Eugie Foster, 1971-2014

Nebula award winning-author Eugie Foster died on Saturday.

She was forty-two.

I knew her from my time reviewing for Tangent Online and The Fix, where she worked as an editor.

Eugie was one of the very first people I became acquainted with in the world of science fiction fandom, and the first with whom I actually worked in it.

She was always kind, considerate, patient and supportive.

The world is a colder place for her no longer being among us.

However, her work does remain with us. If you are not familiar with it, I urge you to check it out for yourself.

Telling Lies About Tolstoy's War and Peace: The Short Version

My recent post on Tolstoy's War and Peace has been getting a lot of hits lately, and so I thought it worthwhile to write up a quick summary of my thoughts on the book.

Exactly what I had to say about the book is the following.

The length of the book; its crowding with a huge cast of at times confusingly named characters; its loose, even plotless structure; and its frequent digressions into lecturing about ideas which are in some cases abstruse, in others deeply against the grain of twenty-first century attitudes; make it a challenging read.

It must also be admitted that the book has its limits of perspective. Tolstoy is in the main focused on Russian aristocrats here, and takes little interest in the strata below them, or in the modern, urban side of life. He also subordinates the variety, balance and color of his tale to his expounding of certain ideas about life and history. Unsurprisingly the story often seem sanitized, poorly paced and even dull in places--the contrast with his contemporary Dostoyevsky, for example, quite marked--while his relation of his ideas gets repetitious.

Still, along with its challenges and its arguable defects, it has very real strengths. Tolstoy's eye for detail, and the vividness this often gives his characterizations and scenes, often elevates the interest of his material beyond what might be expected from its limitations. As one might hope from he title, he is particularly good at writing about war (and as it turns out, especially the fog of war), and while his presentation of his ideas is one-sided (and frequently self-contradicting) the ideas themselves have enough interest to engage a reader ordinarily disinclined to consider such views.

The result is a book that may not necessarily live up to the claims made for it as the greatest novel ever written, but which remains deservedly a classic, and which I found worth my while.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Box Office in Summer 2014, and The Movies of Summer 2015

A summer exceptionally short on megahits came to an end this Labor Day weekend.1

This season, only one movie crossed the quarter-billion dollar mark. By contrast, three or more has been the norm since about the turn of this century, with a few exceptional summers scoring as many as five (2007, 2009, 2010), and last summer seeing four.

The biggest hit was Guardians of the Galaxy, just shy of $300 million at the time of writing. By contrast, 2013 had Iron Man 3 with $409 million, and Despicable Me 2 with just a little less (some $391 million). The preceding year was even more impressive, with Avengers taking in $623 million, and The Dark Knight Rises pulling in another $448 million.

Overall, the earnings during the summer season were down almost 15 percent from the preceding year.

Of course, that is not really grounds for panic. The slow ticket sales do reflect a number of exceptional factors, like the fact that last summer's earnings had set a new record, and so skew the perception of the average; and that the bumping of a number of "tentpoles" (like Jupiter Jones) over to later release dates, and the fewness of big, family-oriented, animated films (no Pixar, etc.), meant fewer of the kinds of movies most likely to be big money-makers.

Still, the long-term picture looks worse when one thinks in terms of tickets sold rather than monetary grosses, as a quick glance at the data on Box Office Mojo shows.2 The fact that the top films in particular were such a letdown can be taken for a reminder of the limits of the blockbuster, "event movie" strategy--its high-risk nature, and the reality that one can only have so many successful releases of the type in any given period. The distribution of success and failure during the season also implies that not only critics, but audiences too, are weary of the kind of fare being served up. The films that did perform relatively well were the fresher and riskier releases (Maleficent, Edge of Tomorrow, Lucy, Guardians of the Galaxy), rather than the remakes and sequels of May and June that seemed such good bets (Spiderman 2, Transformers 4).

