Red Dessert

Like R. Knight, I too have a thing for Monica Vitti and the surreal and alienating wonders that Antonioni has managed to slip into the culture, unseen and now inoperable. Criterion is releasing "The Red Desert" (Il deserto rosso (1964)) in blu-ray and it seems too little too late, especially when we read that sales of DVDs are down 30% more this year from last year's already alarming 30%.

People aren't buying catalog titles anymore, and they're barely buying the new stuff ("Avatar" is an exception and an outlier, and should be discounted for more than one reason. What are you people thinking?). What does a 45-year old art-house avant-garde visual tone-poem, Antonioni's first color film that so aggressively fucks with the palette to make it seem more finger-painted than choreographed, corrupted rather than blooming, have to offer a generation raised on perfect and digital hi-def hi-res imagery?

"Rosso" is poised between the hip and minimalist "Blowup" (1966) and the stoic and elitist (and to my mind perfect) "L'eclisse" (1962). Circling around a popular mode of film-making after overly existential narratives influenced but never embracing the populism (or socialism) of neo-realism, Antonioni seemed genuinely hurt by "L'avventura"'s critical drubbing in 1960 at Cannes. It's a tough movie. Not of this time, and I'm not sure of any time. Conceptually more fun to talk about than to watch, I think very few people have given it a chance, really, at least until the (seemingly) only camera move in the whole film, that slow push-in on the empty street showing us... nothing. It's indulgent, arrogant, yet transcendent. It opens up the film ontologically as well as metaphysically. Yet it happens a good hour in, and trying to explain that to anyone is a fool's errand, like telling someone to hang with Warhol's "Empire" - a bird flies by in hour 6.

Ergo, "Rosso." Antonioni seemed insistent in making an art piece. That looked and felt like art-capital-A. Reportedly set decorators painted walls red and leaves green to give the film a palette more impressionistic than realist. The acting, as was the speed of prevailing traffic in Europe at the time, is conveyed mostly with words spoken to the table rather than at the people in the room, looks out windows and walking across the industrial sets to strike a pose, framed within and sometimes dwarfed by the manipulated (if intentionally) ugly sets.

It displays the best things about Antonioni, as well as the worst. It's too much and yet not enough, a recipe of elements that don't quite bake together. The existential ennui drowns the narrative momentum in a manner that points ultimately to the explosive and resonant failures of "Zabriskie Point" (1970). More gesture than contact. Vitti, game if done, finally becomes what had never happened before, a decorative detail, a directorial flourish, just an undigested element in the set design, caught between existential malaise and the director's obsessive blindness.

I can't wait. "Rosso" had a sub-standard DVD release in 1999 that didn't properly master or balance the color or aspect ratio. I'm guessing the Criterion DVD blu-ray will, at the least, go back to original reference materials to make it look as close to the original release as possible, regardless of how out-of-date and stale it might be to current audiences. It's the missing link in Antonioni's 1960s oeuvre. It's like a cake that's a little too dry to go down, but you can't stop nibbling at.

Drips, Thousands of Them

Last month the Library of Congress took the bold and inevitable/ inenviable move of deciding to preserve all of Twitter's feeds since its inception in 2006. This was cause for concern in many cultural circles - the corpus of "tweets" are famously inconsequential, brief (140 characters means they have to be as concise as haiku and they don't even rhyme) and so very much of the moment.

They exist outside any context beyond the immediate, without footnotes or backstory, disconnected to meaningful singular or tracable threads.

Or not. It seems like so much digital noise, either seldom serious or way too personal. I imagine the anxiety in some quarters has to do not with the content as much as the size of this archive. How is this possibly going to illuminate any future historical research?

The problem isn't necessarily in the weight of the corpus - millions of small and disjointed tweets about who and god knows what. They refer to timely and ephemeral cultural events that fade as quickly as they rise in the search-fed trending charts. A cursory look at Twittter's own page of trending topics ("Right Now" vs. "Today" vs. "This Week") reveals the distorted view from the rear view mirror of historical perspective. Objects are closer than they appear.

