Movies for Grownups
There's a lot for adults to mourn these days, culturally speaking -- the death of newspapers, the death of books, and now, apparently, the death of movies.
Not all of them, of course. Paul Blart endures. But movies for grownups seem to be in trouble. You can't pick up a newspaper, if you still do that sort of thing, without reading another article about the new studio decree: They're not making adult dramas anymore.
You can't really blame them. The most recent ones -- State of Play, Body of Lies, Syriana, even the terrific Michael Clayton -- haven't done much business. And the studios have a plausible explanation: There are just too many other things to do on Friday night. Netflix, HBO, YouTube, Kindle, a game of Wii with the kids.
It's a decent argument. But there's a decent argument the other way too -- namely, that the problem here isn't the genre. It's these particular films.
Three other dramas this year, Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and Gran Torino, did very nicely indeed. And in the not-too-distant past, some pretty highbrow dramas have made a bundle -- The Departed, Traffic, A Beautiful Mind, Schindler's List, and on a smaller scale, The Queen.
Now it's easy enough -- and a good parlor game -- to try to distinguish each of these hits. There's the well-settled exception for heroes with a mental disability (Beautiful Mind), and for dramas with some fantasy element (Benjamin Button). There's the exception for movies directed by either Steven Spielberg (Schindler) or Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino), and for dramas about old people (The Bucket List) and minorities (American Gangster). There even seems to be an emerging exception for dramas that end -- however brutally they begin -- with a music video set in a train station (Slumdog).
It's not that the studios have tried and failed with adult dramas; they've just tried and failed with one particular subgenre -- what people in the business call the "70s movie." The key texts here are Chinatown, The Conversation, and Three Days of the Condor. They're movies about glum, damaged men who challenge, and are generally outfoxed by, sinister government organizations. The tone of the movies is deeply skeptical.
It so happens that I'm devoted to these films; they're why I became a producer. And I'd venture to say that, for many of us who work in movies, they're the template, the Platonic form, of the adult drama.
But wonderful as they are, they're period pieces, grounded in the politics and aesthetics of that era. Sad to say, it's no longer the default state of thoughtful people to distrust authority, and to deify journalists with very messy desks.
More important: Whatever the politics of the audience or the filmmaker, new movies need to do new things -- that's the art part -- and this recent batch just isn't doing it. They're elegantly made, with good acting and good dialogue, but they hew too closely to their 70s models. At this point, the postures and obsessions of their heroes seem tired. (Another subject for another day: There used to be a handful of young stars who were a sure bet to carry these movies, and now there's only one -- Will Smith. Why is that?)
The irony of the new decree is that it writes off the one demographic group that, historically, has loved movies above all else -- that remembers, wistfully, when film was the essential medium, when moviegoing was churchgoing. Kids today may be "platform-agnostic" -- as happy to watch a film on an iPhone as to go out to the Arclight -- but grownups aren't.
And it's not as if they aren't going to theaters anymore. They went to Dark Knight and the Jason Bourne pictures, in droves. Now admittedly, those are movies with real visual scale. But they went to The Departed too, and to Traffic. If even half of the grownups who went to those movies went to State of Play, everything would be fine. The truth is, the new dramas feel old, and while children may love seeing the same movie over and over, adults don't.
Soon enough, though, some screenwriter's going to send in a script, and the hero will have bright new conflicts and bright new demons, and a studio will get excited, and audiences will get excited, and then we'll all remember how durable the form really is.
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Like newspapers, sports, and a host of other things in our society, movies are commodities to be sold on the marketplace for the most money. The results are disasters. Only by chance or accident does a decent, intelligent film get made in the Hollywood system. The greatest failing, perhaps, is the lack of mature, intelligent writing. But, then, hey, who writes anymore anyway? It certainly is not a skill being taught in our schools. And, oh yes, intelligent films require an intelligent audience. None of this is new, by the way. The same situation led to the influx of foreign films in the 1950s and 1960s. After all, "Seventh Seal," "La Strada," "The 400 Blows," among others, had a lot more to offer the mind than "Beach Blanket Bingo."
Indeed. Mediocrity is built into the current so-called "development" system, which develops nothing more that the size of a couple of dozen corporate-fed egos who rarely have little or any artistic talent, or respect for creation, themselves. Respect for anything well-constructed, probing and provocative would force them to turn the same lens on themselves, and that ain't gonna happen.
Having sacrificed integrity in their own lives, their mission is, consciously or unconsciously, to destroy it.
Here's my beef with the movies. Many have overdubbed sound effects and stupid low rumblings that drown out the bleeping mumblings of the actors. My husband and I just abandoned a netflix movie that we would have had to activate subtitles to hear what the mumblers were saying. It just wasn't friggin' worth it. And it's worse at the theater. At least at home we can shut off all the external speakers and just use the TV or use subtitles.
"Platform-agnostic" is wonderful. A new moniker for my nephews.
