Tuesday, May 13, 2008
People also no longer care much if they miss a movie they wanted to see in the theaters since, in no time at all, there will be plenty of other ways for them to see it. In most major cities, you can buy a wretched bootleg of a new movie the day after it opens. Slightly higher up the aesthetic scale, you can see it on pay-per-view in your home or in a hotel (though probably shown in the wrong aspect ratio) a few months later, sometimes while it's still holding on at a few screens. And not long after that, the same movie that generated such hype just a while back will come out on DVD and be reduced to background noise projected on the screens of media megastores where consumers are given the choice of buying it in the correct widescreen format or in the falsely named "Fullscreen" edition, which actually gives them less of the picture. Every Tuesday at the branch of the national electronics chain in my neighborhood you can see customers with a stack of that day's new releases under their arm. Nobody ever seems especially excited about any one release. The buying appears indiscriminate, and you can count on seeing the same folks doing the same thing on the following Tuesday.
The inevitable cumulative result of relentless movie coverage (that has become indistinguishable from publicity), and of a home-video market that reduces every movie to something to be acquired, is to convey the message that no movie is worthy of our sustained attention because in just a few days something else will take its place.
Editors don't need to be corrupt or on the take to play into the hands of the studios. Fearful of losing readers by appearing out of the loop, newspapers and magazines (and, yes, online publications) give each weekend's new blockbuster the prime spot in its movie coverage -- no matter what the publication's critic has to say about it. Put it this way -- if two movies are opening on the same Friday, one a hyped-to-the-skies turkey, and the other a smaller picture that the critic loves, the smaller movie will need all the help it can get. Editors justify this by claiming their readers are interested in the blockbuster. But all that means is that their readers have been exposed to publicity on television or billboards or bus and subway ads -- just as the editors have. Editors who claim that readers won't be interested in smaller movies never seem to answer two questions: 1) How can you determine readers will not have an interest in what they haven't heard of? and 2) Shouldn't informing readers about what they don't know be part of the media's job?
It can't be, though, when the media are acting as de facto publicists. We all laugh at the old movie trailers that sound a lot like "Years in the making! With a cast of thousands!!" But how are interviews where a star talks about how much he worked out to prepare for a role, or where the director or producer talk about the size of the budget, any different? The most insidious thing about covering movies in this way is that often, by the time there is something significant to say about the movies -- after they've been released and the public has engaged and begun to discuss them in meaningful ways -- they are deemed to be no longer of interest.
When hype dictates what is and isn't important, when knowing how to characterize a movie has become more important than responding to it, a movie doesn't have to be an indie or art-house movie to be crushed by the blockbusters. It can happen to good mainstream movies. "13 Going on 30" has done respectable business, but if what's really significant stood a chance of being covered, then the true movie excitement this spring would be Jennifer Garner's performance, which is one of the most lyrical to ever grace any American screen comedy. When movie coverage is focused on the spectacle of blockbusters, no one pays much attention to the beauty of Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy," a narrative shambles and, visually, a Gothic tone poem about sin, redemption and lovers defying the gods to be together. (Ron Perelman and Selma Blair make most of the actors in "Troy" look like something that came out of a cereal box.)
Get Salon in your mailbox!