The Counsellor marks Cormac McCarthy’s venture into screenwriting. While a number of his novels have been adapted to the screen, McCarthy has never had sole input into the screenplay – the closest he came was holing up with the Coen brothers to co-pen the script for No Country for Old Men. That movie aside, we must question whether or not McCarthy’s novels transition well to the screen. Ostensibly, they should. His novels read like film treatments. Each moment is plotted out in meticulous detail, so much so that seconds on screen take pages. The genius of McCarthy is that these many pages don’t elicit boredom. His cadence moves at a rapid-fire click while his assonance and alliteration prohibit the reader from breaking free of the rhythm of ominous and nefarious moments.

However, with the exception of No Country, these moments and rhythms are often lost in translation, something that is most obvious in the 2009 adaptation of The Road. Admittedly, the problems of adaptation to not belong solely to The Road, but the adaptation of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – as it reads so much like a film treatment – offers an indictment of the film industry’s inability to adapt without playing down to their audience.

What I mean to suggest here is that the adaptation of The Road is ruined by the studio’s refusal to embrace the novel’s ethos. Changing the message of the novel is not venal and often works out for the better when it provides two different perspectives that center on the same characters. Stanley Kubrick is famous (or notorious) for his adaptations that differ – often greatly – from their source materials. The common threads in his and Stephen King’s The Shining are the characters’ names and their presence in a hotel, but the source of the haunting and the overall development of characters are polar opposites. To a lesser extent, Kubrick’s reading of A Clockwork Orange varies from Burgess’ novel, and his film version of Lolita is Lolita in there is a young girl – albeit fairly older than in the novel – named Lolita and she is pursued by – a much older – Humbert Humbert. Kubrick is not the only auteur to take such liberties with adaptation. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood is based – quite literally on a one-and-a-half page excerpt of Upton Sinclair’s 500-page novel, Oil.

However, an adaptation does disservice to its source material when its adaptive difference are solely there to commercialize it and make it palatable to the masses, which is what The Road does.

This is not to say that The Road lacks all merit. The performances is decent. Viggo Mortensen is believable as a man who survives solely because of his warrant, his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Smit McPhee is also fine, though a bit whinier than the boy in McCarthy’s novel.

But performances aside, the film refuses to adopt the nuances of the novel that make it superb. Simply put, the film version of The Road exemplifies the need to make something from nothing The problem here is that the nothing of McCarthy’s The Road is vital to its power. McCarthy’s work pits the desire to survive against the presence and fate of nothingness, thus posing the question: why do we push to survive if survival is ultimately futile?

Perhaps this theme is one that is simply too depressing to subject audiences to for two hours. Or perhaps there was worry that watching a father and son for two hours would not generate $270 million dollars.

Regardless, the natural urge to survive is often lost in the film The Road. Granted, the need to survive is apparent. The landscape is gray, burnt, and barren. Eviscerated remains line the road, the father and son get increasingly dirtier and emaciated. Cannibals are often present as is the paranoia that accompanies isolation.

However, the mysterious urge to survive in a world plagued by devastation is missing and is often replaced by Mortensen’s voice over and unnecessary dialog between the father and son. This is the primary difference between the film and the novel. In McCarthy’s work, the text is consumed by the description of the setting and the sparse dialog becomes almost indistinguishable from the characters’ surroundings. In effect, McCarthy paints a picture of action and describes each movement, while director John Hillcoat and writer Joe Penhall choose to tell us what is going on in the father and son’s head. In effect, the exposition heightens melodrama and decreases the study of survival. To have the father say, “I’ll kill anyone that touches you, cause that’s my job,” seems redundant when we can see the father perform the role of hunter, gatherer, and protector. The father’s lament, “When I have nothing else, I try to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings,” is a beautiful line, but one that could be summed up by an emerging smile while watching his boy drink a Coca Cola for the first – and presumably only – time.

Furthermore, the persistent existence of elegiac violins (to symbolize hardship and sympathy) and guitar / synthesizer scranner (to show moments of suspense) detract from the sense of isolation, as if the filmmakers have little faith in the actual content of the tale. What I mean to suggest here is there is no soundtrack to isolation. There is nothing, and this is from where the isolation stems.

