Noel: Gang, a year ago at this time, we were so
overwhelmed by the quality of the movies we were seeing that we actually came
up with a feature where we looked back at other great years for movies,
just for the sake of comparison. Well, that run sure didn't last long, did it?
I actually don't think 2008 was a bad year for movies—I'm happy with my Top 10,
and I can think of 10 to 15 more '08 movies I'd recommend fairly
strongly—but I certainly didn't see much that I believe will stand the
test of time the way the likes of No Country For Old Men and There Will Be
Blood
surely will. I didn't see a lot of greatness, in other words, or even
much that aspired
to greatness. Outside of the daring, wonderfully confounding Synecdoche, New
York,
much of the real ambition in 2008 came from blockbusters like WALL-E and The Dark Knight (and even Hancock, to some extent). Those
were the movies that stirred debate, and earned passionate defenders and
detractors. As much as I like Milk—to name just one of the purportedly serious
movies competing for our attention here at the end of the year—I don't
consider it a landmark piece of cinema that people will be discussing for
decades to come.
If I had to pinpoint one problem with this year's
awards-bait, it's that for all the usual hype about Oscar season as the one
time of the year when adults can go to the movies, I have a hard time thinking
of any of these big Oscar contenders as being for grown-ups. Slumdog
Millionaire? The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button? Australia? These are safe, cutesy entertainments
that try to excuse their shallowness by claiming to be "fables" and "fairy
tales." Heck, even Milk and The Wrestler, two movies I'm quite fond of, are simplistic by
design. Generally speaking, I've got no problem with movies that want to go
broad in their approach, or even those that try to be a little whimsical. But I
like the slam-dunks and lay-ups in contrast to the riskier shots. A
steady diet of movies like Frost/Nixon—which leave no deeper meaning
unhighlighted—gets pretty bland. I'm not saying a movie has to be
depressing or hard to watch to be worthwhile. But even the movies this year
that dealt with serious topics like poverty, mortality, bigotry, and betrayal
all felt far too insubstantial.
I want to talk about some of the bright spots and
encouraging trends of '08, so this conversation won't be a total downer, but
let's vent a little more first. Scott, what's your beef with this year?
Scott: 2007 was always going to be a tough act to follow.
At the top were three decade-best list contenders—No Country For Old
Men, There
Will Be Blood,
and Zodiac—as
well as ambitious entertainments like The Assassination Of Jesse James By
The Coward Robert Ford that could never be accused of spoon-feeding their audience.
You're absolutely right that the prestige films of 2008 are not made for
grown-ups: Frost/Nixon would have been much improved had it allowed the exchanges
between the two to speak for themselves, rather than having a peanut gallery of
behind-the-scenes advisors telling us how we're supposed to be interpreting it
at all times. Doubt is well-performed and full of delicious ambiguities about
what really happened and who's right and wrong, but it's similarly guilty of
spelling its themes out in capital letters, particularly in a final line that
drops with a clang. And though it's a reasonably satisfying fantasy, Slumdog
Millionaire
epitomizes the general lack of seriousness in movies in 2008; were it not
contextualized as a fairy tale, the film's commercial gloss on poverty would be
unforgivable. As is, I don't see why this little diversion has so many so
enraptured.
Still, I found plenty to like in several year-end
movies: Benjamin Button, hard as I tried to resist its broad emotional pleas, wrecked
me in the final hour; The Wrestler trades on too many stock elements, but is more
than redeemed by its disarming humor, authentic feel for off-brand wrestling,
and a lead role so perfectly tailored to the Mickey Rourke of today that no one
else could have played it as well; and Revolutionary Road, though stifled by Sam
Mendes' hermetic suburbia, at least has Michael Shannon tearing it up in two of
the year's best scenes. But none of those movies came close to making my Top 10
list; of the ones that did, I saw three of them back in '07 (4 Months, 3
Weeks And 2 Days, Paranoid Park,
and Stuck),
and another, Funny Games, provided more or less the same gut-wrenching experience it
did back in 1997, when director Michael Haneke made it in German. Rachel
Getting Married
and Wendy And Lucy
are the only last-quarter '08 releases that made my list, and much as I adore
the former, which sits at #1, it's really more of a minor triumph than one for
the ages.
