The "Top-Heavy" 2015 Box Office

Recently the Box Office Mojo's Brad Brevet noted the "top-heavy nature of the 2015 box office," in which a handful of high grossing movies accounted for a larger share of the record total.1 In 2015, 34.5 percent of all tickets were sold by just the top ten movies. The closest any prior year came to that was event-packed 2012 (the year of the first Avengers, Hunger Games and Hobbit movies, The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall), when 29.7 percent of the year's gross came from the top ten.

However, this pattern reflected not just the performance of the outliers, of which there were so many in this year of still more Avengers and Hunger Games and Bond (plus Furious 7, and of course, Star Wars), but the underperformance of the lower-earning movies (relatively speaking). He chose the $25 million mark as a point of measurement, and considered that only 91 films managed to hit that--in contrast with an average of 104 these last fifteen years.

Considering inflation changes this image somewhat. Taking not $25 million but its equivalent in ticket sales as the standard, then for the last fifteen years 87.8, not 104, has been the average.1 Additionally, within this average there is a long-running tendency for the number to fall. In 2001-2005 the average number of movies to hit Brevet's mark was 94.4. In 2006-2010, the average was 88.2. In 2011-2014, it was 87.25. Twenty-fifteen (in which the equivalent mark was $36.8 million) saw just 65 such films--and by itself would knock the average for the last five years down to 82.8. This was an especially sharp drop--but the point is that a downward trend was already quite evident, continuing in a measurable way, and reaffirming the view that today, more than ever, a movie is a must-see-it-right-away-on-the-big-screen event, or not very much at all in commercial and pop cultural terms.

And that is likely the last thing that those dissatisfied with the narrowness of the range of Hollywood's higher-profile product must want to hear.

1. The numbers for the different years are as follows. 2001-91. 2002-96. 2003-98. 2004-92. 2005-95. 2006-96. 2007-85. 2008-90. 2009-85. 2010-85. 2011-92. 2012-91. 2013-82. 2014-84. 2015-65.

Review: The Last Command, by Timothy Zahn

New York: Bantam Books, 1993, pp. 407.

As the third and final volume of Zahn's Thrawn trilogy opens, Thrawn's using the Katana Fleet to throw the New Republic on the defensive--while his power struggle with Joruus C'boath continues to escalate.

It is a promising beginning.

Still, the book does not quite succeed in bringing its various threads together. Granted, the course of events is logical enough, even providing a payoff to the Noghri subplot that comprised so much of the prior two books. However, the Imperial raid shutting down traffic in and out of Coruscant, and Talon Karrde's intrigues, do not add very much to the interest of the whole, and feel as if they could have been cut out of the story with only minimal modification.

More problematically, the climax--which has Han and company tramping through the forest on the way to a potentially war-deciding special forces action against a key Imperial facility, and Luke in a light saber duel before an Imperial throne against an enemy in whom he has seen himself--suffers by comparison with the Battle of Endor it so strongly evokes. Part of the problem is the diffuseness of this section of the story, Admiral Ackbar again leading a fleet into action, but doing so very far away from the Battle for Mount Tantiss, in what is frankly a separate action. This separation extends to Thrawn's denouement which, while appropriate in certain of its essentials, lacks dramatic flair and ends up feeling nearly incidental.

In the end the events of the trilogy appear to have been just a mopping-up operation that had some hairy moments after all--and Thrawn a footnote to Galactic history. The result is that the book does not pack quite the punch that might have been hoped for, and even seems a letdown in light of the series' earlier promise, but still manages to entertain, while setting the stage for later adventures.

While We're On the Subject . . . (More on Jodorowsky's Dune)

Also well worth checking out: Terence Blake's post at Xenoswarm on the same documentary from last year. In his post Blake discusses the extraordinary ambition and passion that Alejandro Jodorwosky displayed for his visionary attempt to film Dune, which is what makes the documentary as compelling as it is.

