The Dish

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Twenty years after the release of The Firm, Sean Fennessey asks why the legal thriller “has almost completely disappeared from the movies”:

Much has been made in recent years of the loss of the mid-tier adult drama, a category that the 30-to-49-year-old demographic once came out for in relative droves, to see their (beautiful) peers endure pain and loss in the face of love. For all the hand-wringing in Hollywood lamenting the loss of, say, a contemporary Terms of Endearment at the hands of Iron Man 3, the genres that have truly been shed are the legal thriller and its cousins, the erotic thriller (save the occasional Steven Soderbergh or Danny Boyle homage) and the rarely executed comic thriller. …

Fewer big-studio films are in production than have been in decades. It’s never been harder to get the somewhat expensive movies in the middle ground made without fantastical source material. This week, the New York Times reported that the number of employed screenwriters in Hollywood has dropped for a third consecutive year. The superhero economy has boxed out opportunities, to be sure. TV writing gigs, coincidentally, are up. That’s also where you’ll find all the legal thrillers. ABC’s breakout Scandal? Legal thriller. Homeland? Kind of a legal thriller. Castle? Believe it. The Good Wife? You get the picture. Though, harking back to Grisham is likely not the answer. (See: last year’s drab The Firm TV reboot.) Hollywood has long exploited the inefficiencies of storytelling, seizing on the hidden popularities of its stories. There’s room for a revival. Go make some more movie stars, and let them speechify.

Sharan Shetty argues the big-screen courtroom drama is in even worse shape:

The courtroom drama has been subjected to some misguided genre mixing, as in 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which bizarrely used a trial as the framing device for, you guessed it, an exorcism. But even the comical takes that were big hits not that long ago–My Cousin Vinny and Legally Blonde, for example–have stopped getting made, and a movie like The Lincoln Lawyer, which Fennessey correctly praises, is an exception to the rule. The law film–whether legal thriller or courtroom drama–may make an occasional appearance, but its death sentence, issued some time ago by Hollywood executives, has clearly been passed. You’re more likely to find celebrity-centered courtroom drama outside the silver screen than on it.

“Instruction art” is a way for exhibitions to continue ad infinitum:

Art created from instructions—or the idea that instructions can be a part of the process—has fascinated Hans Ulrich Obrist, a curator, for decades. Instruction art offers the possibility that art can live on through instructions the way that music lives on through compositions. This is the idea behind “Do It”, a concept Mr Obrist came up with, which calls on artists to create instructions for making art. Twelve artists participated in his inaugural “Do It” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Ritter in Austria in 1994. Since then shows of “Do It” art have taken place in cities around the world. More than 250 artists have contributed instructions to the project, including Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Anna Halprin, Marina Abramovic and others.

To mark the 20th anniversary of “Do It”, Independent Curators International and D.A.P. have released “Do It: The Compendium”, a thick, orange, 448-page manual, like an art recipe book, filled with artists’ instructions and essays. …

Meant to be executed at a gallery, museum, at home—anywhere really—some of the instructions are direct and easy to realise. Ugo Rondinone tells the reader to sit down, “light a cigarette” or not, and look out the window or at a wall until something happens. Ai Weiwei offers directions on how to construct a device that can be used to spray paint on CCTV surveillance cameras. Tracey Emin instructs readers to place 27 bottles of different sizes and colours on a table and then wrap them in a reel of red cotton, “like a strange web that joins them all together”.

Other instructions are more bizarre and conceptual. Maurizio Cattelan, a practical joker in the art world, instructs curators to wear only underwear and shoes to a show’s opening. Ms Abramovic offers a recipe for mixing breast milk with “milk of the sperm” to drink during earthquake nights. Nicholas Hlobo tells an ambitious curator to “install a work of mine on the moon”.  “Most of [the instructions] can in theory be realised,” says Mr Obrist, though he concedes that “some are unlikely to be realised.”

Laura Bennett flags a hilariously overacted Snowden biopic:

She considers the dramatic appeal of whistleblowers:

Some of these characters, while prickly, were redeemed by the moral straightforwardness of their crusade; others were clearly propelled by murkier intentions. Their onscreen treatment reflects the full spectrum of cultural attitudes toward whistleblowers: derision, suspicion, tentative admiration for the sheer commitment to a cause. … From Snowden’s earliest interview there were echoes of [“Enlightened” protagonist] Amy Jellicoe: half prophet, half loose cannon. There was something of Amy’s deluded narcissism in his ridiculous claim that he was going public with his identity so as not to make the story about himself, while the media cloud around him swirled. And like Amy he seemed partly driven by the numbness and the tedium of office life, his own sense of being a drone in the service of evil.

