Archive for the ‘Film Industry’ Category

Summer’s here and with it, the seasonal cinema: big box-office-bursting behemoths. And, no doubt, trailing in their wake will be the inevitable pieces from serious cineastes, bemoaning the success of these vapid entertainments.

This isn’t, I hope, going to be one of them. It’s not that I dispute the critical analysis – how can I? – but rather, I think it misses the point about big movies. These are the only films most folk bother with; laying into them makes the egg-heads sound shrill and elitist. It’s also a touch hypocritical. It’s not hard to find contemporary reviews of film buff faves like North by Northwest and Rio Bravo, apparently written with the same poison pen many reviewers used to spear Speed Racer with.

We can condemn the showmanship and hype as crass. And, yes, there has to be more to cinema than empty sensation. At the same time, however, it can be a joy to sit as part of a capacity audience and to share the experience. I was reminded of that when I went to the final Pirates of the Caribbean flick last year.

It was rammed: with teenagers and pensioners, with harassed parents giving the nippers a holiday treat. Judging by the mounds of confectionery and the way they laughed at adverts that had been on heavy rotation for months, I figured most of them weren’t cinema regulars. And so what? It was a good crowd to be a part of, free of the cynicism that can sometimes waft through the art houses.

What surprised me, though, was how little they seemed to enjoy it. There was none of the enthusiasm which I observed at, say, Lord of the Rings or the first Pirates flick. Now, I accept what follows is as unscientific as Creationism but the thing is, I’ve noticed this sort of dissatisfied audience reaction at any number of the blockbusters I’ve attended in recent years.

It’s not that the people are tiring of spectacle and excess. My sense is that they’re getting frustrated with how bloated and self-important these films have become. Hands up who else thinks modern blockbusters are too long? That last Pirates flick was pushing three hours! And hands up who else is fed up with not being able to follow the action?

This last point is important because action is one of the major selling points of a summer movie. Yet directors have forgotten how to stage it. Instead, each set-piece gets divided by hundred of cuts, rendering everything incomprehensible. Maybe this looks ‘cool’ if you’re jacked up on sugared drinks from the concessions stand but it don’t do it for me.

I want to explicitly exonerate Paul Greengrass, whose remarkable work on the Bourne series uses this aesthetic brilliantly. But then, he’s a real filmmaker and it’s part of his overall strategy. Too often, though, rapid-fire editing is used by clods who have no idea how to build momentum, pace a movie or carry an audience.

Summer movies exert a powerful gravity. Despite the above, I’ll probably check out a couple of this year’s juggernauts. However, I have an inkling I’m not the only one to get ever diminishing returns for my ticket money. In an age of piracy and audience fragmentation, perhaps that’s something for the studios to consider.

Hi, glad you could make it. Take your seats. The fight’s about to start. In the red corner, there’s Mark ‘Lethal’ Lawson. He wrote a piece for The Guardian recently, saying how future generations will regard ours as a golden age of movies, comparable to the 1940s and the 1970s. He cited things like No Country For Old Men, Sweeny Todd, the Bourne franchise and (his favourite) There Will Be Blood. All are evidence, he said, of filmmakers reacting to our troubled times (spelt I-R-A-Q), and moviegoers should be grateful.

But not everyone agrees and in the metaphorical blue corner, there’s ‘Gorgeous’ George Clooney, perhaps metaphorically trash-talking about his opponent’s withdrawing hairline and (who knows?) his parentage. In an interview with the Radio Times, he pours scorn on modern films, including his own. He compared them unfavourably to what he thought was the golden age, 1964 to 1976: “it’s twelve years,” quoth cinema’s reigning Mr. Sex, “and you could find ten films a year that are masterpieces. They don’t make those films any more.” (He neglects to add if he remembers when it was all fields around here or whether policemen are looking younger.)

I doubt we’ll see George ‘n’ Mark go mano-e-mano anytime soon but between them they’re raising important issues. So, who’s the winner? Well, I am, obviously. The lazy assumptions and presumptions on both sides would give me material enough to fill this slot until Christmas if I wanted. For instance, the original pieces ignore foreign films, as though the only barometer of excellence are films with American accents: we could have hours of fun with that one.

To be fair to Clooney, he does say that it isn’t just American cinema he’s disillusioned with, it’s all “modern cinema”. Hmmm. Now, Clooney’s one of the few stars I respect. He’s made some interesting choices, he’s honest about who he is and he’s pissed off the right people. But on this one, he’s talking out of that-which-he-famously-bared-in-the-remake-of-Solaris.

Even a cursory glance shows that modern cinema is as buoyant as it’s ever been. Asian cinema is thriving, in particular Korean cinema. Anyone who still thinks that anything with subtitles automatically equals ‘art house’ is advised to pick up The Host or Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. Those are films that show ticket buyers just how short changed they are by western blockbusters and they’re just the tip of a huge iceberg. Elsewhere, countries as diverse as Mexico, Thailand and Romania could all legitimately claim to be in a golden age. If there’s really nothing out there that floats your boat, you probably don’t like movies.

But just because George Clooney is wrong, it doesn’t follow that Mark Lawson is right. His arguments for the health of American cinema won’t wash. He buttresses his arguments with some good films but just as one Swallow doesn’t make a summer, so a few good pictures don’t make a golden age.

