torsdag 26 september 2013

The abandoning of core viewers, or film/TV triangulation

Apparently, viewers who really like Westerns despise the "hero's romance with hard-bitten saloon girl" plot. Earnest female teachers don't go down so well either. In fact, I've heard it said that the more women there are in a Western (I suppose we are talking women as love interests here, not Calamity Jane), the more rubbish it is. I've always found this view a little harsh, but I'm starting to understand it. I like romance. But I'm not the right audience for Westerns - in fact I find them mind-numbingly boring. By forcing in a bit of romance in between shoot-outs, face-offs and bar fights, the film-makers are trying to ingratiate themselves with viewers that don't really like Westerns much to the detriment of real Western fans who want tough-guy action, not a lot of sissy cooing. The reason I'm beginning to see their plight is because now it's happening to us rom-com and costume-drama lovers.

It started with the rom-coms. I've not seen a decent one in ages, and that's because so many of the rom-coms who are released now have an ingredient I just can't abide - "gross-out" comedy. This basically means toilet humour, plus jokes about all other kinds of disgusting bodily functions and body fluids you can think of. How did jokes that are primarily enjoyed by teenage boys end up in films primarily aimed at girls of all ages? There's a political concept called "triangulation", which officially means you position yourself between or above notions of left and right, but in practice tends to mean that you ditch your party's principles in order to poach voters from your opponent. "Triangulation" is great when your political enemies do it - sure, your side loses some votes, but it's worth it to hear your opponents recant on nearly every single thing they've championed for decades, if not centuries. And then, it starts to happen with your crowd, and suddenly it's not so fun anymore. The gross-out takeover of rom-coms is the film equivalent of political triangulation, and not a million miles away from the saloon girl strategy. As saloon girl romances are meant to draw in the wives and girlfriends of Western-loving men, so "gross-out" gags are meant to keep the boyfriends of chick-flick lovers happy and make those cinema outings with their gel less of an ordeal for them. The problem is, by courting the laddish vote, the cinema-goers are ruining rom-coms for those who really enjoy them and have always enjoyed them. I still haven't seen the hysterically praised Bridesmaids because there's reportedly a food-poisoning scene involving vomiting and diarrhoea in it. Seriously? They put a scene like that in a film about bridesmaids? And I haven't even mentioned the trend of letting the hero in these kind of films be a slacker or man-child with limited appeal to a female audience. OK, now I have.

This sort of strategy shouldn't work, really. Why should lads who enjoy gross-out jokes watch rom-coms when they can watch a similar comedy without too much silly love stuff in it? And why should real rom-com fans watch this kind of ghastly hybrid at all? The problem is, as in politics, giving your faithful followers a kick in the pants and pursuing their complete opposites seems to pay. Don't ask me why. Perhaps core viewers, like core voters, are loath to wander off: you'd rather vote for a party that is nominally or historically on your side rather than for one that has always considered you to be a first-class twit, and maybe the same applies to films. For my part, I'm boycotting gross-out rom-coms, and hoping enough rom-com lovers have the same idea until this awful trend finally stops.

Maybe it's paranoid of me to see a similar movement in the costume drama field. But consider the BBC's newest brain-child: Peaky Blinders, about British gangsters in the interwar years. Apparently, they had razors sewn into their flat-caps and could quite literally blind people with them. Now, I'm not saying that costume dramas are necessarily as much of a chick thing as rom-coms, but what with these gangsters, sooty mills and muddy villages, it does seem as if the current trend is for everything that does not appeal to the average fan of Jane Austen dramatisations and Andrew Davies's adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit.

Is it any wonder that I - and many with me - obsess about Downton? That we're waiting impatiently for the new series for the same amount of time than it takes to have a baby,or even longer (in Sweden, we won't get it until November at the earliest, and the poor Americans don't get to see it until January)? Just what or who is going to replace it in our affections? Some bleedin' geezer with a razor in his cap?               

onsdag 18 september 2013

(Human) tigers vs rom-coms: result 0-1

For once, an Ambitious Book Project has disappointed me. I remember the enthusiastic reviews for Tigers in Red Weather. They made it sound like one of those novels which you start fearing it will be faintly worthy, and then find out is a really exciting read. In these cases, you can almost feel the reviewers in question (who have to finish the books they're writing about, let's not forget) heaving a sigh of relief. They've actually been allowed to read something they enjoy - and still get paid for it. The puff quotes on the cover reinforce the impression that this is a ripping yarn with literary merits. "A delicious pleasure" (The Sunday Telegraph) and "Immensely gripping" (The Guardian) are only two of them. So when I spotted a second-hand copy costing only 4 pounds on my latest London trip, I bought it, thinking I'd made a bargain. The word "tigers" was in the title too - always a bonus.