A bigger question is how are we'll know who wrote these tweets or why. These terse, clever, obscure koans are anonymous to the larger population - the usernames are often pseudonyms, synonyms, acronyms, homonyms. Is that being archived as well, Twitter's proprietary user backend with ISP#s and geo-locations embedded? What if users disabled that feature? Is there a privacy issue at stake? Who is represented geographically and who is anonymous?

And who's tweets will have greater historical weight in the future? Which ones will be more heavily researched simply because they have more surrounding context? Spelled things correctly? Levels of "impact," re-tweet factor, rate of followers, whatever?

Many news stories broke on Twitter in "real time" including the widespread dissemination of Michael Jackson's ride to the hospital in the sky - there are legit reasons to track what's discussed in this skewed and auto-democratic forum. The Iranian election protests in June 2009 on the streets caused 200,000 users to change their avatar green (and some are still are). What does this say about Iran... or about the average Twitter user - that they're politically committed or that they forgot?

It's a new level of discourse, outside journalism and academia. The importance of this LOC archive if it lasts - if it's actually maintained - won't be in what people say in those 140-character text-bubbles but how.

Language when repressed or limited expands in strange and revealing ways. People express themselves differently if they think they're anonymous and if they got no time to finesse. When Twitter goes away, and it will, this collection of immediate inconsequential snapshots, these text notes under the bed, will reveal a time and a place in which, facilitated by mobile devices and the attention spans that all the new toys of our age engender, will show us as a community digitally connected in ways never thought possible, still trying to say something meaningful to the people around us.

Contracted Cinema

One of the larger Barnes and Noble stores in the San Francisco area closed recently, and I realized that I missed browsing in a bookstore.

I also miss browsing in libraries, seeing what's next to what. Now it might be too late. So much of our research is in finding what you (think you) want online and ordering it for delivery or to having the local branch hold it. Get an email, drop in and check it out and leave. No time to search, since it's not local anyway.

It was over 10 years ago when I first read about the bookstores complaining about Amazon. How people would go into their stores and browse, figure out what books they wanted, hold them, fall in love with them, then go home and order it online for 25% less.

This drain would put the smaller bookstores out of business unless they could get their inventory into exlibris.com (itself bought by Amazon) or had room for a coffee shop in the back (which kept the Borders' open in my neighborhood). Now with Google Books you don't even need the book. You search by keyword and it brings up the section of the page that it shows up in. It doesn't show you the whole page, let alone the whole book; that's for copyright reasons - don't want to give it away for free. There's your citation. So you never see the page, the book, or the books sitting next to it that might be as relevant, more relevant, or at least instructive.

In the old days you might go to the Animation section to look for a book on Donald Duck but you would see 25 or 30 others including ones on Warner Brothers or the Fleischers or Windsor McKay. Some were old and some were new; even if you never picked them up you had an idea of what the scope of the field might be, from "Z for Zagreb" to "Expanded Cinema," sitting there daring you to figure out what they were. They somehow had to do with animation, and when the topic came up a year later you were familiar.

I must have seen 200 copies of "Expanded Cinema" in my life but I never bought it or had one in my house. I didn't need to. It was everywhere. By picking it up every so often I know it's about the avant-garde/video scene in the late 60s and early '70s, about verite and experimental animation, and Buckminster Fuller was involved somehow. The fact that there are so many copies indicated that this mattered at some point. The fact that it was such makes it culturally important, even if its 40 years old now and technology may have made some of its practical insights historically quaint.



A hard-cover on Amazon now goes for over $70 bucks - the paperbacks are still around for $20, a relatively high price for something that was a dime-a-dozen in the '80s. If you look up "Animation" or even "Experimental Animation Books" in Google this book doesn't come up. No one's linking to it and no one's selling it.

The only way to find it is to go to an old used bookstore that has been in business long enough to have acquired a copy 20+ years ago and still has it next to novelizations of "Myra Breckinridge" and books by Amos Vogel. Those two are at the far end of the alphabet as well, and are entryways into expanded cinema of their own.

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You can also read about the joys of browsing here.

