films. He uses this week’s release of Tate Taylor’s The Help as an entry point to the pitfalls of American cinema regarding our nation’s incredible struggle with racism. He doesn’t introduce anything particularly new, but rather lays out what has been abundantly clear regarding how cinema tends to handle the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

The fail-safe response for Hollywood has been to depict racial prejudice in cartoon caricature, a technique that has made the Southern redneck a cinematic bad guy on par with Nazis, Arab terrorists and zombies. By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.

This paragraph feels of monumental importance in the wake of the recent [murder of James Craig Anderson](http://hypertext.net/2011/08/hate-crime- videotaped) by a group of white teenagers led by 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon, Jr. in Jackson, Mississippi. Hollywood’s rednecks may be some kind of foreign evil, but in reality, they’re our friends and neighbors. Worse, they’re our kids.

One of the things that I find most harrowing about this horrific crime is Dedmon’s mugshot. He is a scrawny, bright-eyed boy, yet he is the face of hatred; he is the face of racism. Deryl Dedmon, Jr. is a murderer who killed a black man because he thought it would be fun. George’s point is that in films we don’t see the commonplace racism that leads to horrific acts such as Anderson’s murder. Hollywood’s stories need a villain, but what about when that villain is the kid next door?

Do the filmmakers put us inside the head of the black woman braving a gantlet of jeering whites to integrate a segregated school? Do we understand the strain on a white diner owner who finally allows blacks to enter his place despite the anger of his neighbors? It is this nuanced humanity that this movement demands.

I feel Melvin Van Peebles’s 1970 Watermelon Man is worth mentioning here. The film is about Jeff Gerber (played by comedian Godfrey Cambridge), a loudmouth suburban white racist who wakes up one day as a black man. His friends, family and neighbors who were once the prim and pious quiet ones in the face of his boisterous racism, now show their true colors toward Gerber’s new form. Once it is clear that there is nothing that could make Gerber white again, his relationships and his status erode to the point that he is no longer welcome in the community. The film ends on a sobering note, with Gerber and other black men preparing to fight, as if for battle. The war, it seems, was only beginning.

Peebles would go on to make the groundbreaking Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That film represents a turning point in black cinema, but Watermelon Man is a standout work in its own right. It portrays what Nelson George is suggesting, rightly, is too often forgotten in civil rights cinema, showing us not just the violent ugliness of racism but its underlying prevalence. The violent history of racism in this country is something we should never undermine. Still, there is a certain horror in watching Jeff Gerber’s neighbors cogently explain why he must move out for fear of their property values dropping. This was not the extreme, this was market-supported racism that illustrated just how deeply entrenched our nation was.

If George’s Times piece gets you fired up to seek out films about the civil rights movement, I think Watermelon Man should be on your shortlist. Follow it up with a screening of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and you’ll already be two films deep into Peebles’s repertoire. Not a bad start.

Julie Bosman for the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/books /survey-shows-publishing-expanded-since-2008.html):

BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, revealed that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008.

They didn’t have data for 2009?

Ms. Raccah emphasized that the newest survey incorporates data from a much larger group of publishers, in addition to distributors, wholesalers and retailers like Barnes & Noble. In its definition of what is a book, the report counted professional and scholarly journals and databases, multimedia teaching materials and mobile apps.

All of the numbers here are somewhat dubious. The survey took all of the apples and oranges (and pears and lemons and, hell, some avocados) and lumped them together to show a net win. For one, I’m not sure what growth over two years tells you.¹

The numbers that are of personal interest to me, and perhaps to most outside of the publishing industry, are these:

In 2008 e-books were 0.6 percent of the total trade market; in 2010, they were 6.4 percent. Publishers have seen especially robust e-book sales in genre fiction like romance, mystery and thrillers, as well as literary fiction. In 2010, 114 million e-books were sold, the report said. > > The survey does not include sales data from 2011, a year of substantial e-book growth.

But:

…sales of adult hardcover and paperback books from 2008 through 2010 were relatively flat, growing about 1 percent over three years. Sales of mass- market paperbacks declined 16 percent since 2008.

In short, paper-bound books are dying fast, but e-books are being rapidly adopted to pick up the slack. I’ve been reading nearly everything electronically for at least two years² and I don’t miss paper nearly as much as I thought I would. There are some aspects of paper that e-books can’t replicate, just ask [Jonathan Safran Foer](http://www.visual-editions.com/our- books/book/tree-of-codes), but that doesn’t mean that e-books can’t replace most books.

