The Challenge of Art

I came across a great article that falls right in line with our purpose of seeking out good art.  The whole article is worth your attention, here's a small excerpt:

"The challenge of art is beauty. And the challenge of beauty is truth. Truth is challenging. But it is also inviting. It is also glorious and liberating. Truth is wondrous, not scandalous....

New and Updated Moral Rating System

The rating system we've been using up until now has been very simple (a Moral Value score of 1-5), but it's been hard to be consistent on our ratings given that we just looked at a list of criteria and assigned a score that we felt fit best.  We've recently developed a formula for a Moral Value score to help us be more consistent and hopefully make our ratings a little more useful.  We appreciate all the inspiration and feedback we've received from family and friends on this.

The new formula is:

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) and Other Thoughts on the MPAA

The MPAA and its ratings are helpful if at a glance you’re trying to decide what to see. In other words, you don’t follow movie releases very closely and you’re just looking for a good show to watch. Shows that are for kids will be G or PG, with an occasional good adult movie being PG. Your typical action, or comedy, or romantic-comedy without too much graphic content will be PG-13, and shows with more mature or raunchier content will be R or above, with an occasional gem there too. The MPAA is good for those who don’t take movie watching all that seriously.

For those who do care about movies, it borders on a waste of existence. I get more information on the content of a movie from websites I frequent (rottentomatoes.com, commonsensemedia.org, imdb.com, kids-in-mind.com) than the vague and usually unimportant rating the MPAA slaps on a movie. While cinephiles and directors usually gripe about all the wrongs committed by the MPAA in giving too hard of a rating (R or NC-17), Hollywood still churns out more R-rated movies than any other. If more people are willing to pay for your lower rated films, which generally are less graphic in content, why not give the people what they want instead of forcing what they (Hollywood) think we want on us?

A Discussion on Viewing R-rated Movies in LDS Culture, Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here).


The R-rated Movie “Commandment”

Let me start off with a large quote from an essay by Orson Scott Card called "Is There An R-rated Movie Commandment" (I recommend reading the entire article). The purpose of this article is not to defend the watching of R-rated movies, but to help people (mainly LDS) to not judge those who choose to watch R-rated films (both LDS and those who aren’t in the LDS church) on the faulty notion of there being an "R-rated Movie Commandment."

Only one President of the Church has made an official statement that mentioned R-rated movies. On three occasions, President Ezra Taft Benson, when speaking specifically to the youth of the Church, mentioned films so rated. 

Here is an actual quotation, in its context. I know it will be a lot of trouble for some people to read what the prophet actually said instead of merely repeating a rumor of it as a means of condemning other Saints -- but now and then it's worth it, don't you think?

A Discussion on Viewing R-rated Movies in LDS Culture, Part 1

I grew up in a family and culture (LDS) where R-rated films were a definite no-no, a taboo. I’m grateful I have parents who cared enough to be ultra-conservative with the types of movies I was allowed to watch. Through most of elementary school I wasn't even allowed to watch PG movies, unless I got express permission from my parents. I didn't always understand their reasoning and on occasion remember always being excited about sleep-overs, because I was a little freer in what I chose to watch (thankfully those who I spent the evening with were good enough to not watch inappropriate movies anyway). We were even the proud owners of a TV Guardian that muted out the profane or sexually related dialog and inserted subtitles with a euphemism in place (e.g., “sex” became “hugs”), though we knew what was being missed anyways.

I don’t think I missed out on anything by being so restricted, on the contrary, I think it helped me become extra careful and to develop a knack for knowing (finding out) what any film was rated and why it was rated that way. Sites like screenit.com were quite helpful, though tended to make movies sound worse than they actually were.

Last Night

Moviefone posted a review of the movie Last Night (still to be released) that is very telling of what the world is coming to (though I know it's not a surprise to many).  The article explains,

"It sounds like a derivative and typical tale of marital morality -- a couple doesn't talk to each other, and lazily lets things get to the point where they both want to cheat. But Tadjedin infuses such thoughtfulness and cleverness into the proceedings that Last Night begins to feel unique. She employs a myriad of techniques to tell the story and to have her characters interact – an action or seemingly irrelevant anecdote being just as important as a straightforward response or bit of exposition."

First of all, it's sad to hear this as being told as a "typical tale of marital morality."  The fact that it's a tale, doesn't imply that it's always true, but it makes it sound as if it's something that everyone encounters trouble with in their marriage.  I'm not going to deny that it's true that married couples battle with this conflict (as anyone can see by the number of tales in books, movies, TV, and even the scriptures).  But to display it in such a way makes it seem like it's not that bad and that it's OK to get "lazy" in your relationship because it happens to everyone.  Good, moral media should seek to inspire people to be better, not be content or complacent with a disintegrating relationship.

