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American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western.It Was A Holocaust.My Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them.

— Spike Lee (@SpikeLee) December 22, 2012

The movie has also been criticized for its objectification of women, the cartoonish (and anachronistic) representation of the Ku Klux Klan as buffoons suffering a wardrobe malfunction, and Tarantino’s Australian accent.  Some critics couldn’t stomach the blood spatter of the gunfights.  Others thought Tarantino’s trademark violence, once so exciting, has become so normalized it seems tired. It’s a problematic film on many levels. However, Tarantino has to be commended for opening up discourse — and, potentially, opportunities for other filmmakers — about the slave era, two hundred years of history that American mainstream pop culture likes to pretend never happened.  Other than grisly blaxploitation like Mandingo, or historical lamentation like Roots, slavery has been off-limits as context for a period drama. Until now.

Like it or not – and as Lincoln demonstrates – America’s modern political and social identity is shaped by its slave-owning origins.  While Django Unchained might be disrespectful to the memory of those who lived and died as slaves, it’s also disrespectful to ignore their contribution to history.  If, as in Spike Lee’s comparison, slavery was a Holocaust, where are the movies examining and reconstructing the terrible experiences of the victims? Hollywood has churned out countless tales of suffering, nobility, cruelty and the triumph of the human spirit set in the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps of Western Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.  Why not examine the systematic persecution of one race by another that occurred much closer to home, and spanned centuries rather than a couple of decades?   It’s heartening that two of the most influential directors in Hollywood, Spielberg and Tarantino, have grasped the nettle with their films this year, perhaps opening the door to more stories of the era being greenlit?

Django Unchained brings the era to life. Kudos to the production designers – it’s a masterpiece of mise-en-scène, with the beloved tropes of the Old West (big sky, dusty trails, a gunfight on Main St., an anti-hero in a black hat) blended with the bucolic antebellum South (Spanish moss-draped trees, immaculate white plantation mansions, ornamental enslaved women).  We’re used to compartmentalizing our cinematic depictions of America in the mid-nineteenth century, the arid landscapes of gold prospectors, pioneers and marauding Native Americans in one box and the rich cotton fields, tree-lined drives and ballrooms of the elegant South in another.  It’s difficult to reconcile Paint Your Wagon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, How The West Was Won, The First Great Train Robbery and The Frisco Kid as contemporary stories to Gone With The Wind and Jezebel but they’re all set in the same decade in the same nation. Django Unchained blends the Wild West with the Mannered South and presents the result as a single, continuous, all-American experience.

This is a potentially fascinating diegetic world, full of ideological and territorial conflict, but Tarantino is content with plowing the easiest available narrative furrow.  Superficially, it’s as though he’s afraid to challenge his audience with anything other than the simple, binary tale of a righteous black man versus a lot of ignorant, cruel white men. Woo! Yeah! Watch Django shoot those fat racists in the head!  Cue stereotypes, and oppression, tyranny and persecution played for laughs.  Tarantino sidesteps many of the racial issues by positioning his (mainstream, white) audience as enlightened post-colonials who, free of personal racism or slave-owning guilt, can view the horrors of the era as lurid entertainment, historical curiosities, nothing more.  In an interview with the Guardian, he described slavery as “absurd and bizarre”, and his vision of the times offers up a straightforward solution: retaliatory violence.  Django rises up against his oppressors and gets his Happily Ever After.  All very neat and uncomplicated.  It’s just a dumb movie, right?

Yet Tarantino is smarter than that.  Although skin color is the obvious flashpoint on screen – and the issue most likely to attract critical ire – Django Unchained buries an intriguing and potentially subversive commentary about class deep in a subplot. Slavery in the antebellum South didn’t just divide society along color lines.  It shored up the gap between the haves and have-nots and made social mobility almost impossible, whatever your race.  Nonetheless, there were underdogs who figured out how to live high off the hog.  Tarantino gives us one of these in Stephen, a house slave so servile and obsequious he’s a clown.  Samuel L. Jackson mines the “Massuh! Massuh!” eye-rolling stereotype with verve, inhabiting a character so cringeworthy Stepin Fetchit might have balked at playing him.  Our first encounter with Stephen presents him as a victim of slavery, an old man made near-imbecilic by 76 years of plantation oppression. His antics are difficult to watch, a chilling example of the effects of lifelong humiliation and servitude.  He draws our modern liberal pity even more so than the slave ripped to pieces by dogs in the previous scene. He represents the point at which the white audience stops laughing.