But there was good news in 2008, too. For one, the
summer-blockbuster season was the strongest I can remember: WALL-E and The Dark Knight alone were more
thematically ambitious—not to mention, more entertaining—than any
end-of-the-year white elephant trotted out by a major studio. And both are
proof that it's possible to advance a complex, even personal vision within the
confining expectations of a $100 million-plus mega-production. The first third
of WALL-E,
in particular, constitutes the best 30 minutes of cinema I saw this year; where
other animated films settled for the usual brightly colored, sass-talking
animals, Pixar zagged by giving us a vision of extreme desolation, illuminated
only by an intrepid robot and songs from the 1969 musical flop Hello, Dolly.
It was also an excellent year for documentaries:
Critics weren't as kind as they should have been toward Errol Morris' Standard
Operating Procedure,
which may have felt like too much of an ordeal, but quite apart from being a
compelling and original investigation into Abu Ghraib, the film has a lot to
say about the deceptive nature of photography. Man On Wire applied something close
to Morris' cinematic pizzazz to tell the story of high-wire walker Philippe
Petit, who strolled across a cable between the World Trade Center towers in
1974; the focus on the details of pulling off the feat give the film the
feeling of a great heist picture, while the act itself occupies some beautiful
place between anarchy and artistry. Other gems: Surfwise, a portrait of a nomadic
surfing family that's almost too remarkable to fit into 90 minutes; Bigger,
Stronger, Faster*,
which overcomes its Michael Moore-like first-person approach to inject
refreshing candor and ambiguity into the steroid issue; Up The Yangtze, a visually striking
reverie on the upheaval caused by Chinese progress; Operation Filmmaker, a deeply uncomfortable
and very funny jab at the limits of well-intentioned do-goodery; and Roman
Polanski: Wanted And Desired, which was so effective in reversing presumptions
about the Polanski rape case that it's currently being reconsidered in court.
And I still have yet to catch up with Trouble The Water, I.O.U.S.A., or Dear Zachary, just to name a few.
What about you, Nathan? Was 2008 a step down in
your mind as well, or did it have some things to redeem it?
Nathan: To answer your question, Mr. Tobias, 2008 was both
a step down in my mind (and in reality as well) and had some things to redeem
it. Are we really all that surprised that the big prestige-y Oscar-bait movies
we find disappointing and unsatisfying year in and year out left us cold? Did
we really expect Revolutionary Road or Australia to rock our collective
worlds?
True, few films bitch-slapped audiences with their
greatness with the devastating visceral force of a There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, or No Country For Old
Men, but as my colleagues have
noted, there was ample awesomeness in the world of superheroes and animation.
At opposite ends of the spectrum, my world was rocked by the queasy intimacy
and messy humanity of Rachel Getting Married, and the epic vision of The
Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight was a culture-wide event.
In a fractured world dominated by niches and demographics, this was a film
everyone had to see. There's something exhilarating about the sense of
community a film as big and ubiquitous engenders. But The Dark Knight wasn't ultimately about
escapism. After all, the grim, terror-ravaged world of Gotham City looked an
awful lot like our own tense world. It's great entertainment that's also great
art, as is WALL-E, which Trojan-horsed an almost unbearably grim warning about
the apocalyptic consequences of pollution and mindless consumption into a
family-friendly tale about a loveable robot.
Every year, I despair of finding 10 albums I like,
let alone love, for my year-end best-of-music list. It's easier with film, but
in both cases, you generally have to look deep into the margins to find the
best stuff, into documentaries and squirmily human stories like The Wrestler and Wendy
And Lucy.
I think one of the reasons 2008 feels a little
unsatisfying cinema-wise is because this year witnessed the emergence of so few
audaciously original new voices. I suspect I could watch Synedoche, New York a dozen
times and find something new and brilliant in it each upon each viewing, but
Kaufman's achingly sad postmodernism has undoubtedly lost some of its novelty.
I think it's heartening that some of the year's
biggest films took some of its biggest chances, whether it was Will Smith
taking his endlessly lucrative persona into dark, twisted places in Hancock, or Pixar trusting
audiences enough to give them a half-hour of near-silence at the very beginning
of WALL-E.
Who do you see as 2008's rookies of the year?
Joachim Trier made an auspicious debut with Reprise, but the film was haunted
by the ghost of the French New Wave, which in turn drew inspiration from
American film of the '40s and '50s, so it's hard to herald him as an exemplar
of minty-fresh originality.
