Gaiman’s Worlds on Film

With the release last month of the creepy, animated film Coraline, I thought it was time to post the first filmography on Film and Libraries.

Neil Gaiman, photo by Cat Mihos

Gaiman’s comics, novels, and children’s books are widely known to librarians, especially following this year’s Newberry Award for The Graveyard Book. Film rights for many of his works have been snapped up and we’re starting to see large-scale productions like Coraline make it to theaters.

Here are five films based on the works of Neil Gaiman to keep people occupied until The Graveyard Book or Death: The High Cost of Living make their way out of production and into theaters:

Neverwhere (1996)

This BBC production preceded the novel. American viewers are unlikely to know any of the actors. For example, Laura Fraser is probably the most identifiable actor for American audiences, having had a supporting role in A Knight’s Tale. The made-for-television production values give a low-budget feel, but the strength of the performances keep things credible.

This mini-series spans six episodes for a total of three hours. As a television production, the content is somewhat restrained, although there are some scenes younger viewers might find scary.

A Short Film about John Bolton (2003)

I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know about this one until I started researching this post. Even more embarrassing for me is that it marks Gaiman’s one direction credit at this time. It’s in my queue of things to watch, and I promise to come back and revise this once I’ve done so.

Mirrormask (2005)

Frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean directs this film. The first viewing reminded me of several live-action fantasies from the 1980s like Labyrinth and The Neverending Story. Of all the films here, this one has the closest kinship to Coraline. It also features a girl, albeit older, visiting a parallel world which has an ominous feel. The cast is largely unknown, although I always appreciate a little Stephen Fry in my films.

In my experience, this was the first Gaiman film to make generous in-roads into the American markets–it could even be bought at Wal-mart. In the end, I think it was unfairly overlooked.

Stardust (2007)

The first Gaiman story to get a Hollywood-scale treatment and wide distribution in U.S. theaters. It features a strong cast including Robert De Niro, Peter O’Toole, Claire Danes, Ricky Gervais, Sienna Miller, Rupert Evert, and an exceptional turn by Michelle Pfeiffer. Stardust isn’t exactly a secret, but it is important for showing the progression of the level of production in Gaiman’s films.

Coraline (2009)

As of this writing, Coraline has earned $61 million at the box office and has benefited during a lack competition in the children’s market, allowing it to be seen by people who might have opted for something more familiar, possibly involving chases and car crashes. It feels like the most matured production, as if I’m finally seeing visual styles on par with one’s own imagination. I’d be amazed if Coraline doesn’t earn some well-deserved nominations come awards season.

Bonus Film: Beowulf (2007)

We all know Neil didn’t write Beowulf, but he did help adapt it for the screenplay. This is the most adult of the films on this list: digi-Jolie is likely to be too slinky for younger audiences. Nonetheless, I think it deserves recognition despite some flaws. First, if ever there was a man born to play Grendel, it is Crispin Glover. Secondly, the Old English dialogue for Grendel was a nice connection with the original material.

Masks Beat Oscars?

Maybe We Should Be Watching the Orange British Academy Film Awards this Weekend

Annual awards shows are a necessary evil for the film buff. For some they can be a guilty pleasure. I don’t really like to hear actors talk off-script and I know that the Oscars are a horrible indication of quality in movies, but you’ll still find me watching the broadcast basking with smug pleasure as the Academy voters prove me right about the myopic and protectionist tendencies of the U.S. film industry.

As I’ve been tagging my collection on Take11.com to indicate which major film awards they have won, I’ve noted that the Orange British Academy Film Awards seem to line up better with my personal tastes. I wondered if it was possible that I could quantitatively prove that the British Academy had a better track record than the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Methodology & Results

There isn’t an absolute standard for what the best films ever made are, but the closest thing I have found is They Still Shoot Pictures, Don’t They’s list of The 1000 Greatest Films. The site has aggregated rankings from thousands of sources and updates on an annual basis. I’ll be reviewing the site in more detail at a later time.

My first analysis was performed by taking the list of best film winners from both the British and American Academies throughout their entire runs and determining if the film had been ranked on TSSPDT’s list. Observe that neither organization has a great record identifying films that end up on TSSPDT’s list. Looking at the hit rate (number of films matching the TSSPDT list divided by total number of awarded films) for the full history of each award, you see:

• American Academy: 39 of 80 films ranked by TSSPDT (48.8%)
• British Academy: 33 of 62 films (53.2%)

Since the Academy Awards have a longer history, I also determined the hit rate for just those years where the awards were given by both groups (films released from 1947-2007 for British Academy; 1946-2007 for American Academy). The gap narrows:

• Academy Awards: 32 of 62 films ranked by TSSPDT (51.6%)
• Orange British Academy Film Awards; same as above (53.2%)

That’s right: if the past is any indication, this year’s best film only has about a 50% chance of actually becoming sufficiently well-regarded to be placed in the top 1000 films of all time.