Will that fact make Hollywood a bit more adventurous in its future offerings? Perhaps, perhaps not (more likely not, given how few seem to be saying this), but 2015, at least, will come along too early to reflect any such change, and that year at least seems to be much in line with this one, with movies like Avengers 2, Mad Max 4, Jurassic Park 4, Terminator 5. A reboot of the Fantastic Four, remakes of Poltergeist and Point Break. Movie versions of Entourage, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Assassin's Creed. The Despicable Me spin-off Minions, and a sequel to Ted. More Insidious and Sinister, and more Melissa McCarthy in Spy. Another Marvel superhero franchise in Ant-Man . . .

Reviewing the list I still wondered if maybe there would nonetheless be material for another post like the one I wrote in 2013 about this summer's films ("And Now For Something Slightly Different (Maybe)"), and simply didn't see it, so I'll content myself with making guesses about how this crop will do.

As it seems to me, with even a steep drop from the earnings of the previous film, Avengers alone should be adequate to ensure one mega-hit for the summer of 2015. And there's no reason to think Marvel's luck is running out just yet, so Fantastic Four and Ant-Man have a shot at being decent performers.

Despite the flopping of Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West (yet another reminder that Westerns don't do well in summer, as if one were needed), I expect that there's enough goodwill left toward Ted to make Ted 2 a success--just as Minions will probably be a success.3 By contrast, the very hard push made for Melissa McCarthy seems to be running out of steam if Tammy's anything to go by, and Spy seems likely to suffer accordingly.

It has been a long time since either Jurassic Park or Terminator were on the big-screen, and when they did put in their final appearances, those franchises were well along a path of diminishing returns (though I personally liked the lean Jurassic Park III better than the lumbering The Lost World). That will work against them, and so will the ex-California governor's awful track record at the box office this past couple of years.

The idea of a new Mad Max film at least seems more relevant, but this franchise has been off the screen longer (thirty years!), was closely identified with a star no longer attached to it (and whose star is far from what it once was), and was never a big money-maker in the States. (Mad Max 3 made $38 million in '85, which even after inflation still isn't blockbuster money.) I'm not sure there are grounds for expecting this to change now.

I don't have much idea as to whether Man From U.N.C.L.E. will be another Mission: Impossible-like blockbuster--or an I Spy. Equally, Assassin's Creed may be the breakthrough Hollywood's been waiting for with video game-based movies--or it may be another Prince of Persia-style disappointment (though in fairness, a movie can do a lot worse than Prince did).4 And the decision to remake Point Break seems just plain incomprehensible.

This seems to imply a good many gambles--but not necessarily the kind of gambles likely to pay off. Rather than serving up something a little less conventional, it looks like a great deal of effort at squeezing exhausted properties (Terminator, etc.). And so I won't expect that 2015 will shift the talk from dismayed reactions to hopes for endless boom times.

Still, even if that summer ends up with another load of underperformers, Hollywood will not necessarily see it as reinforcing the disappointing signal from 2014, especially with foreign markets continuing to blunt its worry over the trend at home (and few in the industry seeming to worry much about intensifying competition for markets like China's and Japan's)--and in fairness, the absence of any clear alternatives that the studios might plausibly find attractive. So industry-watchers will once again talk about how something must be done, while business goes on as usual.

1. This was underscored by the following weekend being the weakest the industry has seen in thirteen years--with the last such low point due to highly exceptional circumstances simply not comparable to the events of September 4-6, 2014.
2. 2013 may have been a record year in terms of dollars earned, but ticket sales were down 15 percent from 2002, and was actually the fourth lowest year for ticket sales this century. This year seems likely to be worse than that. All the same, when the numbers are crunched at year's end, it remains more than likely that theatergoing in 2014 will be found to have been within the normal range for recent decades--4-5 tickets per capita for the twelvemonth.
3. Even before MacFarlane's film, the list of such flops was already quite long, with Jonah Hex and The Lone Ranger recent memories.
4. Despite its reputation as a flop, Prince still made $91 million at the U.S. box office, $336 million worldwide--more than any other video game adaptation to date.

