Posted on 07/23/2005 4:31:17 PM PDT by MadIvan
‘You can take Hollywood for granted like I did,” says a character in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. “Or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
If that was true decades ago, it is truer today. I have yet to find any American grown-up who disagrees with the notion that Hollywood movies today are unprecedentedly bad. But nobody quite understands why.
It has always been true that Hollywood put commerce before art. It has always been true that celebrity often drove casting, and that sex drove celebrity. But none of that glorious sordid American reality produced movies as bad as the ones we now have to endure.
Take the two films that a wonderful actress, Nicole Kidman, has starred in over the past two summers. Last year she appeared in a remake of The Stepford Wives. The original was a campy, creepy 1970s feminist screed. The Kidman version was an artless, humour-free, dumb-as-a-post sitcom with a logic-free plot.
This summer she starred as Samantha in another painful, universally-panned remake, of the cheerful early 1960s sitcom Bewitched. What exactly was an actress of Kidman’s calibre doing anywhere near it? Perhaps the most concise answer is money. The old studio system was geared toward raking in the dollars, but it also kept costs down. Stars were contracted to studios and were unable to leverage up to $20m a movie or a cut of the profits. Expensive visual effects were yet to be invented. The massive Lucas-Spielberg formula for the summer blockbuster — with advertising and marketing budgets to match — was in the future. And so, as the film critic David Thomson points out in his new book The Whole Equation (yes, he cites the Fitzgerald quote in his title), more movies were made.
In its prime Hollywood used to churn out up to 700 a year; now it’s 200 tops. With fewer and far more expensive movies you tend to take fewer risks with any individual one. And so you tend toward bankable celebrities and concepts that will guarantee sales.
A couple of years ago Thomson related the problem in an interview with the journalist Robert Birnbaum: “Someone comes along and says, ‘Look, Tom Cruise is a secret agent. Goes all over the world. Beautiful exotic locations. Lot of very high-tech machinery. Four or five beautiful women. Two or three major supporting actors as villains. Do you like it?’” The script, the storyline, the characters, the photography are almost afterthoughts.
And so you get something like this summer’s War of the Worlds. It’s another remake; its script is risible, the effects are amazing (but no better any more than most state-of-the-art video games), the characters are cartoons, and the acting rarely gets beyond movie-of-the-week quality. The ending was so corny and contrived the audience I saw it with burst out laughing.
And this was Spielberg! We know he’s capable of at least competent film-making. The producers must have known it was dreadful, because they organised an absurd series of advance publicity explosions to create interest. But watching Cruise bounce up and down on Oprah’s sofa declaring his new love for a Hollywood starlet was about as interesting as watching him disappear in the movie into what looked like a giant alien posterior. (The latter, at least, got a cheer when I saw it.) There is a reason why this year Hollywood has seen almost every week’s take decline compared with last year. The audiences are catching on. They know that imaginatively exhausted dreck is now the rule.
Other factors count. As Joseph Epstein observes in the current issue of Commentary, most movies are aimed at niche markets, mainly teenagers and young adults. Intelligent, challenging adult films are no longer the mainstream. The global market also favours easily translatable special effects, crass plots and minimal dialogue.
The best comedy is now on television, and usually in cheap cartoon form — South Park, The Simpsons, (yes, still) and The Family Guy spring to mind. The kind of intelligent middlebrow of Hollywood’s past is now more likely to be found on HBO: Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Oz, Deadwood, or even the innovative comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Every now and again something in this genre makes it to the big screen, and when it does critics are so relieved and overjoyed they tend to overhype it. Sideways struck me as a classic example of this. The ecstatic reviews were more about the deluge of dreariness the critics usually have to sit through than the flawed, slow movie itself.
So why don’t the big newspapers and critics simply ignore the big movies and refuse to review them? Aren’t critics in some way supposed to check commercial mediocrity? A few of the old school still do. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffman simply refuses to review much that Hollywood produces. But The New York Times cannot. Its advertising income is heavily dependent on Hollywood blockbuster hype. And so, day after day you read critics who grew up on Fellini and Scorsese finding new and inventively ironic ways to describe The Fantastic Four.
Money also traps. Stars paid a fortune find it hard to accept modest sums for more interesting work. Recently I found myself watching Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in a film called Meet the Fockers. It was the sequel to the intermittently funny family comedy Meet the Parents. Hotel Rwanda was funnier. But watching Hoffman and De Niro tart themselves out for millions they do not need in a script whose awfulness defied belief was, well, a bummer.
Will it get better? No. Will some great movies still get made? Of course they will. At some point long after they have been distributed you’ll find out which movies they are. And that’s what DVD players were made for.
"Oliver Stone has been signed to direct the first 9/11 movie."
Well, the man who suggested a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, who has a last name with a double entendre, could at least think about his future in film making. I agree with you though. No doubt this will be a character study of the mind of the terrorist and how we should understand what kind people the Muslims really are, how these men missed their families and lived in privation, and really do not want to die.