All in all, the adaptation suffers from the need to satiate audiences, the misunderstanding that the end of days needs to be exciting, and the belief that an audience can’t infer the gravity of silence on the big screen.

Pop Meets the Void is an innovative project that presumes to tackle the problems of self-promotion and success in the age of the Internet, where the music industry is suffering through the tail end of its death rattle. It’s precisely within this rattle that writer, director, and star William Cusick tells his story “through a series of parallel narratives that explore varying levels of success” in a series of fractured narratives that “overlap, intertwine and never end in this surrealist comedy.”

The narrative style that Cusick employs similarly serves to mirror the ways in which both artist and audience are pulled in various directions. This constant pulling is made doubly chaotic in an age besot with the perceived illusion of endless information, which is often slickly re-package as different forms of the same entertainment and distraction. This is not to suggest that the Internet lacks jewels of discovery and unique experiences. But, for the most part, we are drawn to certain interests – for many, it appears to be cats on treadmills and skateboards – and these interests relate to the generated pop up ads that uniquely appear on our screens. Moreover, Google finishes our sentences as we type, calculating the probability that we are looking for one of its top three autotyped suggestions.

In other words, entertainment has become much less about discovery and much more about self-medicating, or as Cusick suggested in a recent interview, “As a culture, we’ve come to treat our entertainment as therapy, and most of us want reliable, comforting narratives to disappear into for a few hours.” Ostensibly, this might seem cynical inasmuch as it suggests that there is a general decline in the search for or enjoyment of more highbrow or evocative viewing, but this point can be better understood if we look at a recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers study, in which it is suggested that 88% of viewers are comfortable watching a show they have seen in the past, 59% view something recommended by a close friend or family member, 45% flip through the channels until they find something, and 42% are swayed by an advertisement they saw on TV, online, or on a billboard, while only “4 percent of respondents said they listen to social media” (source). While intriguing, the second, third and fourth stats are tricky in that they could very well fit under the umbrella created by the paradox between unlimited information and familiarity. Taking suggestions from family or close friends is fine, but this is where we find both comfort and similarities in daily life. The 1,000 friends we each have on Facebook might suggest a large social network with myriad interests, but the dozen that we communicate with most will generally share the same interests. Those who flip through channels until they find something will most likely settle on something they’ve seen before, or something similar to that, and those swayed by an ad most likely, in this day and age, viewed it online, which means that the ads were crafted to their settings and previous searches. (There’s a reason why Hulu is continuously asking where this ad is “relevant to you.”)

So one question begged here for the artist is: How does the artist relate to an audience that is set in its ways? Cusick believes, “The conversation is consistently about artists’ responsibilities of knowing their audiences, performing outreach, advertising and promotion to connect with audiences – which in some ways makes sense. However, it is problematic that the onus to connect is laid almost entirely on independent artists and creators.” This final sentiment justly sums up one of Pop Meets the Void’s agendas. (If you’ve seen Cusick’s previous award-winning film Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road), you’ll know that his work has multiple agendas.) The age of the Internet has provided a “rebirth of the musician industry,” but the primary problem in this rebirth is that the musician is now required to become a dozen or so other people along with being the artist. Larger budget endeavors like the slew of tentpole films created solely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars – Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, Disney, and most recently Pixar (for shame!), we are all looking in your direction – benefit from the “work of professional marketing and advertising [that] eases this transition from interested individuals to complacent consumers.” However, Cusick argues that “The Internet Age is causing a class of artist-marketers to sink or swim. The major music and film studios are taking fewer chances, coupled with more folk artists taking more chances and creating more work and uploading it freely online. And then these artists are faced with either daunting self-promotion or simply letting their work sink into the void.” In turn, “Artists are pitted against other artists competing for attention and opportunities in what increasingly (albeit deceptively) appears to be a zero-sum game of success.”