Since the hit rate doesn’t seem to be significantly different between the two academies, I decided to look at a different measure: the average rank of films for each award set. To do this, I had to exclude the non-ranked films and I’m not sure what impact they might have. First, looking at the full history of each award, we find the following average ranks:

• Academy Awards: 391
• Orange British Awards: 380

So score a slight advantage to the Brits. A more sensible comparison would be to compare the rankings across range of years in which both academies gave awards. The average ranks then become:

• Academy Awards: 407
• Orange British Awards: 380 (Same films as above)

The margin appears to widen to the Brit’s advantage, but I also noticed that the two academies tended to recognize the same films. So I performed a third analysis excluding the “consensus” picks where the best film award from both academies went to the same film. We’re still only looking at the common years, as in the second set of results. This time I found the average ranks to be:

• Academy Awards: 428
• Orange British Awards: 375

When the Orange British Awards disagree with the Academy Awards on what the best film of the year was, they appear to have a better track record.

Analysis

While I haven’t attempted to quantify it, the one thing working in the British Academy’s favor is a willingness to award foreign-language films the best picture honor. In doing so, they have get credit for recognizing highly-rated films like Bicycle Thieves and Forbidden Games. Unfortunately, the last foreign language film recognized was in 1988 (Jean de Florette), so the British Academy may have lost this advantage in recent years.

On the other hand, the British Academy has been slow to recognize a distinctively American film staple: the mafia film. While Oscars have been awarded to the Godfather and the Godfather, Part II, both films were over-looked by the British Academy. Scorese’s Goodfellas was the first Post-Godfather mafia film to receive the Best Picture award from the British Academy. Interestingly, Scorsese was unable to win a Best Picture award from the American Academy, until Departed in 2007, while his films have won Best Picture three times with the British Academy.

I don’t know if this analysis provides any sort of indication of future outcomes. Especially troubling is analyzing the most decade or two of wins, where most films haven’t had enough time to percolate into the TSSPDT top 1000. What it does show is that buying Oscar-winning best pictures alone does not a great collection make. And maybe we should pay more attention to the Orange British Academy Film Awards.

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies

There is perhaps no better known film critic in the world than Roger Ebert. He has been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1975. Most people are familiar with him through his decades-long collaboration with Gene Siskel on the television show Siskel & Ebert. While he is no longer on television due to his 2006 health problems, he continues to review movies in print.

In 1994, Roger began a series of columns entitled “Great Movies” featuring selected films he thought were important and noteworthy. The selections from the columns have been collected into two books: The Great Movies and The Great Movies II. As of this posting, there are actually 296 titles listed in the series and new additions appear on a bi-weekly basis. The entire list, along with the reviews can be found at Ebert’s site.

I’ve chosen to write about Ebert’s Great Movies first among all the hundreds of film lists that have been published because it was my personal entry point to serious film appreciation. A person may very well be interested in broadening their film experience, but doesn’t know where to start. The Great Movies can serve as the first guide.

Ebert’s Great Movies provide not only a good list of movies, but well-written analysis. You’ll learn about director hallmarks like Fellini and parades or Ozu’s low camera angles; the historical context of a movie like Blow-Up; and connections to related works like those between Aguirre Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.

A real strength of Ebert’s selection is its wide-ranging inclusiveness. You will find a broad range of foreign-language film from all of the major foreign film industries. Ebert reaches back as far as the early silent feature films like Cabiria and Birth of a Nation, but will occasionally bestow greatness on recent films like Babel, which was listed less than a year after its release.

The Great Movies aren’t without their short-comings. From a collection development standpoint, there are more than a few titles that are unavailable in new condition on DVD* and some of have never seen a U.S. DVD release. Being a list compiled by one person, there is no avoiding biases introduced by Ebert’s personal taste. For example, Ebert has a few directors who appear to be favored above and beyond their peers like Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman. There are also a few cases which might be construed as a conflict of interest where Ebert has provided commentary tracks to films that appear on this list (i.e. Dark City, Stories of Floating Weeds).

Nonetheless, if you had to pick one resource to serve as both a collection guide and a tool for viewer’s advocacy, The Great Movies are hard to beat.

In Brief

Coverage: 1914 to present, all genres, English and foreign language
Format: Books (2) and ongoing newspaper/internet column
Biases: Heavily favors Scorsese, Bergman; Ebert’s commentary tracks, single selector
Drawbacks: Selections are not always readily available for purchase

*Unavailable as of 1/30: The Apu Trilogy, L’Atalante, Chimes at Midnight, The Dead, The Fall of the House of Usher, Grave of the Fireflies, Johnny Guitar, Last Year at Marienbad, Mephisto, The Music Room, My Dinner With Andre, My Life to Live, Pixote, Rocco and His Brothers, Secrets and Lies, A Sunday in the Country, The Wizard of Oz, Woodstock, Yellow Submarine

Is This the Blu-ray Tipping Point?

