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Under discussion:

Young@Heart  (2007)

• Wildly divergent posts on the State of Documentary today. At Film.com, Eric D. Snider comes up with four “possible explanations” for why reality television is more popular than documentary film; scale of distribution (ie: the fact that most documentaries play in just a handful of cities, if they get traditional theatrical distribution at all) is not mentioned, but the “lighthearted” nature of reality TV vs. non-fiction film is. Meanwhile, AJ Schnack points out that the crowd-pleasing Young@Heart is the fourth doc to cross the $1 million mark at the box office so far this year, putting 2008 on track to be the biggest year for docs since 2003. The second-highest grossing doc of this banner year thus far is Expelled; in a Pop Matters post about why that film is “the essence of bullshit”, George Reisch dismisses its success by claiming that “early box-office indications are that it’s a fizzle.” I know reality is subjective and everything, but when it’s *this* subjective, it starts to seem like a bad joke.
• Rainbow Media, the Cablevision-owned company that in turn owns IFC and the AMC network, has purchased the Sundance Channel. Bloggy bits from Matt Dentler, Nikki Finke, Jason Guerrasio and Alison Willmore.
• Anthony Miccio at Idolator bemoans the lack of a “a critical backlash” to I’m Not There (what can I say––I tried), then rants for a bit about why it sucks. A salient point: “[T]here’s a TV movie from the ’70s that equally reveled in ’60s iconography, while revealing a little more about the music itself and throwing in a bunch of jokes to boot. Maybe not taking their marvelous meta seriously is why The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash doesn’t get the same boot-licking treatment I’m Not There is enjoying.”
• Netflix and Blockbuster “subscribers are stuck somewhere between the years 2004 and 2006, unaware that movies like Juno and No Country for Old Men are out on DVD,” posits Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee. “How else to explain the dearth of anything remotely resembling a “new release” in their respective Top 100 lists?”

Exactly one month ago, a measly 60,000 people had signed the “Stop Dr. Uwe Boll” online petition. Today the number of haters is more than 230,000 (provided all signers are unique). If the campaign does indeed reach the one million signatures required to supposedly convince Boll to quit filmmaking, Stride Gum will hand out free packs of its “ridiculously long-lasting” chewing gum to each and every signer. Seems random, but apparently the two-year-old gum brand (part of Cadbury Schweppes) sees it as a way to support its target demo. According to the company’s press release:

“Since gamers are one of our most supportive groups, we’ve been looking for ways to return the favor,” said Gary Osifchin, Stride North American Marketing Director. “And what better way is there to get gamers’ backs than by helping them rescue their cherished videogames from the clutches of Uwe Boll?”

There is a catch, of course. The petition has to reach its goal in another seven days (by May 14, 5pm EST) in order for this promotion — I repeat, promotion — to follow through. Considering the number of signers went up 50% on the first day I blogged about it, and another 233% in the following seven days (to my second posting), and only another 18% since then (about three weeks), it’s hard to imagine that it will increase the necessary 323% in a week just for a free pack of gum. But hey, at least Stride is getting its name out there.

Of course Boll has already responded, via Diehard GameFAN, with the following: “These guys [Stride Gum] are the slaves of major studios.” The site adds its own idea that, “things can’t be going good for Stride Gum if they’re reduced to publicity stunts like this.” Either way, it should do little for the anti-fans while doing great things for both Boll, who continues to be at least a brand name thanks to the antipathy towards him, and Stride, who gains the respect of the gamer gum chewers while not actually having to lose any money in the process (not that giving out a million packs of gum would be that big a loss for them anyway). And Stride didn’t even have to make it out that they actually care if Boll stops making films:

“Look, it’s nothing personal against the guy. Maybe his non videogame-based films are unbelievable! But we’ve seen such intense passion for this cause that we couldn’t help but get involved,” said Osifchin. “Let the signing continue.”

And let the gum consumption continue, as well.

An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:

Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.

I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!

The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.