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The Film Habit #36 - January 26, 2005 I thought we were on to something… I was wrong. Over the past three months, thanks to all of you, Cinema Blend’s traffic has been a steady, stable rise. For awhile we’d been stuck on a plateau, punctuated by a series of brief spikes (whenever we got some particular scoop). But since November, looking at our stats was reason for a hopeful smile. Solid, steady. Up up up. Well that’s over with. Over the past week we haven’t fallen, but we have hit another plateau. That’s still pretty good considering it’s January, but I was starting to get used to the slow boil. Building web traffic is frustrating. It seems like it’s impossible to achieve steady growth. Each step only seems to go so far before you hit an artificial ceiling, where the site languishes until I come up with some creative, and extremely time consuming way to break through it.
The frustrating thing is that I think we have something really special here. I want to take it to the next level, but it sure is a bitch getting there. It’s like swimming up stream while being smacked in the face by the tails of competing salmon. The problem is simply that we’re late to the game. When sites like Aint-It-Cool-News got started, there wasn’t any attention competition. They had huge traffic overnight. A few years later and the internet is glutted. Even if you have a great destination (and I think we do), it’s tough to find a way to let people know about it. You’ve got to fight with already established big players, who aren’t necessarily moving over to let you in. The 1 ton gorillas are quite comfortably cuddled at the top of the heap, who knows if we’ll ever get past them. Heck, first we have to get near them, and we have yet to manage that. Right now I’m trying to still trying to shoulder my way past lame linking sites. Having actual content doesn’t seem to be the way to get traffic. If you love Cinema Blend, do your part to help me get the word out! me to offer free advertising on your website. Losing Is Common Ground I hadn’t planned on talking awards this week (I’ve had my fill for awhile), but last night I got an email from a colleague. By colleague I mean a film critic who writes for another site and is equally underpaid. Colleague makes us sound like doctors, instead of unpaid hacks. Great word. The email contained a long and rather biased rant in which he lambasted the Academy for failing to nominate The Passion for best picture.  He also went nuts over the lack of nominations for Fahrenheit 9/11, (which in itself is pretty unique, since most people are usually only on one side of that fence or the other), accusing Oscar voters of accepting bribes based solely on his contention that these are the best movies of the year. He knew they were the best because of course, he thought so. I’d heard a couple of other people throwing a fit over the lack of nominations for these two films, but didn’t take it seriously until then. It had never occurred to me that so many people could be that wildly out of touch.
Apparently a lot of you are, so wake up and pull yourself out of the socially isolated cocoon you’re ensconced in and pay attention to some unbiased fact. People hate The Passion. A lot of people hate it. Just as many people hate Fahrenheit 9/11. Funny thing about both the Jesus movie and the Bush movie: for every person who adores either film, there’s another person out there who despises it. Both movies are equally divisive, and you’d be hard pressed to determine which one is more hated as much as you’d be hard pressed to determine which one is more loved. With all the protestors out there marching, with all the Jewish groups attacking, with conservatives sending Michael Moore death threats, you’d think this conclusion would be an obvious one. For me it was, for some of you, sitting comfortably in your church pews or in milling about in your anti-war rallies, I guess it isn’t. What does that mean in terms of Oscar votes? It means that neither The Passion or Fahrenheit 9/11 ever had any chance of winning. Best case scenario for either film is if the Oscar voters in some way closely resemble the general political/religious/social makeup of the country. In that instance, you’re looking automatically at 50% of the Oscar voters on the opposite end of the spectrum, refusing to nominate either film. That means right from the get go, both The Passion and F911 have a 50% smaller voter pool from which to get nominations from than that enjoyed by any other film. Under those circumstances, it’d take a major miracle for either movie to get a serious nomination over other, more widely liked films. Of course the groups championing those movies aren’t prone to looking at things logically any more than was my critic friend who sent me that message last night. It’s easier to cry “foul” than to accept that your personal cause is not one shared by everyone.  People love conspiracy theories almost as much as they love making fun of George Bush and kicking the ass of Jesus. But please, whether or not one of those categories fits you, try to widen out enough to comprehend what’s going on in the real world. Your opinion is not law, many people may have other views.
