Giant Size #37: Hero Initiative

This post will be updated with ReadingList recommendations soon.

John and I plowed through an enormous list of books in our own special way of looking back at 2013. Before finding a book to spend money on, consider giving instead to the magnificent cause that is the Hero Initiative.

If you don't want to take John and I at our word for how worthy a cause it is, for the love of the multiverse, listen to this episode's interview with Dennis O'Neil. His verve and passion for supporting and providing for creators is beyond inspiring.

Major Payne: Behind the Scenes

I was hoping that before the end of the year, we would get the third and final installment of screenwriter Dean Lorey's great (thus far) series of articles about working on Major Payne. The movie was originally called The Private War of Major Benson, and was developed to star someone like Clint Eastwood. Read the first part, where Lorey meets Damon Wayans, and follow that immediately with the second installment, which digs into his camaraderie with a guy I consider one of the most underrated major comedians of the 1990's.

Giant Size #36: Joker at the Front Door (Reprint)

Think of this as an appetizer for the year-ending #37, where John and I look back at the year 2013 in comics from our own particular angle. Back on Comic Shack #27, we did our "intro to Batman". I chose to plug this "reprint variant cover" episode here, squarely between #35, where I spoke to Neal Adams, and the interview with the equally Bat-legendary Dennis O'Neil in #37.

Soderbergh Doesn't Read This

I'm kind of relieved that Steven Soderbergh has probably never read any of my writing about him. It leaves him free to put more esoteric cineaste shirts in his shop.

Screen Time #50: Turbo Time

This is the most personal episode I've done of this show yet, and it might be the most personal I ever do. Recording solo wasn't the hurdle, it was getting through the thing and staying focused for the most part. The episode uses my brother's love of Jingle All the Way starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a bridge to opening up about living with someone else's autism.

Autism can be a part of who someone is, just as much as anything that makes any of us unique. Unfortunately, prejudices against autism are deeper and more openly expressed than those against something as innocuous as left-handedness, or something like race or social class.

Movie and TV portrayals have trained many to treat autistic kids like classic Universal monsters rather than human beings. There's a documentary titled Autism is a World, which I think is one way to look at it. Throughout my life, I've come to think of it as a radically different calibration of sociocultural behavior and perception.

Social constructs like money, and other things that we invented as a species, seem patently ridiculous to an autistic mind. How could money ever run out when it's a thing that's printed like anything else on paper? The idea that there are times when we should and should not talk, run, or do as we please also makes no sense.

When "normal" people say things to that effect, they are hailed as firebrands, revolutionaries, and champions of liberty. Someone diagnosed as autistic is somehow diseased, and a mutant. They're an outsider on a genetic level, and to many "normals", they are no better than a burden on their loved ones, and something to be hidden from public view. I saw people clutch their children as if my brother's autism was contagious, or not do a good job concealing their supposition that my entire family must somehow be "infected".

That bundle of feelings is almost impossible to convey outside James Whale's Frankenstein.

My younger brother had a great deal to do with shaping the way I enjoy, process, and judge entertainment. I'm at once an exacting critic and most likely to forgive flaws in favor of charm and effort.

The interview paired with this episode is with animator/director Tom Cook. In the 70's and 80's, Tom worked on cartoons for Filmation and Hanna Barbera, among others. His work means a lot if you ever held a plastic sword aloft and bellowed "By the Power of Grayskull!!!", tried to reason with a friend how great The Herculoids or Thundarr the Barbarian were, or simply cackled at the bizarre mismatch that was the He-Man & She-Ra Christmas Special.

Image Comics Direct to Dropbox

With the "wants to be #1" publisher allowing you to buy their DRM-Free comics and insta-dump them into your Dropbox account, I'd love to see the File Transporter folks do the same thing. That's where my primary DRM-free comics library instance lives, and I use it with Chunky Comic Reader for iOS. From my experience, download and upload speeds are way faster with my Transporter as compared to Dropbox.

I'm attending the upcoming Image Expo on January 9th in San Francisco. My chum Merlin and I might just manage a meetup for listeners, fans, and nerds of a feather. Details soon, I hope.

HUGO Free on iTunes in HD

Part of iTunes' 12 Gifts promotion, this is by far the coolest "gift" thus far, and it'll take something pretty spectacular to outdo it. Even if you got a Digital Copy code in the Blu-ray edition of Hugo, it isn't HD, but this free download is, and replaces your old one.

Hugo is one of the few modern 3D movies that I found truly worth seeing that format. I hope that even though it didn't set the box office on fire, it will grow considerably as a children's movie via home video in the decades to come.

