Artificial Intelligence

The Current Cinema

A recent video posted by Insider, How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming, gets to the broken heart of my problem with the current blockbuster cinema, and helps to explain why the directed-by-committee focus of the modern Hollywood franchise film is so frequently devoid of originality, imagination and risk.

Focusing on the work of previsualization company The Third Floor, Inside preface their video with the following description: The Third Floor is one of the world's top visualization studios and has worked on 19 of the 23 installments in Marvel's "Infinity Saga." From previs and stuntvis to techvis and postvis, The Third Floor's work on Marvel movies runs through the entire production process. The first previsualizations of a Marvel film can begin well in advance of its release date, often before the screenplay is fully finished. Find out how Marvel visualizes its movies years before filmmaking and how this practice has helped the MCU rise its position of box-office dominance today.

The video goes on to explain that "previs" frequently occurs before directors and cinematographers have even been hired, meaning the job of a filmmaker hired to helm a Marvel movie is less about directing than merely recreating what has already been rendered as 3D, computer generated animation.

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

You could argue that this process is merely the modern, 21st century equivalent of the storyboard, and to an extent you would be correct. Many filmmakers, from Alfred Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers, have been known to rigorously storyboard every shot in their films prior to the production process. But the difference here is that Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers and others would sit down with a storyboard artist and translate their ideas to the page. They'd then work with cinematographers, production designers and members of the art department to turn that storyboard into a facsimile of reality.

With previsualization, it's not necessarily the traditional filmmakers that are designing and directing the movie, it's teams like The Third Floor, who are creating demo versions of the film and in the process making many of the creative decisions that inform the finished work. As one of the quoted sources in the film puts it, [the previs team are] "literally an additional director/writer/editor on the movie." With this in mind, why are we still crediting directors with the success of these films?

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

The uniformity of Marvel's cinema is not really a surprise at this point. That they're produced by committee is self-evident. A film like Black Panther (2018), aesthetically, looks a lot like Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Captain Marvel (also 2019), and very little like director Ryan Coogler's previous films, Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015). This is because the actual job of directing these films has already been done prior to the director coming on-board. This is why Marvel's cinema feels rote and homogenous compared to earlier, auteur-driven superhero movies like Batman Returns (1992), Unbreakable (2000) and even The Dark Knight (2008).

As one of the contributors to the Insider film puts it, "All a director has to do is be an avid viewer of their own movie," which in other words is a total dismissal or rejection of the role of the director as a creative or artistic individual, reducing it to little more than an arbiter or brand guardian.

For those that enjoy Marvel's movies as escapist spectacle, this is hardly concerning. Most audiences don't care about the role of director and aren't going to see these films for their expression of personal art, politics, or ideology. But what does it say about the role of the film critic? Marvel movies are frequently the most critically acclaimed blockbuster films released. When we have a generation of critics not just rejecting but actively ridiculing a work of personal, auteur-driven cinema, like Glass (2019) by M. Night Shymalan, then falling over themselves to praise directors for work they didn't even create, and films that were put together by artificial intelligence, like those by Marvel, then the future of cinema as anything less than a corporate, committee-driven enterprise, is seriously at risk.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: On contemporary cinema: Superheroes and the denial of humanity [11 October 2020], The Film Director as Superstar [15 August 2020], The Current Cinema [09 January 2020], The Popular Cinema [22 June 2019]

A Question of Aesthetics

Thoughts on a film: Repo Chick (2009)

It's been ten years since the release of Repo Chick (2009); writer and director Alex Cox's self-proclaimed "non-sequel" to his earlier but still very much enduring cult-classic, Repo Man (1984). At the time I'd intended to post something about the look and stylisation of the film, which struck me (and still does) as incredibly intelligent, even satirical; however, a combination of laziness and procrastination meant I never got around to it. Having recently read and blogged about Cox's great and very self-deprecating 2008 book, "X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker", I'm once again drawn to discussing the director's work and feeling compelled to come to the defence of this particular film, which seems misunderstood.

A cursory glance at the YouTube comments for the film's trailer, or indeed the user reviews posted on Letterboxd and the IMDb, give an immediate impression as to why Repo Chick was so mocked and derided. The general consensus is that the film looks cheap (it was, comparatively speaking: the final production budget was $200,000) and that the imagery is flat, fake and bordering on the amateurish. Two of these criticisms seem fair. The imagery is flat - it's frequently composed in a presentational, tableau-vivant style, which restricts the natural movement of the actors within the frame - and it is fake. All scenes were shot with the actors positioned in front of a green-screen, with the backdrops - created through a combination of miniatures, old toys and CGI - added in later. But is it amateurish? I'm not so sure.

Repo Chick [Alex Cox, 2009]:

Given the context of Cox's film, its emphasis on a superficial character - a kind of post-Paris Hilton/pre-Kim Kardashian trust-fund millennial forced to work and engage with the seamier side of life following the 2008 financial crash - it would be fair to say that the film is meant to reflect the point of view of its title character and her background of sheltered privilege. If the world looks fake - and it does - then it's probably because the character is fake. The presentation of the world here is seemingly superficial, made childish and immature in order to reflect the character's sense of arrested development. The artificiality of it, the flatness, the plasticity, are all intentional, and suggest the life of a character imprisoned by circumstances and a culture devoid of authenticity.

In terms of its context and conception, the stylisation of the film, with its posed artificiality, its falseness, the almost Barbie™ doll diorama of it all, is incredibly important to the film's wider socio-political subtext. The character becomes a toy, controlled and manipulated by unseen forces. Through this, Cox is creating a dual commentary: on one hand  illustrating how people, especially young people, are controlled and manipulated by the culture, the media and marketing, by parents and peers, while on the other hand illustrating something of a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of cinema and storytelling, where actors are moved around a play-set facsimile of the world and given thoughts, actions and opinions by some omnipotent, controlling force.

