Posted on 12/02/2005 9:09:32 PM PST by jazzo
To judge from the way the weekend's box office is breathlessly reported in the news bulletins on Monday morning, more people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies. Evidently, Hollywood's now recovered from this summer's all-time record "box office slump." Or at any rate news stories about the box office slump have themselves slumped. In a breathless dispatch on the opening weekend of ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the Associated Press reported that ''the latest Potter movie led a lineup that helped reverse the Hollywood box-office slump."
I wouldn't say the boy wizard and his Hogwarts chums exactly "led a lineup" of slump-reversers. When you look at the weekend numbers, ''Harry Potter's'' $101.4 million is more than the gross of the rest of the top five movies combined and doubled. Indeed, the rest of the top 10 between them managed $66 million. ''Harry Potter'' is an industry apart, and tells us nothing about Hollywood's general malaise, or alleged recovery there from.
I chipped in my own 20 bucks or so of that hundred mil. Went to see it opening weekend. Had a miserable time. Nothing to do with the movie. Everything to do with the theater I saw it in. It was a multiplex operated by a New England chain called Entertainment Cinemas of South Easton, Mass., and they really should make critics see the films in these kinds of joints. It was a small screen at the end of a dingy room with unraked seating and, instead of letting you lose yourself in the dark to the magic of the silver screen, they keep half the lights up for the movie. I e-mailed "customer service" at Entertainment Cinemas to inquire why, but received no response.
Small multiplexes apparently save money by hiring one projectionist to run several screens. The drawback is that one or other of the semi-unmonitored machines will jam, leading the projection lamp to burn a hole in the print. To lessen the risk of this, the projectionist expands the space between the gate and the lamp -- i.e., he shows the film slightly out of focus. I don't know whether that's why the Harry Potter I saw was so dark and blurry, but, after reading about all the lavish effects-laden set-pieces Mike Newell had put in the movie, I did rather feel that I was seeing the cinematic equivalent of a digitally remastered symphony concert played back through a 1950s transistor radio.
The average multiplex is surely not long for this world. Already, 85 percent of Hollywood's business comes from home entertainment -- DVDs and the like. Suits me. Or so I thought until, on the way home from the hell of Harry Potter, I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the ''Looney Tunes Golden Collection.'' Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: ''Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups,'' she tells us sternly. ''These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today'' -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages.
I don't know what Whoopi's making such a meal about. It's true you don't see many positive images of people of color on ''Looney Tunes,'' but then the images of people of non-color aren't terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don't think about hitting the "Next" button and skipping to the cartoons: You can't; you gotta sit through it.
A Hollywood that's ashamed of one of its few universally acknowledged genuine artistic achievements is hardly likely to come up with any new artistic achievements. As the instant deflation of that Whoopi cushion reminds us, the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump. Say what you like about those Hollywood writers of the '30s and '40s, but they were serious lefties. Their successors are mostly poseurs loudly trumpeting their courageous ''dissent'' while paralyzed into inanity. This year's Sean Penn thriller, ''The Interpreter,'' was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. And instead the bus got blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. ''We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way,'' said Kevin Misher, the producer.
But being so perversely ''non-political'' is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qaida butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, ''Hey, we'd rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change.'' But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being ''encumbered,'' it starts to look like a pathology. And by the time Hollywood released this summer's ''Stealth,'' some studio exec must have panicked that, what with all this Bono/Live8 debt-relief business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. So ''Stealth'' was a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane.
That's right: An unmanned computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is -- stop me if this rings a vague bell -- a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.
This is the pitiful state Hollywood's been reduced to. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let's make the plane the bad guy. No wonder it's 20th century Britlit -- ''Harry Potter,'' ''Lord of the Rings,'' ''Narnia'' -- keeping those Monday morning numbers up. It's Hollywood's yarn-spinning that's really out of focus, and in the end even home entertainment revenue won't save a storytelling business that no longer knows how to tell any.
Lol, the movie industry has gotten so bad that a movie many times worse than an average book shines above all others. Goblet of Fire as a book was pretty good. The movie destroyed most of the good aspects of the book, and yet is decent.
Yes, I agree...
By the way, does Hollywood still make movies?
I wonder how much longer small multiplexes will be showing conventional motion picture prints on film anyway? I would think the next step will be to replace film prints their projectors with high resolution digital projectors. There may not even be any hard copy of the movie actually shipped to the theaters either.
I'll just have fun with my copies of Maltese Falcon, Minority Report, Aliens, Training Day, and Man on Fire, thank you very much.
Xinua-English: "Hollywood studios are going to cut more jobs in coming months amid a variety of problems like lingering box office slumps, a slowdown of DVD sales growth and runway production, according to an industry report released Tuesday."
To me, Hollywood has become artless.
It is true that they are telling less engaging stories these days. I used to like movies better.
More like "yawn-spinning"...
That is the plan. The question though, as always, is "Who is going to pay for it?"
A digital theater (I been to a couple over the last few months) requires about 100K worth of equipment for each screen. Print films projectors run about 20K. It will take a bit of accounting magic to replace existing, working equipment that still has many years of working life left.
That said, I don't think that digital projection is as nice as film. On the big screens, you can definitely see the pixelization of images, and fine detail is lost. Its more like a big television screen - even at the 4000 lines of resolution that is shown (compared to 2000 line for HDTV). Even more jarring is the showing of television quality images on the large movie screens - the quality is horrendous.
Just got back from Aon Flux and it is definitely a fine screen experience. The ending does do a sort of genuflection in the direction of political correctness, but does shows how citizens should remain armed, because human society is highly competitive and people can be pretty dangerous when pushed.
Sorry, Hollyweird, but car crashes, gangsta thugs, obviously aged "stars" with too much plastic surgery, and anti-American propaganda flicks just don't cut it for this consumer.
The last movie I saw and truly enjoyed was the Kurt Russell film, "Miracle" about the 1980 Olympics ice hockey team coach Herb Brooks and the gold medal win. Fantastic and made ya feel damn good.
Hollyweird has totally forgotten the fine art of storytelling, instead it's a mindless whirl of stereotyping and boredom.
This guy has the mark. I have stopped going to the low end movies because they are so unsatisfying and for th 50-60 dollars or so they expect one to spend for a family outing it becomes more appealing to wait for the DVD or when it comes on a movie channel.
Some of the most memorable movies I watched and enjoyed in the past few years at a theater are:
Lord of the Rings (All Three Movies)
The Passion of Christ
Spider Man I and II
Harry Potter (all the moves except the Goblet which I'm seeing this weekend)
American Pie (All of them)
The worst movie I saw in a theater in the past year was
"Kicking and Screaming" but I'm sure there were many more available to choose from. It is horrible how easy it has become to watch very few movies at the theater and find that you have watched much of what was worth watching leaving little that is desirable to watch from the video store.
Oh......poor Mike Farrell. (sp?)......
did you catch him on Hannity today.....with his BS crap?
The Hollywood folks are kind of like John Kerry........no one listens, so give it up.
Dummies that they are.
That system is already here, its called Video on Demand and you can get it in your living room.
Say bye bye to movie theaters, the are going the way of druve-ins.
Exactly.
It's become a poorly-drawn caricature and parody of its former self.
You know they have Jumped The Shark when they make movies based on cartoons.
Basic plot summary of 90% of the trailers I've seen recently:
1) It's dark
2) It's wet
3) Everything blows up, catches fire, or jumps
4) And the plot is stolen from another movie...
Says it all really.
Except it will have higher resolution and contrast ratio than home HDTV signals.
Heh-heh.
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