Odds & Ends

The intent is to blitz the eyes, rattle the ears and provide plenty of close-ups of those big, expensive stars. Pummel the audience with the package. Overwhelm them with starpower and firepower.

That's what audiences are being sold now - not films, but deals.

This dumbing down of movies - it's still very hard to believe that Miss Congeniality 2 actually does exist - has been accompanied by a dumbing down of audiences.

Schembri is at least in good company: even the best critics seem to succumb after a while. Not coincidentally, they invariably suggest movies went downhill sometime after they started reviewing (ie, when they lost the ability pick and choose what they watch). The famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote her definitive MAWTUT-B piece, "Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers," back in 1980. (You can find it in her books Taking it All In and For Keeps). While Kael's explanation differs slightly from Schembri's (she's talking about the corporatisation of Hollywood and the packaging of movies for TV), the sentiment is much the same. Indeed, the opening sentences of that essay could be grafted directly into Schembri's article:

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up.

Nobody ever hangs out hoping for great second-weekend figures, because by then the film's fate has been well and truly sealed. Big films can't afford the luxury of growing or finding audiences.

In fact, the vigour of a blockbuster's performance over its theatrical run is calculated by the rate of the audience decline - or "drop-off" - over successive weekends.

Which, despite Schembri's assertion that the fate of a film is "sealed" after the first week, means quality does matter. Just because modern movie-making loads the box-office towards the "front-end"of its run doesn't mean subsequent weeks can be disregarded. While it's true that blockbusters will almost never grow an audience after their opening, holding one is highly desirable. That's why Titanic made so much money - it got a lot of return business and kept the "drop-off" in later weeks as small as possible. Studios can, to a certain degree, buy that opening weekend, but it's the subsequent weeks that make for a really big hit.

Indeed, if we look beyond the most brainless of mega-budget blockbusters, I think its arguable that movies (including Hollywood movies) are getting better, not worse. I'm not sure I entirely believe this - I said it was arguable, remember - but when there are still Hollywood movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Incredibles and Return of the King and Kill Bill Volume 2 and Sideways out there rubbing shoulders with Catwoman and Godzilla, then I feel someone has to say that maybe movie culture as we know it isn't about to die a horrible death. So while there's a whiff of devil's advocate about my argument, I think it at least needs to be made.

Look at this way: cinema is a young medium. It's barely over one hundred years old, and cinema with sound is less than eighty. Many of the film classics we know are developmental works, famous because they were the first to utilise a particular technique. The technical capabilities of cinema continue to expand, and as they do so the artistic boundaries expand concurrently. Filmmakers are still exploring the limits of the medium, which is part of what makes filmgoing so fun. This means that more recent films are at least potentially able to draw on a richer heritage of filmmaking experience. Think of it like a language: as the language matures, the vocabulary available to its speakers increases.

Which is not to say that any older film is inferior to a more recent film: few films (old or new) make use of the full possibilities the medium presents, and the form was mature enough by about the forties that good filmmakers could achieve results that still look exceptional today. (Citizen Kane, for example, is still astonishing as both a technical and artistic achievement). Yet if you believe that something was added to cinema by the French New Wave, or the "New Hollywood" of the seventies, or the Hong Kong Cinema of the eighties and nineties, or any of the other important filmmaking movements of the last fifty years, then don't you have to believe that the artistic possibilities open to a filmmaker today are richer?

Granted, a routine Hollywood popcorn flick such as Mr & Mrs Smith is not taking full advantage of that legacy. But some films do, and I think as a result we do expect more of our films today. Would a film such as Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jour (The Rules of the Game) be so acclaimed if it were released today? Or would people observe that perhaps the much-praised rabbit hunt sequence labored its point somewhat? This might seem insensitive to the qualities of that film, but my point is that the blend of comedy and tragedy in that film, which seemed so noteworthy to postwar critics, is something that we would expect of any arthouse movie released today with similar subject matter.

This is not to degrade Renoir, but to note how filmmakers since have drawn on and expanded upon his artistic approach. Another to ponder: would anyone get away with Last Year at Marienbad today? When you have films that play with the narrative reality in the assured way that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does, who would have the patience for a film that deconstructed the artifice of film but which failed to make any other coherent point?

Those are both arthouse films, but I think the argument becomes even stronger when you turn to Hollywood films. There are a lot of bad Hollywood films about (as there always were), but if you look at the general level of craftsmanship that we expect from a run-of-the-mill film, it has only gotten better. When we harken back for the golden age of Hollywood, I think what we usually mean is that we miss particular genres that have gone into decline, like musicals, or comedies of the type produced in the silent era. But there are things we have now that we didn't have then. We even have a whole new form that has appeared in the last fifteen years (computer animation) which is having its golden age right now.