While stylised to look intentionally cheap and kitsch, the filmmaking is in fact incredibly clever and works to suggest subtleties and nuances in the text and sub-text of the film. If audiences found this style dismissible, or refused to engage with it on the academic, post-modern level at which it was clearly aimed, then it's probably because the "form" stands in direct contrast to their perceptions of what a film should be; or more specifically, what an Alex Cox film should be in the context of the earlier Repo Man and its particular "brand."

Repo Man [Alex Cox, 1984]:

Contrast and compare with the imagery from the earlier Repo Man, with its gritty Los Angeles noir and nods to atomic-age B-movies recalling the apparently more authentic and conventional influences of The Driver (1978) by Walter Hill or Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich.

What critics and audiences were really reacting against in their dismissal of Repo Chick and its particular visual aesthetic was that the film didn't conform to their expectations of what an Alex Cox film should be. Even though the film is true to the same spirit of post-modernist deconstruction, socialist politics, genre play and subverting expectations consistent throughout the filmmakers career, the markedly different approach to the stylisation - which looks nothing like the earlier Repo Man or Sid & Nancy (1986) - saw Repo Chick dismissed as a failed experiment.

Rather than look at the film for what it is, viewers approached it in the context of what it isn't. They wanted the real Los Angeles with its grit and grime, the car chases, the urban sprawl and decay, the disenfranchised Generation X mentality of drop-out nihilism, and they balked when they didn't get it. Rather than embrace Repo Chick as something different, something new or something alive with ideas and ideals, critics of the film merely turned to derivative efforts such as Drive (2011) and Nightcrawler (2014), finding their fix for alienated L.A. noir in those particular works instead.

Repo Chick [Alex Cox, 2009]:

It's worth mentioning that Cox doesn't categorise Repo Chick as an actual sequel to Repo Man; however, given both the title and its plot contrivances, as well as the obvious facts that both films are by the same writer and director, it's not unreasonable for people to drawn comparisons.

In the ten years since Repo Chick was released to mixed reviews and much bemusement across social media, the general language of the mainstream cinema has shifted. The rapid development of digital cinematography, CGI and green-screen technology, has meant that the cinema, post-Avatar (2009) by James Cameron, has become increasingly artificial, with the line between live-action and animation, especially in relation to recent Dinsey® remakes, such as The Lion King (2019), becoming increasingly blurred. If we're to still cling to the criticisms of Cox's film and its flat, artificial aesthetic, then how do we square that with recent films that have been acclaimed by audiences and critics as pinnacles of the modern cinema? Are the images from Repo Chick more or less fake-looking than this?

Black Panther [Ryan Coogler, 2018]:

The above images are of course taken from massively acclaimed, Oscar® nominated Marvel™ blockbuster, Black Panther (2018). While the imagery here has a gloss and a scale that the Cox film isn't able to compete with, it's still to all intents and purposes, flat and artificial. The images lack depth, scale and spatial authenticity, and yet despite all this they're not embracing artificiality as an aesthetic choice, but merely putting up with its lack of photo-realism because the convenience dictates.

The makers of Black Panther aren't satirising the falseness of a character or their arrested state-of-development. Images such as the ones seen here are meant to be believable and true to life. Is it also worth mentioning that the Marvel film in question had a production budget of $210million, enough to fund Cox's film countless times over, and yet the imagery - so acclaimed by modern critics - is scarcely "better" than that of Repo Chick, and certainly less distinctive.

No one would say that the imagery from Black Panther looks amateurish, but the fact remains that is doesn't look authentic, convincing or real. Like Repo Chick, the imagery looks flat and fake. And yet no one has levelled this as a criticism against Black Panther, or of other films in the same comic book sub-genre, such as Avengers 2: Age of Ultron (2015), or the more recent Aquaman (2019). All of these films were shot in the same manner as Cox's film, with the actors in front of a green screen, and the backdrops rendered later in post-production. And yet the deliberate stylisations of Repo Chick were seen as a deterrent to the film's success - while Black Panther can look like a 90s video game movie and still get nominated for "best cinematography" by members of the Film Critics Association Awards.

Black Panther [Ryan Coogler, 2018]:

Repo Chick [Alex Cox, 2009]:

In Repo Chick, the image has context. The style, no matter how contentious or derided, is a part of the content. There is no context for the garish imagery of films like Aquaman or the video-game-like flatness of Black Panther. These films are aesthetically deficient, not to create a point, but because they're manufactured products. Unlike the stylisation of Repo Chick, the additional films discussed here represent no unique vision, purpose or intent. They're simply examples of the corporate cinema, which unfortunately continues to triumph over the genuinely independent cinema that Cox is dedicated to.

Styling Repo Chick to look and feel identical, aesthetically, to the earlier Repo Man, might've served the kind of audiences and critics that don't go to the movies to be challenged or provoked. It may have even resulted in a return to cult-movie acclaim for its writer and director, who rejected the lure of Hollywood to make greater films like Walker (1987) and El Patrullero (1991). However, it would've been a mistake. By rejected nostalgic recreation and instead embracing the new, the independent, the handmade, Cox is remaining close to the spirit of post-punk anarchism that runs throughout his career. After all, there's nothing less radical than a middle-aged artist trying to play to the nostalgia crowd by becoming a tribute-act to their own past work. Just look at The Rolling Stones.