Returning to the disjointed narratives within Pop Meets the Void, we can see an industry-induced schizophrenia that simultaneously offers the promise of an audience through a ubiquitous, expansive connection of networks, as well as a daunting, exhaustive requirement to undertake the responsibilities of self-promotion that can, ultimately, lead to the self-dilution of one’s work. Or, as Alina Simone eloquently lamented in a recent New York Times article about her “forced entrepreneurship” when her record label’s “website vanished without warning one day,” “I was a singer, not a saleswoman. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.” And, at times, this forced entrepreneurship “naturally winnows out the artists who lack the ability, confidence or desire to publicly solicit donations” or promote themselves” (source).

Ironically enough, the initial success of Pop Meets the Void will rely on the ability to self-promote, another skill Cusick has added to his titles of actor, director, writer, composer of the music within the film. The project is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, with an intended goal of $35,000. The money raised proves that there is an audience out there waiting to be challenged, one that understands the difficulties in finding interest despite being thrust into an age with ever-so-much-more fluid gauges of success – and illusions of the same successes.

Brilliantly summing up these difficulties, Cusick admits, “Almost everyone is a creator of something, in some form, and so the act of listening becomes integral to the reciprocal act of sharing, or in this age, re-sharing and re-posting. But that concept is at the heart of community – we ought to give a shit about what others in our community are doing, lest we cease to be part of a community at all.”

It’s impossible to see Fruitvale Station and not think of Trayvon Martin. Thinking of Trayvon Martin in conjunction with thinking of Oscar Grant, the subject of Fruitvale Station, means you’re not just thinking about those two human beings who were unarmed when they were shot and killed. There’s something bigger there. Much bigger.

We do a lot of things in America that are pretty cool. And we do several things that are the opposite of cool. Really, really far away from cool, in fact. Probably the thing we do the absolute worst at is race.

Racism in America didn’t end in 1865. Or 1964. Or 2008. It’s still there. It’s a strange fruit that refuses to rot and die. It is ever ripe.

So where does racism come from? In its most elemental form, it comes from a fear of the other. And part of what perpetuates that fear is the reduction of human beings who, for whatever arbitrary reason, are defined as “the other.” This reduction of the other creates a tragic gap between human beings where some people have to earn their humanity and some people don’t.

There’s a record out there of who Oscar Grant was. It includes all the complexities and paradoxes that were true of him and the choices he made. None of those things make him a greater or lesser human being than any of the rest of us. They just illustrate the specificity of the life he lived.

If you see Fruitvale Station—and, really, you should—you’ll see neither an apology for nor a glorification of Oscar Grant. Consequently, the film isn’t about how or why he was killed. Instead, Fruitvale Station is an expose of Oscar Grant’s beautiful, flawed humanity. It is an approximation of what happened to one actual human being on what turned out to be the final day of his life.

Filmmaker Magazine recently published an incredible conversation that took place earlier this summer between Ava DuVernay, writer/director of Middle of Nowhere, and Ryan Coogler, writer/director of Fruitvale Station. It bursts with big insights, but the one that matters most for our purposes is an excerpt where Coogler describes his intent for the film—that his work might close the tragic gap leaving one group of Americans unnecessarily afraid of their fellow citizens.

Here, Duvernay speaks first in italics while Coogler’s words are bolded:

I want to tell you about a scene that really resonated with me: Oscar, by himself, driving in his car with the music up. He’s calling his mom, talking about picking something up from the grocery store. What struck me is the profile shot of him in the car with the music on and the windows open, and he’s just driving. I don’t know how many times growing up I looked to the right of me in the car and see a brother in the car with the music up, right?

Yup. [Laughs]

And for me, to see a film in the context of Sundance, where I saw the film, I literally look around me, and it’s filled with white people seeing that same image that I see every day. I know they see it too. But now they have knowledge and context for what that brother’s day was like before that moment. Where you just see some hood in the car with the music up? No. He has a daughter. He has a mother. He has bills. He has worries. He has blood in his veins.

Life.

That scene made me cry. And we hadn’t even gotten into the narrative yet. I was that emotionally into it. You deconstructed something we see every day and allowed people a way into it. That’s one of the reasons why I think this film is so important, and that’s a lot of weight on a film. From my knowledge, the film hasn’t really screened widely in the African-American community yet, but are you feeling the weight of the way the community of black folk will take these [scenes] as opposed to the way that the dominant culture will take them?

