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Drew Barrymore’s Whip It, which opens this Friday, marks the return of a long-neglected, gloriously low-rent genre: the roller derby film. Roller skating exhibitions and competitive marathons date to the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that sportswriter Damon Runyon and promoter Leo Seltzer created the “roller derby”—a full-contact spectacle. Like professional wrestling, which similarly straddles the line between entertainment and athletics, roller derby fell into and out of favor over the years. But popular interest spiked during the late ’60s and early ’70s, with breathless talk in the press of “America’s fastest growing sport” and a legacy of derby-themed films. Herewith, a brief history of the roller derby in cinema:
The Fireball (1950)
Tag line: Rooney Runs Riot in the Toughest Game of All
Mickey Rooney plays Johnny—a tough-luck street kid who escapes from an orphanage to become a roller skating star. Suddenly the toast of the town, Johnny carouses with gold diggers like Polly (Marilyn Monroe) while neglecting the good girl who loved him from the beginning. In a grim twist, he contracts polio, and his high-skating days come to an end.
Unholy Rollers (1972)
Tag line: A Locker Room Look at the Toughest Broads in the World!
1970 Playboy Playmate of the Year Claudia Jennings stars as a cannery worker who quits her job to join the roller derby. Her dangerous curves and rebellious ways alienate her teammates, guaranteeing that her path to stardom will be lined with hard knocks and flying elbows.
Kansas City Bomber (1972)
Tag line: The Hottest Thing on Wheels
The tag line says it all. Brunette bombshell Raquel Welch stars as K.C. Carr, a classy lady by day and skate-stomping firebrand by night. A rivalry between teammates Carr and Jackie Burdette (saucy statuette Helena Kallianiotes) culminates in a heated race.
Rollerball (1975)
Tag line: In the Not-Too-Distant Future, Wars Will No Longer Exist. But There Will Be Rollerball.
The roller derby genre here graduates from mildly titillating sports romp to brutal, dystopian action film. In 2018, with corporations ruling the world, crime and wars have been replaced by a controlled bloodsport: Rollerball. James Caan plays leather-clad baller Jonathan E., a veteran of the game who refuses to hang up his wheels and thus incurs the wrath of team/league/world CEO Bartholomew (John Houseman). This derby is all about testosterone, and is punctuated by bearded motorcycle marauders, fierce jai alai action, and giant pinballs.
Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990)
Tag line: In the Future, the Streets Will Belong to the Rollerboys
Rollerball meets Gleaming the Cube meets License to Drive in this neo-futurist skate odyssey. Corey Haim plays an honest pizza delivery boy recruited by the police to infiltrate a rolling Los Angeles gang. Will a young, sultry Patricia Arquette hook up with goofy, neon headbanded Haim? Will Haim earn his stripes as a Rollerboy and save the world from slicked-back mullets?
Rollerball (2002)
Tag line: Get in the Game
All you need to know about this pointless remake of the 1975 exploitation classic is that protagonist Jonathan, originally portrayed by seedy hunk James Caan, is played here by bland nonstarter Chris Klein. Hyperactive editing and nonsequiter pyrotechnics obscure the in-line skate action, but professional amateurs LL Cool J and Rebecca Romijn gamely summon the spirit of '70s camp.
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More than 100,000 people were expected at IMAX movie theaters Friday night for "Avatar Day," a 16-minute sneak preview of James Cameron's science-fiction epic. In what the New York Times called an "audacious marketing ploy," 20th Century Fox made an extended trailer for the film—which is due to be released in December—into a major theatrical event with ticketed showings on more than 100 screens. Yet despite all the hype (and all the hype about the hype), the screening I attended in midtown Manhattan was only one-third full.
It's too bad; I would have liked to see how the footage played to a crowd. The smattering of viewers at the AMC Empire theater watched in near-silence as the CGI-heavy, three-dimensional action sequences played on an enormous screen. No doubt some were put off by the movie's cornball heroes. As I watched a tribe of blue-skinned cat people wearing loincloths and glitter makeup wrestle their way through an enchanted forest of savage beasts and glowing jellyfish, I couldn't help but wonder whether this is what Apocalypto might have looked like had it been directed by George Lucas.
