Crix Nix Kix Flix (Part I)

It's always kind of amusing when someone makes an observation, and then decides it's a "growing trend" of some sort without really examining whether anything's really changing or not. I don't think that a movie like 300 would have gotten a radically different reception 10 or 20 years ago by critics. And as for Norbit... well, I didn't actually see it, but somehow I think it would have been acknowledged as garbage in other times as well.

The only hint of agreement I have with Bart's column is that I have noticed there is a kind of rough division one can draw in the way that critics approach reviews. Some critics approach the review from this point: "What did I think of the movie?" This is honest, but can be a little narrow. For me to get any value out of such a review, I have to know the critic's history and where our tastes overlap.

The other point of view is: "Who will enjoy this movie?" This is harder to do and involves more guesswork... it's more like the Variety reviews, since it's speculation as to how the movie will be received. Yet a critic that does it well is, I think, more valuable than the first kind. Even if that critic doesn't personally like (for instance) superhero movies, if he or she can spot when one is well made, then he or she can write a useful review for readers who don't share his/her tastes.

By the way, nice catch on the "quadrants" thing. This gets misused a lot. I was at a business meeting recently where someone was presenting a 4 quadrant model, but said that if you broke things down further, you could have a "lot more quadrants." Out of politeness, I refrained from pointing out that they would no longer be quadrants then, but it seems the word confuses some people.

If the critics at Variety pretend to find films like 300 insulting to their intelligence, then I suggest they stop insulting ours by starting sentences with the word "Pic".

Meanwhile, Inland Empire was shown just twice a day for one week, just ended, at my local supposedly "independent" movie house in Baltimore. Naturally, I was sick all week and unable to make it. And now it's gone.

By the second weekend, it's all going to depend on word of mouth. It's not uncommon for a movie's grosses to plummet by 50 or 60 percent in the second weekend. Is that because of negative reviews? No. Is it because people who have seen the movie don't like it, and tell their friends? Not necessarily. In many instances, this is by design. It's because the hype has been so effective, and the movie available on so many screens, that most of the people who would be interested in seeing that particular movie already bought their tickets on the first weekend. One reason for staggering showtimes across multiple mall-tiplex screens is so that, if one showing in theater 3 sells out, ticket-buyers aren't turned away; they just have to wait around another 20 minutes for the next show in theater 12.

What's funny is I first saw this argument put forth by Steven Spielberg in -- you guessed it -- Variety, back in 1999 or so. It was true then, it's true now, but most people just don't seem to catch on that films are getting such robust opening weekends because the saturation levels are at all-time highs, and because competing movies no longer open against each other so each can yield maximum opening-weekend box office. And people are still somehow stunned -- stunned! -- that a movie with a bunch of harmless known actors (such as Wild Hogs) competing against nothing else that weekend can rake in such high cash.

It's because there are no other options. People don't magically stop wanting to see movies in the month of February, despite what "conventional wisdom" says about the "dumping season" of January/February/March. I remember what a big fuss Hannibal made when it came out in February and netted such a huge opening weekend. Well, no fucking kidding, Studios of America -- if you give someone the option of a bunch of gormless forgettable romantic comedies or the sequel to Silence of the freaking Lambs, which one do you think they'll go for? In droves, even?

In chasing that "opening weekend" phantom, movie marketers are effectively cutting their movie's shelf life in half. I'm not wise enough to know what repercussions this may have (and is having), but at a wild guess? I'd say that's why we're seeing a lot more crap coming out in higher frequencies. There's a lot more mouths to feed -- 52 of them a year, in fact -- and the signal-to-noise ratio is getting all out of whack.

Can you tell I feel strongly about this?

You know, the Clint Eastwoods and David Finchers of cinema really have no right to force critics into believing that psychological depth and careful craft and a lack of racial stereotyping are a "good thing." Silly, shallow critics.

To be honest I felt that "300" was just a movie that everyone had been trained to accept as legitimate because of so many comic book dramas lately full of macho posturing, some better than others. Even the top shows on nowadays have that kind of appeal (even critical darling "Lost," with a few exceptions, gave up psychological depth a long time ago, if it ever had it, and often reduces to histrionics and half-thought out philosophical musings). And I *liked* "Sin City," the other recent Frank Miller movie, but there's a difference between a movie loudly proclaiming itself as a two-dimensional macho comic book based on a film genre, and a movie loudly proclaiming itself as a one-dimensional comic book based on, you know, actual history.

As far as David O. Russel, I liked "Three Kings", not quite sure I got the reference.