It is standard for artists to talk about their devotion to their work--and often they merely seem blandly pious in doing so, and we take it as just that, bland piety of the type that is simply grist to the PR mill. When Jodorowsky speaks about the same issue in the documentary--when he declares that he was ready to die for his vision, when he recounts his approach to Pink Floyd (who were to make much of the music for the film) and his insistence to them of the world-historic importance of his project--one takes him much more seriously than that. One believes that he believes, and doubtless it is a reason why so many uncritically accept the claims for the project as not just a missed opportunity, but a missed turning point in the history of cinema--and even as one unconvinced of these claims, I find myself regretting that the kind of ambition and passion he displayed is such a rarity.

Jodorowsky's Unrealized Dune: A Critical View

After recently seeing the 2013 documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky's plans for a film version of Dune back in the 1970s, I decided to check out the commentary online.

As it happened, the consensus view (corresponding to those interviewed within the documentary) seemed to be a wish that it had been made and they could have seen it--and that it would have been a triumph which would have put science fiction filmmaking on a different course.

Granted, particular ideas were dazzling. (The opening long take Jodorowsky described would have been epic.) However, given the degree to which it deviated from the letter and spirit of the original novel (indeed, Jodorowsky's predictable disinterest and even inversion of its themes), it would not have been a definitive version of Herbert's books--or even a really satisfactory one.

More importantly, the chances of its having been a successful film, even on an artistic level, strike me as having been vanishingly small. I will admit that my attitude toward the Modernist/postmodernist aesthetic, and still more, its underlying assumptions, grow increasingly dim.1 (Increasingly I feel as if a very large part of our artistic and cultural life has been in a cul-de-sac for a hundred years.) But all the same, I will say that even dazzling bits do not make a successful whole. And taken altogether the movie could easily have been unwatchable. Consider how David Lynch's 1984 version has been received, despite its dose of weirdness being far, far milder than Jodorowsky's not just much longer, but astronomically more surreal, gruesome, garish conception. (The idea of a freakishly made-up Orson Welles overseeing and completing the graphic dismembering and beheading of David Carradine just about says it all in this regard.)

Perhaps the best and worst that could have been hoped for it would have been its becoming a cult film, a curiosity--which is a very different thing from its replacing Star Wars as the defining science fiction film success of the period. Indeed, it may have wound up more influential in not getting made--in that bits and pieces were taken from it and utilized in other, more plausible work (most famously, the H.R. Giger drawings that became the foundation for the Alien franchise).

1. Shameless plug time: because much of the history of science fiction makes little sense unless one gets all this (and frankly, even the professional critics tend not to), I discuss these matters at some length in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry. Why not go and check it out?

Ready to Go Boldly, Part II

Recently I suggested that the most valuable thing a new Trek series could offer would be a rational, humanistic, progressive vision of the future. Of course, we all know the knee-jerk response to such calls. That this is "dated." Of course, people just say that, never really explaining it, but what they seem to mean is that the only respectable view of the world holds it to be "more mysterious than intelligible . . . more evil than good" as John Crowe Ransom put it, and that the only proper thing to do is wallow in the dark-and-gritty dark-and-grittiness of it.

This hardly seems an unquestionable position to me. Indeed, spelled out in this way it seems to me an extremely dubious one, passing off a snob's irony, a thug's callousness, a bigot's prejudices as wisdom ("Welcome to the real world!") by wrapping them up in the obscurantism that the gullible take for profundity.

And it all seems to me the very opposite of what anything bearing the Trek label ought to stand for. Consider those things that did make James Whitbrook's wish list for things a new Trek would offer, among them an interest in ideas. An exploration of ideas cannot amount to very much without reason, or the expectation that knowledge means something, such as this view denies.

