A Record Store Day Reality Check: Or Why You Should Stop Whining
I am not an expert but I feel very confident when I talk to my local record store and discover they did 8x better on RSD then they did on their next best day. The reason for this is obvious, way more people shop for records on RSD then any other day of the year. People who dont usually buy records, people who usually buy online, and people who are only in it for a quick buck all go to their local record shops on RSD. That is a beautiful thing because it means RSD attracts a bigger market to record buying. RSD is just an excellent use of marketing strategies, designed to bring more buyers to the stores. Hurray it works! So stop your whining! Everytime someone whines about RSD a hipster gets their mustache.
So here is your Post RSD Reality Check:
1. RSD is a cash grab on behalf of distributors, stores, labels, and bands. This is GOOD, we want this. Days like this promote record buying, and collecting, but more importantly it financially suppprts the vinyl industry. So ya know people can pay rent, move to better spaces, release more music, pay more employees. THAT GOOD SHIT. So they release a Nirvana single specifically designed to move many many copies, that means the store makes money on it, the distributor makes money on it, the label makes money on it, and the record manufacturers makes money on it. That means its working.
2. Everytime someone flips a RSD item on ebay it is a GOOD THING. We want this. Why? Because it promotes the idea that vinyl as a medium for recorded music retains and increases in value. This makes the medium the wisest use of your music buying dollars. The more people realize that records have a value beyond manufacturing costs the longer record stores will be around.
3. The internet exists, lazy ppl use it to get things they want. Get used to it, cause often enough you are that lazy person.
4. Complaining that you didnt get what you want cause of someone else buying to flip, doesnt make the flipper an asshole, it makes you an entitled prick. Thats right when you get mad cause you didnt get what you want it means you felt entitled to it. Records exist in limited quantities, and thats what helps the industry remain stable. You are not entitled to getting the record you want. Standing in line for hours does not entitle you to ownership of this physical object, it just doesnt. The only thing in this society that entitles you is payment. Thats the system we live in, deal with it.
Please remember the record industry is not, and should not be free from the realities that face any other business within our capitalist system. You don’t like this system? Well then find a more constructive way to vent your frustrations, because getting mad that you can’t get what you want ,when you want it doesn’t change anything and makes you look like a fool.
So Fast, so Furious; Why Fast 5 rocked and Furious 6 didn’t.
Fast 5 worked, very well as a movie, which lead people to the understanding that these films might be quality. If you watch any of the others you find this to be far from the truth. However the momentum from 5 is what is pushing Fast & Furious 6, both in terms of audience perceptions and critical reception as well.
5 benefited from two things;
One, most of the audience had never seen or had totally forgotten any story from the previous films. As a result during the horrendous dialogue scenes that push forward characters archs, instead of focusing on the piss poor writing and less then stellar performances the viewers are playing catch-up in their minds trying to put together the pieces to understand the basic thread of information and motivations. This distraction leaves the audience with the feeling that they weren’t bored during those lousy scenes because it was making them think, which is find and dandy except you aren’t thinking you are trying to remember why you care. But then the scene ends and the next action scene begins and you realize you don’t give a damn anyway. When viewing this film again it becomes apparent that any scene that doesn’t involve someone fighting or driving a car is almost unbearable.
Two, insane action set pieces. Wow, just wow. Stealing cars from a moving train, involving blow torches custom cars, a cliffs edge, etc. This scene off the top of the picture is stellar and ludicrous and sets the film’s tone. It is so much fun anyone would be willing to sit through an hour of boredom as long as there is another scene to rival it. Which of course there is which is what makes Fast 5 so good. Rarely does an action film of this caliber deliver upon much. The finale of the film The Safe sequence, which is easily the most balls out insane chase scene since The Matrix Reloaded, is filled with wtf, and fun holy shit moments every minute or so. For the entire sequence the audience is constantly reacting vocally, cheering, hooting, etc. as the film delivers upon promises made in the tone setting of the train scene.