In this case, cooler heads have prevailed. F911 might have had a shot in the documentary category, but Michael Moore removed it from contention, and so got exactly what he deserved to begin with… nothing. Come on, it’s just shoddy filmmaking. If you take away the message you’ve got the equivalent of a student film with bad voice-overs. I’ve seen Bugs Bunny cartoons with more depth. Birth of a Nation is less blatantly manipulative and heavy handed. You may like this particular flavor of manipulation, but that doesn’t make it any less crass. On the other hand, The Passion is a movie created solely to appeal to hardcore Christians. If your background is a religious one, you’re going to love it. That doesn’t make it a legitimate Best Picture. That film too, got exactly the nominations it deserved. After all, that’s some hellaciously great gore makeup. Peek out from underneath your Wrestling magazines or your copy of High Times and join the rest of us in a little place I like to call reality. Look, I know where you’re coming from. You’re passionate about movies. That’s good, even if the movies you’re passionate about don’t deserve you. Just realize that though you may dig it, everyone else doesn’t have to. me to throw away objectivity and declare your team the winner. Letters From Close Enough to the Edge to See the View But Not So Close That There is Danger of Falling Off  Guided by the spirit of the small Asian woman to your left (who I really need to replace with something more snazzy), I answer reader mail. It’s new, it’s innovative, and no doubt this idea will be ripped off by thousands of copycats, like that hack David Letterman. your comments to have them read on the… er answered here. Let’s see what you folks have to say this week: Carlene Cordova: Hello there! It was with great concern that I read your article about my film "Ringers: Lord of the Fans." I immediately realized that our press releases and film synopsis must be inadequately doing their jobs if you so readily could have such a misconception about our film. Please let me apologize for any inaccuracies that you may have perceived from our marketing materials. We're planning on retooling them. Our film is produced in association with the Tolkien fansite TheOneRing.net. Written by two TORn staffers who are the biggest LOTR geeks you should ever care to meet. (So much so that we've devoted our lives FULL-TIME for the past three years to creating this film with no financial compensation yet.) It is a thorough exploration of how the BOOK "The Lord of the Rings" has affected people and pop - culture since it's publication 50 years ago. It is about as far from "Trekkies" as one can get in this "geek documentary" genre. In fact we've had complaints from Hollywood types that it ISN'T making fun of the fandom and that it is too reverential of the work, deep and meaningful. I take great pride in those complaints. In fact, the film is the exact opposite of what you said it was portraying. It shows how COOL it is to be a "Lord of the Rings" fan. We make great pains to show a regular everyday (extremely intelligent usually) fan and juxtapose how they  have the same insights into the book as "cool" celebrities such as Geddy Lee, Lemmy Kilmister, David Carradine, Clive Barker and Peter Jackson. We even have Elijah Wood's appearance on Jay Leno as he explains to Jay how UNLIKE Trekkies, Ringer fans are, and that we're so much cooler. Led Zeppelin is cool, is it not? Elijah is really behind our project and will be helping us with publicity. As is Peter Jackson, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd and Viggo Mortensen. They've all seen segments of the film in rough cut stages and are very happy with what they've seen.
We explore the themes of the book and discuss the mythological overtones and the spirituality of the book and how it changes people's lives. And most importantly how the current success of Peter Jackson's films are encouraging young people to read this very large book, and how this is having a ripple effect by inspiring them to read more books. Yes, we have a rock-driven score. Yes, we try to add Terry Gilliam-esque humor where we can and yes, we do explore some of the extremes of fan devotion. But we would not be telling the entire story if we left out some of the present mania inspired by Jackson's epic. And that in short was our goal in making this film. To document ALL of the reactions to the book since its publication, academic and pop-culture alike. From the sixties Hippie counter-culture, the Ralph Bakshi and Rankin & Bass adaptations to Peter Jackson's films. I'd really love to send you our complete synopsis and more information about our film. And if you'd send me your address I'll send you an invitation to our world premiere which will be in Park City, Utah in late January. (This is confidential and will not be formally announced until Dec. 13th.) Or we'll invite you to any of our premieres as we take the film on the festival circuit in 2005. Or, when complete I could send you a promotional DVD of the film for your review. Just let me know what you'd prefer. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Josh: Geeks rarely know they’re presenting themselves as geeks. If they did, they’d cut it out and be called “Puff Daddys”, not geeks. Mark Hanson (follows up from last week): Look, I wish you liked the movie or even didn't hate it. That's not the case. I could debate this movie with you all day. We may disagree about this movie and many others, but I believe we both love movies and the movie business. I love your website and will continue to visit it. and seriously I did not intend to slap the hand of friendship, I'm just sticking to my opinion. I believe this movie is good and that is far from irrelavant garbage. I would love to have a conversation and a drink if we ever met. Hell you wouldn't be the first person I met under bad circumstances that became my friend. Josh: You’re buying! Hey! Do you like writing for mildly successful movie websites with no guarantee that you’ll ever be paid? Are you over 18? You’re in luck. CinemaBlend.com is looking for writers just like you. If you think you can capture the signature Cinema Blend style as a DVD critic and/or BNN reporter send me an with a few samples and we’ll talk. |
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