SEWER VOICES: IS IT ALL DOWNHILL FOR HOLLYWOOD?

I would like to see post converted 3D banished to the sewers... 

 

I also hope that Prometheus is as good as the talent suggests. If it is, and it makes bank, it could be the start of a new chapter of older heavy weight directors finding something that excites them again and bringing the goods. 

Not sure why everyone ignored this thread, but whatever.

I think it's going to be another year when people complain about all the shitty movies and then when we get to December it turns out that there have been a lot of good movies. Just like most years. If you add up everyone's top 15 you get at least 30 - 35 movies most people would agree are good, if not great.

It's only February and we've already had HAYWIRE, THE GREY, CARNAGE and CHRONICLE. Not all perfect - well apart from THE GREY - but all decent and interesting.

Anyway, I hate being overly negative about movies. Maybe it's because I ENJOY the act of movie-watching. I dunno. Fuck pessimism.

Well it's the continuing problem that began in the 80s, with Hollywood's dependence on producer driven material.  This trend started with Katzenberg, Don Simpson and Michael Eisner at Paramount, as they started putting pop soundtracks on films and applying TV production methods to the movies; as in, the director is a hired hand, the producer or producing entity (studio) runs the show, the script is a Frankenstein monster of disjointed ideas that come from a committee.  

 

It was a reaction to the Spielberg/Lucas blockbusters of that era, the difference being, their films were made from a genuine love of cinema, not a desire to chase profits.  And Hollywood really having no way of duplicating that success themselves, as they were not creative people, reduced those successes down to a formula, like coca cola.  

 

We've always had bad movies, but before the 80s, the bad movies were made with good intention.  The question was "how do we make a good movie?" and letting fate take care of itself, not, "how much money can we make?" and micro manage everything into the ground (Hollywood is one of the worst run "businesses" on the face of the earth).  Paramount started the whole blockbuster mentality and catering to a 15 year old's sensibility in just about every area of movies; from action, to violence, to sex, to dialogue...it's like a teenager's version of reality.  Fortunately, a few post Spielberg/Lucas directors were able to fool Hollywood into giving them tons of money and successfully married commercial instincts with artistic integrity.  1982 was the peak of this phenomenon, and sadly doesn't seem to able to be repeated.  

 

With the emergence of digital technology, the viewing habits of the population changing, and increased economic hardship, Hollywood simply doesn't know what the fuck is going on.  They are effectively clueless on how to ride this transition.  The same thing happened in the 50s with the advent of television, luring movie audiences away from the cinema and back into the home.  The moguls who ran the studios back then were more able to ride this turbulent time because they were visionary businessmen, not the Harvard MBA drones who run the studios now.  They offered new, bigger, grander and more bold ways of viewing films with techniques like cinerama, cinemascope, technicolor, better sound, etc etc.  Today, since the guys who run the studios have conservative shareholders to answer to, it's the filmmakers that have to spearhead these radical changes in theatrical viewing to lure audiences back to the cinema...James Cameron and Peter Jackson with 3D/higher frame rates...Christopher Nolan with IMAX features, and Douglass Trubmul, who's planning some extremely radical shit that would scare even Cameron. 

 

This time though, I think the changes are much more complex and difficult to handle, so everyone is panicking and screaming that the sky is falling.  But I think everything is taking its natural course and things are going to look very different when we come out of this fog.  You can never see how radical things are changing in the middle of that change...you need time and distance to fully appreciate what we're going through.

    I agree mostly with Ambler, but I do believe that some of the heads have learned the hard way and some continue rocketing along the direction to a point of no return.  Somewhere in the middle is where most fans reside.  Not the rabid geeks, but the folks who treat going to the cinema as a pleasure and an experience that they enjoy less then 5 to 10 times a year at best. These folks have endured enough franchise deaths to know that most sequels don't add up to the original and rarely do their totals increasingly grow with each successor.  They've seen Batman and Robin, American Wedding, the Pirates of the Caribbeans and all of the Matrixes.  I always love the conversations where someone hates all sequels and says they are never better.  One mention of Empire Strikes Back and they retreat from the conversation.  Even a sequel doesn't always guarantee the same quality as the first, Hollywood has been able to use the first as a forecast of what to expect business from the next.  They follow this pattern to the point where the diminishing returns don't exceed the production cost by enough of a margin.  The problem is that short of the teenage market, if a person gets fooled once by the studio, they tend to remember it.  The flashy trailers that spoil half the movie exist only to trick money out of people before the word gets spread that the end product is not worth your time. 

    At one point, you could hear people that were not "movie buffs" asking why every movie was a sequel or a remake (if they even knew), but I don't hear that moaning anymore.  The idea that a foreign film being remade is pointless, because the most I hear is that I can't stand films with subtitles and the english language remake will surely come at some point.  Now movies that do well the first time out don't always follow the success because the people who were tricked into seeing the first know the second will try to trick them again and the the appeal of the trailer may still exist, but the end so does the bad taste of the previous end product. 

    I do believe that somewhere out there some of the brainless MBA touting studio heads are looking into the films that hold most of the box office records, be it in ticket sales or box office.  Most of them had very little producer micro management.  Most have been original stories or concepts, or they have been told uniquely.  Probably the biggest thing is that the profit margin was also larger for the Dark Knight, Titanic, Avatar and Episode 4 than any of the formulaic offerings the studios force feed.  I hope, along with Mike's Pants that Prometheus does incredibly well, turns a huge profit and gets Hollywood to understand there is not always a guided route to achieving box office gold, sometimes allowing the ability to go off the road provides an experience that won't soon be forgotten.

Interesting point Renn made on the power of the 'blogosphere', and you don't really have to look much further than Edgar Wright's body of work to get a feel for how that life cycle works.  There's always buzz around everything he's involved with, and the responses to that buzz have ranged from excitement and enthusiasm to cynicism and indifference.  Everyone was pretty much on the same page with Shaun / Hot Fuzz, but then there was significant backlash against the hype with Scott Pilgrim.  And by the time Attack the Block rolled around, people (in general, not here) just seemed to ignore the hype all together.  

 

I don't think Facebook and Twitter will ever significantly dilute the kind of strong editorial voices you find on sites like Chud / BAD / etc.  I just think people get burnt out on hearing the same names and the same 'brands' (for lack of a better word) get talked up, but that's not to say film sites aren't an effective driving force for buzz.  I think the overwhelmingly strong word of mouth on Rise of the Planet of the Apes drove a lot of people to theaters, for example.  

 

But surely the APES buzz came from the marketing, especially the tv spots, and then word of mouth from people who had seen it? People who read movie sites make up about 1% of the moviegoing population. They might influence 2%.

Bingo.  Film sites give themselves way too much credit.  In the grand scheme of a film's success, film sites mean diddly.  Otherwise, Scott Pilgrim would've made more than fuckin' Avatar.

 

No offense to present company...

That seems low, and if that's the case, then how much influence did the blogosphere ever have in the first place?  I guess Apes was a bad example too because it was a big studio tentpole, where as Attack the Block is a smaller budget genre flick that doesn't need blockbuster level returns to be profitable and is kinda aimed at us movie site folk.  Still, Apes was one of the biggest surprises of the year, and I would never have given two shits about it (I have no love for the franchise as a whole and the marketing did nothing for me) had it not been for the positive buzz from places like Chud.

Nor would I, but we regularly read CHUD etc. No-one else does. I dunno, maybe more people read sites 12 or 15 years ago, when horrendous test screenings appeared to help kill BATMAN & ROBIN. Or maybe that was just bad WOM too, as the opening weekend was quite big.

Batman and Robin failed because it's a terrible piece of shit.