Yeah, I feel the weight. But I feel comforted in that I was always honest to how I was feeling and how the people that were involved were feeling while we were making it. I feel comfortable giving that to that community because it comes from an honest place in me, and I’m a member of that community. And what you say is very moving about that scene because I feel like the media is how we connect with other facets of humanity. I came up watching American TV. I’ve never been a police officer, but I feel like I know what a cop says when he comes up to [a crime] scene because I’ve seen Law and Order or CSI. And I ask myself, what aspect of us are we exposing to other people? It’s like we’re newspaper headlines, we’re caricatures. Our humanity is squeezed out to the point where people who are not familiar with us don’t see us as human beings. But we see ourselves as human beings from the inside out. So I hope to capture that humanity, the stuff we’re going through every day, from the inside out.

For a “studio film,” The Purge is surprisingly edgy.

The premise—a 12-hour period where all crime, including murder, is legal so the nation can be safe, strong and prosperous—is probably hella unconstitutional.

But…Yo!…how ’bout that premise? Arguably an all-time great “What if…?”

Big takeaways from the film: White children of privilege are the worst. Their moral ambitions will cause trouble for you. Or their deluded pseudo-morality will be your trouble.

Also, people of privilege, in general, are the worst.

Finally, our state may be kinda failing. But we’re not THAT failed. Right?

“You holdin’ anything?”

“Nope.”

“Glove compartment’s locked?”

“Yup.”

“We should be good then.”

The Lil Homie pressed a button to lower his car window. He placed his hands on the steering wheel in plain sight. And he waited for the police officer to arrive.

We had just been pulled over somewhere on the 95. I thought I had seen his speedometer register 92 MPH.

“You boys know how fast you were going?”

“Sorry, officer. I got a little carried away. We’ve just come from seeing the new Fast & Furious movie.”

The officer pursed his lips to form a scolding smile.

“I’ve been hearing that a lot. That movie’s generating a good deal of revenue for us.”

He paused. His eyes scanned the car. Then us.

“I’ll need your license and registration.”

The Lil Homie handed the documents over. The cop disappeared into the lights that blinded us from behind. We waited. Silently. And motionless.

“The speed limit here is 55. I’ve written you up for 89. That’s not quite a felony.”

The officer presented paperwork to the Lil Homie. He dipped his head and raised his eyebrows to form a wordless acknowledgement that he kinda did us a solid.

“Next time, leave the movie in the movie theatre.”

You’re probably not supposed to know much about the Shin Bet. Its motto, “the unseen shield,” supplies a literal cloak for the agency and its business. Whatever its business is exactly.

The Shin Bet is commonly understood to be Israel’s internal security service.  It’s kinda analogous to the FBI. Or maybe it’s a combination of the FBI and CIA. It does some really high level shit. A lot of which is secret. And a lot of which takes place in the dirty grayness where morality isn’t as important as legality and legality isn’t necessarily all that important itself.

Five former chiefs of the Shin Bet get The Fog of War treatment in a recent documentary called The Gatekeepers. It’s a dry film. It’s intense. It’s a supremely interesting history recalled by some of the most privileged people who lived it. (Indeed, who created it.) The film exists, in part, because Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning interrogation/memoir of Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, inspired director Dror Moreh to consider the monumental task of securing unprecedented interviews with not one, but five traditionally secretive former Shin Bet chiefs.

In The Gatekeepers, the chiefs, whose tenures cover the years from 1980 through 2011, speak frankly and introspectively about their agency. What we learn about them—and about it—is that Shin Bet is essentially tasked with managing the settlement/occupation/clusterfuck that lives, dies and suffers–really suffers—in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

If you know the 20th and 21st Century histories of that place on earth, then certain phrases and names will trigger memories of a violent history unlike any other: the Six-Day War, the 300 Bus, Intifada, the Oslo Accords, Jewish Underground, the Second Intifada, Yitzhak Rabin, Yahya Ayyash, Hamas. If you’re among the lucky who lack those memories, Moreh’s documentary unpacks them pretty well from an exceptionally unique vantage point. It’s a vantage point that is intentionally biased, and in that bias exists a rare kind of honesty.