Tasha: Well, the claim is that there's nothing new under
the sun, which is both right and wrong when it comes to art; it's hard to come
up with a universal, compelling, relatable story that we haven't already seen
in some form before, but in a way, every film (except maybe Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot Funny Games
remake, which I will never understand Scott's affection and respect for) is its
own entirely new work of art, even when the story and themes are familiar, the
style is influenced by previous works, and the actors are people we've seen
before time and again in other films. The question is whether the filmmakers
managed to find fresh, compelling, authentic ways to combine those existing
elements.
For me, the disappointing thing about the prestige
pictures of 2008 was that they largely didn't. Revolutionary Road felt like warmed-over John
Cassavetes, with a stifled married couple ripping at each other behind closed
doors; the performances were terrific, but there was nothing fresh there except
the specific people going through those familiar routines. Ditto with Doubt, which had a terrific
cast, but otherwise felt like a Neil LaBute or David Mamet play, minus some
swearing and sex, but with the same hateful interpersonal dynamics, choked
gender wars, and stagebound limitations. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button was another tediously
long Forrest Gump story
in which a wide-eyed naïf slowly bumbles through a long, preposterously
event-filled life, changing physically but not emotionally, and having little
to no impact on anyone but a single suffering true love. (I can't help but lay
that at the feet of screenwriter Eric Roth, who won a Best Screenplay Oscar for Gump, and seems
to be plagiarizing himself in hopes of a second statuette.) Australia kept just enough of Baz
Luhrmann's signature style to seem a little too familiar, but not nearly enough
to inject his overly long, two-movies-in-one sprawlfest with some much-needed
fun. Defiance
was a '40s war movie with a '90s gloss, and maybe a weird touch of Red Dawn. Okay, there are better
squabbling-guerillas movies, but that's the one that suddenly comes to mind.
[pagebreak]
In short, I spent November and December mostly
feeling like I was watching films I'd already seen before. Which probably
explains why my best-of list is so skewed toward people who showed me something
new, whether they were recontextualizing old films (like WALL-E did with Hello, Dolly!) or finding striking new
ways to express familiar themes (like the stunningly original Synecdoche,
New York did
with the old idea of the aging artist examining his creativity in the hopes of
reawakening it).
Or—in one of my left-field favorites of the
year, Cloverfield—applying
new technologies to an old genre. I know a lot of people absolutely loathed Cloverfield. I personally can't get
enough of it; there's so much new stuff to see that I rarely re-watch movies,
and yet I've gone back to that one again and again, just to pick it apart from
a technical standpoint—it's a seamless piece of pretense. Technically, Cloverfield is nothing new—Cannibal
Holocaust did
the "found footage from some people who died" thing first, and The Blair
Witch Project brought
it into the present and added digital video—but Cloverfield found a new way to use it
and to make it exciting, which is often all I need from a movie. But it's a
weird and disappointing year when a pop monster movie feels like one of the
most innovative films to hit theaters.
The lack of radical, completely striking new
fictional visions this year—I'd say The Fall and Synecdoche were about the only ones
that utterly dazzled me—may be why this was such a terrific year for
docs, as you mentioned, Scott. The ones that captured me this year weren't
about reinventing the documentary form, they were just about introducing us to
really compelling people like Philippe Petit (Man On Wire) and Dorian Paskowitz (Surfwise), or giving us close-up
looks at places most of us have never been: Antarctica in Encounters At The
End Of The World,
an Army training center full of role-playing Iraqis in Full Battle Rattle, a dirt-poor New Orleans
slum at the height of Hurricane Katrina in Trouble The Water, up a Himalayan peak with
six blind teenagers in Blindsight, to a series of doomed Chinese villages in Up
The Yangtze,
inside the confidences of a family of casual steroids users in Bigger
Stronger Faster*,
and so on.
Still,
I have to agree with Noel that the year lacked ambition—again, The
Fall and Synecdoche had more ambition apiece
than any three films in a normal year, but they were the exception to the rule.
Still, there were a lot of debuts that give me hope for the immediate future,
so maybe I should actually directly answer Nathan's question and look at a few
of the new filmmakers (besides Joachim Trier, whose Reprise was excellent no matter
what vastly influential French movements happened to influence it) whom I'm
expecting great things from in years to come.
