What I’ve Been Watching: Now You See Me

Earlier this week I went to Cineworld to see a a movie with no idea what it was going to be. My only clues were that it was a 12A and that I’d get to see it “well before” its release date.

The film, which came as a bit of a surprise to me (as was the intention) was Now You See Me, something that would be gracing our screens sixteen days after said secret screening. Apparently “well before” means not about a month as I was expecting but “about two weeks”.

Anyway, I wasn’t too disappointed. The trailer made the film look like an entertaining blockbuster about a group of Robin Hood magicians who rob from banks and give to their audience. Plus Prestige was a thoroughly enjoyable movie and this seemed kinda similar but set in the present day.

Anyway, the film opens with “The Four Horseman” being chosen by a mysterious stranger to come together and put on three jaw-dropping shows certain to bring them the attention of both the general public and authorities alike.

“The Four Horseman” are Jessie Eisenberg as a fast-talking street magician, Isla Fisher as an assistant turned daredevil magician, Woody Harrelson as a mentalist who can hypnotise people, and Dave Franco (brother of James) as a wannabe magician who is good at picking pockets and locks (Think they ran out of ideas by the time they got to his character, maybe they were upset after realizing they hadn’t hired James after all).

After the first show, which involves a trick where they apparently rob a bank in Paris from Las Vegas, an FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) and French interpol agent (Mélanie Laurent) start investigating the case. The film mainly centres on their efforts to try and get a few steps ahead of what The Four Horsemen are doing.

The film has problems. The most pressing of which is it seems to have no interest in the art of magic beyond its ability to trick people. In Prestige, we were taken behind the curtain and shown how so of the most famous tricks are performed and got a real feel for the graft a magician goes through in the commitment to their craft.

In Now You See Me there is little intrigue about the apparent tricks on show. One in particular sees Isla Fisher float inside a CGI bubble which appears to unexpectedly collapse before Jesse Eisenberg is revealed to be standing in the audience to catch her. It is never made clear whether she was either on wires and they used a projection to make it look like she was in a bubble, or perhaps they used smoke and mirrors to make it look like she is floating, or if they invented a bubble that could make her float.

Hopefully it won’t surprise anyone if I say that, like Prestige, alongside all the magician’s tricks the movie itself is playing a trick on the audience, which itself is the movie’s only saving grace. The main problem is that the makers of Now You See Me are so determined to impress you with this final trick that they forget to make sure they have your interest with the rest of the film.

There is literally no trick in the film up to that point that is interesting. And even the reveals of the tricks could be a lot slicker, a lot more like the ending to Ocean’s Eleven as slick editing helps you to see the meticulous planning that goes into each and every stage of the plan.

Perhaps the problem with the movie is best illustrated by one of its key scenes thematically. The two agents, Ruffalo and Laurent are on the plane. Ruffalo has no interest in magic tricks, while Laurent is keen to research their appeal. She tries a trick out on him which fails the first time, but the second time it works and Ruffalo smiles. “See” she says “Sometimes its fun to be tricked”. The main problem with the film is that the tricks lack this fun. We fail to feel the exhilaration the audience members feel as they are going along to these shows and being amazed by these great magicians.

“Always be the smartest guy in the room” Jesse Eisenberg’s character says at one point. A rule the film’s writers and directors should have taken more seriously when conceiving this film.

Is the Movie Industry close to an Implosion?

Earlier this week Steven Spielberg and George Lucas spoke at the opening of a new media centre at the University of Southern California. While speaking to students at USC, Spielberg made the following claim:

There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm

They went on to say:

I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they’re going to be on television,” Lucas said. “As mine almost was,” Spielberg interjected. “This close — ask HBO — this close.”

“We’re talking Lincoln and Red Tails — we barely got them into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater,” Lucas said.

Whilst reading this my irony meter went into overdrive. Let me explain why.

Let us take a trip back in time to the 1970s. American cinema creatively was thriving. Auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Roman Polanski were all making great films that made Hollywood the place to be both commercially and creatively.

However, the failure of Heaven’s Gate by Michael Camino meant that these great auteurs were given less control as studios looked to a different type of film with less financial risk involved.

Then in 1975 along came a film called Jaws. Not only was it a great film, it was a film with that was easy to sell and audiences loved it. Later in 1977 a film called Star Wars cemented the Hollywood studios new direction. “Event” movies, which came to be known as “blockbusters” set up a trend known as “Want. See.” That is, if people wanted space battles, time traveling cars, dinosaurs or futuristic robots they got them. Largely the landscape for big budget projects has remained unchanged since.

So now Spielberg and Lucas, two of the directors who have benefited most from blockbuster cinema in the past forty years are complaining about that very model. Having seen off the threat of home video, they now seem resigned to the fact that the combination of the latest technology and changing viewing habits will see off whatever grand vision they have for their next project.