Two things recently pushed me past my personal tipping point on the Blu-ray format: I found an affordable Blu-ray player at a discount store; and I learned that Criterion was releasing its first Blu-ray films.

The first round on the high definition format wars ended almost a year ago when Toshiba officially dropped the HD-DVD format. Up until that time, it was easy for librarians to choose not to make a decision while the formats fought it out. Now that we’re getting close to the first anniversary of Blu-ray’s victory, maybe it’s time to reconsider buying Blu-ray media.

Positive Signs We’re at a Tipping Point:

Digital-TV Conversion Trickle-Down

Broadcast television will be converting to digital format on February 17th. An informal sampling of my coworkers suggests that a number of them have opted to buy new televisions over the past few months in anticipation of the changeover. People with the means may be looking for some future-proofing, opting for larger screens (40″+) capable of 1080p resolution. Over the 2008 Christmas buying season, some of these TVs dropped below the $1000 mark. These same TVs possess the minimal capacity necessary to take advantage of the Blu-ray format.

Personally, it seemed like the logical next upgrade to make for my home-entertainment setup.

Ubiquitous Rental and Sales Availability

Larger discount chains (Wal-mart, Target) are carrying Blu-ray for sale and franchise rental chains are renting them. Even in my small town, I can rent current Blu-ray releases.

Players breaking the $200 barrier

While DVD players can be found as cheap as $30, a DVD player that upscales to 1080p on an HDMI connection will still set you back $70 for more. They’re still not easy to find below $200, but Blu-ray players at that price, with their DVD compatibility, start to look like reasonable investments in future-proofing.

Bandwidth Barrier

Some people believe that the preferred delivery method for high def will be over the internet. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the sort of bandwidth needed to deliver 1080p resolution content. 2 hours of HD programming on Blu-Ray requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 GB of information. I can’t even watch YouTube videos on the fly on my home cable modem connection–I can’t imagine how long it will take to deliver 11 GB.

Campus Installation

This is one I’m curious about hearing from other college librarians. We’ve recently had a limited number of Blu-ray players installed in instructional settings at my school. Consequently, we’ve quietly built policy to handle adding Blu-ray media to our library.

Adoption by Bleeding-edge Cinemaphiles

I don’t have anything more than anecdotal evidence on this, but I’ve noticed a number of Blu-ray titles being added by other users over at Take11. Then again, cinemaphiles also latched on to the Laserdisc format.

No obvious high-definition alternatives

I haven’t seen anything yet, despite the talk of a flash-based media format supplanting Blu-ray. The longer we wait for an option, the more of a foothold Blu-ray gets in America’s homes.

Factors Against a Blu-ray Tipping Point

Retail Media Pricing

The $5 Wal-mart DVD broke an important barrier in price–less than a movie ticket, not much more than the price of a rental. Why not buy it when you paid more to see it? For me, it’s also the sort of price that makes me consider gambling on a film I’ve never seen before.

In Blu-ray land, new releases are often over $30 while older “Bargain” titles are $10 or more. I don’t think I’ll be gambling at those prices any time soon.

Marginal Performance Gain

My DVDs still look pretty darn good on my 40″ display. Only someone really looking for them (like myself) would notice compression artifacts in a film like Laurence of Arabia.

I’m also curious how much more resolution can be wrung out of some of the original film stock of older films.

Lacking Secondary Market

My personal collection habit thrives on previously-viewed DVDs. I still am not finding much Blu-ray in the previously-viewed. This is partly due to price (see 1 above), and shallow title-depth (see 4).

Limited Title List

Want a recent, major-studio film on Blu-ray? You’re in luck. Want a classic on Blu-ray? Maybe you’ll get lucky. Want an indepdent or foreign film on Blu-ray? Good luck.

Playstation 3 Lost to the Wii

The Playstation 2 brought the DVD player into a lot of homes for the first time (my own included). Unfortunately, Playstation 3 appears to have lost the console wars.

The Economy

Economic conditions might create a situation where DVD stays the dominant format for ten more years or more.

Should you be buying Blu-Ray for your library?

Naturally, it depends on your patronage.

In an academic institution, you’re unlikely to get much of a push at this time for instructional materials since they are almost nonexistent on Blu-ray. Watch for Blu-ray capabilities to show up on budget-priced laptops to get a sense when your students will be looking for Blu-ray, if you collect popular titles.

Public librarians can do some simple research to help inform their decisions. Obviously, your patronage will start telling you if you’ve waited too long to add Blu-ray to your collection. You can also have a walk through your local video rental stores and see how much inventory they’re keeping in Blu-ray. Does your local Wal-mart or Target have Blu-ray players in stock?

As for my library, the answer was a tentative yes. We own all of two Blu-ray discs at this time.

Waiting on high-def in your library? Going for Blu-ray? Let us know in the comments!