Since these scenes fall in the beginning and end of the movie the audience walk out thinking they saw something incredible cause as a wise man said, if you give the audience a good first and last 5 minutes what happened in between wont matter. And its true till you try and watch it again in; which case you are glad you are at home and can just skip to the parts you want to see.
Now I trully believe that because of these two reasons Fast 5 was a fantastic film experience. And the audience wants that experience again, so we all bought our tickets for Furious 6, which wasnt very good. It had a good tank chase in the middle, and I cant remember anything interesting about the beginning, and the end was okay but delivered few wtf, and holy shit moments compared to the safe scene in 5. Ultimately not a spectacular film going experience.
Benefiting from expectation, people walk away from Furious 6 enjoying themselves because thats what they wanted, and so they tell themselves that it was a better time then it was. In reality they checked their iPhone at least a dozen more times during Furious 6 then they did during Fast 5.
Lastly, the success of these films I believe is hinging on one other intangible factor, the Hollywood cycle. I think we are entering a return to the more basic Hollywood Action Film which has taken a back seat in the last 10 years to the Fantasy Films. I mean everything from LOTR to the Avengers are fantasy films, based on the idea of characters who can do things human’s cannot. I think (and frankly hope) that audiences are coming back round to a desire to see “real people” push the limits of their human abilities. The Fast and the Furious film deliver just this. I may be wrong on this last point but its the feeling I have, and what I want to see, as I have had enough of superpowers and silly costumes for the time being.
Anne Hathaway Dreamed a Dream less complete
So I have been trying to write this big huge other piece about film, and exhibition, and how I feel about that whole world right now. It has become a bit of a monster so I am putting that aside to write about something a little less serious; the song “I Dreamed a Dream”. Specifically I want to demonstrate that though Anne Hathaway’s performance in the film version of Les Miserable (2012) is quite moving, it lacks depth. I am not trying to take anything away from Hathaway, but maybe from Tom Hooper the Director. What I wish to show is that though her performance is powerful it should by no means be considered the epitome of that song, and by no means should it eclipse others performers work with that song.
I feel I may loose some people here. Her performance drove many people to tears, millions most likely. That is true power, and she is a truly wonderful performer, deserving of her Oscar. This power however, does not imply depth of emotion, nor does the fact that the performance is incredibly tortured. These things are not depth, they are singular emotional tones, and though she can make these tones resonate with almost anyone paying attention to her, the direction of her performance of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ not only missed opportunities it actually placed that character in the position of victim, which dehumanizes her. As a point of comparison I am going to use Ruthie Henshall performing at some type of variety show, not the ideal setting, but her performance drowns out the lack of setting and costume.
So let me speak about the basics of this song. It is Fantine’s solo, it is the audience’s window into her as a person. The song is about how her life has turned out, and how she got to be where she is. Most importantly the song is about dreams, and how far away reality can be from those dreams. At its core the song is about a woman who has reached the end, and she is reflecting upon the life that she lived. That is quite a lot of material tied into less then 4 minutes, but it is all there.
The song is preempted with Fantine speaking about the past, implying that the her view of the world has altered. “When men were kind… When the world was a song, and the song was exciting” this time has passed, she no longer feels that this is true, and she states “then it all went wrong” there was a moment where her world changed from bliss, to hell. The song is then about this journey, from the source of her bliss, to the cause of her hell Fantine guides us through her world and what it has become.
Right from the outset we can hear the two different approaches that Hathaway and Henshall are taking. Henshall sings the lines “when hope was high and life worth living” with a sense of that hope, there is lightness in her voice. This is the bench mark for her version, a deep hope is constantly present throughout the performance, and her character’s story is viewed through this lens of hope, and its loss. Hathaway’s Fantine does not express this feeling of hope, her voice is soft, it barely speaks. Her whispers demonstrate a weight upon the character, and this is the charcter’s lens. She is to be seen as a woman bearing a great deal of burden from the world around her.