Lincoln/Toledo/Detroit

I grew up in Dallas, went to college in Florida, and moved back to Texas, where I've been for almost seven years. My mom grew up on a farm in Kansas, and my dad was 16 when Castro took power in his homeland of Cuba. This New York Times dialect quiz says the regions of the U.S. I talk the most like are decidedly midwestern:

Thank You For Calling: Podcast Pilot

Tomorrow at 5pm Central Time (U.S.), I'm recording and broadcasting a pilot for a new show that I'm hoping can be brought to 5by5 in 2014. If you listen tomorrow and your company is interested in sponsoring the show, please get in touch. It could start as soon as next week.

What Is It?

Thank You For Calling is a call-in talk show where we discuss both sides of the customer service experience. Whether divided by a retail counter, phone call, or chat window, we look at how we can improve the human experience for everyone involved. From ruining Christmas to above and beyond service, we talk to real people whose stories range from all-out horror to a consumer love that will last a lifetime.

Have you had a customer from hell? Talked to a rep who just didn't care? Have you been called names or been threatened on either side of the conversation? Have you salvaged what seems like a lost cause? Even if you still work in a job under NDA, we respect your privacy, your company's privacy, and especially your customer's privacy. We can anonymize anyone's story, situation, or experience.

I want to hear from you. Leave a voicemail with your name and contact info here: (240) 285-9623. You can also send email to thankyouforcallingshow@gmail.com. Make sure to specify whether (and how) anything needs to remain anonymous.

Names can be changed to protect the innocent, but we're only interested in first-hand stories. Please do not submit stories told to you "by a friend" or someone you know second- or third-hand.

Please Call and Email

We will probably take live calls tomorrow, the number for which will be provided live on the show.

For the sake of the pilot not rolling off the rails, we might stick to pre-submitted stories and callers we have ready. If I have a New Year's wish, I hope that someone with a great deal of experience working specifically in call center escalations will call tomorrow.

I'm also tempted for some people to call and email in some "how would you (I) fix Problem X?" stories. Take real dilemmas you've encountered (customer or rep) like ruined holiday plans (gift delivery, travel, home emergencies) and tell me how they went off the rails. I'll do my best to offer some ideas that could have led to happier endings and inform your future tactics.

The Future

If the show goes forward, I'll be digging into a variety of topics, including my work in various forms of the customer service and PR "fixing" worlds. Two years ago almost to today, I got involved in a customer service disaster of epic proportions that ended up on the front page of Reddit and was extensively referenced in a book. That whole thing will come up tomorrow in some capacity, thanks to Justine Sacco.

Examples of topics the show will address include:

Who and what are people really responding to when they yell at a server/technician/phone rep?

Is the customer always right? Is "right/wrong" even the standard we should be using in customer service?

Burning out: what causes it, and what can employer and employee do to reduce the toll on call center reps, IT techs, and those in all forms of service industries?

Canned language, scripts, flow charts, and the automation of customer service: why are we doing this to ourselves?

How do and should companies (regardless of size) engage their audience and deal with public relations issues?

What separates good customer service form great customer service, and is it possible to try too hard?

Chaz on Roger

A moving, haunting, and cathartic look at Roger Ebert's passing by his lovely wife Chaz. 

Wolverine monogatari (#167 & #168)

James Mangold's The Wolverine was said to draw a great deal of inspiration from ten films, including Ozu's Floating Weeds (a remake of the director's earlier silent classic). Mangold's camera never goes static like that of Ozu, far from it. His shot composition instead does a beautiful job of evoking Ozu's depth of field, where the very architecture of Japanese buildings dictates the geometry of the camera angle and position. The opening shot (above) is evocative of many landscape shots throughout Ozu's color films. Including this post, you'll see more from my chronological retrospective Discovering Ozu this week.

Mangold's commentary on The Wolverine, and the longer cut of the movie itself, improve on what I already considered the best X-Men movie in the series thus far. That the extended cut and commentary are only available on the most deluxe version of the movie doesn't bother me.

That there's a retailer exclusive, half-hour-long featurette doesn't bother me too much, since there's only one retailer exclusive extra. What does bother me is that you can only watch it through Target's flavor of UltraViolet storefront. It's more a retrospective of the X-Men series thus far than anything to do with this movie, so it isn't a huge loss.

Fievel, Hendersons, Coens, SOMEWHERE IN TIME on Blu March 2014

The following catalog titles are all getting Blu-ray releases from Universal Studios Home Entertainment on 4 March 2014. According to the info provided by USHE, no new special features are being added to any of them. I've noted in boldface the ones I think are the most noteworthy, including a long-desired (by me) Coen Brothers movie, my wife's favorite childhood movie, one of Don Bluth's greatest triumphs, and one of the most beguiling modern romances committed to the screen.