Further in the article,

"Best of all, Tadjedin shifts the activity from her characters to the viewer. While, yes, there are moments where each couple struggle with matters of fidelity, trust, and commitment, the film also becomes an exercise for how we see things as an audience. No path is clear cut, and just when you think you know how the film will play out, it goes in another direction. It's as carefree as life – not in a suspenseful way, but in a realistic one. Life is not a simple formula of A+B=C, and Tadjedin respects that principle."

Should life really be "carefree"?  Is this reality?  Agreed, "life is not a simple formula" but there are simple formulas for happiness and this representation is flat out lie.  Even if the film shows each partner in the marriage not go through with their "night of sin," the fact that they let it get so far and to tell the account in such a carefree way is simply despicable.

The Day the Movies Died

Excerpts from a very interesting read at GQ:

Consider: Years ago, an ace filmmaker, the man who happened to direct the third-highest-grossing movie in U.S. history, The Dark Knight, came up with an idea for a big summer movie. It's a story he loved—in fact, he wrote it himself—and it belonged to a genre, the sci-fi action thriller, that zipped right down the center lane of American popular taste. He cast as his leading man a handsome actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who happened to star in the second-highest-grossing movie in history. Finally, to cover his bet even more, he hired half a dozen Oscar nominees and winners for supporting roles. 

Sounds like a sure thing, right? Exactly the kind of movie that a studio would die to have and an audience would kill to see? Well, it was. That film, Christopher Nolan's Inception, received admiring reviews, became last summer's most discussed movie, and has grossed, as of this writing, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide. 

And now the twist: The studios are trying very hard not to notice its success, or to care. Before anybody saw the movie, the buzz within the industry was: It's just a favor Warner Bros. is doing for Nolan because the studio needs him to make Batman 3. After it started to screen, the party line changed: It's too smart for the room, too smart for the summer, too smart for the audience. Just before it opened, it shifted again: Nolan is only a brand-name director to Web geeks, and his drawing power is being wildly overestimated. After it grossed $62 million on its first weekend, the word was: Yeah, that's pretty good, but it just means all the Nolan groupies came out early—now watch it drop like a stone. 

And here was the buzz three months later, after Inception became the only release of 2010 to log eleven consecutive weeks in the top ten: Huh. Well, you never know. 

"Huh. Well, you never know" is an admission that, put simply, things have never been worse....

For the studios, a good new idea has become just too scary a road to travel. Inception, they will tell you, is an exceptional movie. And movies that need to be exceptional to succeed are bad business. "The scab you're picking at is called execution," says legendary producer Scott Rudin (The Social Network, True Grit). "Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they're right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint."...

The majority of studio movies are aimed [at men under 25], the thinking being that they'll eat just about anything that's put in front of them as long as it's spiked with the proper set of stimulants. That's why, when you look at the genres that currently dominate Hollywood—action, raunchy comedy, game/toy/ride/comic-book adaptations, horror, and, to add an extra jolt of Red Bull to all of the preceding categories, 3-D—they're all aimed at the same ADD-addled, short-term-memory-lacking, easily excitable testosterone junkie. In a world dominated by marketing, it was inevitable that the single quadrant that would come to matter most is the quadrant that's most willing to buy product even if it's mediocre...

The good news is that [this] theory of marketing may now be eroding. The bad news is that it's giving way to something worse—a new classification that encompasses all ages and both genders: the "I won't grow up" demographic....

That's bad. We can all acknowledge that the world of American movies is an infinitely richer place because of Pixar and that the very best comic-book movies, from Iron Man to The Dark Knight, are pretty terrific, but the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio executives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays.

Amen.  I'm glad to see some more originalish shows at least on TV.  And there are plenty of classic original movies that I have yet to see, so I'm not totally discouraged.  But it will be disappointing if our generation doesn't build up a better repertoire worth sharing with our posterity. 

Do Movie Critics Matter?

An article on FirstThings.com does a good job of explaining the importance of movie critics in our culture today.   An excerpt from the article supports what we're trying to do on this website:

"It is the film critic’s constant struggle to get filmgoers and filmmakers to understand that politics and morality are still part of the artistic equation, even at the movies.

Without using morality, politics, and cultural continuity as measures of value, there is no way to appreciate the state of the culture or to maintain intelligence. Without criticism, we will have achieved naivete."

They also mention the damage that amature critics and the "Internet's free-for-all" can cause to "the concept of film criticism"

"By offering an alternative deluge of fans’ notes, angry sniping, half-baked impressions, and clubhouse amateurism, the Internet’s free-for-all has helped to further derange the concept of film criticism performed by writers who have studied cinema as well as related forms of history, science, and philosophy. This also differs from the venerable concept of the “gentleman amateur” whose gracious enthusiasms for art forms he himself didn’t practice expressed a valuable civility and sophistication, a means of social uplift. Internet criticism has, instead, unleashed a torrent of deceptive knowledge—a form of idiot savantry—usually based in the unquantifiable “love of movies” (thus corrupting the French academic’s notion of cinephilia)."

Hopefully by our continuing study of religious principles, ancient philosophers, current and cultural events, history, etc., the reviews on this site can become more meaningful to our society.