Is That a Monster in Your Dream (Scenario)? No, It's Just Jason Bourne, Weekly Reel #67
Theatrical v. home viewing; Disney's ROI for Marvel, Star Wars; reviews: Monster, Dream Scenario, and the Bourne franchise; and the precariousness of digital film preservation.
(For those new to the Stanley Nolan Blog and/or Weekly Reel, welcome! This is a weeklyish post split into distinct sections regarding films and the industry: news roundups, essay commentaries breaking down more substantive issues, and film recommendations, ranked from Watch Now to Save for Later to Pass. You’re encouraged to hop around and read the sections that interest you the most. And you can always check out all of my other content—essays, book reviews, film festival coverage, pre-Substack stuff, etc.)
News:
A new poll by HarrisX found that 34 percent of U.S. adults prefer to watch movies in theaters, but that doesn’t exactly mean two-thirds prefer streaming, which the article argues. A majority indicated they watch films weekly, which means they’d have to choose streaming because of the limited number of theatrical options available on a weekly basis. Almost a third of adults watch multiple films per week, proving that they ‘prefer’ streaming only because that’s the singular option. Theatrical-based cinema has been the only through line in the history of film, same as the print-bound book for lit, and it will continue to be so whenever streaming falls out of fashion.
Disney revealed the ROI of their big franchises: Frozen at 9.9x, Toy Story at 5.5x, Avengers at 3.3x, and Star Wars at 2.9x. This includes ‘theatrical releases, including theatrical, home entertainment, TV (pay and free), and consumer products’ but not ‘derivative revenue streams, such as park attractions, nor does it include DTC originals associated with those franchises or pre-established franchise consumer products revenue.’ These numbers, while solid overall, are striking in how valuable consumer products are for Disney. (Also strange that Toy Story is singled out and not Pixar in general, which may have a shit ROI.) CEO Bob Iger is flexing these numbers (of franchises guided under his reign) because he has a proxy fight against activist investor Nelson Peltz on his hands, who’s making a run for board seats to eventually push Iger out.
Watch Now
Monster (2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan) is a film that I reviewed for the Munich Filmfest that finally hit theaters, allowing me to refresh my enjoyment for this incredibly well-told story about masculinity, growing up, and perspective storytelling. Without giving away too much, which is hard to do in explaining this film, I’d recommend reading my original review linked above as well as my second-viewing realization review on Letterboxd only after having seen the movie. I highly recommend a viewing, which you may have to go out of your way for because of its limited release.
Here’s a spoiler-free plot description: a Japanese fifth-grade boy exhibits strange behavior, which his mother determines is coming from his teacher. But from multiple character perspectives and flashbacks, a different picture emerges as all the characters reveal a fuller picture of the events. It plays with structure and pov very effectively, turning those elements into essential audiovisual representations of the story taking place. Matching form with content is rare when not done ironically or understatedly, which risks the artifice falling apart. But Monster holds it all together and tells one of the better bildungsromans in recent history.
Save for Later
Dream Scenario (2023, Kristoffer Borgli, USA)
With The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent two years ago and now Dream Scenario, we’re entering some post-modern depiction of the post-modern depiction of Nicholas Cage in cinema, which is horshoeing back around to sincerity of performance—best exemplified with Pig. Dream Scenario mixes the usual Cageisms with Kristoffer Borgli’s (Sick of Myself) interest in how online consumption distorts one’s self-perception. And typical with Cage films, the one-liner plot summary is catchy: what if Nicholas Cage, playing generic Nicholas Cage man, started appearing in everyone’s dreams at the same time?
Borgli is up to the task of blending genres while making Cage’s performance sincerely funny (as opposed to Unbearable Weight). In keeping with his attention to extremely-online discourse, Cage plays a version of evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who went viral for defying ‘cancel culture’, lost his university job (as well as his wife at the same uni), and became a regular on the Joe Rogan Experience—also invoked in this film. But Borgli’s character’s transition isn’t smooth. He’s in the middle of a dead-end university job where his PhD thesis is potentially being plagiarized by an old classmate and isn’t motivated to write his monograph on ants. He needs a viral break, which conveniently arrives when he pops up nonchalance in many people’s dreams. But because this is a film, that dream scenario for any writer needing attention backfires tremendously.
Pass
The Bourne Trilogy (2002-7) and Jason Bourne (2016), but not The Bourne Legacy (2012)
It’s good to re-visit past franchises, especially post-Marvel, to see how things hold up. In the case of Jason Bourne, which is currently developing a sixth film with All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger, it feels like I’m George in The Time Machine (1960) picking up a dusty book only to have it fall apart upon impact. For what was once a highly commercial action franchise that made James Bond and other action franchises step up their game via shakey-cam, ‘gritty realism’ cinematography, Jason Bourne has aged horribly, to my surprise.
The first three films, designed as a trilogy only after the producers ousted director Doug Liman, feature Matt Damon as Bourne, an off-the-books agent who lost his identity but has a particularly lethal set of skills. By the end of this trilogy, with countless European locations ill-used and tens of millions cynically earned from product placements, nothing really happens regarding Bourne’s identity. He was part of a special program, and that’s that. Bringing in fresh-face (and then over-extended) Oscar-nominee Jeremy Renner for the fourth one, this time with Tony Gilroy, writer on all the screenplays, directing, it attempts to pull away from the shaky-cam, vomit-inducing aesthetic and explore the greater world of agents in this program. Because of it’s relative simplicity and standalone story, it’s by far the most effective of the Bourne films in terms of having a beginning, middle, and end. But critics and audiences didn’t think so, which brought together Damon and Paul Greengrass (director of the second and third) for the fifth one. With more star power and locations, this film failed even harder than the original trilogy, having learned no lessons and not interested in updating the story beyond an extremely lame father-trauma plot.