• An American Tail
• Big Fat Liar
• Harry and the Hendersons
• A Simple Wish
• Far and Away
• Fried Green Tomatoes
• Intolerable Cruelty
• Somewhere in Time

"Moral Repugnance" and THE WIND RISES

To allege that Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises does not do enough to emphasize the war crimes of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, as Boston critic Inkoo Kang put it during a critic society vote, is as reductive as saying that there are purely good and purely evil people in the world, and that everyone of Japanese descent should answer for their country's crimes in WWII.

Ordinarily, I would see people float arguments like this online and leave them in the "Why Bother, Who Cares?" pile. This argument has gained too much attention and traction; moreover, it's too damned stupid and ColdWar-ish to leave alone. Jiro Horikoshi, the chief developer of the Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighter, is the protagonist of The Wind Rises. The allegation is that the film should, on a moral imperative, disclaim and decry the lives taken and destroyed by Japan during WWII because it dares make a hero of the man who designed a plane.

Apparently, his inventing of planes used for war was directly instrumental in making every bad thing related to WWII, and in fact he gave the orders that resulted in Japanese troops raping and mistreating prisoners. Jiro Horikoshi apparently also ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, according to these people. I'm stretching it thin on being facetious with that last one, but the detractors' point is that he was in no way an innocent, and since losers are losers in war and there is no other art on the planet about WWII, context must be given in thus-and-so way here and now. This is all being leveled against a peace-demonstarting, anti-nuclear, anti-violence filmmaker who was born in January of 1941.

When confronted with that information, I have seen said detractors counter with "well, how is the audience supposed to know any of that?", and my blunt answer is "how about the goddamned subtext and nuance of film language?"

Regardless of the distance from a major international conflict, revisionist attitudes and ethnocentric viewpoints are common. The further out we get, the more judgmental and sneering they become. The oft-repeated lesson is that we must learn from the mistakes of our past, not obsess over how stupid they are and consider our present-day selves so much better. That is precisely how we blind ourselves through complacency to the current evils in the world around us.

Miyazaki's final feature as a director is, if nothing else, deeply entrenched in the story of the struggle between genius craftsmanship and the human cost of making something in one's chosen field. In Jiro Horikoshi's case, he designs planes. What Inkoo Kang criticizes directly is that not enough is done to extrapolate the concatenated human cost incurred by Horikoshi developing planes used in war. My friend Devin Faraci has said on Twitter that he perceives Horikoshi as entirely indifferent to the fact his planes will be used in war. I disagree completely with his assessment, and would instead put forward that Horikoshi acknowledges that his planes will be used to kill, and that there is nothing he could do short of abandoning his chosen art form and profession and move somewhere else. We should all be held to such standards of moral perfection.

In the ramp up to war, it's made quite plain in the movie's narrative that Japanese plane technology was lagging far behind that of other countries in the face of a major international conflict. I wonder if Horikoshi were American, Korean, or Chinese…would that make a difference to these detractors? Were these countries somehow more worthy of having superior military technology? The 1931 incursion into Manchuria by Japan is summarized in an early paragraph in this post from my Discovering Ozu series. The incursion occurs during the timeline of The Wind Rises, if I'm not mistaken.

Again, the detractors cry "why did they not focus on this?", and the answer is again simply "that was not the focus of this movie", in the same way that not everyone across Japan was even aware of it happening, or Japan's culpability. Internet-style insta-reporting simply did not occur. A case in point is the Japanese Pearl Harbor bomber who crash-landed on the Ni'ihauu island of Hawaii, who was initially shown hospitality and pulled a con only because the people who lived there had no idea the bombing at Pearl had happened. They threw him a party the night of his arrival. The whole thing led to the internment of Japanese-Americans in the US, something that I suppose should be disclaimed and portrayed in every single movie that features Americans as WWII-era protagonists.

The Wind Rises is a fantasy-infused, romantic fictionalization of the life of Jiro Horikoshi if someone wants a different movie, they should seek different subject matter or make their own movie.

All of this is to say that not every movie need be a comprehensive guide to historical events, even if active literacy rates are abominable. There are many very good reasons that World War II is still not entirely covered by multiple TV series, miniseries, and three-hour movies. The best reason being that it was a massive conflict full of many, many stories to be told from many perspectives.