Because of the way film genres rise and fall, it's very hard finding equivalent films from different eras to compare. But as an example, take a film like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. A great film, yes. But consider Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day, which is structured around the same basic premise of some kind of magical intervention forcing a man to rethink his life. Because Ramis' film builds on Capra's, it can move beyond the quite simple Christmas Carol-esque device Capra uses and get into much more complex metaphysical territory, while still remaining a light and funny film. I honestly think that considered objectively it is the better film (even with Andie MacDowell), but this is a hard conclusion to draw because of the attendant mystique that is attached to the earlier film. And this is the problem: when we compare current films to old films, the new ones lack the accompanying cultural associations and haze of nostalgia.

For another example, consider The Matrix. We have never had a Hollywood science fiction film that so successfully blended cinematic action with the kind of scientific and philosophical speculation that is found in literary sci-fi. It is, I think, a better science fiction film than any that has come before. If you compare The Matrix to Blade Runner, its immediate predecessor as holder of the title Hollywood's smartest science fiction film, you'll see how much more advanced the newer film is. Blade Runner is now recognised as a classic, but underneath its wonderful visual look it's a very simple film, with simple ideas. And they only get simpler as you go back further in time: even 2001, which I love, is not a terribly intellectually sophisticated film. 2001 and Blade Runner are both important films, but other movies since have built on their legacy, upping the ante for the kind of material cinematic science fiction can tackle.

It's always difficult to stand up and say that film from the last few years is a future classic: it can seem silly and presumptuous. If I say this about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, you'd probably tell me it was a good film, but that I was a little ahead of myself. But that's what people would have said if you'd said the same about The Matrix in 1999, or Blade Runner in 1982, or Taxi Driver in 1976, or 2001 in 1968, or The Searchers in 1956, or It's a Wonderful Life in 1946. Which doesn't mean I'm right: I'm just trying to point out that the classics of tomorrow are always sitting underneath our noses, enjoyed but not revered at the time they're released.

Critics can never spot these films with certainty, but I think it should be a part of their role to try. Apart from anything else, doing so is the best way to look past the myriad poor-to-indifferent movies in cinemas at any given time, and to retain some faith in the art form.

Update, 20/6/05: I sent an email to Jim Schembri to alert him of this piece, and he was nice enough to respond with the following comments:

Your essay is interesting, though film fatigue is not a factor, as my reviews of Eternal Sunshine and the Lord of the Rings films attest. My praise for the combination of intelligence and spectacle in the LOTR trilogy, in fact, has been comprehensive. I'm hoping they set a benchmark for the new century.

You also generalise comments from the piece to include all film, when it is clear the story is about huge-budget, mass-market popcorn movies, not films such as Sideways or Sunshine.

I know I've been a little single-minded on the whole Star Wars business lately, so I thought I'd mention a couple of good articles on world cinema: specifically, Italian, Brazilian and Turkish cinema of the seventies.

So here, spotted by the always interesting Jaime J. Weinman, are extremely amusing reports on low budget Italian, Brazilian, and Turkish Star Wars rip-offs, written by the pop-culture expert "Seanbaby" (about whom more can be found here).

If you need more incentive to read these excellent reviews, one of these films stars David Hasselhoff.

I've written before about the trick of producing an "all time top" list to generate publicity for a media outlet or organisation, and keeping track of both the silly and sensible examples of this phenomenon will be an ongoing pursuit of mine on this page. I therefore regret that in my month-long Star Wars hysteria the Richard Shickel / Richard Corliss Time list slipped through without comment. If you doubted my theory about these lists being done to boost circulation, consider the number of hits that the list produced for the Time web site: there were 7.8 million hits to the list in a week, including 3.5 million hits on a single day. Little wonder that Time have tried to keep the interest going: those stats are from a follow-up article by Corliss about how they produced the list that remains on the front page of the Time website as I write, some 20 days after the top 100 debuted. The sites' coverage is a movie list-geeks paradise, bristling with little offshoot categories: guilty pleasures (including the underrated Joe Versus the Volcano, which I assumed everyone else in the world had forgotten); scores (which snobbishly fails to list a single John Williams score); performances; shorts; and the films that Schickel and Corliss had to cut from their lists.

Unlike most of the lists I mentioned in my last post on movie lists, the Time list is pretty good. It understands the first principle of making such a list: that there's no point doing it if you're not going to sneak in a few personal favorites. (As Jack Black's character puts it in High Fidelity, "A sly declaration of new classic status slipped into a list of old safe ones.") So, for example, they include Jackie Chan's Drunken Master II, a move calculated to incite a spit-take from anyone still struggling to digest the perfectly reasonable exclusion of Gone with the Wind. I happen to think they're right to include a Chan film, since I think his work will last the way Buster Keaton's has (although I would acknowledge that there is no single Chan film as accomplished as Sherlock Jr, the Keaton film Schickel and Corliss list).

