It’s pretty funny how it happens. The reason why this blog was named “play punk composition” is that there was a time when I felt that I had cracked the code to writing music. I wanted to put up a blog where I could just teach people how to write music. I thought that I could communicate something as arcane as that to other people.
I probably conceived that during a time when I was struggling with my computer science degree, as a form of a diversion. And it reflected some kind of tendency on my part, to be more of a content provider than a platform. Maybe I just didn’t like doing what goes into building a platform, which just sounded like dreary work.
And yet, in 2020, it just seems that platform providers are the ones who are raking in the dough, and basically nobody else is doing it. Content providers are not earning money. The internet was supposed to be a place where everything was available for free. And it turned out to be not a great world.
I still remember being in a train, somewhere in Europe, on the eve of the millennium, and something hit home to me: in the future, the scarcest resource will be human attention, and we will spend endless amounts of time and effort in order to capture it.
But why would we spend all our time trying to capture attention, rather than to make objects of beauty and wonder? Why is life so inefficient? I recall being scolded by my boss. You should be spending more time learning about programming and upping your computer skills. And yet, I felt, deep down, that life was about richer things, like pondering the intricacies of human existence. Deep down, I always liked bookish things more. Being a programmer was like being a construction worker. I went into it thinking that I was doing something noble. But I was probably setting myself up for disappointment in the end? If you’re doing something “noble”, then you might not be enjoying it, and what happens in the end, when you start to tire of it?
I was surfing youtube aimlessly the other day, when I came across a series of videos which were basically mini documentaries about “why this movie is great”. I thought it was nice, but I also noticed that there were just those same few films that people salivated over. There was supposed to be a canon of 100 films out there which were supposed to be great, and after that you didn’t stray too far away from the canon.
This post was triggered by a friend who watched “Parasite” one day and concluded that it was a waste of his time. He was looking for something that was totally uplifting, whereas he ended up with a film that all the critics were talking about. The first half of it was gently mocking social satire, and probably something that found favour with a lot of film audiences. The second half, which probably started with a secret underground chamber, turned out to be some kind of a horror freakshow. (This is a spoiler, but since somebody got pissed off at the lack of forewarning, I thought I’d just tell everybody that the tone of the film changes halfway through.)
He subsequently got disappointed over the film. But the question for me was not why the acclaim of the critics did not align with his taste. Of course, he was suitably scathing about it, wondering if the critics were just too high and mighty and riding roughshod over the culture, while plebeians like him would never join the ranks of the tastemakers. Of course, there was a lot of talk over whether it was totally pretentious. I also have my beef against critics who sometimes seem to love works which are too self-consciously arty and precious. I think that is one reason why hipsters are disliked, because that is self-consciously arty and precious on steroids. And I think that people who are resentful against critics are just taking that argument a little too far.
But I do believe that there’s another element at work. Critics sometimes feel that they have to ride on the zeitgeist of the moment. And that very often means that everybody has to find that “it” piece of work and fetishize the heck out of it. Like they have to accentuate that dreaded power law distribution over the attention they pay the various works of art. They have to be the ones commenting on that one or two hot topic movies, just so that their websites / channels show up on search results, and they get traffic diverted to their content. And this strategic posturing just accentuates the difference between the top 10 “best” movies and the rest of the movies.
Since critical writing went big (for me that was the 90s, but it could have been even earlier), there have been a few movies which somehow slipped under the radar. There are movies that have turned into cult classics, mainly on dint of being discovered by audiences and passed on by word of mouth. Reviews of the Austin Powers movies were generally positive, but they didn’t anticipate that the Austin Powers movies would be classics. They didn’t anticipate that people would love watching the worst movies ever made. They didn’t anticipate that Vanilla Ice’s movie would be a classic of the “so bad it’s good” genre.
Film criticism is usually western centric. There might be an undue leaning upon movies that consciously take after masterpieces of the western canon. “Parasite” got a lot of props because it used the cinematic language of western cinema. Bong Joon Ho was careful to acknowledge his debt to his directors from the West. There were other movies that don’t usually trade in the western tradition, and they tend to get overlooked.
Not a lot has been written about Tsui Hark or Stephen Chow in the western press. I don’t even know what the cult classics of Bollywood are. I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff out there but the paradoxical thing is that even though we have access to a greater and greater long tail, it gets harder and harder for anything of much use to get through to the audience.
Anyway, here’s an essay on Collateral the movie. I’ve always thought that Michael Mann was a brilliant director. Somehow, “Heat”, “Insider” and “Collateral” form some kind of a trilogy for me.
Music Composition 