Halls of Montezuma

In the half a dozen laboratories I've visited in the last year, not only are there hallways of clean tiles and closed-off pneumatic doors between you and the chemicals, there are boxes and boxes of films lining the halls.

Cardboard boxes and metal Goldberg cans. Carefully poly-ed and sieved reels and also rusted-shut boat anchors. Film is everywhere. The backlog is overwhelming. While new film is dead (everything new is being produced on digital and tape-less formats - you can't get film if you wanted it (for example)) there are still linear feet of old film; boxes and Martian tons of film cans, negatives and magnetic masters that haven't gone away.

They're stacked in corners and behind water fountains. Unfinished or abandoned projects, clean and marked, others dusty, crushed and forgotten. Many have to be transferred to a more portable medium, that is, a digital file that can be manipulated in the DaVinci. Optical negative tracks must be married to picture elements.

In the go-go era of 3-D and flip-of-a-switch turnaround, these physical smelly and embarrassing objects clutter up the place. The labels are coming off, they're misspelled, they are incomplete. The archives are full.

Prints of films that have already been transferred to VHS and now (or soon) to DVD are as good as orphans. The studios dumped every possible title onto VHS in the '80s, but many of them didn't sell well, except to fill out the inventories of Blockbusters. They were telecine'd at full-screen and with bitched-up timing. No matter, who wants to see "Crimewave" with Paul Smith? Who wrote or directed it anyway? And "White of the Eye" has... who in it exactly?

Each iteration of technology leaves a percentage of titles behind. Of the 10,000s of films produced in the the last 50 years, a mere half of them made it to video, a format in which you could take home rather than waiting for the broadcast on network t.v. or local cable, late at night, before that real estate was taken over by info-mercials and reality. Once DVDs took over, only the cream of that crop was remastered and released.

They stopped showing up on TV too. After years (decades) of giving old film away all night on late-night UHF stations, the studios began to take them back. That Saturday morning, late Tuesday night film school that afforded me the entire back catalog of Hollywood was taken away from future generations in the '90s. "The Wizard of Oz" will no longer be shown yearly at Thanksgiving. The unexpected and unknown joys of "The Brinks Job" or "Crashing Hollywood" can no longer be stumbled upon accidentally.

Someone's holding on to those, wanting to monetize them somehow, although no one has a business model anymore to do so.

So as DVD sales stall the Corman Poe films go out of print. The masters will be in the vault, waiting for a future format that may require going back to the originals to digitally scan. Blu-ray reveals flaws in the camera negatives that can't be hidden - and perhaps shouldn't be. We'll have to send money on that. One of these days. That's why "Taxi Driver" hasn't been released to blu-ray. It's too gritty - all that grain would be rejected by the "cinephiles" who want their demo-discs clean without the hi-res evidence.

Hi-def 3-D TV will make it worse.

But every 7 years there will be a new release of "Snow White." "Casablanca" and "Gone With the Wind" and "Blade Runner" sell perennially and will be remastered perennially. The rest of the catalog isn't worth the shelf space it's printed on right there, and there's those other copies out there. Why are we keeping them?

Studio archives aren't in the business of keeping their unwanted objects. But how to make room for the new films, the 3-D files from the horror remakes last year?

Free Vodka

Film festivals are easily parties more than they're cultural events. They often get started as home-grown affairs, attempts by the Chamber of Commerce to create a curated art happening that lasts a weekend or a whole week; get visitors into a sleepy borough in the off-season and rent some hotel rooms.

It's easy to find promotional partners to pitch in screening spaces and printing costs for the program, all with the lure of peeling off some of the Hollywood sexiness and glamour that comes from showing half-indie premieres (like "The Cooler" (really "indie"? Like "Juno" is indie?)) and having media louse up the place and maybe get some gift-bag bling.

Festivals inevitably attract submissions from desperate filmmakers, corporate marketers looking to get a laurel leaf on their DVD box, and actual artists that get lost in the fog of late-night activity and the ghetto of a 9:00 am showing on Sunday morning. But the nicer the location (the south of France, or Bermuda) the more visitors come to spend money and only occasionally see an actual film. The theatres are for shit anyway. If they're even theatres. Half the films aren't shown on film - they're shown digitally, from betacam or DVD.