Yuppie hooligans still run the studios and have shallow tastes regardless of their Vassar credentials, which means anything original that appears on his or her desk will be envied and destroyed; it also means that '8 1/2 Weeks' is remembered by this Entourage class as a "deep movie" and "Flashdance" was vanguard and cinematic. It also means 'make lots of money to keep my job and get kicked up so that lunch everyday at The Ivy can continue, I'll get laid, AND, most importantly, my sense of satisfaction at being envied will be magnified.'
The movies suck now. They are empty; the edits mean nothing; the scripts continue to be rewritten to death into one-note hi-concept crap; production design means nothing more than eyecandy; and the soundtrack is crammed with - not a memorable score - but worthless pop trash to promote some insipid band and moreover, insult the viewer by mickey-mousing or telegraphing the action already onscreen.
And all this nothing leaves me expecting nothing more from LaLaLand; I'll continue rummaging through the foreign section, itself increasingly populated with more crap, to see if intelligent life remains on the globe somewhere.
I am not waiting in line for a remake of 'Angel Heart', already, when the original, however slick, was barely engaging.
Thank you for that. When I saw this article, I just swallowed my anger and chose not to rant. Even now I am reluctant, it's a 'don't even get me started' kind of thing. But I've been thinking about what the business schools of the last 20 years have heaped/reaped upon our society. Wall Street has been chronicled, but what about all the Brown/Harvard business grads in Hollywood with their demographics and marketing campaigns? It's no wonder every other movie has been a retread of some 70's television show. I believe the reason mature adults of a certain taste don't flock to the theaters is because it's all shite. They keep making movies for the 'guaranteed' audience, which only drives other potential audiences further away. Not one of these geniuses would have the vision to make "Field of Dreams" (I'm making a point here) because they wouldn't know how to brand it, package it, sell it. Yet look how well that unusual movie did. It just goes to show you, if you build it, they will come.
I keep being told "It's a business," but it was a business in the '70's as well.
Moreover, in my direct experience, most of these Brown/Harvard business grads are - in addition to ruining the movies and everything else they manage to appropriate - foul and shallow people. I think Christian Bale served them up quite well in Mary Harmon's film.
Exactly my comment. They wonder why the mature audience ignores film but they keep pumping out immature crap, suitable onlyfor the horny college student or those who love violence, violence, violence. We have been there, seen and probably done all that (not the killing).
It fhey hope to entertain the large and mature crowd, they need to present to real writing, real acting, and real events not some silly Hollywood concept of what is real.
Amen, Silvanus!!!
The US has become an infantile nation. I'm only 43, but I do remember when adults acted like adults to give their children a roll model of how to be an adult in an adult world.
The first 3 films I saw as a child (starting at 11) were Walkabout, Lawrence of Arabia, and All That Jazz.
I was still a kid who played and enjoyed childhood pastimes, but I was looking forward to a richer world of experience because that is what my parents lived. I was surrounded by a library of books that were all adult, and the "young" books I had were thought-provoking and mature.
Now the parents have to act like children to be "hip" and to "connect" to them. I recently worked in an office with many new parents. They would fill their offices with Disney characters and High School Musical posters and such, even though their children were never in their work place. And they were rarely interested in anything but the blockbusters they took their older children to.
As a result our nation has devolved into a bunch of little infants....down to not understanding the philosophy of logic and civic law.
The only bright lining of our current political and economic crises is that they make force some of the adults to grow up.
That and we have a grown up in the White House now.
LOL Good points! It's so true about parents trying to connect and be 'hip'. It's so laughable....
You know there are of course great things about Harry Potter and Twilight, but there is so much more out there! I am so thankful to my family for reading to me and making me read growing up... even the classic books from school! (Watership Down, Catcher in the Rye....) Everything has become digital, bland, disposable... WE NEED A RENAISSANCE!
AMEN!!!!!
Movies are all but dead.
A film doesn't get an Oscar unless it's dark, dreary, depressing, extremely violent or all of the above. Studios want built in profits and golden franchises that are torture to sit through. People are at their most obnoxious in a movie theater and they bring and use every electronic device they own.
Once every few years, a great film gets made but no other studio will take a risk on a great script. Screenwriters were once called "Schmucks with Underwoods". Now, they're just schmucks.
I guess I'll have to rent from Netflix then. Money changes everything.
I just want a good plot. Razzle dazzle can only go so far.
Chuck, have I got a script for you...
Call me.
The problem seems to be rooted in the studios' insistence on making pastiche movies that will explicitly bring them profit or prestige rather than creative movies that are interesting. I'm simultaneously ODing on all the comic book movies that came out in the past year and weary of the for-its-own-sake stylistic pretentiousness of arthouse indie flicks.
Love the part about the '70s Movie. Add Altman's "The Long Goodbye" to the list--it fits the mold perfectly.
Those films can still work at Christmas, but practically anything will work at Christmas so that isn't saying much. I think that people are devouring so much politics at this period in time that political films are generally passed over. Why see a political thriller when you've been reading them for 8 years? It's just tiresome.
Also, putting Ben Affleck in a film is just asking for trouble.
Couldn't agree more. Who wants to see slick retreads when we can see...uh, damn, not much out there. Soderberg, Cuaron, Del Toro, Payne, can you guys please work a little faster.
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