Indeed, the sterility of the simultaneously pompous and dark "conventional wisdom" is all too clearly demonstrated by that show which in so many minds seemed to supplant Trek as the template for small screen space opera. In the middle of a fit of not particularly imaginative Trek-bashing, another author at the same site where Whitbrook wrote remarked that, in contrast with figures like Data or Seven of Nine offering an outsider's view of humanity, they preferred BattleStar Galactica's "Cylons, who school us about humanity by screwing and killing us."

The truth is that Galactica actually offered nothing in the way of "schooling us," just dumb soap opera and dumber head games. Indeed, in the show's consistent subscription to that view of an unintelligible, evil universe, it slammed the door hard on the possibility of insight into humanity, or anything else.

But just as people don't stop and think of what they mean when they say the Trek vision is "dated," they didn't ask just where Galactica was going with everything, and then after getting burned when it became perfectly clear that it was going absolutely nowhere, failed to learn the lesson.

Fortunately, that's not the final word on the matter.

Showing and Telling Katniss Everdeen

The fourth and final installment in the Hunger Games saga arrived in theaters this past weekend, and made $100 million, which by any normal standard is sensational, but is regarded in many quarters as a disappointment. This is not just as a result of the simple-minded insistence of the Hollywood Suit that any and all movies be record-breakers (real as this is), but also the better performance of earlier installments, which seems to have reflected some dissatisfaction with the movies' course. (The third book was generally not considered the series' strongest--a judgment in which I have to concur--and that problem was amplified by the mostly money-grubbing decision to split the last movie in two, making viewers buy tickets twice to get the whole story.)

Perhaps more important than the numbers and the tactics, however, is the fact that, with the series now complete, the assessments of the whole have begun, with Rob Bricken offering his opinion at io9. In doing so he correctly notes, among other things, the loss of some of the protagonist's complexity in the translation from book to screen, which raises a matter that occurred to me while watching the first Hunger Games film.

Where the balance of "show" and "tell" is concerned, Collins' book tilted heavily toward telling. Of course, this goes against the conventional wisdom that good writing is "show, don't tell," but it was necessary to developing the character's interiority, and supplying a certain amount of necessary backstory and world-building that could not have readily been shown. Converting the books into movies diminished the prospects for telling to rare, relatively awkward expository passages (like Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith explaining what tracker jackers are to the audience), forcing it to rely that much more on showing, made the loss of a certain amount of nuance inevitable--and in the process, reminded us all of just how important an item in the writer's toolbox much-maligned "tell" happens to be.

Wells on "Spiritual" vs. Material Advance

Writing in The Shape of Things to Come Wells remarked the attitude of the mainstream in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward the reality that social and political arrangements were lagging behind technology. "The favourite formula," he observed,

was to declare that "spiritual"--for the naïve primordial opposition of spirit and matter was still accepted in those days--had not kept pace with "material" advance. This was usually said with an air of moral superiority to the world at large. Mostly there was a vague implication that if these other people would only refrain from using modern inventions so briskly, or go to church more, or marry earlier and artlessly, or read a more "spiritual" type of literature, or refrain from mixed bathing, or work harder and accept lower wages, or be more respectful and obedient to constituted authority, all might yet be well.

It is the view that the individual is the only valid unit or level of analysis, and that the insights of social science into even that are to be treated with indifference or contempt. ("No one's written anything worthwhile on these matters since Aristotle!") It is, frankly, a matter of moralizing, or better still, pseudo-moralizing, in a narrow, uninformed, and (especially if one is in a position of authority) exceedingly self-serving way.

Alas, this view, retrograde in Wells' time, is still very much with us. ("There is no such thing as society!" "Personal responsibility!") We have not even got past it in our science fiction, or we would not still be consuming an unhealthy amount of Frankenstein complex cliche in our genre diets.

Poison Rags and Irritated Cortices

H.G. Wells, affecting the position of a historian of the twenty-second century casting an eye back at the twentieth, wrote in The Shape of Things to Come that

the ordinary newspaper of that time was not so much a news sheet as a poison rag. Every morning the common man took in fresh suggestions of suspicion and resentment and gratified his spite with bad news and malicious gossip.