Much of the ballyhoo for Avatar has focused on Cameron's supposedly groundbreaking technical innovations, which may account for the film's estimated $240 million budget. (In March, a writer for Time wondered whether the revolutionary special effects might "be the thing that forces the theaters to convert to digital.") Here's what I can tell you based on the trailer: The 3-D effects do look pretty darn good—they're easy on the eyes and do a wonderful job of immersing the viewer in the film's alien-jungle psychedelia. My only complaint is that some of the off-planet scenes suffer from a rather pronounced dollhouse effect, with the real-life sets and human actors appearing weirdly small.
I'm less sanguine about the computer graphics. The scenes shown Friday were almost exclusively CGI: animated feline humanoids doing animated flips as they hurled animated spears at animated dinosaurs. I'm sure the algorithms used to construct these battles were as sophisticated as any in the history of filmmaking—but everything still looked a little off to me. The movements were too smooth and slippery, like Yoda's cartoonish acrobatics from Star Wars. For all Cameron's technical wizardry, the digital characters in Avatar remain lodged somewhere on the far slope of the uncanny valley.
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Everyone loves District 9. The sci-fi action flick took in more than $37 million in its opening weekend, and drew raves from just about every movie critic in America. It's been called a "genuinely original science fiction film," one that's "visceral yet philosophically sophisticated" and a "biting social commentary." As of this writing, the film's score on RottenTomatoes.com sits at 88 percent, with 142 positive reviews against just 19 negative ones.
I'm one of those rotten tomatoes. (My review, published last week, bemoaned the film's plot inconsistencies and reliance on genre clichés.)
That fact is beginning to make me nervous. In recent days, New York Press film critic Armond White has been targeted by an angry mob of sci-fi fanboys and film bloggers. His review has now garnered almost 600 angry comments on RottenTomatoes, many of which call for him to be kicked off the site's meta-ranking system, since his hyper-contrarian take skews the numbers.
On Thursday, Roger Ebert came to White's defense, calling him "an intelligent critic and a passionate writer" and pointing out that "his opinion is often valuable because it is outside the mainstream." But Ebert had changed his mind by Friday morning. After consulting a list of films that White had praised (e.g., Norbit, Transformers 2), and dismissed (Wall-E, There Will Be Blood, Knocked Up), he conceded "that White is, as charged, a troll."
I guess the argument here is that Armond White takes controversial views on movies just to provoke a reaction—that he calibrates his opinions to go against the mainstream. But a look at his record shows that's not the case. As Ebert points out, White votes with the mainstream exactly half the time: He's neither conformist nor contrarian.
For comparison, I looked up the profiles of 20 film critics whose reviews are regularly featured on RottenTomatoes. White is certainly the most contrarian of the group, but that's because the others happen to be bunched up at around 75 percent on the scale. In other words, most film critics tend to agree with the mainstream as a general rule, but every once in a while—once per four reviews—they go against the grain.
What, if anything, can we draw from this? The first lesson is that you can't be a successful critic if no one agrees with you. (No one in the group lives on the contrarian side of the scale.) Second, you can't be a successful critic if too many people agree with you. (The biggest conformist, Keith Phipps, tops the list at 83 percent.) I wonder if there's a third lesson, too. It's striking that White is so perfectly positioned at the center of the graph, while his colleagues cluster so neatly a little farther down—at what might be deemed a respectable level of dissent. Could it be that professional film critics (not amateurs like me) somehow keep track, consciously or not, of how often they rock the boat?
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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, opening today, will likely become the fourth 3-D movie this year to gross over $50 million. The basic technology is old—and for some, including Slate's Daniel Engber, still a headache—but the genre may have finally overcome its boom-and-bust cycle of past decades.
Stereography, or 3-D photography, has had less luck. It was among the most popular photographic formats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Each stereograph card presents two slightly different images of the same scene, which when viewed properly create an illusion of depth. In stereography's heyday, middle-class families stocked their homes with the stereographic images of lands too distant to visit. Teachers wove stereographs into lessons about history, botany, and geology. The military used the technology for aerial reconnaisance. Stereography's popularity, however, faded quickly with the advent of television and color photography after World War II. Since then, 3-D photography has largely been relegated to the plastic View-Master children's toy, also waning in popularity. Could the box-office bonanza for 3-D movies drive a stereography renaissance?