Publishing’s dirty secret is that the kinds of books that people think of as great writing, the groundbreaking fiction and non-fiction that fill the shelves of your local book store, represent only the tiniest portion of a $28 billion pie. Professional and academic publishing deals keep the industry afloat. Think of all the money squandered on books at colleges. That’s what keeps books in print for now.

I don’t particularly see why consumers might be scared of moving forward into the e-book age. The cost of entry is low enough, and even when the prices are comparable to that of a physical book, the convenience that e-readers offer is still great. I don’t see why paper books can’t live a long and happy life alongside vinyl records, which are still produced by the artists who care for the format and sought out by listeners who prefer it.

The publishing industry is finally realizing what the music industry did long ago, that the convenience and quality that digital offers is something consumers not only want, but need. The time to treat digital as an afterthought has passed.

Ben Fritz for the [L.A. Times](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/08 /consumers-now-spending-more-renting-movies-than-buying-them.html):

New data released Friday by the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry trade association, showed that people spent $4.2 billion renting movies in the first six months of 2011, compared with $4.1 billion buying them on disc or via digital download.

Most of the data cited in the article shows that people are more likely to subscribe to services like Netflix than they are to purchase a physical disc or a digital download. Sneaked in at the end of the article, however, is this tidbit:

Total spending on Blu-ray increased 10% in the first half of this year.

Also, in the DEG’s report ([PDF](http://www.degonline.org/pressreleases/2011/D EG_MID_YEAR_2011_REPORT.pdf)):

In the second quarter, the number of Blu-ray homes grew 16 percent over 2010 (inclusive of [Blu-ray Disc] set-tops, PS3s and [Home Theaters in a Box],) bringing the total household penetration of all Blu-ray compatible devices to more than 31.6 million U.S. homes.

All of this put together leads me to believe that the L.A. Times’ headline, “Consumers now spending more renting movies than buying them,” is only half the story. Viewers are making it clear that they prefer the convenience of subscription services, but they are also showing a willingness to embrace higher quality distribution. This suggests that people only want to own movies that look incredible on their HDTVs. While Netflix’s HD streaming looks good, Blu-rays look better. Plus, subscription streaming services still have paltry HD offerings.

What I don’t understand is why Hollywood has been biding its time with Blu- ray. The format war ended in 2008, yet I have only found a single store (the Upper East Side Barnes & Noble) that actually keeps Blu-rays organized by genre instead of alphabetically. Best Buy even still keeps them segregated from the well organized DVD selection, tucked away like some kind of second class disc. Consumers have gone not just to the better deal, but the more fun experience. Looking for what to watch on Netflix is enjoyable, especially given the company’s varied categories.¹ That layer of discovery has been removed from picking out Blu-ray discs.

Finally, I’d like to answer the question “Who cares about any of this besides studio executives?”² The main thing everyone should be on the lookout for is giving away a good thing. The other day I wrote that I feel like [filmmakers rushed into digital moviemaking](http://www.candlerblog.com/2011/08/06/digital-killed-the-film- star/) at the expense of celluloid film. It’s extremely difficult to revive a format once it’s gone³ and DVD and Blu-ray will go the way of the dodo if consumers aren’t supporting it. We should always be looking to the future and embracing new technologies, but when the quality is lower and the selection more scant, we might find ourselves without a way to find great looking home video at some point. Blu-ray may be the last physical format we ever welcome into our homes. Here’s hoping that whatever succeeds it doesn’t do so at the cost of quality.⁴

Evan Luzi provides a great overview of the costs of digital filmmaking in a new post, The Hidden Cost of RED Epic and Digital Cinema, on The Black and Blue. His main focus is the on the new(-ish) RED Epic 5K camera and how its high resolution carries with it a steep increase in production costs. No matter how affordable the camera becomes (without lenses, the kit retails for $58,000, a relative steal) the actual production costs are exponential to that of a lower resolution camera. As Evan points out:

Estimates are showing that, “At 5k 2:1 and REDcode 5:1 (which will likely be what most features shoot with), a 64GB SSD will be about 12-13 minutes,” [said Deanan Dasilva from RED](http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?52455-More- SSD-questions&p;=687522&viewfull;=1#post687522).

That’s about half of what you get at a similar aspect ratio, 4K, Redcode 42 compression ratio with the RED One.