Tops
on that list would be Charlie Kaufman, who's an old hand at this point as a
writer, but a first-time director with Synecdoche. Here's hoping the movie
finds its deserved cult status and that we see more all-Kaufman projects in the
future. A few more people who made startlingly assured, respectable directorial
debuts: Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Courtney Hunt (Frozen River), Lance Hammer (Ballast), Alan Ball (Towelhead), John Stevenson on Kung
Fu Panda,
Christopher Zalla (Sangre De Mi Sangre) and particularly Martin McDonagh (In
Bruges).
That last is a perfect example of a film that wasn't necessarily brimming with
the ambition to create something radically new, but was content to do an old
gangster story really well, with tight, surprising writing and excellent
performances and control of tone. Sorry, theater world, but cinema has decided
that McDonagh is a keeper; you can't have him back.
Looking
over the above list of movies I really liked and often very much admired, but
generally didn't viscerally, emotionally love, I come down to what was the
defining mark of 2008 for me: Last year was a good year for great movies, with
a small handful of them that blew us all away. This year was a great year for good movies: There were an
inordinate number—certainly more than last year, it felt like—of
films that were well-assembled, competently crafted, and utterly worthy of
appreciation, without necessarily being films for the ages, or standouts in
their field. I for one had real problems making my list this year, and I was
really torn by all the things I had to leave off to pare it down, and the
decisions I had to make; selecting my first two was easy enough, and then
things got muddy from there. Last year, the top five films of the year were
practically pre-listed for me, and required almost no struggling; this year, I
could have constructed a respectable top 30 much more readily and comfortably
than my top 10 list.
Am
I alone in thinking that? Is every year a pretty good year for pretty good
films, and 2008 only seems like that in the shadow of 2007, or was there
something distinctive about the massive mid-pack of solid, enjoyable, but not
fantastically remarkable 2008 films?
Keith: Oh, Tasha, you know I almost always think you're wrong. I
kid, but I do worry that we're putting too much emphasis on some elusive notion
of greatness that, if pressed, we probably couldn't define. Scott, you call Rachel a "minor triumph" and not
"one for the ages," but why? This is a movie I've seen twice now, and it's
totally gripped me both times, immersing me in this world and making me care
deeply about these characters, even a protagonist I would probably find pretty
unsympathetic were I to meet her. It's small, but it still feels major. So did Wendy
And Lucy,
which is about as small as they come, but still opened up a whole world of
lives lived in the margins that most people able to pay a full-price movie
admission don't usually see. Both were as vital in their own way as any of the
2007 movies we talk about so reverently. Similarly, I don't want to penalize
movies like WALL-E and The Dark Knight for their bigness. I wish we lived in a world
when such movies living up to their hype wasn't surprising.
That said, yeah, I had a little more trouble
filling out my Top 10 list this year than in years past, and I think I also
fell back on the what-showed-me-something-new litmus test. Something like Milk reminded
me it was possible to create a fairly traditional biopic that still had a sense
of place and urgency and characters that didn't just feel like a Disneyland
Hall Of Presidents-like attempt to make history come alive. But inventiveness helped
films like Reprise,
whose use of old parts seemed to me to be part of its point. How else do you
express being young, restless, and in love with pop culture in a part of the
world that seems removed from the action? And it helped Let The Right One In, which just
pretended genres didn't exist in
telling the tale of a bullied kid who befriends a sympathetic new neighbor.
With sharp teeth.
If 2008's great movies didn't arrive at the
traditional time and from the traditional places, maybe that just means we have
to look further and wider for greatness in 2009. Or maybe look twice. Noel,
you've told me that you only really recognized the greatness of your number-two
pick, Burn After Reading, the second time around. I'm curious as to whether you think
2008 will look different when we look at it again with a little more distance.
Noel: Isn't that how these things always go? We often
can't fully grasp the dazzling debuts, the larger trends, or the ways movies
capture their times until years or even decades later. For example, what does
it mean that three of the best films of this year were in some way about
elaborate simulacra? From Synecdoche's city-within-a-city-within-a-city to My
Winnipeg's
recreation of the Canada of Guy Maddin's fevered imagination to the training
version of Iraq depicted in the documentary Full Battle Rattle, there was a lot of
scale-modeling going on in '08, for reasons I can't fully explain.
