Who killed John Carter?

I re-watched John Carter on the new DVD release and I'm more convinced than ever that this film didn't die at the box office on its merits; it was sabotaged by Disney.  It's pretty common to love a film the first time you see it and discover that a repeat viewing reveals just how bad it really is, but with John Carter, I didn't have that experience.  I still contend that it was an excellent adaptation of A Princess of Mars that did justice to the source material, took the non-fan audience into full consideration and came out with a feature that was loads of fun and never had me looking at my watch.

The question is, why did it do so bad at the box office?  There may be other factors, but the main one, I suspect is, sabotage.

I'm not the first one to say this.  In fact, there's an excellent open letter to Disney that covers this written back in March.  Really, I can't do much more than echo and elaborate on what the author said.  It struck me as odd how little publicity was given to John Carter in the past year and what there was proved horrible.  The publicity stills looked cheap and dull like something out of a Syfy feature.  The trailer was so badly put together that fans re-edited it to better effect.

Then, as the opening approached, it went from odd to suspicious.  Where were the interviews?  The cynical little marketing bits on the cable channels or on Youtube?  No paperback editions of the Barsoom series with stills from the film on the cover?  No special edition hardbacks with the same?  No viral campaigns?  No posters?  No toys?  No Happy Meals?  No "fan art" that started popping up at just the right time?  No saturation coverage on Disney-owned outlets?  Odd.

Then the smell factor kicked in when I saw what little was out there.  Posters that made no sense.  Standies in the cinema featuring white apes that gave no clue as to what the film was.  Efectively, there was nothing out there.

Then, as the open letter pointed out, Disney was very keen on declaring it a flop as soon as possible.  All this while wailing about how much money they'd lost–including $100 million in advertising.  As the open letter pointed out, who did the publicity?  The characters from Entourage?

Then last Thursday, the final piece fell into place.  I saw the DVD cover that looked like something off of a Chinese pirate version.  More than that, I saw the lone special feature; a making-of video obviously made by the filmmakers that showed them as passionate, creative, high-powered Hollywood types who really wanted to deliver.  I also saw the concept art (where was this before the release?) and crews dedication to doing right by Burroughs.

My verdict?  I'm not enough of a Hollywood insider to point fingers, but from the outward signs, I must conclude that someone high up in Disney had it in for this film or someone behind it and did everything he could to ensure its failure.  Someone not only starved it of the oxygen of publicity; he poisoned it with bad publicity.  When else has a studio ever come out and said "Our film is crap.  Stay away."?

John Carter was murdered.

The decline of Hollywood

There's good, there's bad and then there's annoying.

If you surf the Internet, especially the cinematic corner of it, one complaint that keeps cropping up with greater frequency is how Hollywood (shorthand for the film industry) is in decline and has been for the past ten to fifteen years.  It's not a hard case to make.  The dominance of comic book films and blockbusters; a lack of originality; a penchant for franchises, remakes, reboots, reimaginings, sequels and rip offs mark the current crop of cinematic output.  And then there's the increasingly poor directing; even poorer acting; and appalling scripts have become the hallmark of a medium that I love and once thought of as the only true art form left in the modern world.  It is, indeed, not like the Hollywood that gave us Citizen Kane or 2001: a Space Odyssey or even Laurel and Hardy.

But what made me admit that Hollywood is in decline rather than a slump is that it has fallen so low that it is now in the same realm as popular music.

What do I mean by that?  It's something that I noticed a couple of months ago.  I love classical music.  It is my favourite musical genre and the only one that I don't mind hearing in the background while I'm occupied with other matters. Turn the wireless to Radio 3 or, better yet, Classic FM and I'm happy.  Nothing delights me more than to walk into a secondhand book shop and discover Mozart wafting over the Tannoy.   It's a little slice of heaven.  Indeed, it's one of the reasons I enjoy visiting the local library, which plays Debussy in the car park.  Turn on any other music, or worse, talk and I immediately want to reach for the "off" button.  Last year, the library switched from classical to pop for a couple of weeks and I felt as if I'd leaned over to sniff a flower only to have it squirt lemon juice in my face.

So I like classical music.  What's playing in my office at the moment?  I have no idea.  What classical tunes do I have on my MP3 player?  Hardly any.  Can I name three works by Mahler?  No.  That's because I don't care. I'm happy to listen to whatever comes on.  It's all good.

What is on my MP3 player are pop tunes of various types from soundtracks to rock music to jazz to who knows what else.  Do I like it as much as classical?  No.  So why is it there?

That's where the epiphany came in.  Going through my music collection, I realised that there was a common factor in all of them:  Every single one annoyed me.  I came to understand that the music that I'd selected for my player weren't the ones I liked the most, but which irritated me the least.  And it's the reason why I cannot work with pop music playing.  Because it's so annoying, I have to actively listen to it.  My brain is processing what is aggravating my synapses.  Part of my cortex is always occupied with the insipid lyrics, the simplistic tunes and the untrained voices–not to mention that MSG of the music world, reverb.

What I'd discovered is that, with a couple of notable exceptions, I do not like pop music.  At best, I only find it interesting the way any bad piece of art can be interesting.  Why this is, I can't say exactly.  It's isn't what pop music is, but what it lacks.  There's something missing; an element of polish, craftsmanship or complexity.  It's the difference between  a talented artist who grabs at the low-hanging fruit of his art to create flashy works and an equally talented man who toils for years to master his craft and creates something beautiful. Anyone can bang out a chord on a guitar with an afternoon's practice; it takes months to get anything except a screech out of a violin.

And so we come to Hollywood's decline.  What convinced me that cinema is on the skids is that as I review the new films I've seen over the last ten to fifteen years, I liked very few of them, loathed most of them, and the rest irritate me.  I may be willing to watch a film once.  I may even enjoy it the first time through, but never completely and I certainly don't want to see it again.  I thought Star Trek was a nice little roller coaster, but the only reason I keep the DVD is because the Rifftrax make it tolerable.

That's an important distinction.  If I select a DVD from my cabinet and the film dates to, say, 1968, odds are that I'll be willing to watch it again.  Indeed, I may have lost count of how many times I've seen it.  I even know what kind of refreshment I want as I pop the disk into the player.  Blade Runner?  Brandy.  Theatre of Blood?  Nice cup of tea.  Xanadu? So much cheap plonk that it becomes hilarious.  On the other hand, if someone asks if I want to see Spider-man or Casino Royale again, I'll say no, thank you.  Bear in mind that this is from a man who's seen You Only Live Twice immeasurable times and will even watch a Roger Moore when the wife isn't home.

Maybe this isn't scientific, but I feel that I've stumbled on an effective litmus test of an art form in decline.  It's when something isn't so awful that it's easy to reject it outright as crap, it's when it's done well enough that I'll tolerate its presence, but it still gets on my nerves and I'd rather be watching something better.

That sums up the state of Hollywood today:  It's annoying.