Stephen is outraged by the sight of Django astride a horse.  He shrieks and cowers, jabbing his fingers at the uppity black man like he was the Devil incarnate.  The bystanders (and the audience) see this as part of the general comic entertainment Stephen provides, another example of how stupid he is to be so defensive of the system that has oppressed him.  Yet, as it turns out, Stephen is only feigning servility.  He’s been working the system from within for a lifetime and he’s the puppeteer, not the gibbering, jazz-handed puppet he pretends to be.  If he wants to sip fine brandy from exquisite crystal in the library while he ponders his next move, no one’s going to tell him no.  When he tells Calvin Candie to jump, the young white man jumps.  Slavery has been good to Stephen, but his fancy clothes, full belly and taste in fine wines have come at a price.  Like Django, Stephen has prioritized his individual needs.  Unlike Django, this has meant aligning himself with the slaveowners and lording it over other slaves.  Success involves betraying his color and class.  At some point, deep in the past, Stephen figured out this was the only way to thrive.

Then, in rides Django to prove him wrong.  Like Stephen, Django’s loyalties don’t run along color lines. He partners with Dr. Schultz when the white guy offers him clothes, a horse, and a share in the profits from bounty hunting.  His goal is to rescue Hildy – even though no one ever asks Hildy if that’s what she wants – in order to meet his needs as an individual.  He doesn’t particularly care about freeing other slaves, although he tries not to shoot them if he can help it.  He hasn’t compromised, or sold his integrity down the river.  Sitting high in his elegantly tooled saddle, he’s a slap in the face for Stephen, a sign that the house slave got it wrong all along, that he didn’t need to abase himself to get where Django’s at.  That’s when Stephen decides to slap the interloper down.  He can’t live with himself and all he’s done if Django (and his individual, independent belief system) survives and thrives.

And so it becomes apparent, this late in the movie, that the core conflict isn’t black vs. white – that’s just window dressing, easy target practice for Django on his hero’s journey towards his true antagonist.  That journey won’t be done until he’s gone mano a mano with Stephen, the freeman who’s risen in defiance of the system versus the slave who’s sold his soul for perks.  Django Unchained isn’t necessarily about racism.  It’s about those who’ve figured out a way to rise outside the system challenging those who feel they need to bow down and play by the rules. And we can all relate to that.

It’s a shame that Tarantino doesn’t address this essential (and timely) conflict until the third act, and that he feels the need for both Django and Stephen to have white stalking horses (Schultz and Candie) to distract the audience from the true protagonist/antagonist polarity.  Back in the (Reservoir Dogs) day, he might have made a muscular 90-minute low budget masterpiece focusing on the rivalry between Django and Stephen and their bloody battle for the moral high ground.  That would have been utterly compelling.  Instead, he delivered a rambling 165-minute homage to Westerns, with revenge added for extra spice, but ultimately lacking the courage of its original convictions.

Love or hate Django Unchained, it’s set people talking about and reflecting on how slavery shaped America.  And who knows how many more interesting, focused and challenging movies will emerge from that discussion? Here’s hoping…

1. YouTube Videos

From South Korea to the outer edges of the planet’s atmosphere, the most-watched YouTube videos of 2012 are a truly global collection. Psy’s Gangnam Style became the most viewed YouTube video of all time, and spawned countless parodies. Felix Baumgartner became the man who fell to earth and garnered the most simultaneous views, from everyone watching his record breaking jump live.  And there was KONY 2012, but we’ve forgotten that now.

• YouTube Videos 2012 via the L.A. Times

2. Pirated TV Shows

Game of Thrones topped the list of shows that fans, mostly outside the US, couldn’t wait to see. If the US TV networks could figure out a global subscription model, it seems there’s a lot of money to be made.

• Most Pirated TV Shows via TorrentFreak

3. TV Commercials

Advertising spots around the world continued to straddle the boundary of entertainment and annoyance.