The reality is that Red Tails was not well received by audiences or movie-goers; and Lincoln was released into the cinema and performed pretty well. It is also unfair of them to assume that because of their previous successes they should find it easy to persuade studios to back every single project they can come up with.

Yes, studios can get it wrong, but then so too can directors. If the history of cinema shows us anything, it is that the arrogance of both studios and directors knows no bounds.

As a way of disproving Spielberg and Lucas’ narrative that the movie industry is about to implode I decided to find some information about how cinema habits are changing over the past decade.

This very informative and far-reaching report by the MPAA provided a lot of the answers I was looking for. On page 9 it shows the number of admissions in the USA has gone down slightly over the past ten years (by about 10%). Box office revenue has also gone down in real terms. Adjusted for inflation (which the report does not do), it was $11.4 billion is 2003, compared with $10.8 billion in 2012, a drop of 5%.

Finally the number of theatrical releases in the U.S. is shown on page 20. Contrary to what Spielberg says, this does not show a decrease in the number of movies being released at the cinema. In 2003, it was 455, and now it has pretty consistently increased over the past decade to 677 last year. An increase of 49%.

This data suggests a smaller number of cinema-goers are seeing a wider range of movies compared with ten years ago. So far from it being harder for movies to get into cinemas, it’s actually easier for a young filmmaker to get their film into a theater than it was ten years ago. This probably goes against the personal experience of Lucas and Spielberg but that should not suggest it will be the same for the audience they were speaking to.

Finally their claim that three of four blockbusters will come crashing down seems to have no grounding in reality. Yes, high profile movies like John Carter catch the headlines every so often. However, even it made $282 million at the box office, which means after DVD sales and so on it will not lose money. Mark Kermode has a chapter in his latest book, The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex entitled “Why Blockbusters Should Be Better” where he makes the case that “event” films will always make their money back “no matter how awful they might be”.

So, Spielberg and Lucas, still great at making dramatic statements. It’s just a pity this one is about as believable as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull‘s fridge.

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013: Preview

It’s less than two weeks to go until the start of Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013. Hopefully by now you’ve managed to get your hands on a programme and have started thinking about what you want to go and see.

If not, one of this year’s addition is a very well put together app I’d recommend downloading right now. Here you’ll get access to the whole programme at your finger tips, as well as being able “star” the ones you like the look of before you decide to order tickets (which unfortunately you cannot do via the app as yet).

What’s New?

The first thing to note when going through the programme is that director Chris Fujiwara seems determined to continue the good work he started in 2012. As such the only changes are minor: a return to the audience awards and multi-buy ticket deals, and an abandoning of outdoor screenings and Cameo Cinema were the only real things I could spot in terms of the logistics of the festival. In other words Fujiwara is relying upon the strength of the the films he has chosen rather than any gimmicks to get people along to this year’s fest.

The Tent Pole Titles

Opening the festival this year is Breathe In starring Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones and Amy Ryan amongst others. It sees Pearce play a music teacher who longs for the days when he used to be a starving artist. When his family hosts a UK exchange student (Jones) he falls for her as she brings out a side to his personality he had all but given up on.

Monster’s University continues EIFF’s long standing relationship with Pixar, and will give festival goers a chance to see the much anticipated prequel to Monster’s Inc a month before the rest of the UK. It tells the story of Mike and Sulley’s days at college where their differing methods of scaring make them instant frenemies.

Finally the festival closes with Not Another Happy Ending, a Scottish film starring Karen Gillan (Doctor Who‘s Amy Pond) as Jane, a young Glaswegian author. It sees Jane embark upon ‘that difficult second novel’. Difficult because according to her publisher, Tom, she is “too happy”. So Tom decides to secretly try and make Jane’s life worse as a drastic way to get her unblocked.

(Warning! This trailer seems to show the whole film:)

The Strands

Alongside the normal strands showcasing directors, American/British films, documentaries and horror films come two unique to 2013.

Focus on Sweden and Focus on Korea showcase around half a dozen new films from each of these respective countries.

The Swedish content is mainly dark in its subject matter from Call Girl to Sanctuary to Belleville Baby. Roland Hassell, however, seems to poke fun at the Swede’s love of noir crime drama as a retired detective tries to solve the assassination of their Prime Minister in the 1980s, using a terrible televisual re-enactment as his primary source of evidence.

The Korean strand shows the country’s love for conspiracy thrillers (think Oldboy). The Berlin File, and Pluto fitting snugly into this category. The other films however, seem to have more of a focus on unwrapping Korea’s past. Jiseul covers the Korean War in 1948, National Security depicts the torture of a pro-democracy prisoner in 1985, and Virgin Forest is a more personal tale of two differing perspectives on a family’s history.

