Reviews

I like the idea of Grantland.com. This is the new website that was launched by Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) on June 8th, 2011. He has assembled a talented group of writers including Chuck Klosterman and Dave Eggers. Simmons, Klosterman and Eggers are among this country’s most interesting writers and it’s great to see them combine forces. I read most of the articles posted in the first few days and they were all well-written and interesting. I feel like this is going to be a great spot to read good writing, which is what many of us want most out of the internet: a handful of places to go for good writing. Grantland.com is already one of my favorite websites though I wonder whether they can maintain their current pace.

However, I cannot help feeling that Simmons and Klosterman whiffed. Grantland.com is an ESPN website. I wish Simmons had left ESPN and started this venture with Klosterman and a handful of others. It would have taken a lot of guts, that’s for sure, especially with families to take care of, and I can’t blame them for going with the security of ESPN backing. But Simmons and Klosterman have juice, they have a fanbase, and they had a chance for something BIG.

Nobody has tried Mark Cuban’s idea to monetize a written word website. The idea is that people register with a credit card and then buy articles piecemeal. Say 25 cents for an article. Or on a site like Grantland.com with longer pieces, maybe 50 cents for an article. You could add all these clicks up and bill monthly. I think this would work better than an annual or monthly membership fee. Really put your money where your pen is, make a living per article you output. (That’s how it works now but the magazines pay authors. Why not eliminate the middleman? Have readers vote with their pocketbooks.) True, it’s risky, and Simmons and Klosterman would quickly test the loyalty of their fan base. But in this (excessively gloomy) review of the site in The Atlantic, Simmons is said to get a million pageviews per column. How many of these million people would pay 50 cents per article? Surely at least one quarter would. That’s a good chunk of change. Then you could have collections of articles for sale on the eReaders for 99 cents. This way Simmons and the others could gauge exactly what their readers want and give them more.

The problem with staying in the ESPN structure is that you maintain all the constrictions of the suits. First you have the censorship, which Simmons has famously fought at ESPN. Here’s another example: the name of the website, which the suits at ESPN apparently forced on Simmons. Grantland.com is named after Grantland Rice, a sportswriter of yore. I imagine naming this website after him was an immense thrill for a handful of 70 year old retired sportswriters, at least it will be after their grandchildren teach them how to use the internets.

But as a name for a 21st century website about sports and pop culture? Grantland Rice died in 1954. His heyday was in the 1920s. I’m all for historical callbacks but this one makes little sense. I can only guess some suit high up at ESPN loves Grantland Rice. Wonderful. But most sportswriting sucks. What makes Bill Simmons successful is that he is one of the few sportswriters who doesn’t suck. And maybe that’s why people loved Grantland Rice so much. He was one of the few sportswriters of his day who didn’t suck. If so, Grantland.com should be a Grantland Rice museum & archive site, because if you need five minutes to explain the name of your website to your average reader*, and an hour of required reading (Rice’s old articles), than you’ve failed. You need suits who know when to get out of the way of the creative people. (*I’m not a sports fanatic so perhaps I underestimate G.R. Awareness. I’d heard of Rice but I remembered nothing about him. I’m guessing most of Simmons’ readers under 50 are in a similar boat.)

On the other hand, the sports blog on the site is named The Triangle, a Boston sports reference that I don’t know and don’t care to know. We get enough Boston with your stuff as it is Simmons! I’m surprised Simmons didn’t call it, “Brady’s Corner.” The suits should have said, “No. This is a national website. You can’t use a local reference. And your readers get enough Boston as it is.” But this is a minor quibble.

We need talented people who have juice to declare their independence from the suits. If Simmons and Klosterman can’t do it, how can the rest of us creative types hope to? We need them to lead the way. It’s not a pipe dream. It’s happening with the Kindle and other eReaders right now. People are bypassing the traditional publishing industry and making very healthy livings. The media in this country is controlled by an elite few publishing houses, radio station conglomerates, TV station conglomerates and movie studios. But more and more, people are finding ways around the suits. It’s happening with eReaders, iTunes (podcasts and music), youtube and various other outlets. Simmons and Klosterman missed a golden opportunity to become leaders of this movement.

I watched Gone Baby Gone recently. I had heard it was a pretty good movie but after watching 2/3 of the movie I wasn’t sure why. It seemed poorly written and or poorly edited and full of improbabilities. For instance, Patrick (Casey Affleck) plays a private investigator and at one point he kills two people and nobody seems to care. One of these people is clearly a terrible person but Patrick shoots him in the back of the head while he is sitting down. Basically, he executes him. (He’s a child molester so we don’t mind.) But this is supposed to be a realistic drama and private investigators can’t just run around killing people.

Anyway, the first 3/4 of the movie stinks. There are a few bright spots, like
Patrick’s cute girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan) and Amy Ryan’s performance. She played the harbor cop in The Wire and Michael’s girlfriend in The Office. Here she plays a very different role: Helene, the mother of the kidnapped girl. She has a strong Boston accent in the film and is convincing. But the Boston accents are part of the problem. Sometimes it’s like watching one of those English movies where you can only understand every third word.

One other thing about the first 3/4. The director, Ben Affleck, clearly went out of his way to have real people in his film. There are a lot of shots of down-an-out people who are very convincing. It’s the opposite of the Hollywood movies that show buxom blondes running around in, say, medieval England. The real people thing is almost overdone though I agree with it in theory. I hate to say a movie is too realistic when most movies are so unrealistic but I think that’s the case here on a couple counts. It makes for an odd mixture of near-documentary and fictional film.

But I’m writing about this movie because of the last 1/4. Often a movie is good for the first 3/4 and then falls apart at the end. With Gone Baby Gone, the opposite is true. It comes together at the end and I think that’s why the people who praise it do so.

[The rest of this blog entry contains major SPOILERS]

Here’s the basic plot of the movie. The young daughter of a drug addict mom is kidnapped. Patrick is hired by the aunt of the child to help find her. Patrick uncovers an inside job. In collusion with the uncle, the police have kidnapped the child and given her to a retiring police officer who is childless. The child is now in a good home and is now destined for a great life. Patrick must decide whether to leave the girl in the good home or give her back to the drug addict mother. That’s when the movie gets interesting.

What is the Hollywood ending here? There isn’t a good one. I’d say the most Hollywood ending would be to leave the little girl with retired cop. That way, we know she’s going to have a happy life. And we still have the discussion when we leave the theater: was that the right decision?

In real life, what would you do? I’m not sure what I would do. Patrick turns in the cop and returns the kid to the drug addict mother. A Hollywood ending would then be to show the mother has turned the corner, that she has given up drugs and become a good mother. That doesn’t happen. In the last scene with the mother, she MIGHT have changed. She’s going out on a date and leaving Patrick to babysit the little girl. She hasn’t exactly lined up a babysitter, though she says she was about to get a last-minute sitter. We are left with the possibility that the mother is slightly more responsible then she was previously. There is no information about drugs either way. We have some hope for the daughter but can’t be too terribly optimistic.

I wonder how much of a hassle Affleck had with the studio over the ending. It’s based on a book so maybe that helped a bit. However it came about, it’s nice to see a movie that presents a hypothetical situation, doesn’t take the easy way out, and sparks substantial post-viewing discussion.