All that, of course, fed the problem of hatred--national, racial hatred and the like. He explained this in physiological terms that seem old-fashioned in our brain-scanning era. (This recent Scientific American piece discusses the possibility of a "hate circuit" physically much more extensive than in Wells' description.)

Still, what he wrote about the behavior continues to ring true, not least that it produces "a chronic condition of vindictive disapproval" toward a particular subject. As a consequence,

[t]he patient seeks, often with the greatest ingenuity, occasion for offence, and finds a profound satisfaction in the nursing of resentment and the search for reprisals and revenges. He has what he calls his "proper pride." He disapproves of his fellow creatures and grudges them happiness.

Fortunately, hatred had come to play a much smaller part in human life. As he remarked afterward, where the mass media in that earlier "time subsisted by [hatred's] dissemination, in the interests of reactionary forces," in the later, more rational era,

Our current education is framed very largely to avert and anticipate this facile contagion . . . We are as sedulous now for cleanliness and ventilation in our mental as in our physical atmosphere.

Alas, this is one case where Wells' remarks remain relevant not for their description of what did change in the years that followed, but for their description of what has unfortunately not changed.

The Most Interesting Man in the World?

"I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis."

So goes the catch phrase of "The Most Interesting Man in the World."

As we can tell from the commercials, he is worldly enough to enjoy a certain amount of variety in his beverages, to have become acquainted with the finer among them, and to have acquired particular tastes. Still, he does not turn up his nose at beer, and where beer is concerned, he does not insist on a particular brand. He merely prefers Dos Equis.

I recently found myself comparing this to Bond's well-known and frequently-advertised taste in alcohol.

It strikes me that the Dos Equis pitchman most definitely serves us a display of quasi-aristocratic consumption, but with the snobbish edge that gave us the "dry martini, shaken, not stirred" line blunted.

It also seems to fit our era better.

Perhaps that is progress of a sort.

Stay thirsty for that, my friends.

Noir and Science Fiction

In a recent round-up of new science fiction novels for The Hamilton Spectator, Alex Good remarks that

The strange bond between noir and science fiction has never been thoroughly explained. What is it about trench coats and laser pistols that make them work so well together?

It's certainly something worth thinking about. It strikes me as relevant that both hard-boiled crime, and science fiction, coalesced as genres at about the same time--the late 1920s, the 1930s.

However, I suspect that their appearing at the same moment is not the only reason for the sense of their kinship, but reflects something deeper, which we may find easy to overlook today, or simply prefer to overlook, namely the political radicalism in which they each had their beginnings. Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and company in the case of the former; H.G. Wells in the case of the latter; all had a sense of there being much wrong with this world, but not because of the traditional, conservative, tragic view of the universe as metaphysically rigged (the Fall, etc.), but because of an inconstant social reality that they believed could and had to be changed for the better.

Granted, Hammett gave way to Mickey Spillane. And when people think of early science fiction, they are apt to remember the more out-of-date attitudes of figures like Astounding editor John Campbell. Still, the old radicalism remained, perhaps more conspicuously in science fiction. Man of the right that Campbell indisputably was, he largely carried forward Wells' ideas about science fiction and how it ought to be written.1 Indeed, in what may have been the fullest expression of his own view in a critical essay, his 1959 editorial "Non--Escape Literature," the great virtue of science fiction was that, unlike the "literature of eternal verities" (for which he had such disdain), it grappled with the reality of that inevitable change, helping prepare us all for the "things to come," the bigotries of the highbrows be damned. Moreover, for all that has undeniably changed in the field since then, that idea has never gone away (however much it may have appeared marginalized). Nor is it imaginable that it could, so long as science fiction continues to be written.

1. I discuss the views of Campbell, and his considerable debt to Wells, in Chapter 2 of Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry.