I don't back that far, so I can't claim to know whether mainstream movies used to resonate longer. In the last two decades though, I haven't noticed much change as far as quality goes. We used to have Jurassic Park, now we have King Kong. Conversely, we used to have The Power Rangers whereas now we have The Fantastic Four. I'm not sure if these trends are strictly post-Star-Wars or if they've always existed.

Mainstream films do seem to have suffered similar criticism as far back as the silent era though. Even conversion to sound was just following the marketing trends, studios emulating the big hits of the era as they continue to do today. It's just that no one remembers the films that don't last because, well...they don't last.

Of course, just as you take Bart to task for expecting critics to be something they are not, I could take you to task for expectng Bart to be something he is not: logical or persuasive or anything other than utterly soulless. :)

I only see one valid point in what Bart is barely getting at. Sometimes I wonder why critics apply the same approach or even the same rigor to films that are clearly "product" as they do to, well, "real" movies. As you say, certain movies are just intended to pack in as many (usually young) viewers on the first weekend as possible. They exist for no other reason. Now some of them may be good and a critic may be able to extract something worthwhile from them, but in most cases they're not. WHy review "Dukes of HAzzard" the same way one would review "The Queen" or "Munich"? It seems to me "Dukes of Hazzard" might be better reviewed as a business launch, evaluated in the same way as the launch of New Coke or a new Wendy's garden salad.

Ken: It makes perfect sense that Spielberg would point this out, too. His "Jaws" is always credited (or blamed) for creating the modern blockbuster phenomenon. But the truth is, while they did do the nationwide marketing blitz, they deliberately limited the number of theaters to help intensify and prolong the desire to see the movie. Limit supply and demand grows stronger! They used to say that a long line outside the theater was the best advertising you could get. Exhibitors would deliberately let the lines get loooooong before they'd start letting people in, so more passers by would see how popular their movie was. And turning people away, they discovered, was almost like word-of-mouth in that it made people want to see the movie even more strongly.

But that was in the '70s, before the age of multiplexes. Perhaps now there are just too many other entertainment options easily available at the mall...

The Jurassic Park/King Kong comparison is apt, but probably not for the reasons you think.

They are both high-concept adventures with amazing special effects. But the former was a relatively lean adventure that holds up under several viewings, something that managed to show us new things in new ways... and the latter is a big bloated mess that most people can't manage to sit through a second time... a big bloated mess that could have dropped 45 minutes of its content with no appreciable loss in quality. While using existing technology with all the restraint of a 6 year-old with a new box of toys.

"Could it be (and I think I'd better switch to boldface here) that mainstream movies used to have a broader, longer-lived appeal -- to kids as well as adults, to the intellect as well as the emotions, to the heart as well as the gut -- than they do now?"

Interesting question, but a tough one to answer. I'm 28, and I'm sometimes susceptible to saying that popcorn movies used to be a lot better back when I was growing up (when studio fare consisted of The Untouchables, Robocop, Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the Indiana Jones trilogy, Lethal Weapon, etc.).

But, I wonder, is this because I'm only remembering the good popcorn movies? I'm bored, so I went to imdb and looked at the release dates for 1987 (just b/c many of the good studio fare I mentioned above came out that year).

In 1987, moviegoers were also subjected to the likes of Million Dollar Mystery, Jaws the Revenge, Superman IV, Who's That Girl?, Masters of the Universe, Maid to Order, The Squeeze, and other decidedly unmemorable fare.

But, none of those films made anywhere near as much as Norbit, Wild Hogs, or Ghost Rider, so the saturation theory probably has something to do with it. If the 1987 films were released now, the spectacularly awful Jaws the Revenge would probably get a cleared out opening weekend and play on a few thousand screens at three different showtimes, insuring it would rake in a ton of money its opening weekend, which wasn't the case in 1987.

Good and bad studio films exist in any era (and I love recent mainstream efforts from Hollywood like Batman Begins, Spider Man, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Minority Report), but...I think saturation makes today's bad films seem more significant than they are.

Sorry for the long-winded post! :)

Jim: "Jaws" is in fact the example Spielberg used. His open letter was smart and measured, and made quite an impression on my then-18 year-old mind. Every time I see these stories pop up about "the highest-grossing yadda yadda in the month of March," I wonder if these marketing and producing geniuses -- the ones who should know the trends stone cold, because that's their JOB -- just get a case of amnesia every few years. It's not like Spielberg is a small name and Variety is just some 'zine.

But then we know the answer to that one, don't we?

