The Death of the Hollywood Twist

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Bingöl Two months months ago, while working a story on M. Night Shyamalan’s career, I called up every internet clip and video analysis I could find about the director, who is known for his twist endings (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs).

In the course of reporting the story, a prelude to Shyamalan’s latest film, Glass, I came upon a number of videos breaking down the new film — including the twist ending — which hadn’t even been released yet.

That didn’t stop sneak preview viewers from spilling more than the twist ending. The videos spelled out every twist. Every unexpected turn was revealed, dissected and analyzed. There were a half-dozen surprises in the film, at least. Some video critics warned they were going to spill the movie’s  secrets. Some did not.

By the time I walked into the movie, I knew every turn the flick was going to make, from character revelations to battle outcomes.

I enjoyed the movie, but couldn’t help but wonder whether spoilers had cast a shadow of bias over my viewing. It certainly ensured a surprise-free couple of hours. Tension was a non-factor. Still, the spoilers had alerted me to Shyamalan’s break from comic book tradition with Glass — which perhaps biased me to like the movie.

Regardless of this particular movie, spoilers have become such a reality in film that, to enjoy one, you pretty much have to avoid computers, cell phones and TV sets till you’ve seen the film.

What would Hitchcock think about the development, I wondered. This has to be crazy-making for suspense directors like Shyamalan, John Carpenter, West Craven, and on. Just this weekend, Jordan Peele’s movie Us raked in $70 million on its opening weekend, breaking multiple records for a suspense film. So spoilers didn’t appear to hurt the bottom line.

Still, on a lark, I decided to do similar research Saturday on the movie, which ends with a twist on which the film squarely rests.

So I turned on YouTube. The first video recommended was entitled “The ending of Us explained.” The video was done by a group called Looper, a wildly popular movie website and online channel. The movie opened at midnight Thursday. The video was posted about 4 p.m. ET on Friday. Within its first four hours, it had more than 15,000 views.

The video aired without warning viewers of spoilers ahead, and the six-minute video broke down every key scene in the flick, as well as the identity of the mysterious villain. A cursory look uncovered a half dozen other similar videos. Then I went to Wikipedia and looked up the movie. There, too, was a page-long synopsis of the movie, including the surprise ending. All within 36 hours of its opening.

What’s happening here? Remember when you had to hear someone tell you of  The Sixth Sense! Or The Crying Game? Go all the way back to Citizen Kane or Psycho; Some of Hollywood’s most iconic moments stem from rugs being pulled beneath viewers’ feet. Imagine your reaction if a friend told you in the mid-80’s, “You gotta see The Empire Strikes Back! It’s got great effects! And I can’t believe Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father!” (oh, spoiler alert). You’d likely punch your friend in the face.

But spoilers have become so pervasive in movies some YouTubers are recording their reactions literally seconds after stepping from the theaters. And perhaps that’s inevitable. Maybe word-of-mouth is like the phone booth and mailbox; short for this world. Our laptops have become our water coolers, Facebook our hair salons, Twitter our barber shops.

The overall effect on movies is hard to gauge, though some signs are ominous. A recent study by VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands found that spoilers may not ruin an experience entirely, but can reduce suspense and decrease overall enjoyment of a film.

In a study of 412 college students, scientists found that movies that had been spoiled were rated as less moving, less thought provoking, and less successful at drawing the viewer into a narrative world and providing an immersive experience. The effects of story spoilers were “consistently negative,” Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor and study coordinator, said in a statement.

“Our study is the first to show that people’s widespread beliefs about spoilers being harmful are actually well-founded and not a myth,” Johnson said. “Instead, we surprisingly found that for all the outcomes, spoilers were detrimental.”

The study did not recommend solutions, nor even suggest one was possible in the immediacy of an internet era. But Hollywood may have no choice but to act: Despite annual box office records, most of the increase is due to inflation. Actual movie attendance is down about 10% over the last 20 years, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. If that trend continue, studios may be on the receiving end of a disastrous spoiler.