James Bond, Gentleman of Leisure

I've already discussed Veblen's theory of the leisure class as a way of understanding the figure of James Bond, but a particular passage in Chapter IV of his book, titled "Conspicuous Consumption," strikes me as worth sharing more closely.

The consumption of the "gentleman of leisure," Veblen notes, besides being lavish in quantity and expense, "also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed" (emphasis added). The increase of "personal comfort and well-being" is part of this, but there is, as Veblen notes, the "honorific" aspect. The gentleman, after all,

is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male--the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity . . . he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and . . . weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and [results in] a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner.

Thus the clothes, the watches, the cars must be of suitable brands; he must not only have his martini, but he must take it specifically shaken, not stirred; and it is only appropriate that he favor Old World casinos over the "trap for peculiarly insensitive mice . . . tempted by the coarsest cheese" that is Vegas.

Calvinball Mythology, Applied

A few years ago Jonathan McCalmont remarked the tendency to try and turn every story into a larger mythology, which seemed all the more conspicuous in the particular film about which he was writing at the time, Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, Prometheus, precisely because Alien is such an unlikely candidate for this, and the film ultimately such a failure at developing it in this manner. (Myths, for better or worse, offer explanation, a thing that movie was very short on.)

McCalmont posited that this was a deep-rooted cultural need in an age which has ceased to believe in its inherited myths. (As he put it, "the market has stepped in to fill the gap.")

That's one way of looking at it, one with which not everyone will agree. (There are, after all, those rationalistic types who regard a turn to the mythic approach in the modern world as essentially a cheat, obscuring reality with pretentions of "timelessness.")

Another is to see the market's stepping in in this way as simply a way of milking every last drop from established intellectual properties. After all, fixating on the "timeless" in a particular story, however slight, is an excuse to overlook the ways in which it has dated. And attributing a greater significance to a simple tale is an obvious way of accomplishing that necessary task for making the audience come to the theater and buy a $20 ticket rather than waiting three months and downloading it in the comfort of their home for much less--making them feel that its release is an Event in which they want to participate. That sense that this or that movie is "something more" is equally a good way to justify prequels ("I really care how it all got started") and reboots ("It's timeless; this generation needs one"), which can in their turn also seem like Events.

Obviously the most successful example of this in recent years has been the multi-series Marvel mega-franchise, now including Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Ant-Man (and in a TV version, even humble Agent Coulson) separately, and together in the Avengers. And naturally that success has been emulated. Over at Rolling Stone, David Ehrlich offers a case for the application of this approach to the Bond series being the weak point of its latest, Spectre--its attempting to tie the four rebooted films into a unified whole.

In fairness, the idea of a more unified Bond series is not altogether alien to the franchise. Fleming united the action in his last five novels, with results that have an interest even when they are not always successful. And Gardner followed his example in his own, last three novels (unsatisfactorily, but still functionally). And of course, before Marvel got into movie-making in a serious way, the producers of the Bond movies did toy with the idea of an interconnection with a related series starring a female double-O type. (You remember Jinx Johnson?) Still, the Marvel films were on safer ground doing this, because they were never quite so ambitious as the rebooted Bond films, or so prone to alternating in their course (as the evolution of third Daniel Craig movie into Skyfall demonstrates), making the task a far simpler one. All the same, if Spectre does get chalked up as a disappointment in the end, the series will not come to an end, simply do again what it has been doing for nearly a half century now--correcting course, likely delivering a lighter, brisker, more standalone film.

Bond, Politics, Critics: the Spectre of Surveillance

It is no secret that Spectre has fared much less well with critics than its predecessor Skyfall. As a practical matter, the film's detractors have had plenty of arguments to support their less complimentary stance. However, one may wonder if the stronger political element in this film has not also been a factor in the severity toward the movie. Over at Informed Comment scholar Juan Cole remarked that the

latest entry in the Daniel Craig reboot of the James Bond film franchise, Spectre, turns Bond into more muscular version of Edward Snowden, as he takes down a vast 9-nation attempt at electronic surveillance and information-sharing that would also benefit a criminal cartel.