• Best Commercials of 2012 via AdWeek

4. Tweets

Barack Obama’s “Four more years” got more than 810,000 RTs, making it the most retweeted comment of the year.  Not even Justin Bieber’s farewell to a dying fan came close.

• 2012 Year on Twitter – via Twitter

5. World-wide Box Office

It was the same-old same-old Hollywood doldrums at the global box office this year, with the Top Ten dominated by superheroes, franchises, and superhero franchises. Audiences across the planet responded enthusiastically to big explosions, car chases, sparkling vampires, archers and talking cartoon animals – just as they always do. Only Brave (at no.11) is an original movie, everything higher up the list is based on pre-existing intellectual property.

• World-Wide Box Office – via Box Office Mojo

6. Documentaries

Documentary movies provide a fascinating measure of cultural temperature: what subjects resonated with both filmmakers and audiences in 2012? From the riches-to-rags down/up comparison afforded by The Queen of Versailles to the injustices exposed by Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God to the unique experiences explored in Jiro Dreams of Sushi or The Imposter, 2012 gave us a range of insights into the human condition.  I’d also add The Ambassador and Paradise Lost 3 to this list — although they were officially released in 2011 they didn’t reach a wider audience until this year.

• Best Documentaries of 2012 via The Film Stage

7. Valuable Movie Stars

Every year, Forbes compiles two lists.  One is of the movie stars who deliver the most return per dollar of their asking price, the other details those who return the least.  The young stars who dominate the MVP list owe their position to the blockbuster franchises they appear in (for a relatively low payday) rather than their audience-pulling clout.  However, with the notion of star power, and the resultant massive paydays, fading into the 1990s in Hollywood, this metric is becoming more and more meaningful.

• Most Overpaid Movie Stars
• Best Actors for the Buck

8. Blogs

Despite the rise of other forms of social media, blogging refuses to die.  It’s still the best way for individuals to bypass traditional media – in all its hegemonic glory – and communicate their viewpoint with the world.  Whether you’re a Scottish schoolgirl complaining about the quality of your school dinners, a political pundit, an interior designer or a comic book expert, a blog is as vital as it has ever been.

• 25 Best Blogs 2012 via TIME

9. Tumblrs

Sometimes, a blog is TL:DR and a picture is worth a thousand words.  That’s where Tumblr rules.  Whether the images are of Hillary Clinton, texts from a dog, face math or cats (LOTS of cats) Tumblr is best way of bringing memes to the masses.

• Best Tumblr Nominees 2012 via The FW Awards

10. Music Videos

The migration of the music video from TV to the internet is now complete.  Their short length and instant brand identity makes them an ideal media form for viewing on smartphones or tablets.  This year, Psy dominated YouTube but Carly Rae Jepsen’s lawnboy lust topped the views on VEVO. This is crazy…

• Most Viewed Music Videos of 2012 – via VEVO

Showrunners are the writer-producers who come up with the concept for a TV show, create a pilot, sell it to the network, staff and cast it, cheerlead it through pick-up and then guide the increasingly complex plot lines from season to season. It’s a tough job. Only an elite few are trusted by the networks to do that job, and, at this time of year, they’re busy bringing their Fall 2013 ideas to the negotiating table.

The Hollywood Reporter’s latest issue is dedicated to showrunners and all aspects of what they do with their 5th annual list of the Top TV Showrunners.

THR’s Top 50 Showrunners 2012 – TV’s most influential writer-producers come clean about the credits they’d like scrubbed from their résumés, their most absurd notes from execs, their television mentors and the ways they cure writer’s block.

This is a tragedy that has no single cause. Wherever the finger of blame is pointed, the fact remains that 12 innocent people died a shocking death, 50 more were injured, and countless family members and friends will suffer pain and loss. Unfortunately, there was probably no easy way of preventing these murders. Senseless acts of violence are by their very nature unpredictable, without rhyme or reason. We’ve yet to know what caused suspect James Holmes to plan and carry out his attack or if he had a specific target in mind. All we know is that he decided to kill, and with his choice of venue and time, decided to do it in a theatrical, ostentatious way that would link him forever to all the glamour and hype surrounding the release of 2012′s summer box office behemoth, The Dark Knight Rises.