 

 

To Tubby Little Gingers

Review: Ricky Gervais gets spiny and squishy in the Netflix comedy ‘After Life’

Ricky Gervais flourishes in the awkward moment: the uncomfortable silence of a stiff conversation; a tasteless joke that lands with a thud; the boss who tries too hard to impress employees.  That all-too-familiar discomfit works magically on his TV shows and his four stints hosting the Golden Globes,  and less smoothly in his scripted films, which have a record of spotty box office performances.

Luckily, Gervais is back in his uncomfortable wheelhouse with After Life, a new series streaming on Netflix. The show bounces gleefully from hilarity to heartbreak, tenderness to tasteless, absurdity to absolutely inspired in this story about a widower trying to regain emotional balance in what is Gervais’ best role since he created The Office with Stephen Merchant.

Gervais plays Tony, who works on a free British newspaper in a small town, run by his exasperated but indulgent brother-in-law Matt (Tom Basden). Tony’s works the human interest beat, so it doesn’t help that, angry and depressed over the loss of his wife to cancer, he regards humanity as “a plague.” Reluctantly present at work and mildly suicidal outside of it, Tony is a mess at home, pouring cold cereal into a glass because all the bowls are dirty and eating it with water because he’s forgotten to buy milk. All that makes him happy is watching videos of late wife Lisa (Kerry Godliman) and walking his dog.

The tragedy leads Tony to a fateful decision — to do or say whatever he feels because nothing matters anymore (a similar motif to his 2009 film The Invention of Lying).  While the film was a flop, the premise blends naturally with Gervais on the small screen, where his subtle comic timing is impeccable as he reports local “stories” about oddball townsfolk. And his everyday interactions with them are even funnier.

Tony has a spiny shell but a soft center (which could be said of Gervais’ work as a whole) and the show is a series of transgressions and apologies. Tony’s happiness has been replaced by frustrations, irritations, and hopelessness. Tony nearly loses his mind when a man eats his chips too loudly in a pub. He walks by a grade school, where he calls one kid a “tubby little ginger” and moves on, unfazed. When he’s mugged by two older kids, Tony doesn’t hesitate to punch one in the mouth — if they stab him, who cares? He’s got nothing left to live for.

Like The Office, After Life is brimming with delicious side characters — Gervais may be better at creating characters than playing one. Among them are advertising manager Kath (Diane Morgan), with whom Tony debates God, photographer Lenny (Tony Way), whom Tony compares to a cross between Shrek and Jabba the Hutt, and the remarkable Ashley Jensen (who was the soul of Extras) as the nurse caring for Tony’s father. There’s also the likable town junkie (Tim Plester),  the friendly town “sex worker” (Roisin Conaty), and the nosy town postman (Joe Wilkinson).Image result for tom plester after life

The “stories,” too, are not only hilarious, but quite on the nose for small newspapers: A man who received the same birthday card from five people; a couple whose baby looks like Hitler (though only because they have painted a mustache on him and combed his hair forward); and a woman who sells rice pudding made with her own breast milk.

After Life stumbles in a couple areas, particularly grief. We feel for Tony not because he’s established himself as brokenhearted, but because he says so often how said he is. And Gervais uses a couple of his characters for weak strawman debates over his some of his favorite talking points, from atheism to coping with death to common public courtesy. Anyone familiar with Gervais’ humor will see bits of his stand-up routine in After Life.

The series’ intentions boil down to personal accountability and humanity’s responsibility to itself. Midway through the season, Tony is told the meaning of life: “All we’ve got is each other. We’ve got to help each other struggle through until we die, and then we’re done. No point in feeling sorry for yourself and making everyone else unhappy, too.” It’s a common message in the show, and occasionally sounds a bit like a Hallmark card. But that doesn’t make the sentiments any less true or Gervais’ work any less thoughtful and often compelling.