Image via TheGatekeepersFilm.com

While Moreh draws obvious narrative influence from The Fog of War, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not Hanoi. The Vietnam War eventually ended only to linger as an existential crisis for the superpower who intervened there. However you describe what has been happening in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there is nothing existential about it, and it appears to be a war without hope for an end.

As the film exposes us to the dire severity that sustains itself in the tiniest, most volatile part of the Middle East, two moments in the recent history of that place open the film’s story to suggest a grave lesson about the limits of power.

In 1996, a Shin Bet operation resulted in the death of Yahya Ayyash. To be more accurate, Shin Bet assassinated the man known as “The Engineer.” He was known as such for his proclivity at making the bombs used in Hamas operations where one human being strapped a bomb to his chest so he could simultaneously kill himself and other human beings. To be more accurate, Ayyash was the guy who equipped suicide bombers. Ayyash’s life ended when Shin Bet rigged a cell phone with a precision explosive then detonated it while he was talking to his father.

Based on that success, Shin Bet would go on to run an operation where it gathered intelligence so one of its chiefs—one of the guys featured in The Gatekeepers—could order a 1-ton bomb be dropped on the home of a Hamas leader. That one wasn’t quite as precise as it also killed a human being or two who weren’t necessarily enemies of the Israeli state.

Following each of these operations, the film tells us, the other side unleashed a variety of revenges that resulted in the deaths of lots of people the Shin Bet were, in large part, responsible both to and for.

When a man can order a 1-ton bomb to be dropped on one of his enemies’ homes, he occupies a position of power far above the ordinary malevolence that drives the great masses of true believers. Yelling in the streets and throwing rocks at tanks may be passionate and daring, but it ain’t powerful. It’s all rage. It’s almost impotent. And it certainly lacks the strategy, resources and tactical competency required to blink a building, neighborhood or city out of existence.

The exercise of that level of power exposes those who do the exercising to such destruction that, at some point, a person might achieve a deep and particularly objective kind of awareness. The destruction doesn’t soften. It neutralizes. It dims as reciprocity–whether mild or massive–washes over the truly powerful man in wave after wave. If he is the contemplative type who measures the various consequences of his actions, eventually he no longer sees his enemy. He does not even see the conflict. He sees only the destruction, and he grows bored of it. He would choose anything other than it. If only he had the power to choose such a thing.

Almost as soon as I powered my phone on after leaving the movie theatre, the Big Homie’s number lit up my screen signaling an incoming call.

“Hello?”

“What up, B! Whachudoin?”

“Comin’ out the movies from seeing Spring Breakers.”

“I saw that.”

“Word? What’d you think?”

“It was cool. But that boy, the director, what’s his name?”

“Harmony Korine?”

“Yeah. Dude from Kids. He been listening to too much Robert Plant.”

“Zeppelin? Uh…how so?”

“You know that scene in the beginning when those two church chicks are telling Selena Gomez about how her friends are some demon girls?”

“Yeah…”

“Same thing as that Zeppelin song where he says, ‘The soul of a woman was created below…’ Ya feel me?”

“Um…I guess…But there was a lot more to the movie than that.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway…You comin’ by the house tonight to get these Wizards tickets before I leave town tomorrow?”

“Yeah. On my way now.”

“Bet. Peace.”

The screen went dark again. I slid my phone into the front right pocket of my jeans and raised my hand to signal a taxi.

Like the novel on which it is based, Life of Pi is often heavy-handed on the metaphors, but its beauty and seamless use of CGI overshadows most narrative deficiencies. This is not to say that the story, as a whole, is poor or poorly written, just that the exposition at the end to summarize the theme of the previous two hours feels a bit unnecessary and distracting. Sure, there’s an overall relevant comment on interpretation (as it pertains to life and religion); I’m just not sure it needed to be spoon-fed to the audience, but I digress.

As the survivor of a terrible tragedy that claimed his parents and a number of other lives, Pi is sought to inspire a blocked author (and, perhaps, make him belief in God). While the story is fun, the special effects make it real. The tiger that made the book – by most accounts – un-adaptable is incorporated smoothly and beautifully into the waterlogged setting.