A bit of helpful inside baseball:

The amount of profit counted towards a film's grosses are based off the same distribution as the recording industry--100% of ticket sales at brick-and-morter theaters is counted towards gross, but only 20% of the money home video rakes in is included.

That is, if any actors/directors/producers/financiers have it in their contract to receive, say, 5% of the film's grosses, they are getting the full 5% at the box office, but only 5% of 20% of home video sales, meaning they would actually only get 1% of the post-theater profit.

So where does the other 80% of the home theater profit go? Straight to the studio. Studios can actually make quite a bit more money with home video sales, even if a larger percentage of the film's grosses came from ticket sales.

Christopher Long:

GOOD critics have hopefully seen enough movies to know between different styles and different audience expectations and how to write about their characteristics intelligently. Which usually means coming to a movie on its own terms, and discerning what it wants to do and only then judging how well it does it. It does not mean bowing down to some idea of what "people" like because people are capable of liking a variety of things if they are given access and the right context (which is why reviews can be handy for less mainstream offerings).

For example, in terms of movies about American society, I like both "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" and "Do the Right Thing". Although one is obviously a "serious art work", I won't be stingy on my praise for the other just because it's not "serious" and "deep". H&K's method is almost the opposite of the other and comes to a less complex conclusion, but I can recognize how the limited scope of the stoner movie could be made fruitful in this case. The point is that they are doing different things, and I can't lump them together even if they share the same subject. So how can any good critic pretend to compare a movie about two seventies-era crime fighters to one about the Queen of England?

What I find most fascinating both in terms of watching movies and reading critics is when a movie jumps around genre/audience expectations. Last year alone, it was cool to read critics in re to movies like "Miami Vice", "Children of Men", "Borat", and "Pan's Labyrinth". In their structure and story these movies conformed to a certain "genre" of filmmaking but were often trying to create tension between a received set of expectations and their own idioyncrasies -- whether the juxtaposed endings in "Pan's" or the distinctive, avant-garde-y styles from Mann and Cuaron, or the gross-out laffer/performance art of Sascha Baron Cohen.

I'm just here because since I read that Goldstein article I've been waiting for someone to give it smackdown.

While much stays the same over the decades in the war between critics/"serious" filmgoers vs. Hollywood reporters/"popcorn" moviegoers, one thing that seems to have changed somewhat is the way buzz generates automatic interest even when its bad. I know many people who rush to view something because everyone is talking about it even if the talk is that its terrible. These people then report to me that the film/TV show/website/whatever is indeed terrible and I must see it. When I say "Why would I want to waste my time with something terrible? Is it campy? fascinating? creepy bad? what?....And they just stare at me, baffled, and say: "You have to see it." I know people who hate American Idol and never miss it, not to laugh at it or be contemptuous, necessarily, but just so they can talk with everyone who is talking about it.

Am I wrong or is this sort of thing kind of new?

Dane Walker, I have a friend who didn't enjoy "Snakes on a Plane" but said that he was glad he saw it, more or less because "At least now we can tell our children, yup, I went and saw *that*." I stared at him quizzically and pointed out that our children will probably never have heard of it. I went to see it because I thought it might be entertaining in spite of itself and ended up enjoying it, but I don't understand the "you HAVE to see it" idea at all.

I've thought on occasion that maybe what makes great films great is that they're that much better than bad films. So the best films create a ceiling and the worst ones create a floor. Suppose the floor were much lower. How low can you go? I don't think there's a limit. And then suppose the movies that we now see as great had never been made. In such a universe, the films we see as bad here would be seen as great. Maybe, regardless of any level or range that someone outside the system might observe... well, say for instance an intelligent alien sees earth cinema and thinks it to be pretty homogeneous from its worst to its best, and his cinema is for him on a much higher level and has a much broader range between the good and the bad. I think that perhaps in everything, a bell curve naturally forms. And you can apply that to everything there is: art, morality, intelligence, any kind of saturation. But the bell curve can never be destroyed. It can only be expanded upon. So I guess we all have to work with the bell curve we have. But also the bell curve must humble us in some way. Please correct me if I'm way off track.

But the bell curve has another aspect: the critics wouldn't be connoisseurs if they had the same taste as everybody else. They'd just be normal.

But at the same time, I feel like a lot of the public just really likes the taste of shit. Elect Bush. Watch Deuce Bigalow II. Shit sandwich: tastes good.