Who's watching? The good films were already bought and the undiscovered gems can be had by screener.

It's a social scene with local dignitaries and any actor or filmmaker with a new straight-to-video feature they could lure with a free room, a date with the local prom queen and free booze from the current hipster vintner to do a Q&A after the screening. Michael Madsen is doing the festival circuit for "The Killing Jar." It's more fun to hang out with him than sit in the dark watching the thing - it'd only kill the conversation at the opening night party.

Palm Springs, Nashville, Mill Valley, and Carbondale pull from all 4 corners of the globe. They use promotional partners, offer half-off dinners at local restaurants, and advertise bars that are open late (and early). They also give away ball point pens, iPods loaded with the opening-night movie, and hats saying "Lionsgate."

The films are just an excuse. The appreciation of independent cinematic art can be sated nowadays with a subscription to Netflix and judicious searching on a bittorrent site. With 450 film festivals in the US last year, you may wonder why so many people are still going.

Don't they have plasma t.v.s?

Lights. Camera.

"Avatar" won the Oscar for Best Cinematography a few weeks ago, and the immediate reaction was to wonder how much of the look and composition is due to cinematography and how much is due to computer programming.

Cinematography, it seems to me, is rather pretty intricately linked to cameras and lenses. It's the art of doing what you can with the equipment you have at your disposal to enhance the director's artistic vision and create/emphasize a mood.

There's not room for programming. It's the artisianal use of the indexical quality of film and cameras to make what you point your camera at as emotionally resonant. "Writing with light," as Vittorio Storaro would insist.

J.J. Abrams' "Star Wars" is as guilty as writing with software as "Avatar" is. This discussion quotes Mr. Abrams' artistic enthusiasm for adding lens flares to the film to create a subtext of an overflowing future. I guess that's writing with "light" too. This use of added visual icing to create some sense of "reality" was foregrounded in Lucas's fourth (or is it the first)"Star Wars" film, shot entirely digitally and a busier film on the surface (covering over a disconcerting lack of cake) I've never seen (including the "Matrix" pie-fights). "Phantom Menace" is a film fingered in post-production to re-appropriate the artifacts of film-based and "conservative" and traditional camera work, such as adding lens flares, camera shake, focus rack-ins (all documented in the extensive and strangely disconcerting making-of featurette on the first DVD release).

There's of course an irony to shooting everything in perfect digital and then adding the accidental and (formerly unwanted) visual anomalies. They give us comfort, especially when we realize they aren't there. I imagine "Phantom Menace" as cold and pointless until the "warmth" was added, this in one of the most backward-looking retro films of recent memory. ("Grindhouse" comes to mind, which also takes its inspiration from previous narrative-making modes and is guilty of a similar attempt to "add" authenticity.)

All these digital manipulations are in the interest of making things "real." Even "Avatar"'s hype about changing the way movies will be made also ensures us that the techniques make things more real than real. Actors have nothing to worry about; they aren't obsolete.

See how "easy" it is to add flare:




The other nominee was "Transformers." They photo-shopped out Megan Fox's tattoos in her scenes so they wouldn't distract us. That's a little too real for the story they were trying to tell.

Now that's acting.

Did You Know Mike?

The Warner Archives' press-on-demand DVD series has gone deep into their forgotten catalog and slipped James Bridges' "Mike's Murder" (1984) past us with no fanfare. But it's a lost gem that deserves rediscovering, not only for its strongly evocative tone capturing the post-70s corruption of urban life, but for the many small and powerful pleasures possible in a studio film that was withheld, recut, dumped and then abandoned by the studio (the Alan Ladd Co.), itself becoming a victim of test-screenings and marketing pressure.