There's much to admire about the medium. Unlike 3-D movies, you can view stereographs without special glasses. In many cases, the depth enhances otherwise cluttered scenes. In the stereograph above, the woman, her stereograph viewer, her artifacts, and the fireplace get the breathing room that each image of the flat pair lacks. It's also just fun to have the scene "pop" out at you. Curious viewers can find hundreds of thousands of historical stereographs, and a smattering of contemporary albums, online. And it's pretty darn easy to make them yourself, either with a standard camera or by rigging a specialized setup for $15.
Still, it seems more likely that stereography will remain a small-time hobby, if only because there's ostensibly no money in it. Hollywood loves a good cross-promotion, but there have been few if any stereograph tie-ins to the latest 3-D films. But it's not such a far fetched idea—stereographs did begin as a mass consumer product. Pixar could drop stereo pairs promoting its next 3-D film into boxes of sugar-packed cereal or a Happy Meal. Until then, I'm happily consigned to getting my 3-D photography kicks from historical gems like this rare Abe Lincoln hairdo.
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William Eggleston's one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 is a landmark of photographic history—color photography's first-ever solo show at the country's most influential museum. The medium had been maligned as too commercial and too amateurish, but Eggleston's understated photographs of Southern life were an instant hit. Eggleston's major retrospective arrived Saturday at Washington's Corcoran Gallery after having opened last year at New York's Whitney Museum. Its title, "Democratic Camera," calls attention to his populist streak. Eggleston embraced cheap, widely-available materials. His film "Stranded in Canton," restored last year and available on YouTube and DVD, documents life among hardscrabble musicians in Memphis and New Orleans as they liquor up and play; it was shot on a Sony Portapak, the first mass-market portable video recorder. And he exposed some of his most iconic photograghs on Kodachrome, the first commercially successful color film.
The Portapak is long gone, and Kodachrome will soon be: Kodak announced on Monday it is discontinuing the film, after 74 years on the market. What equipment, then, would a young William Eggleston use today?
The obvious analogy with the Portapak is the inexpensive, feature-stripped line of Flip digital camcorders. In photography, cell phone cameras might have enticed a young Eggleston with their widespread use. But both suffer from low image quality. Eggleston's work bucked prejudices against color photography's lowbrow reputation but his technical skill was still evident—his photographs have great tonal range, color balance, and resolution. The pixilation and poor light handling of the Flip and many cheap digital cameras would seem to make them a long shot for MoMAfication—though digital photographs from more expensive, higher quality cameras have already found wide acceptance in the art world. Has Eggleston's niche—working in a popular medium that still allowed for virtuosic expression-really vanished, a victim of manufacturers' bottom lines and the arms race among luxury consumer cameras? Or is there a true digital successor to Kodachrome or Portapak? Post responses in the Fray.
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Variety reported yesterday that the Steven Soderbergh/Brad Pitt production of Moneyball, Michael Lewis' great book about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistics to change baseball, was closed down just 96 hours before shooting began. Apparently, Columbia Pictures chief Amy Pascal read Soderbergh's latest revision to the script, became wary of big changes in it, and pulled the plug, leaving the director casting about for a new studio. One unusual element in the planned film? Soderbergh intended to splice "interviews with such ballplayers as Beane's former Mets teammates Lenny Dykstra, Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry" throughout.
This news raises the possibility of two grim outcomes: 1) that Moneyball may never get made and 2) that if it does get made, it may not be any good. Although interviews with Dykstra are always entertaining, the plan to include documentary footage worries those of us who are big fans of blockbuster Soderbergh (director of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven movies) and less enamored of his arty, experimental alter ego (director of Bubble and the two-part, four hour-plus Che epic). We'd assumed that Moneyball, the tale of a general manager leading a poor, underdog team to unprecedented success, would be a kind of Ballpark Eleven: A heist movie about a team of likeable smartypantses (including Pitt as Beane, comedian Demitri Martin as number-cruncher Paul De Podesta, and charming ballplayer Scott Hatteberg as himself) sticking it to the smug baseball establishment. But perhaps Pascal got spooked because Soderbergh has something more unorthodox in mind: A star-studded feature film intercut with a semi-documentary meditation on Beane himself. We may never know!