Even the worst of times are never without some interest. If you ask me, the worst times for the America film industry were the 1960s, a meniscus between the old guard’s glory days and the arrival of the young Turks. Yet, our pal George Clooney includes six of those years in his golden age, identifying flecks of gold (Dr. Strangelove, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) amongst the sludge (The Happiest Millionaire; Doctor Dolittle).

However, I’d say the crucial aspect of a golden age is not so much the quality of the top-flight stuff but the state of the second or third divisions: when those are flying high, you know you’re on a roll. It’s the sheer diversity of the 1970’s that make it so worthwhile. It wasn’t just the young talent strutting its stuff, like Scorsese and Coppola (Taxi Driver and The Godfather respectively) but also older directors producing some of their best work: Robert Aldridge (Ulzana’s Raid), Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Don Siegel (Dirty Harry).

Below the radar, exploitation filmmakers like Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13) and Joe Dante (Piranha) were having a little golden age of their own. Even elder statesmen were getting in on the act: Hitchcock (Frenzy) and John Huston (The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City) to name but two. There simply isn’t that sort of wild proliferation these days.

When Clooney talks about his ‘disillusionment’ with cinema, I’m with him up to the borders of the USA. I’m deeply underwhelmed by much of modern American cinema and I’m not talking about the blockbusters. Many critical favourites – I won’t name names just yet, if you don’t mind – strike me as profoundly deficient. Because, historically, Americans have always had the most vigorous film culture we assume that it’s always the case, so we’re slower to notice when the standard slips.

But slip it most certainly has: the first stage to remedying it is for people to face up to the problem and stop bandying terms like ‘golden age’ about. Films like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood are as much exceptions as films like Seconds or Point Blank were in the airless sixties. We need to recognise the wider film culture; hopefully then, American directors will begin pulling their socks up, just as their forebears did circa 1970.

But just because Mark Lawson is totally wrong, doesn’t mean he isn’t right too. I’ve argued before how the only golden age is now, because we have the films that came before us and the films around right now. (With the added bonus, these days, that it’s never been easier to see them.). The 1970s might have been good but we still have those films today – and a clearer sense of which ones are worth bothering with.

So let us hear no more talk of golden ages. The best time for cinema will always be now. And tomorrow will be even better.

One of the more depressing bits of news to filter out of Hollywood in 2007 was that our friends the studios have decided not to make any more dramas with female leads. This has been on the cards for a while, after a string of underperforming films starring the likes of Nicole Kidman, but after seeing the box-office returns for a Jodie Foster film called The Brave One, the moguls decided to call time on female leads.

Now, I don’t know a great deal about The Brave One. I know it’s directed by Neil Jordan, stars the redoubtable Ms. Foster and has been described as ‘a female Death Wish’ (wasn’t that Ms.45?) But I haven’t seen it and I’d rather talk about the decision it has occasioned rather than its merits as a film.

Unsurprisingly, women’s groups are outraged: “Roll up! Roll up!,” they cry. “Come see the institutional sexism of tinsel town!” They’re spot on of course (on your side, sisters), but it’s got nothing to do with patriarchal phallocracy and everything to do with the bottom line. Hollywood would quite happily embrace radical cutting-edge feminism if it turned a buck. The reason no-one will pony up the bread for Andrea Dworkin: The Musical is because it wouldn’t shift enough popcorn.

But I find this new announcement is especially depressing because, if you’re asking me, women make much more involving protagonists than the chaps. Female leads tend to be more interesting characters, with a greater emotional life and more compelling motivations.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said that ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’ but there are some cracking movies where the ladies don’t have sidearms in their handbags: I’m thinking of films by Max Ophuls (Letter From An Unknown Woman), by von Sternberg (The Scarlet Empress), by Howard Hawks (Bringing Up Baby), by Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life).

I’m even thinking Hitchcock. He made some great films with female leads, notably The Lady Vanishes and Rebecca, which updated the basic woman-in-peril formula of Victorian melodrama and Notorious, in which Ingrid Bergman plays a character with more depth and shading than most of Hitch’s heroes.

In the hands of a sympathetic director, a rounded female lead can guide a film into fascinating territory.

Let’s not pretend that Hollywood has anything other than a lamentable record with female characters. The above are the exceptions, directed by people who actually seem to like women. I’m well aware that rounded female characters are a rarity in mainstream movies, that most are either saints or whores (often literally) Oh, and it hadn’t escaped my attention that the above examples were all directed by men.

But God, when they got it right – weren’t the results electric? From the super-confident Dietrich, walking over men to get what she wants (and maybe – maybe – letting you come along for the ride) to the haunted heroines of Max Ophuls, who make the mistakes we all make and show the same vulnerabilities.

These are characters with rich inner lives, with emotional complexity and who seem all too human. Whatever external artifice might be going on, these films are emotionally true in ways they wouldn’t be if their main character had been a man. They are compelling and utterly involving as only the best movies are.

I repeat: women are badly served by Hollywood and I’m not trying to pretend that a female lead guarantees a film will be emotionally sophisticated: I’ve seen Titanic. And I’m really not too gone on your actual chick flicks. But I am saying that the law of averages means that the more films get made, the more masterpieces we’ll get.

I hope that there’s a new generation of female writers and directors who’ll challenge this ludicrous studio decision not to make dramas with female leads. And I’m looking forward to the results.

As for The Brave One, why pick on Jodie Foster? I’d blame the marketing department myself. If ‘the female Death Wish’ is the best they can do, perhaps they deserve a little vigilante style justice themselves.