Best of the Rest

Other films that will surely catch the eye of most attendees at this year’s festival include Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, The East starring Ellen Page, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks and Magic Magic starring Juno Temple.

Of course with over 150 films/events to see at the festival there’s plenty more to discover. Please do let me know what you’re looking forward to in the comments below.

Is Will Smith Right, is there a Pattern to Best Actor Winners at the Oscars?

In a recent, slightly bizarre interview in New York magazine, Will and Jaden Smith were quoted as saying the following:

I’ve read that you believe life can be understood through patterns.
Will: I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

Do you think there is a single theory to everything?
Jaden: There’s definitely a theory to everything.
Will: When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it’s going to happen tomorrow.
Jaden: The sun coming up?
Will: The sun coming up, but even a little more. Like for Best Actor Oscars. Almost 90 percent of the time, it’s mental illness and historical figures, right? So, you can be pretty certain of that if you want to win—as a man; it’s very different for women. The patterns are all over the place, but for whatever reason, it’s really difficult to find the patterns in Best Actress.

Having read this quote I was interested to see how much truth there was in Will’s assertion. He makes two claims here, the first is that for the Best Actor category at the Oscars, the person who wins it normally plays a historical figure or someone with a mental illness. The second is that this is significantly different to the Best Actress category where there is no such pattern.

However, is he correct, or has he simply fallen victim to another case of confirmation bias?

To find the answer, I decided to look at the winners of the Best Actor and Actress categories over the past twenty-five years, and count up how many portrayed a “historical figure” (for simplicity’s sake I just took that to a portrayal of a non-fictional person); and anyone with a mental illness (I found this quite difficult to do having not seen every single film, so if there’s any obvious mistakes do let me know). You can see the table I produced at the bottom of this article.

Having tallied up these two categories I came up with the following graph:

The first thing to note is that Smith is correct in asserting that historical figures do get a lot of plaudits come oscar night. “Mental Illness” at 20% for males and 28% for females fares less well. However, again there is some truth to Smith’s statement.

Where he fails pretty spectacularly is his estimation of how many of the Best Actor winners fall into one of these two camps. He says “almost 90%”, the reality is it’s 52%. Clearly Smith has forgotten performances like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood; Russell Crowe in Gladiator; or Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart before making a statement like this.

Where he failed even more spectacularly, and what might surprise some readers, is in respect to the Best Actress category. Here his “pattern” exists even more than for the male equivalent. 60% fall into one of Smith’s two camps. Clearly Smith has forgotten the last six or seven years when we’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman win for very different portrayals of characters with mental illnesses, as well as Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren win for portrayals of two very different real-life Brits.

What can we learn from this? I think it highlights the way we can often see patterns in things, but use and use these to over-estimate the extent to which said pattern exists. This is the type of thinking that can lead one to becoming a conspiracy theorist. It is unfortunate that reading the full interview, this is exactly what Smith ends up sounding like. If he wanted my advice, it would be that he should simply stick to doing what he does best:

What I’ve Been Watching: Iron Man 3

Tony Stark is back! Kind of. You see he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Whether this is a smart thing or a ridiculous notion is up for debate. However, after the events of The Avengers, Stark is feeling nervous. If someone mentions the word “wormhole” he freaks out.

It is fun to imagine trying a similar trick on other superheroes. “Bus full of kids” to Spiderman, “Kryptonite” to Superman, “Robin” to Batman.

It seems like an appropriate opening to The Avengers 2 would be the “super-friends” attending a self-help group as they unpack their emotions after their harrowing ordeals in each of their stand-alone films.

This is simply a long way of saying I am surprised this idea has never been explored before. And actually, it does make sense that the confident yet fragile Tony Stark would suffer from anxiety. The films thus far have shown us how his over-confidence has gotten him into and out of a whole heap of trouble.

In Iron Man 3 the trouble comes in the form of terrorist Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). A man with a vendetta against America who is capable of taking over the televisual airwaves to get his frightening message across. Apparently he’s never heard of the internet.

Meanwhile, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) has come to Stark Industries with a formula capable of repairing human DNA. Potts rejects the serum, fearing it could be used to on soldiers in warfare with unforeseen consequences.

Iron Man 3 is an enjoyable superhero movie pretty much from beginning to end. Downey was pretty much born to play Tony Stark and does so once again with the perfect blend of humour, arrogance and vulnerability.

Director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) once again shows how well he can balance action and comedy. One compliments the other with such an ease one cannot help but wonder why this is only his second directorial credit.

He even manages to pull-off the lame child sidekick trope without annoying the hell out of the audience in the process. “Can’t I come up with” child sidekick asks at the end of this sequence. “No.” Stark flatly replies and drives off.