I suspect the reason these films aged so poorly is because of how hyper-specific they were for the 9/11, Iraq War era. The first film came out the Summer after September 2001, the second in the Summer after the invasion of Iraq, and the third during the rumblings of Obama’s first presidential campaign. In effect, the theses of these films were: American power oversees is all-powerful and could easily run out of control, but good thing there are good guys like Jason Bourne to expose the corruption of the covert (CIA) establishment. In other words, a kind of Spielberg plot where an American system self-corrects towards justice when bad stuff is exposed. Aside from being a distraction from the horrific reality of how American power was actually working oversees, the Bourne films gives the USA a convenient way out of having to acknowledge that it isn’t just a few rogue CIA managers corrupted by power. This depiction in an artistic medium is especially odious with hindsight, but more than anything, it makes the Bourne films irrelevant and boring.
(Above clip from Babylon is the greatest meta-film preservationesque sequence of all time.)
Have you ever written up a high school or university essay on a word doc that was accidentally deleted or erased, leading to a near complete mental breakdown? Imagine you were an employee for Pixar and deleted Toy Story 2 because of an improper command function, which actually happened as we’ll see below. Although we don’t often think of such faults in the technical system because of our understanding of technology always improving, that reality lurks under the newly established digitization of films and shows. We now have two forms of preservation to worry about: physical and digital. And, contrary to expectations, physical celluloid film will most likely outlive their digital counterparts because of the high rate of change in file formats and storage methods. Remember the floppy disk? Do people still use USBs? Are you sure you want to trust the ‘cloud’ with preserving the existence of all your media?
The good news is that many of the filmmakers who started and built their careers using physical media are still around to ensure the handover goes over well. None moreso than Scorsese, who has spent an impressive amount of time preserving and recording countless hours of film history:
[Archival preservation is] underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library (roughly 4,000 film titles including the James Bond franchise and 17,000 series episodes) is worth an estimated $3.4 billion to Amazon — but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes. “It’s a silent fire,” says Linda Tadic, CEO of Digital Bedrock, an archiving servicer that works with studios and indie producers. “We find issues with every single show or film that we try to preserve.” So, what exactly has gone missing? “I could tell you stories — but I can’t, because of confidentiality.”
Specialists across the space don’t publicly speak about specific lost works, citing confidentiality issues. So, only disquieting rumors circulate — along with rare, heart-stopping lore that breaches public consciousness. One infamous example: In 1998, a Pixar employee accidentally typed a fatal command function, instructing the computer system to delete Toy Story 2, which was then almost complete. Luckily, a supervising technical director who’d been working from home (she’d just had a baby) had a 2-week-old backup file.
Oops. Not to mention having tens of thousands of hours of content to sort, catalogue, and store properly for one of these giant libraries. Do you trust them? And with so much raw stuff, how are films/shows curated for people so that they can get out of content purgatory?
As always we should ask ourselves who is actually at risk in this situation, which is almost never the studios:
Experts note that indie filmmakers, operating under constrained financial circumstances, are most at risk of seeing their art disappear. “You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost,” contends screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, a board member of the National Film Preservation Foundation. His cohort on the board, historian Leonard Maltin, notes that this era could suffer the same fate as has befallen so many silent pictures and midcentury B movies. “Those films were not attended to at the time — not archived properly because they weren’t the products of major studios,” he says.
In part, the indie filmmakers’ digital crisis can be traced to inadequate storage safeguards. (Innumerable thumb drives and hard drives are half-forgotten, only to age and corrupt, in closets, under beds and on garage shelves.) But also, it speaks to the fragile ecosystem that ostensibly supports filmmakers, from overextended financiers to ephemeral distributors. “They’re worried about getting the project picked up and getting it out there; proper preservation isn’t thought about so much,” observes Gregory Lukow, chief of the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, which now digitizes physical media.
Nearly a decade ago I made a four-song music video for my good friends’ band, Ludvig Van, which I saved on a hard drive only accessible by a laptop that stopped working. When I tried sharing the files years later, I couldn’t, and we were living in different cities and didn’t have the time to sort it out, so all I could send was the semi-finished video. The videos have since been split up into singles and were uploaded a few months ago—“In Time” and “Hot Spring Moonlight Lady”—but according to my own color balancing and editing because I couldn’t send over the master files.
And finally, there’s the basic problem of which formats will even exist in the future to be able to access the files:
Migration is also necessary as file formats evolve. “If you have a Zip drive with TARGA files on it, do you know how to open those today?” asks Alex Forsythe, director of imaging technology at AMPAS, referring to a 1980s-era file typology that has since been eclipsed by newer, more efficient methodologies. “I don’t think anyone expects these file formats to last a dozen years, let alone 50.”
This aspect of film preservation combined with the streamers ability to license films/shows, at will for a brief period of time, makes physical media all the more attractive. And we’re at the point where screen technology is so good that advancements in graphics won’t matter anymore, unless you’re gaming. 4K TVs have the highest possible resolution our brains can process while still remaining a manageable living-size screen. 8k is only effective and noticeable at extreme distances/measurements. That means we’re at this comfortable plateau where home viewing with physical media (at 4K or 1080p) is the best we can reach until VR becomes ubiquitous. So enjoy your Blu-rays and 4Ks!
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