But herein lies the rub. Yes, the film is beautiful. The colors are brilliant. The character is charming. But, does this warrant Ang Lee’s second Academy Award for Best Director. Don’t misunderstand; I like Lee a lot. I thought he deserved to win for Brokeback Mountain, and probably should have napped a statuette for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Furthermore, The Ice Storm, which is also adapted from a rather deep novel by Rick Moody, is one of my favorite films. So, this is not meant to be a knock on Lee. Rather, it’s a question as to whether or not the director should be credited for stunning visual effects.

James Cameron, in his win for Titanic, first prompted this argument, but the CGI available in 1997 was, as a whole, drastically immature in comparison to today’s capabilities. That said, if awards are given to directors with amazing special effects houses, then Cameron probably should have won a second Oscar for Avatar. But he didn’t. As I’ve noted a number of times, I’m no fan of Avatar and wouldn’t have awarded Cameron an Oscar because much of the direction was taken over by a computer graphics program.

So, I wonder whether I would have awarded Lee an Oscar for having some of the same tools in his box. Avatar’s story was basic at best. And Life of Pi, while interesting, boils down to a pretty transparent metaphor on religion. On the surface, it’s more complex than Avatar. (To its credit, there’s a more palpable connection between Pi and the audience than any of the Navii or cartoonish humans in Avatar.) However, I’m not sure that the metaphors, cute animals, and fun play on the name “Pi” makes the story more well-rounded, or just equipped with more endearing moments.

But again, should Lee be credited with how we find some sort of connection with a cartoon tiger?

If the animation lines around the tiger were more obvious, it would have been a distraction, so any connection between him and Pi would be voided. However, Lee did not control the animation. He controlled the story board and directed the main actor around where the animation was presumed to be. But, the presence of the animation is created by the visual effects house, a presence that includes the tiger, the ocean, the sky, the ship, and the island – so, about two-thirds of the films that exist outside of Pi’s house and his elementary school.

Now, if Lee were to have made this film without a wealth of special effects — perhaps intimating the tiger and its ferocity, using close-ups on Pi to show just how isolating floating around the ocean is, instead of wide-angle shots of the ocean and its consistent storms – then it would have been a more incredible feat to direct an “unadaptable” film. But this isn’t what happened.

Lee was afforded the benefit of a VFX studio that performed phenomenal work on this film.

With Dr. No as a starting point, it’s a bit hard to believe that the James Bond franchise has lasted for fifty years. This is not meant to completely castigate the film, but its fairly linear narrative, one-note Lothario protagonist, and rather inorganic connection to the United States space program and nuclear war wouldn’t seem to bode well for a five-decade spanning franchise.

And this is the miraculous beauty behind the films inspired by – and some directly from – Ian Fleming’s novels. Until the most recent Daniel Craig-driven incarnations, there is no arc.

Bond is Bond, the super spy from MI6, the man who can get every woman he wants and breaks the hearts of those he doesn’t. And that’s it. In a number of films, the villains steal the show. Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) in Spiderman 2 and the Joker (Heath Ledger) come to mind. The protagonists in those films, while slightly interesting, are pretty basic and stagnant. The Bond franchise (Skyfall notwithstanding) doesn’t benefit from amazingly nefarious and believable villains. Instead, they are nearly as cartoonish as 007 himself, but yet we keep watching.

Perhaps it’s for the gadgets and the incredible situations from which he improbably escapes.

Perhaps it’s the blatantly sexual monikers given to the interchangeable women.

Perhaps it’s the Oscar-winning songs that introduce and provide a précis for the movie and the man’s motivation.

Perhaps it’s because Bond is a constant. He is, in a sense, what we aspire to be. As the series has progressed, the women have become more relevant and their characters have been given over to bigger-name actresses, so Bond’s actions have become slightly (slightly)less sexist and the stories slightly less misogynist when the men and woman are on a touch more of an equal footing.

But Bond is still Bond. He still snatches life from the jaws of death, wriggles his way out of far-fetched situations and ends up seducing anyone he wants. The nuclear allegories are still present, as is SPECTRE, a terrorist group that seems to last longer than most government organizations, which is quite the testament to their leadership, but I digress.

