The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - 7
The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - 7
The more the merrier
'Somewhere' soars
Hollywood franchises
are a quintessential
part of our understand-
ing of the film industry and are
key to its current and future
states. Char-
acterized by
big-budget
sequels,
franchises
connect K
audiences
to previous
experiences ANKUR
without the SOHONI
financial risk
associated
with original concepts.
Disney is the master fran-
chiser - the studio's success is
not simply a product of hit films,
but rather of visionary concepts
and characters that can be taken
in every direction.
My own interaction with Hol-
lywood's commercial focus on
franchises is typical: I am a rabid
consumer of the familiar, ready
and willing to interact with char-
acters I've already met and sto-
ries I've been told before. Going
to the movies hasn't always been
about discovering originality, but
often becomes a hunt for comfort
in the blanket of the past.
That's been a very simple
strategy for a long time - for
the past 30 years, Hollywood
has had ultimate power to cre-
ate and continue film franchises
by bastardizing the original and
releasing comically low-effort
sequels. Audiences have con-
sumed sequels like mad, myself
included, because audiences are
remarkably comfortable with
what they've already seen.
A new polar studio strategy
that pushes production toward
either super-low or epically-high
budgets while losing the middle
ground stands to create a film
industry that emphasizes fran-
chises more than ever.
The five highest-grossing films
of last year exemplify that. At the
top was "Toy Story 3," the con-
clusion of an animated film series
emphasizingnostalgia and the
fleetingnature of youth. Second:
"Alice in Wonderland," a re-
imagining ofthe classic tale with
which almost every age group
is already familiar. In third and
fourth: "Iron Man 2" and "The
Twilight Saga: Eclipse," respec-
tively - one a typical sequel
tryingto one-up the size of the
original and the other a book saga
adaptation feeding on the raven-
ous tastes of teenagers. The fifth
place film comes from the fran-
chise of all franchises, "Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
Part I"- essentially the surest of
sure bets.
Thinking beyond simple the-
atrical grosses, though, consider
the cost of producing so many of
these installments. In most cases,
cost is never recovered on theat-
rical release alone. The attraction
of franchises isn't simply that
their films will make box office
money. It's that they will make
money, create obsession, branch
out across mediums and con-
sumer goods and make more and
more money long after the film's
release.
I have "Lord of the Rings" and
"Avatar" calendars in my bed-
room. No matter how much Ilike
"The King's Speech" or "Black
Swan," they won't inspire fandom
like that.
But franchises now aren't nec-
essarily like franchises of decades
past. Before, sequelswere univer-
sally inferior to their originals,
lost in tryingto recreate an exist-
ing story but characterizedby
Hollywood goes
franchise crazy.
consistent failure. In a risk-averse,
recession-minded film industry,
sequels like "The Dark Knight,"
"The Bourne Supremacy" and
"Toy Story 3" are the goal. These
films not only increase the size of
their original films, but creatively.
pursue entirely different courses
in plot and thematic focus.
While sequels may still tend to
disappoint, there is more hope for
these films than Hollywood has
ever seen.
In conjunction with those
expectations, blockbuster
franchises have chosen to hire
"brand" directors - whether aes-
thetically auteuristic or not - to
See SOHONI, Page 8
Coppola's latest
creation sinks in
with patience
By JENNIFER XU
Senior Arts Editor
Ah, "Somewhere" - the
neglected stepchild of 2010. Upon
winning a Golden Lion at the
Venice Film
Festival, Sofia
Coppola's
("LostinTrans- Somewhere
lation") latest
film amassed At the Michigan
Oscar buzzfor
the entirety of Focus
three seconds,
before being promptly set off to
the side, forgotten.
Perhaps it's because nothing
ever seems to happen in the film.
One of its openingscenes presents
three minutes of the waiflike Cleo
(Ele Fanning, "The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button") ice-skating
in a blue dress - nothing else.
No cuts away, no stuntwork. But
there's a strangely mesmerizing,
almost hypnotic quality follow-
ing Cleo's every move, every bent
knee. Her father, the jaded actor
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff,
"Public Enemies"), looks up from
his phone and it hits him what a
flower his adolescent daughter has
blossomed into - a ball of loneli-
ness and pride wrapped into one.
Where "Somewhere" succeeds
exquisitely is in communicat-
ing the language of temporal-
ity. Much of the film takes place
inside the luscious, opulent Cha-
teau Marmont Hotel - a lan-
guorous playground of a celebrity
haunt where sin goes to bed with
melancholy. In French, chateau
means castle, and the term evokes
a contained, Old World hollow-
ness in which the kings have all
died or become irrelevant.