The film, titled disarmingly with the straight-forward "Mike's Murder" to have us believe this is simply a whodunit, is anything but. Betty (Debra Winger) has an on-again-off-again relationship with Mike (Mark Keyloun) a tennis coach who seems to be slipping in and out of trouble with drug deals with characters we - and she - never quite get to see or know. They meet by accident over the course of a year or so (without the amount of time being clearly defined, but that's part of the dreamy momentum) and by the time Mike is murdered (off-screen) we've been slowly investing so much emotional baggage on them getting together that Betty's ambling search for the truth of the murder, and of Mike, takes on a fated urgency.

Ultimately the film is really about the inability to know who people say they are, the world around us, who we can trust. Betty, in the center, is a cypher who hasn't quite been paying attention to the various vacuous influences around her but "likes" Mike. A lot. Yet except for the opening romantic montage in which we see them play tennis then dissolve into falling into bed, they actually spend more time together on the phone making and breaking plans to meet than actually going out on dates. Mike, even before he disappears from the film, slowly comes into focus by various photos of him by friends (Sam, his drunk older mentor, and Randy at a record producer's house up in the Hollywood Hills).

Indeed the story shorthands the obvious broad strokes and is aggressively ambiguous in its details, more interested in the nuances of conversation, looking, and even composition. It's formal but strangely cocaine-inflected. Anxious yet non-causal. The phone calls are often shot in one take, without intercutting to the other person, a sly and troublesome affectation to withhold information, even if it's simply the look on the face of the other person.

The ambiguity spreads to the sexuality of the various relationships as well, which we are left to ponder along with Betty, not only starting with the unexplored relationship between Mike and Sam, but most enticingly in the Hollywood Hills where Phillip the record producer (played quietly and strongly by a slightly swish Paul Winfield) begins to suggest a more polymorphous network of alliances and debts among him and Mike's friends before Betty stops him, not wanting to know more. Details are withheld. The camera stays its distance, not revealing anything out of turn.

Ultimately it all boils down to drugs. And yet the film never gives a face or range to the forces against Mike (and against his surviving buddy, Pete, who gets the closest to Betty finally, uncomfortably so). The film seems to take the drug subculture as so obvious that it doesn't dirty its hands by explaining it. It merely permeates the film. The cocaine world in the film is populated and partaken in by the upper middle class, white collar businessmen with no foreign, black or sinister inflections in sight. Phillip, the black record producer, is only seen to drink cranberry juice although there is cocaine around. The entire business is portrayed as efficient and omnipresent, invisibly and peaceably coexisting with the characters.

The film is unable or unwilling to reveal the unexplored corners of the world Betty travels in. Mike's world is dark and less knowable.

The film has no center. It's perfect. Presumably Bridges originally conceived the film as being told in a jumbled or even "backward" timeline, akin to "Memento" (per Ned Merrill in his fine write-up on Obscure One-Sheet blog here) as Betty tries to uncover the mystery, in fragments. If the original cut still survives (and there is a rumor it's still out there) it's not likely forthcoming. The original trailer's tagline "No one is innocent" is quite different and ominous than the final's "The mystery that led her into a world of incredible danger." No doubt before its time, and a hard thing to pull off in any case, the film was recut and reformulated by the studio, appearing 2 years late.

If the film was that altered, it survived well. Those elliptical scenes of Mike making deals would serve equally well as visual evidence in flashbacks, yet fold in well in strict chronological order. The sense of lost time and uncapturable memory, underscored by such moments as when Mike sees Betty in her car and notes "It's been 6 months" or later, when he calls her and she says "It's been 3 months", take us by surprise. Late in the film, when Betty has visited various people she says to a friend that the murder happened "last night" and we are equally surprised that only a day has passed.

The original trailer, available on the Warners' DVD (and here), suggest a more rigorous investigation into the mystery of "Mike." There are more shots of bloody knives and violence (all of which may be stock footage and not originally part of the film) as well as Betty and him in romantic soft-focus shots (and she is implicated in the drug-taking in an apparent sharing of a joint). Instead the Morricone-esque plaintive music (by John Barry, added to replace Joe Jackson's original score) every time Betty is on screen centers the tale on her.

The film only suggests the theme of how we know someone only by how they're reflected in others, and formulates an uneasy truce over the heartache when we confront inevitable loss.