Somehow, Holmes wanted his act of violence to blur and mesh with the violent entertainment on screen, hence his choice of a Bane-esque costume and weapons, and the fight scene within the movie that triggered the launch of his first gas canister. He destroyed the fourth wall, the barrier that’s meant to separate spectator from spectacle, to divide fiction from action. This is a truly disturbing act by an individual. It’s also disturbing on a societal level. It has legal, cultural and moral ramifications that will induce much hand-wringing in the press, social media, and water cooler discourse over the next few weeks. It raises a lot of serious questions that no one will be able to answer about how, as a civilization, violence is our first resort, for thrills, for problem-solving, for driving political agendas.

Occurrence and Signification

The first stage of the moral panic is already well under way. The Dark Knight Rises was already a huge news story, the most-anticipated movie release of 2012. It had been generating the usual hype-related headlines, about budgets, stars, special effects, midnight screenings selling out with lines around the block in some of the worst summer weather North American has ever experienced, effectively a re-run of The Avengers and Hunger Games copy from earlier this year. However, over last weekend, a new kind of story emerged. Things got ugly in the comments section of negative reviews of TDKR. Abuse was hurled at critics who expressed their personal opinion that there were flaws in the movie. Rotten Tomatoes editor, Matt Atchity, took the unusual step of disabling comments to prevent any more rabid fanboy mouth-frothing but the #hate tag had already been attached to the TDKR meta-narrative. The violence of the comments suggested there was an element of hooliganism within the passionate fans who would show up for the midnight screenings – a tiny minority of the tens of thousands who bought tickets, but a significant element nonetheless.

Enter Holmes, who probably hadn’t seen the whole movie before masterminding his attack and cannot be accused of ‘copy-cat violence’ of the type that, for instance, followed in the wake of Natural Born Killers. He does, however, appear to have absorbed crucial information from the movie trailer (deconstructed admirably by Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Sayres Rudy here) about a single gas-masked man threatening a large-scale entertainment event as an expression of class war. The Dark Knight trilogy as a whole has celebrated a lone, caped crusader, whose main superpower is his ability to confront the criminals he pursues in a lawless space, outside the usual moral constraints. Holmes’ violent actions dovetailed all too neatly with TDKR’s aesthetic. It remains to be seen how much he believes he chimed with the movie characters’ (Bruce Wayne or Bane) personal morality.

Wider social implications (fanning the flames)

By choosing a movie theatre in Aurora, CO, Holmes was inserting himself in not just a current news narrative (TDKR) but a long-running one. Aurora is just under 16 miles away from Columbine, the site of another tragic, senseless shooting in April 1999. The wounds caused by Klebold and Harris’s rampage have never healed. While the two events are materially unconnected, their proximity has meant frequent links between the two in this morning’s news reporting. And there are many column inches yet to be filled. Did we learn nothing from Columbine? How could it happen again, so close by? Do Colorado’s lax gun laws make it a hot-spot for mass shootings? Is the economic health of this region a factor? Are local mental health provisions a failure?

Social Control

We’ve long been encouraged to consider public and semi-public spaces (schools, airports, railway stations, government offices) as potential war zones in which carrying a firearm is an act of terrorism. Although we grumble about increased surveillance and security measures, we accept them as a necessary part of doing daily business in 2012. However, the erosion of freedom and anonymity is a one-way street. George Carlin was as prescient as ever in his 1999 stand-up movie, You Are All Diseased:

..if we made airplanes completely safe, the terrorists would simply start bombing other places that are crowded. Porn shops, crack houses, titty bars, and gangbangs. You know, entertainment venues.

Inevitably, last night’s events will make it likely cinema multiplexes will be added to the long list of places where passing through a metal detector is a condition of entry. ‘Additional security’ is already being provided at theaters screening TDKR. “We’re concerned that someone, perhaps seeking notoriety, will attempt to do something similar,” said NYPD head Ray Kelly.

However, the wider discussion about gun control, how an individual like Holm could get hold of such deadly weaponry and ammunition, continues to be a political hot potato, with those calling for more restrictions shouted down by gun enthusiasts citing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. In an election year, neither presidential candidate wants to alienate voters by threatening their constitutional freedoms. They avoid addressing the question that one individual’s legally enshrined right to purchase an automatic weapon threatens the freedom of hundreds of others to enjoy a movie in peace and safety. A society where people live in constant fear of attack by a lone, insane gunman is hardly a democracy.