Reading Literary Classics, Again

Time and again I have been struck by the difference between people how are supposed to read literary classics, and the far less inspiring way they actually experience them--a combination of unthinking respect for their Authority, and equally unthinking boredom with the actual stuff of them.

As it happens, this is not a new situation at all.

Oscar Wilde summed up the situation almost one and a quarter centuries ago in similar terms, when he remarked that:

In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them.

Certainly where Shakespeare is concerned, it seemed to him "quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays."

Moreover, he took the view that this tendency "does a great deal of harm," the public "mak[ing] use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities."

Some decades after, H.G. Wells observed in The Outline of History that it was "a pity that the ridiculous extravagances of scholastic admirers . . . speak of [Homer's Iliad and Odyssey] as supreme and unapproachable and so forth," for these attitudes had left the general reader's response to these worthwhile works an "awe-stricken neglect."

And so it went with every other writer enjoying a company of "scholastic admirers" prone to "ridiculous extravagances" of this sort, who insured that that part of the public which did read fiction gave their attention to figures like E. Phillips Oppenheim instead. So it still goes, long after Oppenheim himself became obscure, while his heirs advertise their novels on television.

Incidentally, I expect to have more to say on Wells' Outline in upcoming posts.

Selling Theater Tickets in a Post-Netflix Era

The entertainment press is, like the rest of the press, not famous for encouraging a long-term perspective. Slight ups and downs in the mark get trumpeted as indications of endless boom times to come, or the End of Everything, when in North America, at least, the numbers have remained fairly constant: 4-5 tickets sold per capita, per year, for the past several decades.

Still, that does not rule out the possibility of deeper and more worrying changes for the business, like the apparently decreasing tendency of the younger age cohorts to go to the theater. To go by the statistics routinely offered up on BoxOfficeGuru, for the young moviegoing (rather than mere movie-watching) is less and less a casual activity during a weekend outing, and more and more a deliberate decision--which seems understandable given that they are as a rule more cash-strapped, less mobile and more accustomed to alternatives for accessing content than older cohorts, even as all demographic categories seem to be affected by these trends.1

The result is that while it has always been the case that most movies lose money, leaving the industry dependent on a comparatively small number of big moneymakers, a "regular" movie has even less chance than before. A film simply has to offer something on the big screen that will make buying a ticket rather than waiting and seeing it on the small screen worthwhile. The most obvious way is sheer visual impact--hence, the accent on blockbuster-style spectacle, supplemented with the punch of IMAX and 3-D.

The other is making a film's release feel like an event, something the viewer wants to experience not in two months, but right NOW along with "everyone" else. Of course, there is hype, but it only goes so far when everyone does it, and those charged with generating the hype need something to work with--the very reason for the pressure on would-be filmmakers to produce "high-concept" work. Basing a film on a property which already has a large and interested following is the most obvious strategy--hence the endless sequels, spin-offs and remakes, as well as the tendency for new work to come from adaptations of already popular properties rather than original scripts. (The phenomenon is not limited to tentpoles: Twilight was not an action-packed CGI-fest, but its release was certainly received as an event by fans of the book.2)

Still, there are limits to the "event" strategy. If every movie is an event, then no movie is an event, especially if all the movies out there look alike anyway--a gripe that has become fairly routine, though it may be increasingly plausible. And particular franchises can be worked to diminishing returns in this as in other ways. The Spiderman reboot failed to stir up real excitement back in 2012, and the sequel suffered accordingly this summer, setting the tone for a season full of movies that large parts of the audience felt they could afford to miss.

Nonetheless, for all the disappointments of the past few months, Hollywood, buoyed by all the surcharges and foreign receipts, looks a long way from the kind of crisis that would require it to seriously alter its way of doing business.

1. Their decreased propensity to drive has often been noted; and it should be remembered that this is not a reflection of improved public transport, the reverse likely being the case given post-2008 cuts to public services.
2. It seems, too, that movie running times reflect similar pressures. The 90 minute film seems largely a thing of the past, just about everything seeming to be a two-and-a-half hour epic, intended to make the viewer feel they got something they wouldn't just watching a TV show at home. And of course, when the movie's main offering is spectacle, the longer running time lets it serve up more of this.

