MOVIE

Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better

By A. O. Scott
08.09.2010

For as long as anyone in the movie world can remember (which may be only 20 years or so, but never mind), the fall season has been marked by a sober kind of excitement. The commercial entertainments of summer give way to more ambitious fare, and the grown-up segment of the audience goes back to the theaters looking for stirring performances, complex storytelling, important themes and big emotions. That’s the theory, anyway.
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Recently, though, that eager, earnest sense of anticipation — which this section of The New York Times, along with similar preview issues of other publications, both reflects and encourages — has been accompanied, at least among insiders and journalists, by annual paroxysms of anxiety. A few years ago the dominant worry was that a glut of serious movies would overwhelm the marketplace, the films crowding one another out, a concern that was followed almost seamlessly by the fear that such films might disappear altogether.
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Several of the major studios shut down or scaled back their specialty divisions even before the global economy began to sag. Since then producers have had more and more trouble raising money through private equity and the preselling of foreign rights. As DVD sales sink, and the best minds in the movie industry try to figure out how to take advantage of video on demand, Internet streaming and other forms of digital distribution, the business climate seems grimmer than ever.
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Perhaps the movie business, as it has before, will take care of itself and figure out a way to wring profits from changed circumstances. What concerns me more, apart from the quality of the movies themselves (which will continue to vary and to seem, in successive weeks, either better or worse than ever), is the state of the audience. By which I mean you, if you have read this far. Do you still care about movies? Should you?
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You probably do, and I somewhat self-interestedly think that you should, but how much of this is the force of habit and the weight of tradition? People like going to the movies. As personal screens and media platforms mutate and proliferate, with content streaming from all directions, there is still something special about the experience of buying a ticket and a tub of popcorn and sitting, alone or with friends, watching pictures projected through the darkness.
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And movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video games, more important than viral Internet videos — even if those things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more fun. Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show guest spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date on the global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere! Everyone loves movies!
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But love is never easy, and the relationship between cinema and its public, which has endured for more than a century, has hit a rough patch. Some data, and some impressions: This summer, box office revenue was higher than ever, but the number of people going to movies was the lowest since the summer of 1997. (Remember “Con Air” and “Men in Black” and “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”? It seems like so long ago. Or maybe just yesterday.) This apparent paradox is explained by rising ticket prices, and especially the lucrative practice of charging a premium for movies shown in 3-D. Some of the biggest hits of the season were presented in this format, which seems an especially profitable vehicle for children’s entertainment.
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It was not a brilliant summer, even if some of the more dyspeptic complaining, like the novelist and screenwriter Joe Queenan’s apocalyptic late-July rant in The Wall Street Journal, might seem exaggerated. Summertime brought the usual fare — superhero sequels, action thrillers, goofball comedies, animated spectacles for the whole family, remakes and reboots and rehashes. A lot of these were not as good as previous examples, though it may be splitting hairs to distinguish levels of mediocrity. But the Will Ferrell comedy (“The Other Guys”) was not as good as “Talladega Nights” or “Anchorman”; the Steve Carell comedy (“Dinner for Schmucks”) was nowhere near “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; and, as Mr. Queenan noted at some length, the Adam Sandler comedy (“Grown-Ups”) was downright lame.
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People went to see them anyway, and also “Ironman 2” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” and “Sex and the City 2” and “Salt.” And quite a few went to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a film that, whatever its flaws, showed originality rare in big-budget studio releases. It was also unusual in inspiring excited talk and obsessive argument on the Web and in multiplex parking lots. Did the top fall at the end? Did you hear that music? Was it all a dream?
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“Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” virtually alone among the scores of summer releases, came close to sustaining the dream of Old Hollywood, spawned back when the movies enjoyed a monopoly on visual entertainment and preserved the utopian capitalist ideal of the summer blockbuster. Movies are for everybody.
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But of course not everyone goes to the same movies. A few times a year it seems that way — the parents cry while the children giggle at the Pixar movie; even your nongeek friends need to check out “Avatar” or “Inception” to see what everyone is talking about — but more often movies follow the logic of division, splitting what used to be called the mass audience into demographic segments.
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There are, supposedly, “guy movies” and “chick flicks”; genre movies aimed at teenagers; films that cater implicitly or overtly to various ethnic, religious and ideological subgroups. Sometimes there is crossover, or (to borrow from the jargon of electoral politics) high turnout from the base. And occasionally a movie seems to sweep away all distinctions — between popular and critical success; between box office power and awards prestige — and becomes the focus of passionate discussion that ripples through the culture.
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