Our collected, occasionally sporadic thoughts on hot subjects in the world of entertainment!Seasoned readers of On-Screen may well recall a time when barely a week would go by without us providing an 'Opinion' feature article on a pressing matter that had recently come to light in the entertainment industry. This year, as part of our comprehensive overhaul of our feature roster and our overall output, this particular series is making a return, albeit under a new heading ('Opinions Omnibus') and with a slightly altered format.
Instead of focusing on individual issues and debates, here we'll round up a number of topics which have made the headlines in the past fortnight or so and offer our own verdict, speculation or evaluation of the matter at hand. Read on below for the first examples of these condensed, ideally provocative thoughts, and feel free to respond in any way, shape or form via the usual social networking domains with agreement, opposition, comments, criticisms, future suggestions and the like.
86 YEARS A SLAVE TO PRESTIGE
As you'll no doubt have learned from the infinite coverage afforded to the 86th Academy Awards ceremony this morning (our round-up of which will land soon), Steve McQueen's stellar historical drama 12 Years A Slave claimed this year's Best Picture gong. Now, we're not simply attempting to play devil's advocate by asserting that another nominee was robbed of the prize- quite the contrary, since 12 Years represents nothing less than an unprecedented evolutionary step in the right direction towards a non-glamorised, unrelenting and thus unrestricted mode of cinema which one could argue that mainstream audiences are deprived of on a frequent basis.
The bone of contention for us lies instead with the inescapable fact that the Oscar panel has always sought out those motion pictures which deal with a topical, relevant and oft-harrowing period of history, rather than necessarily commending those works which stretch and/or break the boundaries (or at least offer other mainstream directors an insight into how to do so) of cinematic convention from both a narrative and aesthetic perspective. Laden with such outings avant-garde cinema may be, but for our money, their integration into the realm of the mainstream is absolutely essential to its ongoing progression and increased prominence in modern society.
In this regard, Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is most certainly a superior work to McQueen's biographical retelling of Solomon Northup's inspirational struggle to "live" rather than to "survive", for its helm takes the revolutionary technology which has rendered worlds such as Avatar's Pandora and Prometheus' LV-223 and combines it with that which both of those science-fiction efforts lacked: a heartfelt, tonally assured storyline hell-bent on exploring our race's discourses on loss, physical limitations and how we can endure against all of the odds, taking the latter ambiguous issue and placing it in a semi-romanticised (yet for the majority of the time believable) vacuum (pun fully intended) whereby Cuaron's protagonist can realise on her formative, epic-esque journey how and why to rage against the dying of the light even in our darkest hour.
For the Academy, however, a sense of self-complacency appears to guide the process of their selection of the year's winners, such that the astounding disconnection between Gravity's Best Director victory and 12 Years' Best Picture win can be 'justified' due to the latter's historical levity and the significance of its positioning within the US film industry. Groundbreaking works of cinema such as Cuaron's latest will no doubt continue to be neglected in years to come by the panel, and so long as we support their allegedly prestigious awards ceremony, we will simultaneously remain slaves to the inevitable ideological assumption of a critical and perceptional hierarchy which such a ceremony constitutes.
Just as Solomon's decade of suffering was rewarded with his liberation, surely the time has come for our eight decade-long servitude and prioritization of an unnecessarily esteemed critical institution can be rewarded with the opportunity to view films in a new, unrestrained light? If anything, Cuaron's loss is our gain, since Gravity's defeat may yet mark the crucial industrial development that was necessitated to bring us back to Earth, to see clearly the extent of the Academy's closed-minded approach to cinematic evaluation and therefore to cast their awards ceremony from our minds forever more.
THE FANTASTIC FURORE? IT'S MISSING THE POINT
We superhero followers are an eternally discontent bunch, and make no mistake. As has been the case for around 90% of announcements made this year surrounding the genre's latest instalments, news of the casting of The Fantastic Four's lead stars was met with something of an adverse reaction two weeks back, with Michael B. Jordan's inheriting of the role of Johnny Storm the unequivocal star of the show in terms of the resulting controversy. Jordan rightly responded to the vocal minority with the assertion that "they'll see [the film] anyway", but to us, the central dilemma lies elsewhere.