War is a bad thing that does bad things to innocent people. If we spend enough time tracing the blame for all deaths related to war, we would end up with a timeline of blame causality that would envelop everyone on the planet, because one of the fundamental functions of being a living organism is that we consume and thereby destroy to survive. Whether you're omnivorous, pure vegan. or anything in-between, no matter how it is cased, something suffers somehow because we all exist on the planet. If all you do is think about that and try to become purely, perfectly good, you'll go insane. This is not a defense of war and conflict as necessary evils that should be accepted with passivity, but rather, an acknowledgement that they are facts of existence and that they happen. Would I prefer it if we as a species didn't kill, rape, starve, and torture each other? Of course I would.

The only way for someone to prove that they effectively protest the advance of technology as the great evil in the world (with complete moral authority) would be their decamping from the modern world to live in the wilderness, off the grid. I would (and do) admire people for doing things like this. The people who do so are exceptionally rare. The argument forwarded comes from so high a horse I don't think it's been genetically engineered yet.

At once, I acknowledge that it's possible to lessen one's impact and have a conscience about how we live our lives on the planet. I try to do so, and wish more people would. To compare Horikoshi to Josef Mengele, or a rapist, or a government official from any time in history is disgusting. To compare Miyazaki to Leni Riefenstahl for not doing so is flatly idiotic. It's also hilarious to accuse the Horikoshi in the movie of not caring that people will die because he developed a piece of technology.

The fantasy sequences in the film are all about the weight of regret that Horikoshi  carries throughout most of his life. I guess the development chief behind aluminum alloy should throw himself off a bridge since, without aluminum alloy, the planes could not have been built. Enabling Japan to enter the modern age of aircraft ended and saved countless lives on all points of the conflict. Without the strength of Air Force they did have, Japan 

The desperate cry for this guy who designed aircraft to singlehandedly answer for all war crimes committed by his country is insanely nationalistic and ethnocentric. It makes just as much sense to say that all Americans alive during WWII must be held accountable for the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. I would also love for every person calling out The Historical Record to acknowledge in the same breath whether they'd even heard Jiro Horikoshi's name before seeing the movie or finding out about its existence.

Cars weren't created to kill, but then they were transformed into tanks. Planes weren't created to kill, they were created to fly. This guy, as portrayed in the movie, wanted to push the still-new world of manned flight to new heights and achievements after they were already being used for war. If an animated movie about flight were made about the Wright Brothers, it would probably not have a disclaimer about how they chronologically weren't first in flight and stole a bunch of ideas and so on, because in the USA we like to hide dirty laundry and tout our exceptionalism.

We make and watch movies to ask, answer, and sometimes just meditate on the notion of "what if?". In the years following WWII, the real Horikoshi had decades to reflect on the ravages of that war for himself, his people, and the world. To be furious that Miyazaki did not make a movie about how badly Horikoshi felt his role in the war is to wish one were making films of their own. It's an arbitrary pronouncement of how the critic would have preferred the movie been focused were they in charge. Miyazaki acknowledges that his treatment of Horikoshi is fictionalized, with a very specific focus, and and the movie succeeds for me on all points, armchair directors be damned.

This Essay was posted before the US release of The Wind Rises, which, as of this writing, is expected to be an English-dubbed presentation of the original movie. 

Roku (3) Adds YouTube

This completes Roku's set of all the "majors" in streaming at long last. The channel is only on the newest and most expensive Roku 3 for now, and will filter to the ones with car and truck-style descriptors (LT, XS, etc) next year.

Discovering Ozu: 110 Years

The New Yorker's Richard Brody tweeted a birthday wish for a US release of Yasujiro Ozu's 1933 gangster movie Dragnet Girl. It's a movie that stands out quite a bit from the rest of Ozu's filmography, as I noted months ago in an installment of Discovering Ozu, a feature I've wrestled with how to better curate and maintain. In terms of US release, I feel like we would most likely see unreleased Ozu features in a third Eclipse set, but what in the hell do I know?

In some sort of tribute to one of my favorite directors, I think I've finally cracked a refreshed angle on this project, a tack I'm also taking with Soderberghopolis. I'm going to continue the big, meaty, and numbered chronological retrospective installments alongside more "tumbloggy" entries of a shorter length, like this one. It's never too late to get into Ozu's staggeringly brilliant films. Most of Ozu's movies, including those which only survive in fragments, are now available on Hulu Plus here in the US thanks to The Criterion Collection.

Screen Time #47: Romance of Paperwork

$14.21

$21.49

$16.99

$25.81

5by5's new engineer Zak Holden joins me for an impromptu bonus episode to talk about Coen Brothers movies that deserve just as much recognition as The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona. It's a fun, brief chat wherein we discuss a few favorites at varying length before cutting to an interview with newly Golden-Globe-nominated Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac.