Meanwhile, Brad Plumer charts evidence that people are indeed far more interested in Snowden’s own saga than the programs he revealed:

He adds:

Maybe that’s not too surprising. The Snowden story is, after all, genuinely fascinating — not least after he disappeared into the bowels of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and was then thought to be hiding on the president of Bolivia’s plane (he wasn’t, in turned out). But a few weeks ago, some reporters were worried that the Snowden circus would distract from broader coverage of the NSA’s surveillance programs themselves. “Snowden’s flight and its surrounding geopolitics are a good story; what he made public is a better one,” wrote Ben Smith. And, at least for now, the flight seems to be crowding out everything else.

Recent Dish on Snowden here and here.

In light of the new film I’m So Excited – which makes use of the gay flight attendant trope – Forrest Wickman provides a history of the profession and its relation to gender roles:

When commercial flight first started, the job of the flight attendant was thought to be appropriate only for (presumably straight) men. As Phil Tiemeyer points out in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, a new book which proved an invaluable resource for this post, the first flight attendants, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were actually men, and were expected to be traditionally masculine. Since aviation had been associated primarily with war and engineering, it had been considered a man’s industry, and the cabin crew, too, was expected to fit that role.

Because of this, early uniforms for crew and pilots were also often military-inspired, featuring stripes, pilot wings, and caps (some of these elements persist in uniforms today). The work was also often physically demanding, with the crew being asked to help haul luggage and row the passengers into shore from seaplanes. The first flight attendant for Pan Am was a man, Amaury Sanchez, and before the airline advertised stewardesses in miniskirts it advertised itself, in 1933, with “Rodney, the smiling steward.”

However, the responsibilities of the stewards in flight were often more stereotypically feminine—a steward might, for example, lend a hand in changing a diaper—and it was only a few years before it began to be seen as a woman’s job. The woman who broke down the cabin doors was Ellen Church, the first female flight attendant, who had been trained as a pilot but who only found work with Boeing Air Transport (the predecessor to United Airlines) as a stewardess. She was able to convince Boeing to hire her in part because she was also a registered nurse, and soon other airlines also saw nurses as ideal candidates, as long as they were also young, unmarried, and in possession of a dainty figure.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar reflects on the components of a successful movie comedy:

Timing in comedy is not like rational time. When the actor gives his reply, he hasn’t had the physical or mental time to assimilate the previous line, but he has to deliver his reply at full speed. No one is going to wonder if he’s understood what was being said to him. If the audience does wonder, it’s a bad sign. Within comedy, the style that teaches you about rhythm (as do all of Woody Allen’s films, but I think that’s because the New York director is in a hurry) is screwball, the crazy American comedy.

Think of Midnight (Mitchell Leisen), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks), Ninotchka (Billy Wilder), The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges), To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen), Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges), or in general any comedy where the comeback is delivered by Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, or Katherine Hepburn. …

Timing. Rapid-fire dialogue. Rehearsals. Otherwise, even though the situations are funny, and the actors excellent and with resources, the film becomes long and so do the scenes. I don’t want to point the finger, but one example of this problem is Bridesmaids. The director lets the actresses improvise until they come up with the right joke. You shouldn’t improvise in front of the camera. It should happen long beforehand. To crown it all, both the editor and the director are in love with the actresses and the material shot. The result is an attractive film, but one that lasts 125 minutes; it is saved because Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are wonderful comedians.

Update from a reader:

God, Pedro Almodóvar is so enormously full of crap. He has taken the entirety of comedic cinema and defined what is “good” according to an arbitrary speed value supported by nothing more than “here are a select group of movies that I like.”  He then dismisses Bridesmaids, a fantastic movie by the way, as saved only by great comediennes.  Is he so enamored with his deeply flawed thesis that he can’t see that these two great comediennes have … wait for it … comedic timing that stands in stark and wonderful contrast to his narrow preferences?

Look, I loved the West Wing, but I could never immerse myself in it to the point where I could quiet my discomfort with the obvious falseness in dialogue.  To put it bluntly: no one talks like that! No one! And yet Pedro thinks that everyone in comedy movies should speak in that ludicrous rapid fire, beyond human comprehension manner.  His preferences are precisely why I am ambivalent towards so much classic cinema: a forced and artificial depiction of human conversation nearly unrecognizable by those of us who actual talk to other people.