That’s not to say the film is perfect, it’s not without its faults. In particular a deus ex machina so big and obvious I’m surprised Thor himself did not appear out of Tony Stark’s iron man suit to help save the day.

However, the fact I am willing to forgive “House Party Protocol” shows just how enjoyable the rest of the film is. The thrust of the narrative attempts to answer the question “Who is Tony Stark?” Surely the answer has to be more than “I am Iron Man.” It is telling that Stark stays out of his iron suit for much of the film, a wise choice that allows it to largely steer clear of comparisons to Transformers.

Iron Man 3 is another solid edition to the Marvel universe which reflects a studio at the top of its game in terms of producing highly entertaining superhero films. Now does anyone hear the sound of thunder?

What I’ve Been Watching: Star Trek Into Darkness

The second in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot is a reassuring return to the characters so well re-established in the first film.

In it we see the Enterprise come up against former starfleet agent John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who has carried out a terrorist attack on earth before feeling to the Klingon homeworld of Kronos. The Enterprise must then try and hunt him down without starting a war with the notoriously tetchy Klingons in the process.

What Star Trek Into Darkness does it does well. The interactions between the characters, in particular Kirk and Spock continue to be expertly handled; the action sequences are all top-notch, in particular the opening scene; and the villain of the piece is well introduced and developed.

What it does suffer from, which the first film could be forgiven for, is that it does not feel original enough. In Star Trek we were promised that the path our re-booted heroes would be following would be separate to the ones of the same characters in the original series.

However, it is becoming clear that while the details might be different, the writers are intent to include as many of the same stories as in the original series and films as possible.

This is a mistake and I shall try and explain why.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are genres primarily of the imagination. They allow us to ask “What if” questions. “What if there was a mysterious force in a galaxy far far away?”; “What if there was an alien time traveller with a soft spot for earth?”; “What if there was a spaceship trying to discover new worlds?”

Star Trek: The Original Series had a mission. Its mission was “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” This is one of the simplest and best premises a science fiction show can have. It gave the writers almost unlimited scope to think of new stories, new aliens and new problems for its characters to overcome.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” It is a phrase worth remembering not just in this context but in the context of any creative enterprise. Star Trek Into Darkness is an enjoyable film that is a nice, safe way to spend a few hours. It’s just a shame it lacks boldness.

Do Critics’ Opinions Matter More For Original Films than Sequels?

Last week, I looked at the idea that movie audiences are getting dumber. By looking at the highest grossing movies from each of the past 43 years, I showed that these films were largely just as well received by critics today as four decades ago.

One of the things that struck me about the list was that a lot of the movies that did well in the box office, despite poor reviews from the critics, were sequels. From Moonraker to Die Hard 3 to The Phantom Menace to the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, critics did not seem to have as much of an influence on films where the viewer already had an idea of what to expect from a previous installment.

I decided to put this theory to the test in a more rigorous manner. To do this I sought out the films with the biggest budgets, thus attempting to nullify the impact of marketing. From that I took the 20 biggest-budget original movies and the 20 biggest-budget franchise films (that includes sequels, prequels, reboots and spin-offs, so films like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man are included in this list).

I then found out the worldwide earnings for each of these movies as well as their score on metacritic. These have been plotted on two separate scatter graphs (click to see a bigger view):

So what do these graphs show? Well, the first graph seems to follow some kind of vague pattern and the second one just seems like a big mess, about which few conclusions can be made. However in statistics “a big mess” is something really quite important.

To try and understand these graphs better we need to use some mathematics in the form of the correlation coefficient. (Please stay with me.) This ranges from -1 to 1, where -1 is a strong, negative correlation (as one variable increases, the other decreases) and 1 is a strong positive correlation (as one variable increases so does the other). 0 means there is no relationship between the two variables (something so rare in statistics to find it is very remarkable)

The correlation coefficient of the graph for original films is calculated as 0.49. This makes it a “weak, positive” correlation. So if we had to guess which film would do better between a well-reviewed original film, and a badly reviewed original film we’d opt for the well-reviewed film. However, as you can hopefully see from the graph, we’d not always be right.

The correlation coefficient of the graph for franchise films is calculated as 0.13. This is an incredibly weak positive correlation, to the point where it’s more accurate to say there’s really no correlation at all. Therefore the much more conclusive statement we can make based on this result is that how well a franchise film is reviewed has little impact on its box office takings. (Big Mess = Important)

Looking at these too results together it is important not to read too much into them. All I have shown is that’s there more of a relationship between critics and box office takings for original films than for franchise films. However, the relationship there is for original films is a weak one.

If this all sounds a little vague and airy-fairy, then that is something I am not going to apologise for. At the very heart of statistics lies the notion that we can draw conclusions from just about every statistical result, but it is important to note that sometimes that conclusion will be that the result was inconclusive.