The other significant trend of the year—and
another one I'm not sure is wholly explicable—was the resurgence of genre
movies swaddled in indie clothes. I'm not talking about flashy low-budget crime
pictures like Nobel Son or How To Rob A Bank either, but well-crafted tales of crime
and punishment like Red, Frozen River, Shotgun Stories, and Transsiberian. A few years back, I'd
gotten tired of the way nearly every indie film seemed to end with people
pulling guns on each other, but even though there was a little of that going on
in this year's indies, I was impressed by how well those four movies I just
cited got the details of character and place just right, even as they were
telling entertaining, pulpy stories about desperate characters. They all struck
me as far more mature than the '08 Oscar-bait.
So
when future film historians look back at 2008, I wouldn't be surprised if they
point to these smaller, punchier movies as the year's real gems. (Then again,
I'll be surprised if the job "film historian" still exists in 20 years, but
that's another discussion altogether.)
Scott,
any closing thoughts? What trends are you following into this coming year?
Scott: To
respond to some previous questions and provocations: Nathan asked about 2008's
Rookie Of The Year. In addition to Joachim Trier, who brought a young hotshot's
brio to Reprise
that perfectly complemented the young, volatile hotshot authors at the film's
center, I'd echo Tasha by offering two candidates: Jeff Nichols, whose Shotgun
Stories
had the visual richness of an early film by its producer, David Gordon Green, but
in service of an authentically nasty Southern family feud; and Lance Hammer,
who evoked another part of the South, the dirt-poor Mississippi Delta, with a
deliberate, quietly magisterial style in Ballast. I expect great things
from all three of them in the future.
And
Keith, I probably shouldn't have taken my disappointment with 2008 out on Rachel
Getting Married,
which is, after all, my choice for number one. Calling the film "a minor
triumph" says less about its estimable qualities than it does about the lack of
vision and ambition that defined most of the year's "prestige" projects. There
wasn't a film this year better directed than Rachel Getting Married, which has earned
comparisons to Robert Altman for wrangling such a free-flowing event into a
cohesive and comprehensible whole, but its warmth, music, multicultural,
humanist touches were pure Jonathan Demme. The cutting of the cake in that
movie may be the most enduring image I'll take away from 2008.
Noel,
I'm not really following any trends into 2009, though I would love to see a
continuation of the independent genre fare you mentioned, because the arthouse
could always stand to be shaken up a bit. (And you forgot to include Stuart
Gordon's Stuck,
my number 10, among the winners: Its ripped-from-the-headlines tale of human
callousness still has me laughing and cringing just thinking about it.) Mainly,
I'm just hopeful that these things are cyclical and 2009 will find domestic and
international cinema on the rebound. This year was just a weird confluence of
mishaps: All the major festivals, like Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and Toronto,
failed to generate much excitement from critics, and the ho-hum end-of-the-year
offerings may well reflect damage done by the writers' strike. To end on a
positive note, I will say this: 2008 may be the weakest year of the decade so
far, but even a weak year produces a wealth of interesting movies. The list of
good-to-great movies is still many dozens deep, which is plenty to tide me over
as I wait for that next elusive masterpiece.
[pagebreak]
Nathan: Dammit,
Scott, why must you be such a cynic? I'm the kind of guy who generally sees the
glass as not only half-empty, but laced with cyanide, but I found plenty to be
optimistic and hopeful about this year. It's interesting that you mention Stuck and Rachel
Getting Married in
the space of two paragraphs. They're pretty damned antithetical in tone, but
they also have surprising commonalities. They're both gloriously life-sized,
and have refreshingly nonchalant attitudes towards race.
The
interracial relationships at the core of both films are never commented upon,
just accepted. Stuck actually plays with race in a really intriguing, subversive
way: Mena Suvari's black drug-dealer boyfriend swaggers like a badass, but when
confronted with the morbid spectacle of Stephen Rea lodged in his girlfriend's
windshield, he quickly becomes the film's unlikely conscience. After the
hyperventilating likes of Crash, is the matter-of-fact way these films handle race
a sign of cultural progress?
Wendy
And Lucy and The Wrestler were
two more films that felt as rooted in the rhythms of everyday life as the '70s fare
lionized by many contemporary filmmakers and critics. While Stuck and Rachel Getting
Married embraced
realism, movies like the aforementioned Synecdoche, New York and Be Kind Rewind turned inward, offering
funhouse mirrors of their creators' very meta psyches.