We hear this most clearly when she nearly falters after the expression of “God” in the line “I dreamed that god would be forgiving”. This is a powerful moment for her character. She is broken by this idea, a god who she believed in, believed could save her, forgive her, but that was dream, a falsehood. Hathaway’s character knows that all these dreams are untrue, and that is the weight that sits most heavily upon her.
Henshall’s emotional emphasis comes in again on “Then I was young and unafraid” there is a nostalgia present in her voice. She is going back in time, and she is filled with that feeling of youth and courage. Within these next few lines she is relishing in a time when youth afforded her the ability to believe in a better world, to waste energy on silly things, when there were no consequences to dreaming.
Hathaway’s Fantine does not relish in these memories, she dwells on the words “used, and wasted” with mournful regret. As if there were something in that time gone by that she wishes she could change. And then comes the songs first major tonal switch;
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame
This is a key moment in the song, for Henshall, the darkness of her world begins to cloud into her performance. A sense of fear is shared here bewteen the two performances. The difference is that this is a shift for Henshall who has just been nostalgic and is now reminiscing as if shell shocked, remembering a great trauma. The use of tiger as metaphor for reality, or outside forces of the world and the description of “tearing your hope apart” demonstrates the ferocity of Fantine’s experience.
Hathaway uses this moment to bring her character to the point of tears. We then hit a big note on the word “shame” there is a lift in the music a swell as emotions boil over. Henshall takes us from deep hurt as she begins to sing the word, and as the song lifts we and the character are lifted out of this low and back into a high. We come out on top, and now she is beyond reminiscent she lives these lines. Her summer of love, the high point in her life. We the audience get to live this memory with her through her use of emotion. We can feel the beauty of that time, understand why life was worth living.
In contrast Hathaway brings us from the point of tears up through shame to hysterical tears and deep breathes for this next section. She culminates this emotional swivel with a shift from hysterical sadness to deep anger on “he took my childhood in his stride”. For me this is where the lack of character depth becomes prominent. Her anger at this man is centered here on the loss of her childhood, at the moment of their sexual union. His desire for sex took something away from her that she cannot retrieve. But it is this sexual union that produced the child Cosette. To me this negates much of what this song is about, much of what this character is about. It places her as a victim to this man, and then a victim to the rest of the world. Her hatred implies she had no control over this situation, that she did not choose to loose her innocence she was some how wronged in this action. It puts her in a position of weakness, the audience sees her in this weakened state and she never recovers from it.
Henshall’s Fantine does not see this loss of childhood as a point of anger, her performance presents this line with pride. For this Fantine, the loss of her childhood was received with a sense of fulfillment There is pride and fulfillment in her voice and expression. It is these attributes that I find her character depth, it is the strength that has gotten her this far in a world filled with Tigers, a world that tries to turn this moment into shame.
We must understand that Cosette is where hope still lives, and this is why that character is so important; not only to Fantine, but to the whole story of Les Miserables. If Fantine expresses with hatred the moment at which she conceived this child it takes away from the entire show. Cosette is not shameful for her, Cosette is her world, and she would and does give everything to preserve that.
For Henshall’s Fantine it is the nameless man’s absence, his leaving that is the source of her pain. “But he was gone when autumn came” brings us into a yet another tonal shift for Henshall. We have just moved through her remembrance of the best days of her life, the beauty of love experienced culminating in the conception of her child and the great sense of pride that fills her with. We are then hit with disbelief, and pian, moving into longing. Another dimension to the character, this man that has left her and caused her so much grief and despair yet he still holds that place in her heart where she remembers what love felt like. This is the ultimate tragedy for the character of Fantine, the person that has caused her the greatest pain is also the person whom all her dreams revolve around, because all her positive experiences in life where with this person.