Indeed, everything is synthetic
here at the palace of the lost souls,
even people. Marco, a Hollywood
actor trapped in the perpetual
state of waiting, falls asleep in
the midst of watching a soporific
striptease starringtwo bombshell
blonde-headed pole dancers. He
falls asleep again later that night,
this time while administering
oral sex to a different leggy young
thing. When his daughter, the tall,
willowy 12-year-old Cleo, decides
to stay with him, Johnny needs
to reprioritize. Cleo, more fairy
sprite than an actual girl, brings
to Johnny's isolated universe a
mystical world of underwater tea
parties and room-service pan-
cakes.
Critics may deride Coppola's
range. Why can't she move on
from her comfortable cocoon
of navel gazing to something a
smidge more dynamic? We want
action, excitement, they cry. But
the static, almost therapeutic
ambienceworksfor"Somewhere,"
and whatever is left unsaid
unlocks a chasm of introspection.
It's minimalism at its finest: The
empty spaces are literally empty
spaces. There are scenes seething
with past memories of loneliness,
repression, wanderlust - scenes
that recall many a film in the
Coppola discourse: Lux Lisbon's
lace collared dress blowing in the
wind, Charlotte's light pink briefs
cradling her heart-shaped derri-
ere, Marie Antoinette's toppling
pile of shoes, bouffants and bon-
bons.
"Somewhere" might only strike
a chord among a select few, but
for the patient, it can open petal
by petal (to slightly rephrase ee
cunimings) an entire world. A
silky tone poem saturated with'
an ennui as thick as the foggy,
smoggy hills of Los Angeles,
"Somewhere" bubbles with the
most stirring ontological ques-
tions: What is real anymore? With
all of the modern age's reflective
surfaces and transient promises
of fame, how do we find the thing
that is genuinely authentic? We
can go from womb to tomb with-
out ever touching the essential
qualities of existence - but some-
how, "Somewhere" can bring us
closer to them.
ALBUM RE anfi
Lupe s Atlnti fCiasco
By CASSIE BALFOUR
- Daily Arts Writer
When Chicago native Lupe
Fiasco burst on the hip-hop scene
with Lupe Fiasco's Food and
Liquor, he was
hailed as the
thinking man's
rapper, known Lupe F so
for his literate,
flow and social- Lasers
ly conscious Atistlic
lyrics. How-
ever, Lupe's lat-
est record Lasers, whose release
was withheld for roughly a year
by Atlantic Records due to its
tragic lack of chart-topping hits,
is watered down. The rapper has
been exceedingly vocal about his
label's stranglehold on his cre-
ative sovereignty, and if the pop
tarted-up Lasers is any indica-
tion, it appears that Lupe lost the
battle for the creative freedom
that made his previous albums
stand out among his contem-
poraries' electro pop-saturated
work. Despite Atlantic's patho-
logical
trasha
onstrat
iantly
filler li
It m
for Atli
ten to t
Run Ra
at the
and th
guitars
you wi
you du
you co
Re
bef
Trac
end up
bait for
Sex hir
Trey S
bland
which
obsession with poppy a heels-donning babe that Lupe
a few standout tracks dem- wants to court. Honestly, these
te that Lupe fought val- lyrics are not worth repeating,
for control_- even if pure and with the annoying pop-
tters ehercord. , friendly electronica backdrop,
oust have been awkward it's easy to imagine some Atlan-
antic Records execs to lis- tic suit holding a gun to Lupe's
:he bitter, dystopian "State head to get him to record a song
dio." Lupe takes a few jabs that will be "out of your head" in
music-industrial complex no time.
e government over angry If one can stomach generic con-
, rapping, "Not too smart fections like "Break the Chain"
ll be a superstar / and if or the weirdly upbeat "Til I Get
imb or something maybe There," listeners will recognize
uld be number one." Burn. flashes of the old, virginal Lupe in
songs like "Words I Never Said,"
which has the rapper organically
ad the labels venting his political frustrations.
Unfortunately, the track features
ore you pick the suddenly-ubiquitous Sky-
. lar Grey (you may recognize the
songstress on Diddy's new ditty
"Coming Home") warbling in
kAs like "Out of My Head" between Lupe's angry verses. Her
sounding like desperate melodramatic, painfully Auto-
r Top 40. The Inventor of Tuned voice kills the mood. The
nself and pop-chart staple record company just couldn't
ongz bizarrely lends his resist slathering the politically
vocals to this dull track, radical song with a little slick pop
has something to do with See FIASCO, Page 8
I
A
r-