There’s a lot more shop talk in his article (that’s The Black and Blue’s charm) about where all the money goes, but it’s later on that Evan hits on the most interesting aspect of the new format’s effects.

For the longest time, digital impressed filmmakers because they could shoot at high qualities at a relatively low cost to film.

The inevitable is happening: digital costs are equalizing themselves, offering little to no advantage over actual film. Meanwhile, the rush to digital has completely eroded the film marketplace. In the very near future, there may be [nowhere to process film anymore](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news /deluxe-technicolor-begin-orderly-retreat-212459), that is if companies are still producing the stuff. Film’s death knell never rang so loud as it does today.

As curmudgeons no doubt whined about sound and color in cinema, I feel we rushed into digital. In New York City, it’s almost impossible to catch a new movie on 35mm film anymore¹. I have a particular love for celluloid film. It’s an organism, beholden to nature and the elements just like the rest of us. This, of course, is its downfall. Digitally projected movies are crisp and clean, lacking the dust, scratches, cigarette burns and other blemishes of its forbear, but it’s not nostalgia for film’s ugly side that makes me love it.

Digital motion pictures are more lifeless than film images. They hang there over the audience, a corpse-like patina covering the screen just above the action. Digital’s binary nature allows it to be exactly what it is told to be (either a one or a zero); film, on the other hand, manages to have a mind of its own.

Digital production tools are often considered to be superior to film for their cost and their convenience, but they are becoming more and more like film as time goes on. I for one, don’t find digitally captured images to be superior, or equivalent, to their film counterparts. There is a certain beauty that digital imagery brings to the table, but as a format all its own, not as a replacement for film. Too bad, then, that we now live in a world where it’s the only game in town, and its convenience and cost are now on par with that spurned hog known as celluloid.

The A.V. Club published an interesting article yesterday by writer Sam Adams called [“The convenience trap: What the changes at Netflix reveal about an insidious trend”](http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-convenience-trap-what- the-changes-at-netflix-r,59829/).¹ The crux of it is that viewers should not be worried for their wallets in the face of Netflix’s 60% price hike, but instead should be worried of a world where Netflix streaming is considered the gold standard of viewing selection.

In essence, Netflix is gambling that its customers are less concerned about watching the right movie than watching right now. What if it’s right?

In short, Adams argues that we are headed for a future in which the great cinema gets cast aside as technology iterates. The landscape is such, he argues, that if viewers don’t have to seek out good work anymore, then there will be no place for it. The convenience of a bottomless, instant pool of choices ultimately tempers our outlook on the work. If we can watch a film anytime, why watch it now?

It’s an interesting argument about technology, but Adams muddles the whole thing up by laying the blame at Netflix’s (and really its users’) feet. netflix is decidedly the biggest gorilla in the room, but there are alternatives to it, both for discs and for streaming. Adams ruefully points out the holes in Netflix’s streaming library (“Derek Jarman’s Edward II is there, but not his masterful The Last Of England.”) but fails to mention that filling them remains antithetical to his argument. The good stuff isn’t on there, but if it were viewers still wouldn’t watch it.

When I read and reread this article, I can’t help but ask “What’s the problem?” and find that I can’t quite figure one out.

If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it? How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?

When you wonder why people find film writers often intolerable, this is why. First off, it’s offensive to compare these two works. He has chosen a dense, cerebral Thai masterwork and butt it up against an American television drama about football. Again, what’s the problem? While it’s true that most would pick the latter, ten years ago Weerasethakul’s film probably wouldn’t have made it into American homes at all. If anything he’s proving the boon that Netflix can be for world cinema.

The trouble is thinking that Netflix is the only option for both viewing and discovery. Before Netflix, how did we decide what to watch? Maybe it was the clerks’ picks at the video store, maybe it was word of mouth from a friend. At one time it was based solely on what was playing at the local theater. There is a lot of room for improvement for how we discover cinema (Jinni is one somewhat maddening attempt at fixing this) but it’s foolhardy to blame streaming technology for our own viewing deficiencies.

Films are available out in the ether on a variety of above (and below) board services. The trick is in deciding that they should be watched. That’s not something Netflix can control, nor should we be so naïve as to think any one company should be in control of that. Adams is right in the sense that we should seek out great art. With that in mind, there’s no reason that we can’t use our computers or our television sets to find great cinema; we just need to look places besides Netflix to promote competition and innovation in this space.

Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block may be the most fun film of 2011 thus far, and perhaps one of the most astonishing directorial debuts of the year. It is a romp that lightly parodies its source material while holding it’s own in the pantheon of genre cinema. Better, it transcends genre enough to become something increasingly rare at the multiplexes: a damned good little movie that actually makes you think.

The film follows a gang of troubled youths, led by the aptly named Moses (John Boyega), as their housing project is overrun by creepy creatures from outer space. The film posits that an alien invasion might not be as dramatic as films generally make it out to be. Perhaps instead of the usual “Take us to your leader” rhetoric, the aliens would land in an area where no one cares if it’s inhabitants live or die and let nature take it’s course.

I can’t help but bring up J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 when discussing Attack the Block. Where one is dipped in saccharine, the other is doused in acid. Both films follow a similar structure: kids discover destructive extra- terrestrial(s) and must bring a reckoning once they realize the adults of the world are unable to see the truth, all while learning valuable lessons about themselves. The difference, besides the gore and mortality ever-present in Cornish’s take but rid of Abrams’s, is in the revelations of the main characters. Moses’s sense of self in the Attack’s pivotal (and beautiful) final moments comes from inside; he is one with himself. Super 8’s Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) on the other hand realizes that he must firm up the relationships around him in order to live happily. The irony is that the film with the stronger message (and equally less patronizing) is the one that parents will likely keep their kids away from.

Finally, the “low-budget” creature effects in the film are absolutely brilliant. They are reminiscent of the eerie creature in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but with significantly more bite. Just as in that Thai, it is the cocksure hand of the filmmaker that makes the otherwise cheesy costume come across as harrowing, terrifying, mesmerizing. Anyone suffering from CG fatigue will certainly enjoy these fuzzy black monsters.¹

I can’t think of a better way to spend money this weekend than on a ticket to see Attack the Block. At worst you’ll get a laugh out of Nick Frost’s stoner comic relief. I’ll join the ranks and tell you to check out the film about a South London gang that fights aliens, but really there’s a lot more to this film than that. I can’t wait to see where Cornish takes us next.

I just barely made it to a screening of Bellflower at SXSW this past year, but I was [instantly taken](http://www.candlerblog.com/2011/03/15/sxsw-11 -review-bellflower/) by its apocalyptic charm. For a film that is about the bitterness of love lost, it has a surprising amount of life, a certain demonic spring in its step. That melange of emotions comes from the film’s writer, director and star, Evan Glodell.

Woodrow, the character Evan plays in his film, and best pal Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are tinkerers, forever trying to build bigger and more explosive contraptions. The film itself is something of a handmade experiment. Evan and his team built their cameras by putting vintage bellows systems together with cutting edge digital sensors, giving Bellflower a look reminiscient of, well, nothing else I’ve seen. It is at once vintage yet modern, aged yet entirely new.

I had the opportunity to speak with Evan recently about Bellflower and the work that inspires him. Give a listen and check out the film when it hits theaters this summer.

[podcast]http://www.candlerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/candlercast-19 -evan-glodell.mp3[/podcast]

[Right-Click to Download](http://www.candlerblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/candlercast-18-jeff-malmberg.mp3) • Subscribe in iTun es

Bellflower opens in New York and Los Angeles on Auguest 5th. For more information, check out the film’s [official site](http://www.bellflower- themovie.com).

Ken Auletta in this week’s New Yorker profile of Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook:

In the meantime, Facebook is quietly trying to integrate itself into every form of media. Chris Cox, the engineer who oversees Facebook’s product development, says of television, “You go home at night and there’s nine hundred and ninety-nine channels. . . . The real problem in that world is: What should I watch?” Perhaps you could read TV Guide, perhaps you could type “best Thursday sitcom” into Google, or perhaps you could scan some newspaper reviews. Cox wants you to be able to see on your screen what your Facebook friends are watching. “You should turn it on and it should say, ‘Fourteen of your friends liked “Entourage” this week. Click to watch.’ ” The idea is for Facebook to “tune in to everything around you,” he said. “We call it social design.”

Add this to a growing pile of evidence while you consider my previous article on What a Netflix & Facebook Alliance Means for Filmmakers.

Porn. That’s the best way to describe Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. And all kinds of porn too (well, not gay porn) including the kind of the woman-terrorized-by-phalluses-slash-tentacles variety. The story is ludicrous, the main character’s mate is way too good looking for him and all you want to do is fast forward to the good parts, which involve everyone shutting up and getting some action. That’s not to say it’s all bad. Who watches porn for the story anyway?