But other things: I think that business majors have a stranglehold on the popular art world. It's the god damn business majors. Moloch, who is a business major. Moloch, who lives with the one-eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar. Moloch who surrounds himself with yes men and won't take no for an answer when demanding that the public be brainwashed. Moloch who said Ebert and Roper called M. Night Shyamalan's The Village one of the best movies of the year when Ebert hated that film. Moloch who invents movie critics to praise him. And Peter Bart is another business major Moloch.

Tangent: Comedians like Eddie Murphy who pander to a public that likes to see black people embody all the worst stereotypes about their race spit in the face of the civil rights movement.

I would agree that movies are becoming less broadly appealing. There's an ephemeral quality to a lot of movies made today, probably due to this overwhelming burden of pop cultural awareness we've apparently taken on as a society. It seems like every movie I enjoyed last year was a freakin' reaction to something. Would I have liked Casino Royale as much in a world without Die Another Day? Would Children of Men have struck me as so remarkable if not for its anti-narrative shenanigans? While this obviously doesn't apply to every movie released, and I'm sure this sort of thing went on to some degree in the past as well, I do think its prevalence may be a symptom of the very self-conscious time we're living through.

And such reactionism does lead to a narrowing of appeal. People who weren't there for the beginning of the conversation aren't going to enjoy coming in halfway through. A lot more movies are being made for a niche audience, one which has been subscribing to the feed from the start, so to speak. I'm not a horror fan, so a lot of The Devil's Rejects, say, is liable to be lost on me. I think this is related to the "having to see it" thing that others have discussed - if you lose the thread, you might not understand the next movie that comes out.

As for the people of the future, what are they going to think?* If I'm Alan Partridge doesn't end up being required film school viewing, Tristram Shandy is kinda screwed. Is a movie like Adaptation., which is actually about this issue in both story and structure, going to be completely incoherent in a generation? I think these are fair questions.

What I'd like to consider, though, is whether or not this is a bad thing. Fritz, you took Emerson's question as equivalent to asking whether movies were better before; maybe he did mean that, but I would call the equivalency between broad, long-lasting appeal and quality into question. There can be a special kind of excitement and vitality in being caught up in an artistic conversation of sorts. It sacrifices a lot in terms of universality, but it gains a lot in terms of each work being embedded in a context which can enrich it or call it into question. Or so I would propose!

---

* Oh man, I can't believe I wrote that sentence in earnest.

Jim, one thing that doesn't quite hold up about your McDonald's comparison, but actually makes it more interesting, is that McDonald's sells so many burgers because they're CHEAP. People aren't choosing between a Big Mac and a gourmet meal that cost the same. However, filmgoers ARE choosing fast food over a gourmet meal, even though they cost the same. That's what's so sad.

The only reason that Peter Bart is wrong is because he's old. Old people are always wrong. Have you looked through those glasses of his at his eyes...when he smiles they go all googly.

To your final question, the main question, it didn't take me long to consider, because I know I'm right - ahem - in conclusion it is this: in the past less movies were made so they had to reach a broader audience, now studios seem to be aware that there are different audiences for different movies, and since many more are being made each year, they can go out and make a film for each group. There is more than one type of person that can be taken advantage of my a great trailer which turns out to be a horrible movie (oooooh, I hate you makers of Hills Have Eyes 2! And that means Wes Craven!!...and his smug beard!!!) I don't think it's so much that they feel they have to make a good movie anymore through the major studios. They just need those few beats throughout the film that they can base the advertising campaign on...for three hundred there were about 70 of those beats! I happened to enjoy "300" personally. It reminded me of all of the Old English poetry I've read. Mighty warriors going out to do incredible things...like cutting the cheeks of transsexual king-gods or something like that...Yeah!

I did actually enjoy the film. Loved it. Loved "Zodiac" which had naught a moment of action in it. Remember "Chinatown" or "The French Connection"? There was characters, suspense AND action. Wow, all three things in one movie!!! They make more specific movies no, because they know they can. And when the studio is afraid of taking in a smaller, cleverer, intelligenter film - they go through one of there indie places because they know there's a market for those too! And I think with this process just as many "good" or "great" movies come out each year.

