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IN MY DAY (MOVIE EDITION)
by Daren Foster

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DAREN FOSTER PODCAST September 1 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN

IN MY DAY (MOVIE EDITION)
by Daren Foster

***Going to Hollywood in a hand basket.***

As I sit screaming at my noncompliant internet connection (“What do you mean you’re only willing to cough up 88 Mbps?! I’m paying for 100! One fucking hundred Mega fucking bytes per fucking second!! So start performing as advertised! AS FUCKING ADVERTISED!!”), it strikes me that, lo, I may not be settling all that gracefully into middle age.

In more youthful days, I remember being blissfully happy with simple dial-up, using the interminable time it took to bring the most basic of graphics fully to the screen with the utmost of efficiency. I’d take a shower. After nipping out for a quick 5k run. And stopping to pick up a few groceries for dinner with the cash I’d lined up and waited for a teller to withdraw for me. This was the technology at hand and I worked within its narrow confines.

Now it’s all about the instantaneous. The whole I want it and I want it yesterday ethos that invariably leads to disappointment, resentment and high blood pressure. Many of the same symptoms that accompany middle age. So maybe I’m just projecting. Assigning blame for my own misgivings and shortcomings on the entity closest to me at the time, regardless of how inanimate. If computers are considered inanimate, what with all the processing 1s and 0s they do.

Or maybe I’m crackling with discontent because September is here already. Summer’s pretty well done and all that start of school year fretfulness is still deeply ingrained in my psyche despite the fact I’ve not been inside a classroom for more years than all the time combined that I actually sat inside one. If you don’t include the anger management courses the courts have asked, nay, decreed, I endure. September ushers in the fall, the fall the winter. Winter signifies death and with my autumn years starting to show their brilliant but dying colours, I creak uneasily, and unsuccessfully fend off the rage at the arbitrary unfairness of it all.

Hoping to find some solace in my old friends, television and the movies but, no, they bring no relief. Instead I see my sad reflection in them. That’s not quite right. I see that same harried, wrinkled, drawn look that startles me in the mirror every morning when I shave because of movies and television rather than in them, as in reflected in them. Does that make any sense? Old people tend to babble incoherently.

No, this is not shaping up to be an in-my-days-the-pictures-used-to-be screed. At least not in terms of TV. When it is good, television is better than it ever dreamed of being. (See last week’s post as a prime example.) Overwhelmingly however, TV is as eye-splittingly and jaw-droppingly bad as it ever was, only seemingly more so because of all the additional avenues available to roll out the dreck for our viewing pleasure.

Movies, on the other hand... Well, back in my day…

I recently came across this column, Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema by the New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott. While certainly not in concurrence with all its views -- if Scott truly thinks The Hurt Locker is “… the kind of fierce and fiery action movie that might have been a blockbuster once upon a time… sold on its prestige rather than on its visceral power…” than I would suggest Hollywood filmmaker’s hand over the reins of serious grown-up storytelling to the big boys in television like David Simon. Any single episode of his Generation Kill is much more thought-provoking and entertaining than the whole of The Hurt Locker which was so cliché-ridden and unsurprising that I was surprised by how totally unmoved by it I was.. shocked, actually. But, still, I think Scott’s article has a couple salient and worthwhile points to make. I urge those interested to read it in full as I can’t do it justice with the couple snippets that follow.

“… But those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audiences are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

The big lesson of the summer of 2009 is that those qualities, while they may be desirable in some abstract, ideal way, don’t pay the bills. The studios, housed in large and beleaguered media conglomerates, have grown more cautious as the economy has faltered, releasing fewer newer movies and concentrating resources on dependable formulas. Nearly every big hit so far has been part of a franchise built on an established cultural brand.

…

The box office numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth either. The weekend grosses, widely guessed at on Thursday night and breathlessly reported by the middle of Sunday afternoon, record quantity of tickets purchased, but they can’t register the quality of the experience. The aggregate of receipts shows that a lot of people like going to the movies, but not necessarily that they like what they see.

Commercial success may represent the public’s embrace of a piece of creative work, or it may just represent the vindication of a marketing strategy…”

Aside from taking up a lot of column space and relieving me of a little pressure to provide content, the above quotes bring up a couple interesting and inextricable issues in terms of the modern movie going experience. One, money does not equal substance, satisfaction or pleasure. $400+ million does not make Transformers 2 a good movie. It only means there will be a third instalment and Michael Bay will continue to be employed. Both downsides to most right thinking folks but music to the ears of those who are in the film business purely to make mountains of cash.

And who are those people?

Marketers and their evil-doing, MBA-laden minions, fresh off their Robert McKee weekends, fuelled by the belief that they now know how to make movies. News flash, people. You may know how to sell movies. Making them is another matter entirely.

You see, movies these days are simply one branch of the entertainment industrial complex. Mostly housed in edifices alongside bars, restaurants and arcades, Hollywood fare is just another product to be sold. Two hours you fill before or after going out for dry ribs at the Jack Astors®© located just down the hallway. What’s up on screen matters only when there’s something you can cross-promote at the concession stand.

Hollywood has always been about money. I’m not suggesting otherwise. It’s just that they used to sell a story oftentimes trite, derivative and/or inane. Boy meets girl. Germany invades France. Shark eats swimmers. As long as there have been movies, there have been bad movies, many of which made lots and lots of money. But it seems to me that the belief was about getting the right stars working with the right directors in the right vehicle (meaning story) in the hopes of engaging a wide audience in order to make the most amount of money possible. Now it’s about spending the right amount of money on the movie in proportion to the right amount of money on marketing in order to make the most amount of money possible.

On the Making of Bonnie and Clyde DVD extra, Warren Beatty talks about how studio head Jack Warner used to gauge how much he liked a movie by the number of times he had to go out and take a piss during it. A crass measure but it suggests a level of engagement with what was on the screen that simply isn’t a part of the equation anymore. I go to the movies and see people wandering in and out of the theatre like they’re strolling through a mall. Or talking to each other as if they’re still at the lobby bar. Or texting. Texting, texting, texting. Possibly (and ironically) telling all their friends how much they’re liking the movie. Engagement is the last word I’d use for the modern movie outing.

But alas, this old-timer’s time is nearly up. As surely as the weather will turn cold, so will this body of mine. Grandpa’s going to be dead soon, son, and you won’t have to put up with his crazy, when-I-was-your-age blather anymore.