Category: Film

I used to feel that seeing the previews was better, on the average night, than seeing the movie to follow.  I would have paid the $6.00, or whatever, just to watch twenty minutes of previews.  Today I am considering forsaking previews altogether.  The economist in me wonders why:

1. Internet reviews make previews less important for judging whether I want to see a movie at all.

2. Current previews are more likely to spoil the money and give away the good bits in advance.  The goal of a preview today is to get you to go at all.  It doesn’t matter if the preview ends up spoiling the movie for you, since word of mouth is today worth less.  Movies make more of their money in the first week than in previous times.  Earlier previews took greater care to preserve the quality of your moviegoing experience.

3. The pre-movie warm-ups, including commercials, have become longer.  Filmgoers are treated as a captive audience.  At my local theater I can show up seventeen minutes late and miss nothing.

4. I am older and presumably harder to satisfy in most regards, although the value of good chocolate ice cream has not declined.

1. The movie is a "space oddity."

2. It feels like a TV production, even on the big screen.

3. It won’t take off without a big marketing push.

4. The cast has good chemistry and the movie has a strong human
dimension.  Yet by now many of the premises appear less than fresh.

5. The movie’s colors are dark and unappealing and the score is mediocre.

Variety reviews are usually reliable.  Unlike most
newspapers and magazines, they do not offer an aggregated and confusing
"weighted average" assessment of both quality and popularity.  Written
for insiders, the periodical tells you how good the movie is, how
popular it will be, which countries will like it (sometimes), and how
it will do on DVD.

If you are lost, here is background information on Serenity.  If you saw the movie on its brief early release, don’t put any spoilers in the comments.

…in China, where government regulations severely limit distribution and piracy is common, Hollywood studios took in a grand total of $1.5 million (slightly more than one-tenth of a penny per capita) from theaters in the first quarter of 2005.

Here is the full analysis, which rebuts the myth that Hollywood makes all of its money in foreign markets.

That is favorite, not "best," and the years are approximate:

1965 – something like Bambi, whatever

1969 – Them!, The Blob

1971 – Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman, with a nod to Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster

1973 – Diamonds are Forever

1977 – Star Wars

1980 – The Empire Strikes Back

1985 – The Magic Flute (the Bergman version)

1990 – Smiles of a Summer Night

1993 – Persona

1997 – Stalker

2003 – Scenes from a Marriage

I’m not going to tag anyone, but of course you are welcome to try your hand at this…

OK, Sith is now the tenth highest grossing film of all time, and probably headed toward number seven.  But Wall Street is bearish on film stocks; on Monday Dreamworks shares fell more than 13%.  The big fear is that DVD sales are falling, as Shrek 2 bombed in this market.  Hollywood box office has been down for nineteen weeks out of twenty, and believe me Harry Potter won’t do Johnny Depp and Tim Burton any favors.  Daniel Gross opined that Hollywood is the next Detroit.  Others see a big mystery in falling receipts.  Yet others blame blue-state bigotry.  I will offer a few more fundamental hypotheses:

1. Hollywood cannot control its marketing costs or star salaries.  The growing importance of DVDs increases the "needle in the haystack" problem for any single film and thus locks studios into more marketing, creating a vicious spiral.

2. TV is now so much better, and offers artists greater creative freedom.  Why watch movies?

3. The Internet is outcompeting cinema, whether at the multiplex or on DVD.

4. Big TV screens are keeping people at home, which lowers box office receipts.  This also hurts the long-term prospects of many DVDs.

5. The demand for DVDs has fallen because movie lovers have completed their core collections, just as the demands for classical CDs have fallen.

5. The demand for DVDs was due to fall in any case.  Forget the collectors, you buy DVDs to have a stock on hand so you don’t have to run out to the video store on short notice.  Now everyone has a stock.  Stocks must be replenished every now and then, but there is no longer a large new cohort simultaneously building up a stock from scratch.

The bottom line: These trends do not appear reversible in the short run.  It is not just that this year’s movies mostly stink.