The other social control that will be discussed, but not implemented, is mental health care. Like so many lone gunmen before him, Holmes has already been identified as a quiet drop-out whose last regular links with society (i.e. university attendance) were recently severed. His actions yesterday evening, dressing and arming himself, leaving a booby-trapped apartment, and driving to the multiplex with murder on his mind, speak to a severe mental illness. Although he clearly made plans, they didn’t include eluding capture. He must have been so disconnected from the people around him that no one noticed his state of mind, and he felt there was no one he could approach for help, or to warn them that he was feeling the urge to act on some dangerous impulses. Modern city living isn’t geared to awareness of those around us. Even if you are aware that something is “off” with a neighbor, there’s nowhere to go for help. Many, many people fall through the cracks on a daily basis, and no one notices or cares unless their mental breakdown manifests in tragedy. PhD student Holmes certainly engineered his breakdown so that it would have maximum media impact, reminding us all that in the great chain of society we are collectively only as strong and as safe as our weakest links.

L.A. Photographer Takes The Long View

And here’s the result of his work:

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

The independent record store is one of the only places you’ll get to hear local, new music, talk to an expert in a particular musical genre, hang out with like-minded fans, get details of gigs and exclusive tracks, find rare and vintage records. In the face of high street chains (who then all went bust, RIP Our Price, Tower Records and HMV), and the transition to downloading digital music, rather than buying physical records, a lot of these small stores, run by enthusiasts, have managed to keep going, even through economic recession. They represent community and culture, and the music industry would be much the poorer without them.

They deserve to be celebrated!

Find the independent record store nearest to you via Record Store Day, and a list of the exclusive tracks that will be available via these small retailers. And don’t forget that the official brew is Revolver Beer. Customers are expected to start lining up for the bonanza at 7am, and there will be long queues all day, so plan accordingly.

If you’re in Leeds, my friends at Jumbo Records (5/6 St. John’s Centre) have a number of offers and in-store events throughout the day.

Mediaknowall favourites, Man Without Country, are releasing a very limited edition white 7″ vinyl tomorrow to celebrate Record Store Day. It includes ‘King Complex’ and their remix of M83′s ‘Midnight City’

In addition, Lanterns On The Lake are releasing ‘Low Tide’ on 12″ white vinyl which includes a MWC remix and Laurel Halo, Dauwd, Sun Glitters, Young Montana and Damu.

Have fun out there!

Box Office Mojo works with an average per ticket price of $7.96 for 2011 (although I usually pay twice that). I’ve included the revenue discrepancy if everyone who downloaded had instead bought a ticket at a theater for that price – although I know some of these pirates might have rented or bought the DVD instead.

1. Fast Five – 9.2m downloads ($73.23M of lost ticket sales)
2. The Hangover II – 8.8m downloads ($70.05M of lost ticket sales)
3. Thor – 8.3m downloads ($66.07M of lost ticket sales)
4. Source Code – 7.9m downloads ($62.88M of lost ticket sales)
5. I Am Number Four – 7.6m downloads ($60.5M of lost ticket sales)
6. Sucker Punch – 7.2m downloads ($57.3M of lost ticket sales)
7. 127 Hours – 6.9m downloads ($55M of lost ticket sales)
8. Rango – 6.4m downloads ($51M of lost ticket sales)
9. The King’s Speech – 6.2m downloads ($49.4M of lost ticket sales)
10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 – 6m downloads ($47.76M of lost ticket sales)

For a movie like Sucker Punch, which managed a worldwide gross of only $89.8M, these numbers must be particularly galling. If everyone who downloaded the movie had actually bought a ticket instead, then it might have been considered a middling success, rather than a dismal failure. The same goes for Source Code, which barely scraped $55M as a domestic gross, and could certainly have used an extra $62.88M in its final tally.

The money lost on each one of these movies, had it gone to the studios, would have funded a mid-budget movie (and employed hundreds of people). So, next time you go to the multiplex and wonder where all the “missing” movies are, the non-sequels, the non-remakes, the non-adaptations, this is what happened: pirates ate them.

The Guardian has the full breakdown.