The Big Lebowski
Like many Coen Brothers movies, it rewards multiple viewings. You don't have to be intimately familiar with every line and nuance of the relationships between The Dude, Walter, Donny, Maud, and the rest of 

Raising Arizona
For $20, you can get four of the Coens' best movies on Blu-ray, including this one and the unmentioned-on-the-show Fargo and my beloved Miller's Crossing. A twenty is a cheap price to pay to find out what, indeed, the rumpus is.

The Hudsucker Proxy
Under-appreciated and unfortunately impossible to find for some time, the lovely people at Warner Archive Collection recently remastered and released this screwball comedy-of-industry (a sibling to Trading Places and Putney Swope). Tim Robbins and Paul Newman are at their best here. Amazon has it, but it may very well cost less direct from WBShop.com thanks to the frequent sales and discount offers they run.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!
Briefly mentioned in an aside is classic screen comedian Harold Lloyd. Criterion recently dropped their first in a series of Lloyd classics. If the box art in this post looks familiar, whether you've seen the movie or not, his style and signature have somehow filtered down to you through the years.

Blood Simple
Included in the four-movie box further up, this Austin-set southern noir story is a crackling, uncompromising, and intense ride for a first feature. If you're ever in Austin, you should look up the old Dessau Hall, which is often vacant as of the last few years. I once organized a screening of the movie outdoors in the parking lot of the bar, which features prominently.

Intolerable Cruelty
This movie includes a character named Heinz the Baron Kraus von Espy on top of giving George Clooney an opportunity to go completely screwball madcap goofy, on top of what is a delightful and at once ridiculous look at the world of gender relations, marriage, and divorce. Some would say it's terribly cynical (a word used to describe various Coen-ings), but I think it's delightful, honest, and fun.

A Serious Man
Richard Kind really did ask me if I was sure I wasn't Jewish when I told him I had seen this four times. You don't have to be Jewish (I'm not) to understand nor appreciate nor enjoy this dark, funny, and bewildering parable of fate.

Criterion Collected: Martin Scorsese's WORLD CINEMA PROJECT for $65

I try to not flood this feed with "DEALS EXTRA! LOWEST PRICE EVER (UNTIL NEXT WEEK)!" sorts of posts, but this case is an important exception. This week sees the release of Criterion's other big end-of-year boxed set release: the six-film Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project.

Amazon is selling it for $65 at the moment, and there's no way of knowing when the price will suddenly skyrocket. I hope that a sales success with this installment means that we see subsequent editions down the line.

For just over $10 per movie, you get new digital restorations, introductions to all the films by Scorsese himself, interviews with filmmakers, a visual essay, and more, including booklet essays by some of the sharpest critics in the world, including my friendly electronic acquaintance Bilge Ebiri among other experts in the cinema of different regions.

A rundown of the included films, from Criterion's site:

Touki bouki (Senegal, 1973)
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s.

Redes (Mexico, 1936)
In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen), one worker’s terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers.

A River Called Titas (India & Bangladesh, 1973)
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal.

Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964)
Metin Erksan’s wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops.

Trances (Morocco, 1981)
The beloved Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating musical documentary.

The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960)
A torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal is unleashed under one roof in this venomous melodrama from South Korean master Kim Ki-young.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE from Scream Factory, Summer 2014

This is biggest news in catalog Blu-ray bringing something long-awaited back into print in the USA. The only way to get Phantom of the Paradise on Blu-ray (or at all, for that matter) has been an all-region French import that I insist could look better and include better extras. Scream Factory will undoubtedly knock it out of the park, based on their amazing track record.

Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise is a favorite film of not only fussy film writers like myself, but brilliant filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, who spoke to me about it briefly on Screen Time #18 (Subscribe: iTunes/RSS). The brief Phantom bit comes while discussing Phantom star Paul Williams' work on the upcoming Pan's Labyrinth stage musical.

Soderbergh Revolutionizes Apps, Filmmaking Permanently (Forever)

As excited as I was about Warner Archive Instant arriving on iPad yesterday, I'm infinitely more ebullient about Steven Soderbergh literally and comprehensively changing the fundamental tools of filmmaking with his brand-new filmmaking app, SSHH 1.0 (aka Steven Soderbergh Hand Held 1.0). Using this multi-universal and omni-functional app, you need none of the craft inherent in aping his signature handheld style. Finally, one app to make us all shoot the exact same way.