It is here that Henshall’s Fantine starts falling to pieces on the stage holding back her tears at the realization that “there are dreams that cannot be” and her impending doom “there are storms we cannot weather”. Henshall’s despair finishes out the song now, as she sings the last few lines we are brought into the realization that this character will see no redemption, that life has not given her a way out. It is through the realization of a life lived and lost too early that the despair of the song is felt. With out the emotional highs of her reminiscence we cannot feel true empathy for her characters despair.
In this final section of the song for Hathaway there is no where new for her Fantine to take us. She has presented us with despair the whole length of her song, and now all that is left to feel is pity for a women who has been taken advantage of by the world. This is a weakness in the direction to me. I am not interested in feeling pity, as no one is interested in feeling pitied. I seek to understand a character, as I seek to be understood. I think that is true for most people, which is why Henshall’s ability to pull us into her character through her expressions of hope are so much more meaningful as they allows us to empathize with her feeling of despair. We do not pity this character Fantine, no we are transported on to that stage and become Fantine for a few brief moments. It is because the song is built to give us these few brief moments that it is considered one of the best stage songs of all time, and it is because Henshall gives us such a range of emotion that we are able to understand this character enough to make that leap into her mind, and into her heart.
This is a deeply sad song, but it is also a deeply beautiful one. I hope I have made some interesting points, and I hope it made you think about the power of performance and the power of good song writing. I am no expert on either, but I like to take a few minutes to really appreciate them when I see them. I hope you do the same.
Inaugural Post
Hello and Welcome,
This is a space for my thoughts and feelings on the world around me. That should be obvious as that is the intended use of a blog. I suppose what I wish to state is that I am not doing this as a Journalist, nor do I have any desire to be seen as one. I just have a lot of things I wish to express about this world around me and want a place to save those thoughts, and I don’t mind other people peeking in to see what I am thinking.
A little about my world; It revolves mainly around film and television. I have worked in and around theatrical exhibition since I was 16 and got my first real job with Famous Players at their Paramount location (now Scotiabank Theatre John & Richmond). I have loved film my whole life, and my Dad, working in the industry as a Post Production Supervisor and Writer, exposed me to a great deal of wonderful film and helped instill a deep love of the theatrical experience in me.
I am a huge fan of large format film, and regard myself as an advocate for Medium Specific Presentation (there will be a post dedicated to this topic). I collect film as much as I can, currently I have well over 2000 35mm trailers in my room, and a print in my closet. I hold 35mm near and dear, however this does not prevent me from acknowledging that Digital has superseded film as the primary format. I am fine with this, as long as it is done right. When it is not however, I find it completely unacceptable. I am not a great person to see a film with as I have a habit of complaining about what I consider to be sub par viewing conditions; doors not being shut when trailers start, light spilling onto the screen from poorly placed exit lights, poorly calibrated projectors, all these things have made me leave a screening or demand a refund in the past. People find this annoying, and I can’t blame them, but nothing makes me more upset then seeing a space with the resources to be run to the highest standard failing to meet what I consider basic items.
I am not just focused on the physical realities of a viewing environment, I have a deep appreciation for the content, and how it is made. I am currently of the opinion that the Story is the utmost important element in film and television that Characters, and their decision making is at the heart of the writing process. I do not say this as a fact, I say this as a point of view, and I see all films with this point of view. I will be commenting on film and television as it relates to story, and production values which I consider secondary to story, but superior to style.
I will also be commenting on the world of MMA. Over the past 2 years I have been drawn into this world. I have never been much for sports, and this is the first time in my life that I have been so inspired by one. I feel this is in large part due to the way the UFC in particular manages to build story around their fighters. I do feel it is the purest sport. Two people enter a enclosed space, and using only their bodies and abilities fight until there is a victor. Its so simple and beautiful. But more on that some other time.
So in summation; I plan to write about film and television as it relates to story and production. I intend to share my love of the theatrical experience and the mediums at hand. I will on occasion muse about some upcoming fight that has my attention. I will also think of some other interesting things to write about if I can.
If you are reading this, well then cheers.
Alex
alex aboveground 
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