At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:
Nanette Burstein’sAmerican Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, as if to say, “This is it! This is an unfiltered portrait of averageness!” Certainly, its semi-rural Indiana location was chosen for its middleness, both geographically and demographically––or, at least, to conform to a coastal idea of what middleness looks like. Certainly, in choosing to focus on a cross-section of subjects playing into our media-fed concepts of high school stereotypes, Burstein manages to show life at the same high school from a variety of different angles, whilst simultaneously playing up the idea that all American Teens are––really––hopelessly insecure dreamers stuck in a variety of systems and strictures that they’re desperate to break out of. But everyone prevails, because that’s what (totally mythic) average Americans do –– it’s, like, rugged individualism!
Much has been made in regards to Burstein’s alleged “manipulation” of her subjects and their lives: did she recreate email/text message exchanges or the reactions they caused? Does it matter if she did? I’ve seen the film twice, and neither time did these shot-reverse shot depictions of near-instant communication seem to get in the way of a larger truth.
But there are other elements of American Teen’s construction which are troubling––not because they came after-the-fact and weren’t produced organically in real life, but because Burstein either isn’t aware of or has made a conscious decision to ignore the very fact of “non-fiction” filmmaking that her subjects and their peers are likely most exposed to: MTV’s various reality shows, including True Life, The Real World, and, especially, Laguna Beach and The Hills.
It’s barely 9am, and I’ve already read a story that made me choke on a bagel and therefore fear for my life: Audrina Partidge, brunette scenery on The Hills, has become the first member of the reality drama’s cast to land a film acting role. She’ll play “a no-nonsense, beautiful beach babe whose boyfriend caters to her every command” in a sequel to Into the Blue, a Jessica Alba film that flopped at the box office but made gobs of money on DVD.
Iron Man dropped almost 50% in its second weekend, which was still good enough for $50.5 million at the box office––more than the weekend’s two big openers, Speed Racer and What Happens in Vegas were able to scrounge up combined. We’ll have more on Speed’s crash later today.
Steven Spielberg will put his long-in-the-works Borat-as-Abbie Hoffman movie on hold temporarily to tackle his long-in-the-works Liam Neeson-as-Abraham Lincoln movie. Personally, I’d like to see the two movies combined.
At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson rounds up the reviews of Stop-Loss, which are, surprisingly, pretty positive (Peter Keough and Bill Weber are the exceptions that prove the rule). My favorite pullquote comes, as usual, from Armond White’s mixed review: “Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.”
Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills — a by-all-accounts highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience — “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.
The Playlist passes along word that David Bowie has recorded back-up vocals for Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers album. The record’s producer, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, describes Anywhere as having a “‘cough medicine/TinkerBell’ vibe”––which, funnily enough, seems as good a description as any of Bowie’s performance as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.
In other indie-cred starlet-turned-pop star news, remember Zooey Deschanel’s album? Justin Wolfe, that smart-star who writes one of the blogs I mentioned in this post about The Hills, wrote an incredible post last week, in which he made the argument that, as “extension of their brand, from image to sound” the She and Him stuff as a Zooey Deschanel product is materially the same as Hills star Heidi Montag’s much-reviled first single. Check it out here.
Indie video blog superstar Ze Frank has issued a clip in which he weighs in on the Writers Strike. Through this, we learn that Ze watches The Hills to pick up slang terms for female genitalia, has several deeply held opinions about Grey’s Anatomy, and has apparently been spending a lot of time in the offices of studio executives, “kissing ass.” Watch it here.
This cinematic reference is, in terms of the literal conditions of The Hills‘ production, probably more accurate than most, but when held up to any sort of scrutiny in terms of the content of the show, it’s proven to be off the mark.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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At the Kansas City Star’s 
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