The Decline of the R-Rated Action Movie

The dominance of the effects-powered science fiction and fantasy spectacle, and with it, the "summer tentpole," is typically traced back to the mid-1970s, and films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and Richard Donner's Superman (1978), since which time films of the type have typically topped the box office.

Yet, their dominance of the marketplace has never been so complete as it is now. Going back over the lists of releases as recently as the 1980s, one struggled to find a handful of such films in any given year. Now in a typical summer, most weeks see a new release of the type (or even two), while a good many other such films are sprinkled around the rest of the calendar, giving the impression that it's summer all year long.

In the process they have crowded out other types of films, among them other styles of action film which had managed to flourish even in the post-Star Wars age, like the paramilitary action movie, and with it, the R-rated action movie in general (in contrast with the typically PG/PG-13-rated Spielberg-Lucas-superhero spectacles).1 During the '80s, and even much of the '90s, various Schwarzenegger and Stallone vehicles (like 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1993's Cliffhanger, and 1994's True Lies), the first three films of both the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises (1987-1995), and assorted Die Hard imitators (1994's Speed, 1996's The Rock, 1997's Air Force One), as well as a slew of science fiction films made in similar style (like 1986's Aliens, 1990's Total Recall and 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day), were all among their year's top ten hits.2

The annual top twenty during these years also included such hits as 1982's First Blood, 1986's Cobra, 1987's Predator and Robocop, 1988's Rambo III, 1989's Tango & Cash, 1992's Under Siege and Patriot Games, 1993's Demolition Man, 1994's The Specialist, 1996's Broken Arrow and Eraser, 1997's Con Air and 1998's Lethal Weapon 4. Two other Schwarzenegger films widely seen as prime examples of the '80s action movie, 1984's Terminator and 1985's Commando, also came very close (making the twenty-first and twenty-fifth spots in their years, respectively).

The preponderance of these kinds of films would seem even more overwhelming if one also counted in related films like Eddie Murphy's '80s-era action-comedies (1982's 48 Hrs., and the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies in 1984 and 1987, all of which were top ten hits, with the original BHC the top earner of '84), or the period cop film The Untouchables (the sixth highest grosser of 1987).2

In fact, it could be argued that where the action genre was concerned, they were predominant, big-screen action almost synonymous with the words "People under 17 years may only be admitted if accompanied by a parent or guardian." Still, even before the end of the '80s the relationship shifted into reverse, as the shoot 'em ups characteristic of the decade became creatively exhausted and decreasingly relevant, while improving CGI and the superhero boom boosted the science fiction and fantasy epics. In succeeding years the blazing machine guns gave way to wire work and computer-based superheroic feats, and the mayhem became at once larger in scale and edited in quicker-cutting fashion, leaving less opportunity or reason to linger on gory details, while the subject matter (so often drawn from the pages of DC and Marvel) made a lighter tone appear more appropriate. The result was action that was at once more spectacular and nearly antiseptic.3 Meanwhile, film in general, the action movie included, became prone to downplay that other major reason to exclude the under-17 crowd, sexuality (such that one writer recently remarked the sexless lives of superheroes). Under such circumstances, the shift away from the "rougher stuff" was natural enough, and encouraged by the risk attendant on swelling budgets.

In hindsight, The Matrix (1999) seems particularly representative of the transition, in its blend of withering machine gun fire and superheroics (Neo even flies), and its launch of the last R-rated action franchise to meet with really massive commercial success. After its debut fifteen years ago, new R-rated action movies tended simply to continue older franchises (like Bad Boys and Terminator in 2003, Rambo in 2008), often sold on nostalgia even when that was not the case (like 2010's The Expendables), and tended to be comparatively marginal within the marketplace.4 The highest-grossing such film last year, Olympus Has Fallen, fell short of the $100 million mark to wind up only the thirty-sixth highest-earning film of its year--a long way down from the prominence of comparable movies a quarter of a century ago. Unsurprisingly, even traditionally R-rated franchises have tended to sanitize their content in pursuit of a more lucrative PG-13 rating (as Alien, Die Hard and Terminator did in the 2000s, as has been the case with the Total Recall and Robocop remakes, and now even the third installment of The Expendables).5