To be honest, this third Transformers installment is probably the best in the franchise. The concept behind these films has become completely unhinged, lending itself even further to excess, stupidity, stereotypes, explosions and, well, fun. For the longest time Michael Bay has had a chip on his shoulder about the quality of his films. Everyone says they’re terrible, but he says they’re great, usually citing box office numbers as proof of his worth. This go round, it seems he has finally accepted who he is: a maker of fantastically terrible films.

The plot, crafted by writer Ehren Kruger, actually has a lot of potential. The Autobots (good guys!), now government shills, are blindsided when a former friend turns out to be working with the Decepticons (bad guys!) in an effort to restore Cybertron, their devastated robot planet, to its former glory. The Americans, for their part, hid the fact that the Apollo space missions were designed to learn more about a crashed Autobot ship that had been stranded on the moon since the early 1960s. Then Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) gets annoyed about something, his girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) pouts while narrowly avoiding upskirt mishaps and Patrick Dempsey flips his hair douchily as Sam’s faux-cum-actual enemy, Dylan Gould, accountant to the stars. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess that manages to thrill.

I’m hearing this idle chatter that the action is too frenetic to keep track of, but I think the creative team finally got the speed and motion of these robot aliens right. There is a lot of movement, sure, but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was hardly watchable as there was too much shit flitting and spiraling across the screen. That still happens, but the movement is more balletic, more pleasing somehow. Say what you will about Bay’s irresponsibilities as a filmmaker, the effects team here is top notch. It is clear that they take the character design seriously, even if nothing else in the film is worth a brain cell.

Michael Bay’s messages are always so boring. The main message that runs through the bulk of his work is quite simple: America is great, the military may be fallible but its soldiers aren’t and fuck all you haters. There is a certain nobility to his unwavering (to the point of stupid) patriotism, but here, in an intergalactic fight to the death, it doesn’t make much sense. The Autobots claim to love humanity, but that manifests itself into fighting wars for America, wars that shouldn’t exist given that only the U.S. has friggin' robots on its side.¹ Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, to pick one, is a far more nuanced film than this one that actually confronts the issue of military disarmament in the face of technological superiority. The best Optimus Prime and his buddies could think up to help humanity was to blow up illegal nuclear facilities in the Middle East? Advanced civilization my ass.

Perhaps we should give Mr. Kruger more credit for crafting this story. It’s entirely possible that there once was a message to the story that got muddied up by all the explosions and underwear modeling. There are obvious allusions to America’s post-9/11 place in the world (e.g. “Chicago is Ground Zero”, a keffiyeh-wearing Megatron wandering the desert, the severing of an office building as soldiers and workers slide to their deaths) but the story never congeals into anything meaningful. Bay is a director for whom emotional and thematic development is a nuisance. He needs to move characters from one firefight to the next, and if that means in one scene Carly is Sam’s greatest defender but in the next she is bitterly pissed, that’s okay as long as she wanders into impending doom.

Michael Bay never really stopped directing music videos. His budgets are bigger and his runtimes may be longer, but he is still a maker of snacks, not meals. As a collection of scenes, Transformers: Dark of the Moon delivers as much action as anyone could expect. It’s far more entertaining, adrenaline- wise, than the other blockbusters that have come out this summer. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention X-Men: First Class, which is a superhero action film that tries to imbue a very real message on its viewers. I liked that film very much, for its performances, its story and the conversations it incited after I left the theater. However, I don’t think I actually had as much fun watching it as I did Bay’s latest. On some level I feel guilty for smiling my way through the mess that is the third (the third!) Transformers film. It is pointless, a bit racist, a lot sexist and absolutely horrible for your teeth. It’s everything a boy could want at the movies.

Paul Harrill:

Below I’ve offered my highly-subjective and quite likely wrong translations of some of the more curious Q+A sections of Apple’s FAQ. I’m no fortune teller, and if I’m wrong I will be happy to be wrong. But this is a very carefully worded document and, as is often the case with PR statements, what’s not said is as important as what is.

Cogent, straightforward and free of fear-mongering. Also, see his [original piece on filmmakers’ knee-jerk reactions](http://www.selfreliantfilm.com/2011/06/fcp-x-user…-or-ex-fcp-user- some-thoughts/) to FCP X. Great.