Once upon a time, the point could have been made that the comic-book medium was severely lacking in non-Caucasian protagonists and that those characters of non-white ethnicities who did feature in its ongoing narratives either played a secondary role at best or were reduced to a racial stereotype. In 2014, though, we have inspirational non-white defenders of justice such as the Black Panther, Power Man and even the Ultimate universe's incarnation of Spider-Man, each of whom have been received with little-to-no antagonism from their respective readerships.
Perhaps, then, our concern regarding the industry's casting of African-Americans or actors of other ethnicities in leading roles of adaptations should not be focused on the authenticity of the character-in-question in relation to their previous published incarnations (indeed, we would contest that authenticity in itself should hold no great sway over an adaptation's production, as proven by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2's inspired deviation from its source material's narrative in 2012) so much as the curious lack of 'authentically' non-white superheroes in the film industry. Quite why T'Challa, Luke Cage and Miles Morales have so far either been sidelined to TV adaptations or ignored altogether by Marvel Studios, Sony and Fox is beyond us, and seems of greater significance than the irrelevant representational subversion that has taken place in the early days of The Fantastic Four's production.
The natural hope that comes with Jordan's recruitment to the reboot's cause is that director Josh Trank's thinking was based solely on the star's suitability for the role as opposed to a mere subversion of Johnny Storm's ethnicity for the sake of it. If the latter intention does synchronise with Trank's mindset, though, then the industry and its frontrunners need to seriously consider the implications of such thinking, for by alienating those non-white fictitious constructs which comic-book writing teams have consciously formed so as to ensure equal ethnic status within their narrative universes, directors and screenplay writers risk highlighting a potentially dated approach to superheroic representation on the big-screen.
In this sense, that Anthony Mackie is on board to play Captain America: The Winter Soldier's Falcon (widely regarded as Marvel's first African-American protagonist) could and should signal the approach which studios developing instalments in this particular genre should be aligning with. While the aforementioned vocal minority's opposition to Jordan is a disconcerting issue, the notion that the industry might actively strive to avoid bringing pre-established non-white superheroes to the big-screen would be all the more unsettling indeed.
MASS DEFECT- HOW BIOWARE CAN CURE THE NEXT GENERATION OF GAMING
Just a short one to finish off- today, Mass Effect developers BioWare have claimed that their execs are currently discussing the concept of a next-generation version of their acclaimed trilogy of sci-fi RPGs. Our concise and swift response to those discussions? End them, right now. The last generation of video gaming consoles was frequently hampered by nostalgia, not only imminent nostalgia evidenced by its various annual franchise releases but indeed residual nostalgia evidenced by the plethora of HD remakes which persisted throughout the generation and consistently succeeded in underwhelming their target audience.
It's telling that by only offering direct continuations or facsimiles of popularised genres and franchises from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era in their launch line-ups, Sony and Microsoft have both failed to generate the same widespread appeal with their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles so far. This writer can safely say that he holds no intent to rid himself of his 360 this year, since Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Titanfall, South Park: The Stick of Truth, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Destiny are all confirmed to release on current-generation hardware as well.
More importantly, though, I remain apathetic towards both the One and the PS4 (though the latter will certainly be the one I pick up sometime in the not-too-distant future) due to the fact that at present, just two of the five games which I just mentioned are original efforts that do not derive from pre-existing franchises. Plenty more such efforts need to present themselves in the coming months if the industry is to move past its detrimental reliance upon sequels and remakes (a trait which can of course be attributed to the film industry too, though such a discussion on both fronts is best left for another day), and standing at the crossroads as they are right now, BioWare have the rare power to shape the industry for the better.
If a re-re-redux of the incredible Mass Effect trilogy arrives on our shelves and conforms (as reduxes inevitably must) to the law of diminishing returns, then it will only give way to further needless releases of this ilk and in doing so limit the potential creative vision of countless developers via the restrictive discourse of fantasised nostalgia in the years ahead. If, however, the team who crafted such innovative and fulfilling products as Star Wars: Knights of the Republic and indeed Mass Effect shift their attention back to the future of their studio and the means through which they can continue to subvert our expectations of the science-fiction genre through new, inspired licenses, then the industry as a whole might just be cured of that burdensome ailment which has hampered it for the past nine years- fear of the unknown.
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