In short, like the sex and nudity once a regular feature of such movies, bloody violence, when not presented as part of Serious Drama (like the based-on-a-true-story terrorism-themed films in which Navy SEALs are now apt to make appearances), tends to be left to lower-budgeted fare, and one supposes, to premium cable drama like Game of Thrones, which along with the rest of the post-'90s explosion of means for accessing entertainment, saves fans a trip to the theater.

1. One might include under the heading of Spielberg-space-superheroes such things as the Star Trek franchise (first-class hits through the fourth film) and the succession of Indiana Jones imitations seen during the decade (the biggest success among which was 1984's Romancing the Stone).
2. Indeed, four of the top twenty movies of 1987 were police-centered action movies (The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon) or action-comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, Stakeout)--even without including the science fiction film Robocop, which also made the year's top twenty.
3. Excepting the Blade franchise (1998, 2002, 2004), launched in a time when comic book movies were often lower-budgeted and less commercially ambitious, R-rated superhero movies have tended to perform modestly at best. The most successful of these, 2008's Wanted, is only #34 on BoxOfficeMojo's list of superhero films.
4. One area that has been something of an exception is the battle-heavy historical epic, the R-rated Gladiator (the #4 hit of 2000), Troy (#13 in 2004) and 300 (#10 in 2007) all doing good business, but this remains a small and fickle part of the market, especially in the United States. Another, more modest area of success is action-horror, the Resident Evil (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012) and Underworld (2003, 2006, 2009, 2012) films getting by on smaller budgets and lower grosses.

Learning History From Anime

Time and again I have been struck by the paucity of English-language writing on a major historical subject. Large patches of German history, for instance, like the Peasants' War, or the 1918 Revolution, or the history of the Federal Republic. And while World War II can seem the most thoroughly exhausted of historical subjects, very little seems to have been written about the Italian armed forces' performance and role in that conflict.

No less surprising is the scarcity of historiography about Japan. The obsessive interest in the country in the United States during the '80s does not seem to have extended to an interest in the country's history--a testament to the superficiality of that interest, and of the "expertise" on the country so highly touted at the time. Unsurprisingly, the American anime fan who finds themselves intrigued by a subject like the Warring States period, or the Bakumatsu era, who would like to know more about the career of Oda Nobunaga, or what the Shinsengumi were really like, has very few sources to which they can turn.

That being the case with Japan, with its prominent place in world affairs during the last century, one can only imagine the scarcity of substantive information about other, less-prominent, less-studied societies--and what weak stuff must pass for expertise on their cultures.

Such is the distance between hype and reality in this "information age."

The East Asian Box Office: The Entertainment Press Gets Its Say

I have often remarked here on the trend in the hugely important markets of East Asia (China is the world's second-biggest, Japan's the third) toward the consumption of more domestically produced product, and fewer Hollywood movies.

My thoughts were a reaction to the films I saw topping the box office in China, Japan and South Korea in the past decade, but a more systematic examination only supports that conclusion, as an article in Film Business Asia showed last May. Indeed, the article notes that in 2013 "one hundred films from East Asia made more than US$10 million at their local box office," securing "a combined box office of US$3.41 billion."

Mark Schilling in his article "Why Hollywood No Longer Dominates Japan's Box Office" notes that the market share of foreign films in Japan fell from 67 percent a decade earlier to roughly half that (34 percent) by 2013--which also marked the fifth straight year in which they failed to exceed a fifty-percent share of the market.

These are impressive chunks of not just the local market to which Hollywood has paid so much attention in recent years, but the whole world market.