Land of the Dead is an excellent movie if you would enjoy a synthesis of cinematic Marxism, Mexican "Day of the Dead" folk religion, unmitigated cannibalistic gore, a critique of U.S. immigration policies, allusions to necrophilia (with the corpse as rapist), and a complete unwillingness to invert the usual racial and ethnic cliches.  In other words, thumbs up.  This movie creates its own world with panache, which is more than you can say for the mainstream Hollywood releases this year.

Tarantino, Lumet, Jarmusch, Bertolucci, and others were asked to name their ten favorites, here is the link. 

Here is Paul Verhoeven’s list:

1. La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (Eisenstein, 1958)
3. Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
4. Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1951)
5. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
6. The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1956)
7. La Règle du Jeu (Renoir, 1939)
8. Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
9. Los Olvidados (Buñuel, 1950)
10. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959)

Thanks to the ever-excellent www.2blowhards.com for the pointer.

It is not just in the U.S., here are a few of this year’s declines:

Germany: 14 percent

Spain: 9 percent

Australia: 11 percent

France: 13 percent

Japan: 10 percent for domestic films, 25 percent for Hollywood films.

Italy: 17.8 percent

Here is the full story, and I do not expect the watchable but philosophically lackluster War of the Worlds to change these facts.

Is it the Internet taking our time and attention?  Illegal downloads?  The hot summer in Europe?  The mediocrity of this year’s Hollywood fare?  High prices?  The narrowing of the DVD release window from an average of four months to a forthcoming two months?  And don’t forget, if you remove Passion of the Christ from the numbers — a unique cinematic phenomenon if there was one — this year is just about on a par with last year, at least in the U.S..  George Lucas notes that movie attendance has been declining since WWII.  Stay tuned…

Mark Cuban complains that on a given weekend there are hardly any new movies to see.  I’ve felt film-starved all year (with one notable exception), plus box office take has been down for 15 weeks in a row.  Cuban suggests some solutions:

1. Have a "big push" simultaneous DVD and pay-TV release of the film.

2. Sell DVDs at early release "premium" prices.

3. Allow theater owners to share in DVD profits, thus giving them an incentive to boost long-term interest in a movie.

Coming from another, this Slate piece argues the studios are spending too much on movie ads and need to cut back.

My take: We need the opposite of a "big push," and large TV screens, Netflix, and dowloading are providing precisely that. 

In the long run I expect the film industry to have two segments.  First, theaters will present an utterly mind-blowing multi-media experience, drawing on ideas from Scriabin and the modern rave.  Second, you will watch clever and often low-cost dramas and comedies at home.  The potential for illegal copying will keep down prices and also capital expenditures on these productions.

I could be very happy in this world, and happy or not, I am not optimistic about attempts to find a middle ground.  You’re not going to go to the theater unless it is for something pretty special.

Star Wars-themed barf bags, on Virgin Air.  You’ll find the bad puns at the link.

After only six days, Sith is already the highest-grossing movie of 2005.  Here is a guide to what to look for on your second viewing. Tickets permitting, I’ll be there tonight.

Someday I will try this:

Technical Video Rental is a service that rents video tapes and DVDs…Rent online, at any time of day, and get the videos shipped straight to you (with return postage included free!).

$9.99 for one video for one week, they include some from Teaching Company but I want the one on spot welding.

…get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited…

The two best entries to this film, and to Star Wars in general, are Milton’s Paradise Lost and the popular fascist art of the Nazis and Soviets.  The portrayal of the Jedi shows that the fascist temptation is far stronger than Milton ever believed, which is saying something. 

Most of the other episodes also should be viewed with fascistic traditions in mind.  (Otherwise you may think of them as stupid and maudlin, esp. I and II.)  Is this deliberate, or rather picked up through Buck Rogers, Joseph Campbell, and other intermediate sources?  It doesn’t matter.  Lucas’s final message is supremely anti-fascistic, and at the end of "Return of the Jedi" he presents entertaining story-telling as his preferred alternative means of enthrallment (remember the ewoks reenacting the whole story?).  But of course only a director himself enthralled with the fascistic aesthetic could make such a convincingly anti-fascistic series of movies.  That is precisely what makes the whole thing interesting, and is what most critics miss.  At least Lane gets half the picture.