 

The Science of Denial

 

As a boy, I was always intrigued by the commercials for Trident chewing gum. To this day, I can remember the exact wording of part of the ad: “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.”

Even then, two things stood out in my mind. One, that wasn’t an ad for Trident; it was an ad for sugar-free gum. And two: Who in the hell is that fifth dentist? Did he also recommend Pixie Stix as part of a balanced breakfast? Image result for pixie stix

Apparently Donald Trump found that doctor. And he’s appointed him head of what was once called the “The Federal Committee on Climate Security.” His name is William Happer, and apparently he took his own advice regarding sugared gums and Pixie Stix. Just check out his chompers. Image result for william happer's bad teeth

But I digress. I say once called Trump’s federal committee because it will no longer be called that. It will instead be called his “advisory committee.” And, in a rarity for the president, it was a canny, subtle shift.

You see, when Trump first called for a new federal advisory committee to offset the findings of the the congressionally-mandated report on climate change (www.globalchange.gov), he was hoping to lessen fears of the committee’s startling findings. The report, written by more than a dozen U.S. government agencies and departments, said the effects of climate change would harm human health, damage infrastructure, limit water availability, and alter coastlines. Agriculture, tourism and fishing industries that depend on natural resources and favorable climate conditions would all be hit, it said. In all, the report concluded, global warming would reduce the U.S. economy by 10% ($1.93 trillion).

That’s bad news for any president who wants at least one more term (and maybe more: Trump publicly stated that “maybe we should try that” when he returned from a visit to China, which recently named Xi Jinping “president for life”).

So Trump launched a new contrarian federal committee, one that consisted of his hand-picked stooges. The problem with the first name, he discovered, is the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) (Pub.L. 92–463, 86 Stat. 770, enacted October 6, 1972). FACA is a federal law which governs the behavior of all federal advisory committees. In particular, it has special emphasis on open meetings, chartering, public involvement, and reporting.

The last thing Trump would want is public involvement or documentation of his naysayers’ research methodology. After all, a U.S.-led team of international scientists wrote last month in the journal Nature Climate Change that global warming had hit the “gold standard” of research. They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there were no warming.

And Trump’s going to appoint a federal advisory committee to argue against that? Not a chance. That would be like betting on the Washington Generals against the Harlem Globetrotters. So he switched the title to panel, which does not require any public reporting.Image result for harlem globetrotters vs washington generals

This is the art of subterfuge. Trump can’t disprove global warming. But with a federal “panel,” he can argue the science is debatable. That’s all the ammo his supporters need.

Already, he’s putting climate deniers in key governmental positions. Like Kelly Craft, the U.N. ambassador to Canada. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she responded to a question on global warming by saying “I think both sides have their own results from their studies, and I appreciate and I respect both sides of the science.”

By the way, her husband, Joe Craft, is the billionaire president of Alliance Resource Partners, L.P., the third-largest coal producer in the eastern United States.

The GOP has done this before, most recently with Creationism to battle the science of evolution. In Texas, for instance, the state is considering a bill that would allow public school teachers to present alternative theories to subjects that “may cause controversy,” including climate change, evolution and the origins of life.

Texas needs a new bumper sticker: “Fuck you, Darwin and physics.” Expect some of those slackwits on Trump’s advisory panel.

We in the media, of course, will play along. Fox in particular, but even CNN and MSNBC are complicit in the deceit. Consider the networks’ debate format: One talking head is pro, while the opposing one is con. This format, either consciously or sub, gives the viewer the impression the scientific community is split 50/50. Image result for cnn split screen global warming

If the panel were truly representative of the facts, you’d have nine scientists debating one on the boob tube. And even that would be underestimating the true consensus.

Alas, consensus has never been part of Trump’s lexicon. For one, it’s multi-syllabic. And has truth ever been high on his priorities list?

If you find it all too much, relax. Just take some Valium, and crush it up into powder form. A Pixy Stick full should do you.