Of course, even if Chinese, Japanese and South Korean moviegoers are less apt to choose Hollywood, some American movies still do massive business in this region. Disney's Frozen was a megahit, pulling in close to a quarter of a billion dollars in Japan alone, and another $125 million in China and South Korea. The preceding year, Monsters University was a colossal success, while the comedy Ted was also a hit.

Still, it is increasingly being recognized that audiences are more selective regarding the American films they do. Schilling's thought, after noting the big business those American films did, is that Disney-style family films can still do well here, and that even if Ted is not exactly that, "Japanese audiences love cute, even if they get their cute from a vulgar, substance-abusing animated bear."

By contrast, they're not much for "dark and depressing"--the American entertainment industry's adoration of "dark and gritty" perhaps costing it in this part of the world.

On the Success of Game of Thrones

By the end of its fourth season, Game of Thrones became the most watched show on HBO ever.

More watched, even, than the storied Sopranos.

That the show would meet with much success at all once seemed a long shot.

And yet, in hindsight, it seems perfectly natural.

Game of Thrones succeeded as a fast, flashy, sex-and-violence-laden soap opera. And where soap opera is concerned, it is tough to beat a feudal setting.

The simple fact of the matter is that in today's world power is vested less in individuals than in large organizations, while office and office-holder are separate, and likely the products of a culture of white-collar organization men taught to always seem agreeable and "speak to the well-blunted point." Different kinds of power--public and private, economic, political and military--are vested in altogether different organizations. It all makes power diffuse, and vague, and impersonal, and the players rather self-important cogs in just one of many wheels, for all their flattering by worshipful journalists.

By contrast, in the Game, personal power is often highly concentrated and multidimensional, so that individual players like Tywin Lannister (Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West, King's Hand, creditor to the throne) weigh very heavily in the scales--so much so that they don't have to worry about hiding bodies when violence becomes their preferred recourse. At the same time the drama of politics and war and wealth is tightly bound up with family drama, with people's love lives, in a way they never could be in the modern world (an incestuous relationship, a family vendetta, sufficient spark to set alight the ever-rickety feudal structure). And it is all attended by pre-modern pageantry next to which even the most lavish corporate function must pale (though admittedly, the TV production never quite does Martin's conception of these justice).

To put it another way, a couple of lawyers trying to do each other out of a partnership in their law firm, suburban adulteries, and even the tabloid scandals of the glamorous seem a very small thing next to the drama of the Lannisters and Starks.

Does this mean American television is about to unleash a torrent of feudal-set soap operas on us?

Perhaps. But it seems more likely to remain confined to channels like the CW (already invested in this area with Reign), and historical drama-minded cable networks like the History Channel (offering up Vikings) than the American Big Four, perhaps not totally averse to flirting with the form but much more likely to stick with their lawyers and suburban adulteries and such over the long run.

The Decline of the R-Rated Movie

Through the '80s and '90s, a typical year saw three R-rated films in the year's top ten earners at the American box office, and eight in the top twenty.1

During the 2000s that number dropped sharply, so that the average was more like one of the top ten, and three of the top twenty in any given year were R-rated. Since 2010, R-rated movies have been even rarer than that in the upper ranks.

What happened?

Much of it would seem to be a reflection of the transformation of the action movie during these decades, from R-rated shoot 'em ups to PG-13 rated CGI spectacles about superheroes. Along with the even more complete disappearance of the sex-themed blockbuster, this translated to a major change in the market. Today's R-rated successes, by and large, are comedies like last year's The Heat (#15), We're The Millers (#16) and Identity Thief (#20), horror films like The Conjuring (#19), and Serious Adult Dramas like American Hustle (#17)--lower-budgeted and lower-grossing fare for the most part.

1. The average was actually 3.1 of the top 10 and 7.8 of the top 20 in the years 1980-1989; and 2.9 of the top 10 and 7.6 of the top 20 in the years 1990-1999. By contrast, the number was 1 of the top 10 and 2.9 of the top 20 in 2000-2009; and 0.5 of the top 10, and 3 of the top 20, in 2010-2013. All calculations based on data from Box Office Mojo.