He also observed that reviews seemed to be ignoring the political theme to a "remarkable" degree, and even noted a parallel between Spectre and Quantum of Solace, which "turned Bond into a defender of the left-leaning, pro-peasant government of Evo Morales in Bolivia." While Cole does not make the observation in his piece, it has previously struck me that Quantum of Solace may have taken the beating with critics that it did in part because of the movie's political tilt--and that this might also be the case with Spectre.

Ready to Boldly Go?

Over at io9 James Whitbrook, in response to the recent announcement of a new Star Trek series to air on CBS, offered up a list of "seven things we want in the new Star Trek TV show."

I'm in agreement with much of what he's asking for ("Something new," "Lots of weird and wonderful aliens," "More boldly going," etc.), but there was one thing he all too predictably didn't mention--namely a humanistic, progressive vision of the future. A future that was a mirror to our present, while transcending it; which encouraged us to see more fully, and see that we can--and must--do better than we have. Which sides with reason over obscurantism, principle over prejudice. That, too, defined the old series at its best, and seems the more desperately needed in this era of young adult dystopias and dark and gritty everything.

And while I'm not a particular fan of endlessly bringing back the same old IPs, it wouldn't be altogether inappropriate if it was a new Trek which finally cleansed the small-screen space opera of the pernicious legacy of that show that left it moribund for years, BattleStar Galactica.

The Best James Bond Novels, After Fleming

The question of what were the best "post-Fleming" James Bond novels is a complex one. Just what standard ought we to apply?

Are we looking for more fiction just like what Ian Fleming produced? If so, then Kingsley Amis' Colonel Sun comes closest--helped by the fact that Amis had prior, and direct experience of meeting Fleming, helping prepare his own fiction for publication (reviewing the galleys of The Man with the Golden Gun).*

It helped, too, that he produced his book just a few years after Fleming wrote his last word, before his work dated nearly so much as it was to do later. Indeed, every writer who came after Amis had little choice but to downplay Fleming's attitudes (even Sebastian Faulks, writing "as Ian Fleming"), while changes in the broader political context nullified many an old concern. (What need for imperial policing when there is no empire? And did the hand-wringing over the welfare state unsurprising in the age of Macmillan make any sense in the age of Thatcher?)

Moreover, those unavoidable changes apart, the fact remained that, as a writer aiming not for pulpy adventure but "thrillers designed to be read as literature," Fleming was prone to an oblique narrative style, and character drama. And with only a few exceptions, the result has been that his tales seem slow and lacking in action from the perspective of those accustomed to today's thrillers. (Or at any rate, that was how this reader of today's thrillers found them when first trying Fleming.) That Fleming tends toward a bleakly irony view of life does not necessarily make this more appealing.

By and large, today's reader is likely to prefer something more accessible and less literary, brisker and more action-packed; something more like the Bond films which are the basis for almost everyone's perception of Bond today, even those of us who eventually read the books. And indeed, most of the post-Fleming books have something of this about them. However, if the standard is that of a Bond novel that reads like a Bond film, then the writer who comes closest is Raymond Benson, whose works are easily readable as Brosnan-era Bonds in book form, particularly in the climax to his Union trilogy, Never Dream of Dying.

If one is looking for a better balance (the characterizations of Fleming, the fireworks of the EON productions, a decent amount of polish), then I can think of none better than John Gardner's first, Licence Renewed--while also giving a good word to the novelizations. Christopher Wood's novelizations of the scripts he co-wrote for The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were, some distasteful or strained bits apart, a pleasant surprise in that respect.

* At the time of this writing, the author had not yet read Anthony Horowitz's Trigger Mortis (released only this September).