Well. It's not bad, exactly. The annoying thing is that it's interesting enough to keep you reading - just. But it's not that enjoyable. While you don't hate the characters, you don't care that much for them either. The narrative is in third person but from different characters' point of view. The narrative voice remains more or less the same, though: detached and careful of detail. I grow impatient with it, as the characters grow impatient with each other. There is an atmosphere of tetchiness which is catching. Yes, the book's got something. But "a delicious pleasure"? Nah.

In contrast, one of my self-indulgence reads came up trumps. It's just a soufflé-light chic lit novel, true, but this isn't as easy to get right as people imagine. I know, because I've read some dire chic lit in my day. Ali McNamara's From Notting Hill with Love... Actually, about a (you guessed it) rom-com-obsessed heroine who's trying to figure out what love and life is all about, does exactly what it sets out to do: this is reading as comforting as creamy milk chocolate without too much healthy cocoa in it. I felt a bit guilty buying a book with such an unashamedly chic-ingratiating title, but I've no regrets. The trouble is, now I've finished it, it's back to the tigers (who are only tigerish women anyway).

What do you do with books that are just that little bit too good to give up on? Reading time is precious, and I feel as if I'm wasting it - at the same time, I can't ditch every novel that isn't a hundred per cent perfect, can I? I'd end up with an apartment full of one-third-read novels. In any case, I blame The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. Oh, and Metro: Where's that "intoxicating cocktail of money, sex, heat, boredom and beauty" you promised me?              

onsdag 4 september 2013

Behind-the-scenes dramas are great - but there are limits

Yesterday, I watched the - by now - no longer brand-new film Topsy Turvy (made 1999) about Gilbert and Sullivan and their creation of The Mikado. It was too inert for my taste and far too long, but I still enjoyed parts of it. I've never actually seen The Mikado, but I know some of the tunes pretty well: I've grown up with flowers that bloom in the spring - trala - and have nothing to do with the case and with people who shake hands with you, shake hands with you like that. More importantly, though, I've been stage-struck since as far as I can remember. When I was a girl, I wanted to be an actress (that or a lawyer - don't ask me why, this was before Tulkinghorn and Co.), and the dream stayed with me until I was finally convinced of its impracticability by a combination of lack of talent and other, more fruitful creative interests. But I have always been and always will be a sucker for anything connected to acting and the stage.

This makes me the ideal audience for behind-the-scenes dramas. I'm an avid viewer of those making-of featurettes that are now blissfully standard on most DVDs. True, they are a bit tame. You don't get people involved in a film or prestigious TV series rubbishing each other or admitting to tiffs on set - understandably, as that would make them look pretty shabby. But still, it's fascinating stuff. I must admit to a shamefully one-sided interest in the writing and acting part of things. When you think of all the people involved with making successful films and TV series and all the effort they've put in to make your experience as enjoyable as possible in unobtrusive ways - cameramen, the costume department, composers and sound mixers, the special effects department, those who cut the whole thing into shape and what have you - it really is too bad of me, but there it is. What I want to see is the director, producer and/or script-writer discussing the story and characters, the casting and the actors, plus the actors in their turn discussing much the same thing (and ideally displaying suitable Character Loyalty by talking about their particular character as if he/she were their best pal on earth). My interest is not wholly character-based: I also enjoy "deleted scenes" features, but only if there is a commentary by the director or similar explaining, firstly, why the scene was deleted and, secondly, why it is included in the DVD feature. It's the mechanism of storytelling that's the appeal in this case, and you get a healthy respect for those involved - I have seldom seen a deleted scene which I felt would have made the film/TV feature better if it had been included.

But, as I said, as to juicy gossip, there is none. Curious Georges like me are reduced to over-interpreting anything the least bit out of the ordinary in the friendly, gushing speeches of cast and crew. We have no way of knowing if our fantasies are correct, though. And here's where the fictional behind-the-scenes drama comes in. Here we get loads of gossip, and we can at least imagine that some of the backstage gripes and romances may have real-life counterparts. I just love the in-jokes about endearingly vain actors and writers, and the characters' commitment to putting on a good show despite all squabbling. Shakespeare in Love is an example of a behind-the-scenes drama that works beautifully. I still giggle every time I see Ned Alleyn taking it upon himself to criticise the performance of the actor who plays Tybalt ("Are you going to do it like that?"). What's more, he's absolutely right.

Topsy Turvy is no Shakespeare in Love, though. There are quirky characters and mildly interesting anecdote, but no real drama. You realise why the makers of Shakespeare in Love had to invent a completely fictional love story for its hero. And even then, that story still risked being upstaged by what is actually performed - Shakespeare and his Viola aren't a patch on Romeo and Juliet. In Topsy Turvy - though it's fun to see how Gilbert must have tailored the comic opera's parts to the talents of the actors of an existing troup - you sometimes wonder why they didn't just do a film version of The Mikado instead.