If
I can throw out yet another big, amorphous question, are we starting to see the
emergence of a Netflix generation of filmmakers who see the world largely
through the spectrum of pop culture and their own endlessly fetishized moviegoing
memories? Be Kind Rewind and Cloverfield both struck me as movies
that would have been inconceivable without YouTube and camera-phones, and the
increasingly ubiquitous notion that the line separating filmmaker from audience
and amateur from professional is falling by the wayside, replaced by an
enthusiastic embrace of non-professionalism.
I
think it's safe to assume that 2008 will look a lot different to future film
historians than it does to us critical types in the moment. The noble, highbrow
mediocrities will be forgotten (if not by the dinosaurs at the AFI), while the
weirdoes and iconoclasts will be remembered. But isn't that always the way?
Tasha: Well, I
don't think there's anything particularly new about the ouroboros of
moviemakers fetishizing movies by making movies about making movies, informed
by their experiences with watching movies. I've long wanted to do an inventory
of movies about people making movies, going back at least to Sullivan's
Travels,
if not to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It'd be a really long list.
Sure,
given the growing ease of making their own movies with relatively cheap,
increasingly powerful home-market cameras and home-computer-based editing
suites, it was inevitable that we'd see more movies informed by or about digital
technology, and more films about people making and enjoying their own films.
(My favorite from this year was the good-hearted little charmer Son Of
Rambow.)
But that's just a minor tweak to an old, long-established case of a medium… not
exactly eating itself, but certainly nibbling on itself from time to time.
To
me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through
their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme
iconoclast, who in this industry doesn't?—and more about people filtering
the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be
caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched
Martin Scorsese's 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way
Scorsese's cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger's
cavorting on their phones. He's making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic,
polished production—and they're making their low-fi versions in the
middle of it. Or looked at another way, they're in the front row at a Stones
concert… and they're watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in
front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than
living it.
That
attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on
the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document
their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we're going to see
a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on
themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008
movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey
escapist fare, I'm suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope
it continues. I imagine it depends on whether films like Wendy And Lucy, Ballast, and Shotgun Stories wind up making any money,
or it all gets sucked up by heavily marketed blandathons like Benjamin
Button.
So
Keith, wrap it up for us. What do you expect to see more of, or less of, in
2009? Better yet, what would you like to see more or less of? I'll start you off
with a hope for 2009: that our shiny new era of hope and change and maybe even
some fiscal, environmental, and political responsibility will mean we're
finally done with nearly a decade of smart but hideously depressing
documentaries about the many ways our government is failing us, our country is
falling apart, our soldiers are getting killed to little good purpose, our
leaders are torturing people behind the scenes, and so forth. While I think
they're both terrific films, I'd rather see Man On Wire than Taxi To The Dark
Side any
day… but far better would be to have no pressing need for the latter.
Keith: Hear hear
on that last point notion, Tasha. But we'll see. It's almost like the last
eight years have built a documentary vigilante force and, if nothing else, the
failing economy, the crumbling newspaper industry, and the ever-dumbening cable
news world should make them more necessary than ever.
As
for the rest of the movie world, I remember depressing Scott once with an only
half-kidding explanation about how movies were over. My thinking was that the
narrowing of distribution channels and the difficulties now faced by
independent studies mean that from here on out there would be maybe three or
four movies worth talking about. The rest would be these huge,
market-tested-to-the-point-of-blandness products that were just kind of there.
Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey look good on a poster together so, voila, Fool's
Gold. But
here's the thing: I don't honestly think movies as a form of entertainment,
much less art, would last like if they shifted too far in that direction.
People turn out for Fool's Gold, but they don't remember it. And they may even
turn out for a couple of Transformers movies, but it's the thrills of something like The
Dark Knight
and Iron Man
that audiences keep chasing when they turn out for summer blockbusters. And,
sure, the arthouses might get clogged with overworked stabs at
meaningfulness, but it's not these movies that let the
arthouses survive. But at this point I feel comfortable that movies as real and
exciting as Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler (hi Rob), and Ché will be there to serve as
correctives. I still have faith in movies even as a lean year draws to a close.