The final confrontation between Pete and Betty is a neo-noir red herring. But the film offers other profound and authentic pleasures such as watching Debra Winger in profile driving a VW Rabbit down Sunset Blvd, phone conversations that play out in one-sided real time, and an LA filled with trees, concrete, chain link fences and late model cars, all alternately too dark or bathed in the warm diffused aura of the setting Southern California sun. Visible and yet never close enough for us to touch.

We're Breaking Up

Film theory has shifted in the last 30 years as it's matured, moving from primarily text-based analysis (what did John Ford really mean?) to unpacking more psychological gender and racial-imperialistic tendencies in certain modes of production (what do John Ford films say about the studios he worked for?). By the '80s theorists are bringing up Lacan and semiological post- modern readings (what is the audience bringing to the text, regardless of what the studios or John Ford intended?)

Now the breaking wave of film analysis seems to be moving towards Reception Studies. Academics are analyzing the ephemera and messages, covert and overt, surrounding a text, a film, a moving image "event" that encode and inflect its address to the audiences. The extra-textural, if you will. Stay with me. Cable specials and star power influence and infect how we like or disregard a film's intentions; what culturally surrounds the experience influences the ways audiences receive and perceive the work. It's impossible for the studios to control and sometimes it's simply hype. (A certain blue cat movie comes to mind.)

"Blade Runner" in 1982 doesn't (and didn't) work after "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." But our relationship to Harrison Ford changes after "Presumed Innocent" and "The Fugitive," and 25 years later, even if you haven't seen those, "Blade Runner" is an "instant classic." Hitchcock's "Frenzy" turns our stomachs in 1972 with its droll sick sense of humor, 12 years after "Psycho" (12 whole years!), but when his entire career is all crushed to a convenient weekend of renting on demand and random access, suddenly themes and touches resonate brilliantly all the way back to the original "The Man Who Knew Too Much," through to "Vertigo," as early as "Blackmail" and up again to "Marnie," which may not be so bad after all.

Bowie's "Station to Station" is less discordant and incomplete when it's fit so smoothly between "Young Americans" and "Low," pointing the way to Berlin and later to shiny-chrome disco.

All these attempts by artists to try something new meet with derision and confusion, only to become clearly the first steps in strong and appropriate paths with hindsight of the longer more historical view. "The Cable Guy" still doesn't get a pass.

How does the theatrical experience influence how we appreciate films? It starts with a trailer we see 4 months or so before the movie opens that raises our awareness, in the very theatre where we will eventually see it a season later. We finally go on opening weekend, or at least in the couple weeks before it leaves, firmly in the time continuum and cultural window in which it is born and lives with an audience, all like-minded and motivated to go pay money to see it. The long lines outside "Matrix Reloaded" inflects our experience inside differently than the half-empty "Matrix Revolutions" 6 months later.

Something is irrevocably lost when we chose to watch films at home, later, by ourselves or on our electronic devices. Without the lines, without the need to see it on opening weekend, we lose not only our personal connection to the excitement of the event status of a moving image presentation, we don't get it.

As films become personal, individualized, and casual, we become unmoved by their circumstance. We don't have a community. We don't fall in love with the text because it's a good date and a good night out. The upside is that any analysis of a film must return, by default, to purely textual. But it also strips it of cultural context and important situational meaning.

The New and Improved French Connection

Robert Harris (yes, that Robert Harris) was involved in the new restoration of William Friedkin's "The French Connection" early last year, and it's worthy of revisiting (Friedkin is doing a Coppola - since he isn't producing mainstream films on note anymore (I haven't seen "Bug," so I'm reserving judgment), he might as well restore the old triumphs). And perhaps to be expected, there are concerns about the results of the updating, seen here on the Home Theatre Forum website (here).

Apparently they've moved from the original 1971 film stock color palette and "reimagined" the look, making it more in tune with a '40s Technicolor look, "denaturalizing" the original and sharpening the contrast. While not in the ballpark of Lucas changing plotpoints in his reissues of "Star Wars," this again brings up the responsibility of a filmmaker working in the 21st-century blu-ray aesthetic.