Who's the candy a$$ who ponied up the $$ for freaking Oliver noStones to make a movie about something deserving of patriotism, and not that profoundly tiring adolescent anti-ism we've grown to know from him?
Hooah to you, AR, the man who was there.
"As DVD players gained critical mass, people bought lots of DVDs . . ."
If a movie sucks, I am not going to watch it, period, be it in a theater or my living room. Why waste money -- or 2 hours -- on a DVD?
I feel a certain sorrow on the one hand for Hollywood's decline; on the other I feel a glee in watching these shameless left-wingers get their comeuppance. Until these people finally wake up and smell the coffee, they are going to continue being out of touch with their audiences with their horrendously pointless films.
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"ALOHA RONNIE" Guyer is merely a Witness to the Heroism of Many =
'MODERN DAY HEROES: In Defense of America'
http://www.ModernDayHeroes.com/aloha
Hit: 'Resource Center'
Hit: 'Aloha Ronnie'
.
"A lot of teenagers I know are starting to watch movies from the 30s and 40s. Their favorites seem to be Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant."
My new roommate, interestingly, is also mad about these 2 actors.
As far as their interest in the films of the 30s & 40s, I think it has a lot to do with their charm. The actors were classy & elegant. In action and dialogue, they carried a certain grace and decorum. Nowadays, everyone on screen is coarse or inarticulate. (Or PC, of course.)
"Hollywood is insulting its audience, and they're not willing to pay for it."
You're so right. People are basically voting with their feet and boycotting Hollywood.
I just bought an enormous oil painting of Cary Grant in a classic pose from the Bringing Up Baby/Philadelphia Story era. It came from an LA estate sale (just whose estate they wouldn't say) and the artist caught the twinkle in his eye perfectly. While not a fan per se, I enjoy his early films and had wanted a picture of Grant because he epitomizes the wit and class of the movies of that era. (I had wanted an 8x10 glossy and ended up with a 3 by 4 foot painting!)
good choices. you are not alone. my pals in the video stores tell me the noir compalations are selling big. all the great stuff from fox and rko. check out the new brit offering, layer cake.
I was rereading the book "Donnie Brasco" a week or so ago, got about three quarters of the way through it and wondered if the movie version was any good, as I had never seen it. Got home that night, looked at the TV listings and saw it was starting in about 10 minutes on one of the cable networks. 'Twas quite the coinkydink. I watched about half of it. It was bad, it was really bad. Bad script and particularly bad casting of Johnny Depp as Brasco, and some big galoot miscast as Sonny Black. Al Pacino, normally the world's biggest hambone, was OK as Lefty Ruggiero, though. Took a great story and made it into a cheap thriller.
The problem with Hollywood is the worthless Writer's Guild union is so full of idiots that do not have any creative imagination in their heads they have to constantly ruin older and better films with a newer version that isn't worth the trip to the theater to see.
I asked the following question around a pub table the other day...what was the last good film you've seen based on an original screenplay.
It was really difficult to get an answer.
Regards, Ivan
About the only things that appeal to me anymore are old movies, documentaries, and the occasional good new movie that seemingly gets made by accident. The action movies are all big, loud, idiotic comic books filled with unconvincing CGI effects. And I guess nobody in Hollywood remembers 9/11 as well as I do, because I no longer find it entertaining to watch crowds fleeing in terror from explosions. And the comedies are mostly bad remakes of old shows I thought were stupid when they were on TV for free (but compared to the new movies, old shows like "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Bewitched" were Noel Coward).
It's like Jerry Seinfeld said when someone asked him if he didn't want to "graduate" from TV to movies. He said TV comedy is superior to movie comedy, and that when he thinks of TV comedy, he thinks of interesting characters saying witty things, but when he thinks of movie comedy, he thinks of two people looking into each other's faces and screaming as a car goes over a cliff.
madivan available now on dvd. (sweet smell of success)and the classic (night and the city). richard widmark was incredilble! directed by jules dassin.
You want to do something about Hollywood and its horrible film making why not join us in creating a Conservative Hollywood.
http://www.boondockexpansionist.org/phpBB/index.php
And count one the anime-porn industry to drive sales and innovation here
We know why. They can't relate to real life anymore. There is nothing to make you feel you are a part of the story anymore.
If you don't understand your audience, you lose them.
Last good film based on original screenplay? Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea. Eccentric and great.
Why plunk down your hard-earned money for leftist propagandizing when you can get that for free on any American commercial TV station? (NBC, ABC, CBS, etc.)
Even then, I nearly always borrow DVDs for free from the library (Well, it IS my tax money, I might as well) or use Netflix.
I watch at least three foreign films to one American-made film these days.
That sounds like it might make sense, but can you lead us to a reliable source for the figures?
"War of the Worlds should of been more about the monsters and less about the bratty insufferable kids."
That and many other reasons why this film kept me away.
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