I think when Patrick Goldstein talks about being trained by this over that and by whom from whom and when...he's referring to those films that all film afficionados, majors, and yes reviewers have all grown up loving and believing that those elements are what make a great film, and those can perhaps be the only elements that can. It's not a bad thing, completely natural in fact. My brain has been traumatized by a life long ingestion of video games and "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nests". There's a nice amalgamation I think of things that younger than Baby Boomers appreciate a little more, perhaps that they identify with, on a more spiritual, child-like level. I'm rambling now I realize, so I'll stop shortly. The idea is that, yes, when people live through an era, and grow to appreciate one thing as "art" or storytelling, they will revere that as "the" style or form or genre or what-have-you. Right now many of our worlds reviewers are, yes, a little older, or they write for People Weekly, so they don't always ingest the "300s" as well as they do the "Letters From Iwo Jima" , which I happened to think was trite and redundant both visually and story wise to about a million other war movies out there, and it crawled from a beginning to a halt without saying much at all. I'd prefer a visually rapturous and cinematically bombastic trite film than one that smells of "Saving Private Ryan's" lovely odor.

Jim, one thing that doesn't quite hold up about your McDonald's comparison, but actually makes it more interesting, is that McDonald's sells so many burgers because they're CHEAP. People aren't choosing between a Big Mac and a gourmet meal that cost the same. However, filmgoers ARE choosing fast food over a gourmet meal, even though they cost the same. That's what's so sad.

It's intellectual cost. Attention span cost. If the film isn't bim-bam-boom, they'll get bored, because their attention spans have atrophied just like Andy Warhol said they would. Also they're stupid. And smelly. And Howard Beale humanoids.

Maybe the disconnect is because most moviegoers are out of touch with good filmmaking.

I think TMNT is a perfect example of the type of weekly hit you've been talking about. I was a childhood Ninja Turtles fan (still love the 1st 2 flicks), so I saw it. I admit I enjoyed it in a purely guilty pleasure sense, but within hours, I'd basically already forgotten having seen it.

This discussion basically comes down to a few central dichotomies:
- art vs. entertainment(aka good vs. popular), and
- sophistication vs. naiveté (aka intelligence vs. stupidity or the knowledgeable elite vs. the uninformed masses)

The unwritten issue in Bart's column seems to be (seems because I haven't read the entirety): why do critics and the movie going public not like the same films? In attempting to answer this, Bart appears to avoid looking at the dichotomies and indict the critics for being critics. And for assuming that if a movie makes money, it's popular and lots of people like it - so it must be good.

Critics - professional critics - are who they are because they love movies, they've watched a lot of movies, and they've been trained to recognize when something is done well. I'm not a movie critic - I haven't seen near enough movies, nor have I been trained. I would consider myself a book critic, if I published my opinions on books - I've read thousands. The process is similar between the two.

The point is that a critic can look at something that is popular and see the flaws, or look at something artistic and appreciate the years of learning and working that are behind it. The popular movie goer lacks the sophisticated knowledge to appreciate the artistry, the subtlety of how shots are constructed, how (e.g.) having those two people standing together in the background in the upper left corner is absolutely critical. They're maybe affected by it, they're just not conscious of it.

Thus it has always been. And it's not going to change.

Turning to Jim's question, were films in the 50s or 60s constructed with broader appeal? Almost certainly. In the 50s, America had a population of what? 100 million? 120 million? Now there's over 330 million - nearly triple. Niche films that appeal to proportionately small market segments still have a large potential audience in terms of absolute numbers. Additionally, disposible income has, on the basis of national averages, never been higher (and likely never will be).

The sad fact is that movie making is a business, and at some point someone has to be responsible for ensuring the movie makes money, or there won't be a next movie (and I'm not just talking about sequels, either - Schindler's List would never have got made but for Jaws).

The error, if I can call it that, is that studios are intent on squeezing every last possible penny out of each release. Movies became profitable, so more movies were made. With more movies being made, the maligned studio execs saw that they had to work hard to capture the attention of the ticket & video buying public, and do it quickly, before the next movie came out to steal the audience. And so everything became compressed - marketing became more shrill, releases came faster together, number of screens exploded, and the fight for market share became more tense. That's how the business works - it ain't ars gratia artis anymore.

The other factor is the way life is lived - everything has to get done faster, and people seldom see a movie more than once anymore. Why bother building a layered, sophisticated film when few if any people will bother watching it more than once? Why bother when those who do see it even once are only interested in a few hours' diversion, some form of acceptable group anesthesia?

I'm not saying that's bad. There have been times when that's what I wanted. But when the only votes that count are dollars, one critic or a thousand can't outvote 5 million ticket holders.

And so critics are there to be sign posts. A few people who might otherwise spend their lives being anesthetized by Norbit may follow where a critic points and begin to appreciate better things. Most won't. Who's to say which is better? For me, I say being aware is better.

Anyway, I've probably gone on too long at this point. I don't know enough about, and haven't seen enough, movies to catch a lot of the references people have made. But I'm aware of the issues because I see the same thing in books all the time.