The mention of Keaton, however, raises one little oddity about the list: it isn't an "all-time" list, as many took it for. It's actually an "all-Time" list, meaning it only lists films released since March 1923, when Time was first published. This little gimmick might seem inconsequential, but the arbitrary starting date means that the consideration of silent movies has been curtailed. Sherlock Jr (released in 1924), for example, only just snuck in. It is true that most of the most often cited great silent movies do fall in the late silent period, after the Time date (Potemkin and The Gold Rush are 1925, The General, Metropolis and Sunrise are 1927, Man with the Movie Camera 1929, City Lights 1931), and Shickel and Corliss list several of these films. But the 1923 date precludes any consideration of the really pioneering silent films, and in particular, the thorny question of D.W. Griffith. His Birth of a Nation, from 1915, is one of the most influential ever made in terms of film technique. It is also one of the most racist, detailing the birth of the Ku Klux Klan (it builds to a stupefying climax in which the Klan race to rescue the American south from oppression under the tyrannical rule of its African-American population). It thus presents a thorny problem for any list-maker, and starting in 1923 looks a little too much like a contrivance to avoid having to list it.

Of course, if you think it's difficult trying to list the best of anything, you could always try listing the worst. The site eFilmCritic recently gave this a go with their Bottom 100 Director's List, which itself seemed an echo of Film Threat's longstanding Frigid 50, which each year lists the 50 coldest careers in Hollywood. Listing careers in trouble is actually more hazardous than listing those on top: while nobody's reputation will be trounced overnight by a single flop (everyone has the occasional dud), success can make an assessment of career gloom ridiculous very quickly. In December 1992, for example, Film Threat listed Steven Spielberg (at the time, fresh off Always and Hook) in the number 1 most frigid position. Within a year of that listing Spielberg had released Jurassic Park, which despite its mediocrity was for a while the highest grossing ever, and Schindler's List, which won Oscars for Best Picture and Director. (Film Threat should have expected this, since this was the same man who followed 1941 with Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T..)

But the Frigid 50 isn't really about who's career is most in the toilet: it's about people who remain big stars but are in, or on the cusp of, a big career dive. If it were really about the lousiest career, it would be full of unknowns. And even well-known names have a use-by-date where their career is dead enough that they're no longer worth listing. Number 3 on the 1992 list, for example, was Vanilla Ice. The fact that he does not make the 2004 list is not a sign of a career turnaround. Ditto Andrew Dice Clay (# 4 in 1992), or Dan Aykroyd (#15), Kathleen Turner (#23), Corey Feldman (who in 1992 had his own special "Frozen Stiff" category), and so on. (It's also, obviously, a pretty tongue-in-cheek list: the current list includes Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman jointly at #45, and demands that they "Halt all cloning experiments immediately.")

By contrast, the eFilmCritic list of bad directors does cover unknowns, but this has its own hazards. Their list is full of people who have been laboring away anonymously at mid-budget Hollywood comedies, like Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty), Peter Segal (Nutty Professor II), Andy Tennant (Sweet Home Alabama), and the like. Scanning the list is fun for the way it reveals mediocre career trajectories that you were never aware of previously ("Wow - the guy who made America's Sweethearts was the same guy who made Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise!") but mostly I felt that listing these obscure directors was a bit harsh. What can anyone do with projects like that? Could a better director than Alan Metter really have made anything more of Police Academy: Mission to Moscow? Can you really begrudge these guys for sticking it out in Hollywood and hoping that somehow a decent script will slip past the A-list and to them? Some like, the 79-year-old Joseph Sargent, are seasoned professionals who have been plugging away on both film and TV, with little reward, for decades. (Sargent is best known for the very good thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and the laughable Jaws: The Revenge. The former is a minor classic, and if you actually go back and watch the latter you'll see Sargent does try to imbue some life and local colour into the whole ill-advised enterprise.)

It only feels fair to identify true badness when the bad directors have achieved success beyond their abilities. There are a few prominent directors of action / adventure films on the eFilmCritic list who fall into this category. For example, Michael Bay (of Pearl Harbour, The Rock, and Armageddon fame), is a terrible director who deserves a higher (ie worse) listing than his #46 position. Likewise Renny Harlin (who gets #39 for his part in Deep Blue Sea, Die Hard 2, and Cutthroat Island). And Roland Emmerich probably deserves the #1 ranking, rather than #7, for being so single-minded in making crap (Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow) despite the enormous resources made available to him. But that's just my view: there are plenty who love the work of these directors. In commercial terms Bay, in particular, is an exceptionally good director, with hardly an unsuccessful film on his resume.

Which is the whole tricky thing about listing "worsts." For it to be any fun, the people you are listing have to be kind of good, which can quickly make the exercise nonsensical. It's yet another reason why you should be sceptical of anybody - like those behind the Razzies - who takes too much pleasure in listing bad films or bad directors or bad actors. But my beefs with the Razzies are too long held to cover here: that's a subject for another post, another day.