Mr. Harris himself notes that it is not the film that won the Oscar 35 years ago anymore. It's now a 2009 version of a '40s look applied to a '70s film's version of the '40s. No iteration of which is authentically, intentionally or completely of its time.

I was happy to have seen this film in its new digital glory, but will no doubt never have a chance to see the "original" '70s version again.
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An earlier version of this post originally appeared on the AMIA UCLA Student Chapter blog in 2009.

Blue Cat People

Gaspar Noe is now on record as saying he thinks "Avatar" is amazing (here). I think he used the term "cat's pajamas." Manohla Dargis muses that the success of the film highlights the very nature of film and filmgoing changing before our eyes (here). Like "Titanic," "Avatar" arrived surrounded by clouds of doubt, negative buzz and poisonous PR right up to the time that it became the 2nd-highest grossing film IN THE WORLD - sometime last week.

Whether it costs $220 million or $600 million, it's a hit, and indeed will change the face of cinema. The anxiety over the coming digital revolution has been assuaged for the moment (documented earlier last year).

Hollywood has always been a popularity contest. Incredible three dimensional hi-jinx and digital delivery have been lauded as the lifesaver for theatrical film exhibition ever since about 70% of the $90 million gross of "Meet The Robinsons" (2007) came from the handful of 3-D screens it continued to play at throughout the summer with no other digital or 3-d competition and the worst reviews since "Chicken Little." Filmmakers from Robert Zemeckis to Pete Docter didn't merely jump on the bandwagon. They were pushed.

2009 has posted the largest box office numbers in years, not because of rising prices (which is the usual reason why annual box office goes up) but because actual attendance actually increased. In the failing economy and double-digit falls in DVD sales and record levels of unemployment, with echoes to the depression in the '30s, people are going to movies again, if only to pack up their troubles and brother can you spare a dime. Never mind that much of these numbers are related to films as "The Blind Side" and "The Hangover," two conservative and pretty old-school films that you could name (which arguably "Avatar" is as well).

What if "Avatar" had fallen onto its blue face? Hollywood would have understood that and actually been a little okay with it, and continued constricting and moaning, waiting for the new savior of the industry to be born or some unexpected film or trend or angle to present itself as a pleasant and exploitable surprise. And Cameron would maybe have been put in his place. But this isn't a Leno-at-10 situation. The studios and pundits have put so many eggs into the "Avatar" basket that its success is an uneasy relief. As well as a mixed signal.

So now, 3-D, and Imax, and science fiction, and even Robert Downey Jr. are going to inflect many films put into development this year. People are going to movie theatres again - because they have to. Who wants to see "Avatar" on their iPod? Except a dozen companies have now announced technologies to put 3-D into your home at the recent Electronic Expo (link) and soon you won't have to go to the Arclight after all to see it as if it were happening in front of you.

Millions of dollars will be spent on the infrastructure, new televisions, glasses and devices to stream proprietary content. All to get your eyeballs on their intellectual packages. Hollywood is gripped with a new hope, and a new panic, and finally something new to get to work on. This new technology will throw out 100 years of standards and the theatrical experience, newly reinvigorated, will speed faster to its inevitable decline. Companies will invest in the wrong standards, go bankrupt, won't have content even if their system does work, and then....

...some little $15k film will surprise everyone and do a ton of business. Like "Easy Rider" in 1969, which was inadvertently ruinous to the studios in the '70s when they threw all kinds of money at the youth movement, spending high on low culture, throwing out the old rules and selling the libraries and handing the keys to the kingdom to young turks who wanted to - and almost did - tear the edifice down, not understanding what they were investing in or where the future lied (link).

Recapturing the "Blair Witch" or "Easy Rider" or "Paranormal" magic in a bottle is hard. It's a lot easier to merely spend tons of money on giant loud blue cat people movies. "Avatar" may ruin the business after all, not because to replicate it comes at a dear cost, but because it was so damn successful and Hollywood is scared enough to try.