So, I’ve been reading through Hero Complex’s awesome, three part interview with Neill Blomkamp over the past few days.  And while the guy definitely has a lot of ideas about movies I agree with (original stories are a neat idea! Sci-fi and social messaging can work really well together!  An intimate association with place can only make movies stronger!), I feel like there’s something a bit…precious in his resistance to Hollywood, especially for a guy who made a blockbuster, and whose mentor is Peter Jackson.  Take this:

GB: It’s an admirable goal but other filmmakers have found that, if they want to make well-budgeted special-effects movies, they have to bend to studio pressure to make films that are remakes, adaptations, sequels, etc. Studios feel far more comfortable with “known quantity” properties when the budgets go north of $100 million.

NB: That’s exactly right and that’s precisely the reason I don’t want to do high-budget films. I’ve said no already to doing the Hollywood movie thing with big budgets. And that is the exact reason.

Now, District 9 wasn’t made for Avatar money, but $30 million isn’t pocket change to anyone, not even a movie studio.  The truth is, no matter how often Blomkamp says things like this:

GB: It’s interesting – most directors in your position would have sought a bigger budget at this point, especially if they wanted their next film to be an action or special-effects film. You have a different plan. Could you talk more about that?

NB: I’ve been offered films – a lot of films, in fact – with seriously high budgets, and I’ve turned them all down. The reason is exactly what you said earlier: Once the budgets get bigger, you can’t do what you want as a director, unless you’re Peter Jackson or James Cameron. And even then, the pressure is still on the filmmaker. Even if the studio isn’t clamping down on you, all the pressure is on the director. And if you screw that up, the jeopardy situation is even worse. The way you don’t get yourself in that jeopardy situation is by making films that aren’t as risky financially. I just want to make films that have enough of a budget to pull off high-level imagery but also have a budget that is low enough that I can do what I want.

I just don’t really believe he wants to make a true, tiny-budget indie.  There’s this very weird moment when he says movies based on video games don’t work, and the interviewer asks why he was going to make the Halo movie, and his response is essentially “moving on.”  And then there’s the standard Hollywood-bashing:

GB: So it’s not the familiarity of the face that bothers you, it’s the physics of stardom and Hollywood.

NB: Yeah exactly. That’s it. I don’t want egos and personalities on the set that make it more difficult to make the film. I don’t want people who take the focus away from the movie and the ideas behind the movie.

GB: Considering that stance and what you’ve said about the Hollywood machine, is it uncomfortable for you to promote your movie with an eye toward it as an awards season contender?

NB: A little bit. Sony has kind of pushed for awards and, really, if I feel like people are watching the film because they are interested in the film, then it’s fine. I’m fine with that. But if I feel even remotely like I’m being asked to be a salesman, I have a problem.

This seems really dopey to me.  Look, you can’t want to make movies with significant budgets, and want them to be seen by a lot of people, and have Peter Jackson as your mentor even as you insist he’s not responsible for your success because he’s just so busy, and also be totally pure.  I’m a big believer in and defender of the popcorn movie as an artistic concept.  I don’t see what’s wrong with making something awesome and gorgeous and original and heartrending that also happens to make hundreds of millions of dollars–in fact, doing that, as Blomkamp did this summer, seems like the ultimate purist’s trick on the capitalists and the studios.  But all this pretending strikes me as a little…silly.  If what Blomkamp wants is to make totally pure art, he can always shoot movies of South Africa and get ‘em exhibited somewhere.  If he wants to be an ambassador for the country, he can make documentaries, or work in a trade bureau or a human rights organization.  He chose to do something else, and I’m glad he did, because he clearly has a lot of talent for it.  But he shouldn’t pretend he chose to do anything other than what he did, which is to make outrageously original and moving entertainment.  That’s worth a lot in my book.  Blomkamp shouldn’t be afraid of the profits.

But I think this piece on Jay-Z, modern art, and hip-hop opulence, is pretty much right on.  Jonah writes:

Like Jay-Z, who once calculated his personal fortune during the course of a song, Murakami and Hirst make art that is largely about the markets they exist in and the wealth they generate.. Murakami designedmonograms for Louis Vuitton, which in turn installed a functioning boutique in his 2008 MOCAretrospective. Hirst’s “For the Love of God” is largely about its own value, both before and after its art-world debut; the question of how much it cost to buy the stones, and how much of a markup Hirst’s imprimatur can sustain, is part of the narrative of the piece. This feels especially relevant to Jay-Z—when he raps, during the excellent Blueprint 3 outtake “Ain’t I,” that he paid $250,000 for the beat, he similarly writes the song’s exorbitant cost into the song itself.

One thing I’d be curious to see someone discuss is why rap is recession-proof?  I have a suspicion that even if the international art market suffers a dip, Jay-Z will be just fine.  Perhaps it’s because for all the money the man, the business, himself has accumulated, you can still buy the songs for a buck a pop and feel like you possess them. Not so with Hirst.  Also, I wonder if there’s a uniquely American spin to rap rise narratives.  No matter how obnoxiously rich Jay-Z is, he can easily drop a verse in and remind people he came from not a whole lot, theoretically justifying his present opulence.  Or it may just be that the whole rationale beyond telling folks to “change clothes and go” was to decrease the importance of bling, so his wealth wasn’t so visibly obvious and he could enjoy it in peace.

I fully understand and agree that the porn-starization of female comic book heroes is problematic, and aesthetically and ethically distasteful.  And sexist.  And my Lord, this Rob Liefeld stuff is to weep.  But one thing I think Michael Chabon nailed about the Golden Age of comics in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in thr origin story for Luna Moth, literally the transformation of sexy librarian Judy Dark into a superheroine, was that female superheroes could be sexy as hell without being sluts.  In Luna Moth’s origin story, her transformation is a kind of sexual liberation, the thing that lets her plant a smooch on a cutie cop.  As Chabon writes:

She flies, hair streaming, upwar through a spiral column of smoke and light.  The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix.  No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth’s wings.  They are a pale greenish-white and have a transparent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman’s airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid.  All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies.  Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels.  Mysterious hieroglphys stream past like sparks from a roman candle.  Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride–for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.

 That human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.  That line slays me.  So gorgeous, and so attuned to the fact that intimacy and potential are so much about being open and attuned to the world instead of being hidden away from it.  Read the whole chapter (13 for those of you fools cheating and skipping the rest of a great, great book).  But it’s part of why the absurdity of superheroines’ costumes today is so sad.  Giving a woman super-powers gave her an out, to a certain extent, from being judged a slut, no matter how she dressed.  I’ve always kind of liked that.

Miep Geis was an incredibly courageous woman, and her death represents not just the end of a piece of literary history, but the end of a generation of resisters who stood up to Nazi terror.  That said, I never particularly resonated to The Diary of Anne Frank.  The story itself is absolutely incredible, of course, and I read a fair amount of children’s Holocaust literature growing up, including Twenty and Ten and Number the Stars.  I feel guilty saying I thought Frank herself was kind of boring.  But then, I’ve never particularly liked exceptionally female coming-of-age stories, particularly ones with strong focus on bodily concerns and gooey romances.  I found Judy Blume literally unreadable growing up.  I was always kind of Team Paula Danziger, whose heroines were weird, and prickly, and funny.  And I still maintain that Fifteen is the best book about learning to date ever, especially since its tenderness is leavened with a healthy serving of tart humor and irony.  No one who reads that Beverley Cleary classic will ever see Macbeth or Carl Sandberg the same way again.