The biggest draw of Bond is the lack of consequences, something made doubly apparent at the end of Dr. No. Admittedly, throughout the film, Bond goes pretty much unscathed. His unfortunate love of coffee and women in skimpy robes gets him poisoned, but even then, the primary result is sleep. Even his exposure to radiation results in a brief scrub down and a pass through a series of showers, something to remind the audience of the severity of radiation, but also to ensure them that it can be contained. (A nice addition for a movie released at the height of the Cold War.)

But the end of Dr. No shows us just how important Bond feels he is and how little he contemplates the opposite. As he and Honey Ryder (not nearly as glamorous as Pussy Galore) are drifting about the Atlantic in a small boat without a motor or apparent paddles, the CIA arrives (with the Coast Guard?) and throws Bond a rope. But shortly after grabbing hold of apparent salvation, his libido supersedes any sense of urgency and Ryder becomes his salvific totem.

As Bond lets the rope slide through his fingers and out of his hand, he and Ryder kiss and the camera tilts up and out of view of their subsequent endeavors, while we take position with the CIA, watching Bond’s boat drift, and all we can do is wait for him.

We meet Bond from two unassuming hands at a gaming table, but we know he is there from the money he rakes from the dealer and his opponent. The same is true at the end of Dr. No. We attempt to spy on what he’s doing, but we can’t. And we can’t let him drift there forever. We’ll find him again, many times over.

It’s a very casual, highly irreverent program. Generally, there’s alcohol involved. Although no one can be sure precisely how much.

The point of it is to celebrate the work associated with bringing a film to life outside of the major studio system. It typically features stars of varying luminance, but it’s always an occasion to honor the boot-strappers, the garage filmmakers and the people who accumulated massive personal credit card debt (or turned to Kickstarter) to finance their passion projects.

Independent filmmaking is not a homogenous endeavor. There are the people whose films slide eagerly into the crappy daytime slots at tiny film festivals in places very, very far from Hollywood and Highland. There are the people whose completed films are tagged “Independent” so they can be buried somewhere on Netflix Instant. And there are the people whose films run for two or three months at indie cinemas in the top 50 US markets before being sold for all of the non-NATO media platforms.

At this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony, host Andy Samberg included a gag in his opening monologue acknowledging the class of people who are free to choose the indie path:

As much as the Spirit Awards may want to position itself as a kitchen-sink collection of noble yeomen who lack the power, glamour and prestige of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people who move in the indie world are not so motley. Not the most successful ones, anyway. And if you hope to have a career as a performer in or maker of any kind of films, there is a game to be played. The same game played in other industries. Mostly by start-ups.

When Dennis Quaid took the stage to announce the winner of Best Feature at the 2013 Film Independent Spirit Awards, he began with a line that went like this:

“In a world where Big Box Marts are popping up everywhere, I think we all understand the value of mom and pop stores.”

What Quaid suggests sounds very anachronistic. It’s a small grocery. It’s a rusty hardware store. Only one family has ever owned and operated the place. It receives mail somewhere on Main Street. It’s a dreamy concept of Americana. But it’s not really how we do things.

What we really do lines up more closely with “start-up” than “mom and pop.” And what “start-up” implies is that we want to prove the concept for our business idea so we can seduce a larger, established company to acquire the company we’re running out of our garage. Or maybe we want to cash out via an IPO. Either way, it’s all business. Even if it starts, in part, as a labor of love.

Show business is no different. The big winners at the Film Independent Spirt Awards have partnerships with companies like Warner Brothers, Fox Searchlight, The Weinstein Company, Focus Features and even PBS. Most of those arrangements are about distribution and were initiated after the films were finished being made. A bit like the arrangements people in other industries pursue after their idea is proven as a manufacturable product. None of these things are necessarily bad. It’s just how things get done.

All of which, I suppose, is to say that the casual, irreverent awards show with the name that fills a mouth, the Film Independent Spirit Awards, is very aptly named. You can celebrate independent filmmaking in spirit. But you just can’t separate it completely from the dirty, shiny dealings of show business.