At Oscar time this past
spring, I wrote a doom-laden essay arguing that we were living through the End
of the Movies — not the end of moviemaking but the end of the era when
theatrical cinema could be considered the central form of American popular art.
اضافة اعلان
COVID-19 had driven box office totals to new lows, yielding a
slate of best picture nominees that few Americans had seen in theaters. But the
pandemic was just delivering a coup de grâce, a final shove to an art form that
had already stumbled off its pedestal.
When you make that kind of sweeping statement, your hopes
thereafter are divided: As a pundit, you look for evidence of vindication, but
as a movie lover, you hope to be proved wrong.
For part of 2022, the spring and summer, it seemed like
Hollywood was out to satisfy my movie fandom and undermine my prophecy. Yes,
the top of the box office rankings was still dominated by the superhero
franchises that have done so much to run the classic Hollywood genres out of
business or kick them over to TV. But some of those traditional genres were
back as well, doing decent business — or gangbusters business in the case of
“Top Gun: Maverick,” the highest-grossing film of the year.
The list of respectable box office performers included “Elvis”
(a Baz Luhrmann musical biopic), “The Lost City” (an adventure-comedy in the
style of “Romancing the Stone”), “Where the Crawdads Sing” (a literary
tear-jerker adaptation), and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (an
unclassifiable immigrant family drama set inside the multiverse).
“The Northman,” my pick for the most original movie of the year,
was not a big hit, but some people saw it; it existed. Jordan Peele’s “Nope”
earned justifiably mixed reactions but still raked in over $100 million
domestically. And late summer’s “Bullet Train” did decent business as an
attempted throwback to both Guy Ritchie’s laddish action vehicles and the
vehicular spectacles of the “Speed” era.
I am not saying this was a great run of movies, but there was
some creativity here, some entertainment value, some decent box office — all
enough to evoke, in flashes, a normal cinematic summer in the 1990s.
But that was summer. Now, in fall and winter, we have returned
to the movie apocalypse.
it was not so long ago — just a few years — that Hollywood still delivered enough of that entertainment to fill theaters and fill up its lists of best picture nominees with (at least modest) hits. The danger now is probably not that COVID and streaming have made this commercially impossible to do again. Rather, it’s a problem of skill and imagination where, as an art form goes into eclipse, what used to come easily becomes ever more difficult
My colleague Brooks Barnes wrote recently on the “carnage” at the
art house, the terrible box office showings for so many of the autumn’s spate
of Oscar hopefuls, from the Cate Blanchett showcase “Tár” to Steven
Spielberg’s semiautobiographical “The Fabelmans,” from David O. Russell’s
“Amsterdam” to James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” to “She Said,” about my
colleagues’ Harvey Weinstein investigation. James Cameron’s “Avatar” sequel is
sweeping in to fill theaters over Christmas — and, judging by early reviews, to
help justify their continued existence. But barring an unexpectedly strong
performance from the few remaining prestige releases — like Damien Chazelle’s
“Babylon,” which received something of a rough reception at its initial
screening — we could be looking at a fall without an honest-to-God Oscar-bait
hit.
A theme in Barnes’ piece is that the quality of the films is not
the issue, because “reviews have been exceptional.” And I am confident that
there are some structural explanations for the disastrous autumn: the
expectations of home viewing set during COVID-19, the closure of some art-house
theaters, plus the fact that the audience for grown-up dramas is also an
audience (older, liberal) more likely to avoid hanging out in crowded theaters
in the winter illness season.
But at the same time, I agree with the film scholar Barnes
quotes who notes the conspicuous dearth of simple entertainment value in the
fall’s offerings. I really liked “The Fabelmans,” but do filmgoers want not one
but three movies — Spielberg’s, Gray’s, and the Sam Mendes flop “Empire of
Light” — in which prominent directors indulge in semiautobiographical
longueurs?
“Tár” has brilliance, but it’s the definition of a challenging
movie to absorb. “She Said” is a newspaper procedural that keeps its famous
villain offstage almost throughout; here’s how my colleague Alexis Soloski
described its style:
“Measured and deliberate, the film avoids grandstanding,
speaking in low tones where another movie might shout. Little is glamorized or
embellished here. (New York City has rarely looked so blah.) The points the
film makes about predation, complicity, and silencing are often made in
passing. “She Said” concentrates instead on process, prioritizing the patient
accretion of testimony and corroboration. It’s a thriller, yes, but rendered
discreetly, in sensible workplace separates. Its force accumulates slowly,
stealthily even — lead by lead, fact by verified fact — until the tension
surrounding a cursor’s click is an agony.”
This was a positive review. Does it make you want to rush out to
the theater?
The best pieces written on the autumn of apocalypse elaborate on
this theme. Richard Rushfield, a longtime Hollywood watcher, points out that
there was never some halcyon day when high-minded movies “speaking in low
tones” were guaranteed an audience. Instead, the small-budget movies that broke
out big were usually ruthlessly entertaining: “Art house always worked when the
genre was infused with a fresh, brash DIY energy,” he writes.
Then Noah Millman, a writer and producer who is getting ready to
direct his first feature film, has a realistic comparison between the
well-reviewed movies of 2022 and the movies-for-grown-ups of the not-so-distant
cinematic past:
“So has “quality” declined? Well, take a look at Variety’s list
of the 30 films most likely to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Now compare that
list to the nominees for Best Picture in the 1980s — a decade I chose because
it is widely regarded as a relative low point for Hollywood artistically
between the revolutionary 1970s and the indie-fueled 1990s, a time when the
rise of the blockbuster had eclipsed films of serious artistry. Some of those
nominees are blockbusters: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” most
prominently. Others are small canvas dramas: “Ordinary People,” “On Golden
Pond,” “My Left Foot.” There are films that are revered by cinephiles: “Raging
Bull,” “Tender Mercies,” “The Last Emperor,” and there are more crowd-pleasing
films that continue to please: “Tootsie,” “Broadcast News,” “Working Girl.”
There are also films on the list that are largely forgotten, or that many
people wish to forget. But ask yourself honestly: Which films this year feel
obviously — obviously — like they would have deserved to be nominated for Best
Picture if they had been made 35 or 40 years ago ahead of the films actually
nominated then? I’m not asking to put them up against “The Godfather” or “Taxi
Driver.” I’m asking to put them up against “Chariots of Fire,” “The Mission”
and “A Room With a View.”
“Tootsie” is a good example to linger on, because it is a case
of a movie committed absolutely to being crowd-pleasing — you will laugh,
you will, if
Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, and Teri Garr have to come through the screen to
make it happen — that sacrifices nothing of its comedic greatness in the act of
pandering to the audience. This fall, I have had that kind of experience only
once in a movie theater: during the first hour of “The Menu,” a blackhearted
horror-comedy about a celebrity chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, and his
restaurant’s final dinner service. The quality drops off a bit in the second
half, but for a while it reminds you what it’s like to be unapologetically
entertained.
As Millman notes, it was not so long ago — just a few years —
that Hollywood still delivered enough of that entertainment to fill theaters
and fill up its lists of best picture nominees with (at least modest) hits. The
danger now is probably not that COVID and streaming have made this commercially
impossible to do again. Rather, it’s a problem of skill and imagination where,
as an art form goes into eclipse, what used to come easily becomes ever more
difficult, not because the potential audience isn’t there but because the
system is slowly forgetting how to do it.
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