Pyromaniacs: Hollywood’s Bad Boys

A man who works with his hands is a laborer;

a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman;

but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

In his indispensable film study text, Understanding Movies, Louis Gianetti held forth on what separated craftsmanlike directors from those who rise above the norm:

“…what differentiates a great director from one who is merely competent is not so much a matter of what happens, but how things happen…”

In other words, Gianetti continued, the difference was in how effectively the director used form – visual style, composition, editing, mise en scene, and the rest of the directorial toolbox – to “…embody (a film’s) content.”

But with the rise of big budget blockbusters in the 70s and 80s, there came the ascendancy of a breed of director for whom content mattered less than form.  In fact, there were, actually, some for whom content seemed not to matter at all.  For them, visual virtuosity was not, in Gianetti’s words, a means of embodying content, but an end in itself; they were purveyors of what detractors often referred to as “pretty pictures” and “eye candy.” As opposed to Gianetti’s content embodiers, they represented a new directorial species presciently limned by film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer over a half-century ago:

“The technician cares about means and functions rather than ends and modes of being… he will be inclined…to conceive of them in an abstract way…”

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Fantastic Fest 2012: ‘Red Dawn’ is entertaining at least

Red Dawn
Directed by Dan Bradley
Screenplay by Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore
2012, USA

Jed Eckert (Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) returns home from service in Afghanistan to Spokane, Washington. His father (Brett Cullen) is the sheriff in town, and his brother, Matt (Josh Peck), is the maverick high school quarterback. The morning after his return the family awakes to find North Korea invading. Jed and Matt and a group of high schoolers take off into the woods and quickly form a resistance group, dubbed the “Wolverines” after the high school’s mascot.

There is nothing unfamiliar about the Red Dawn remake. Even the rarely used American teens engaging in guerrilla warfare against an invading Eastern force plot device (one other instance comes to mind) fits snugly into the general disaster movie mold. There is fraternal bickering, inspirational speechifying, precisely two beautiful love interests, and otherwise wall-to-wall action. There’s no room for characters, only archetypes. There’s no room for dialogue, only exposition and inspiration. None of this is to say that the film doesn’t have its quaint charm, though.

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