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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
It was the year of the penguin and the gay cowboy -- but don't forget the Chinese theme park and Syrian bride. Here are 10 brilliant but forgotten films you won't want to miss.
Wong Kar-wai's "2046"
Dec 30, 2005 | "Years ago, films were judged primarily on their artistic merits," says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, whose releases include the hit documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (and also theatrical flops like Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives"). But in an overcrowded movie marketplace obsessed with business deals and insider details, he says, that has decisively changed.
"Films might be judged on their artistic merits the day they come out," he goes on, "but by Monday morning, they're being judged by what they did at the box office. Who knew what Fellini and Truffaut were earning at the box office? Nobody knew, and nobody cared." Bowles adds that he thinks there's no "cultural imperative" to experience "defining aesthetic films" right now, in the way an earlier generation ate up the cinematic experiments of the '60s and '70s art-house gods -- or, more recently, paradigm-shifting flicks like "Blue Velvet" or "Pulp Fiction" or "Being John Malkovich."
That may seem counterintuitive at this moment, given the impressive audiences turning out across the country for that movie about two cowboys in love (technically an independent production). But six years after the supposed indie revolution of 1999, the independent film universe is an amorphous realm where the water is deep and the rocks are jagged. It's internally divided between documentaries and dramatic features, between mini-major studios that produce safe, "Hollywood-lite" product and adventurous distributors who work out of P.O. boxes and can barely scrape up the funds for a newspaper ad. Some people I spoke to in the independent-film world were big fans and supporters of "Brokeback Mountain" -- the film that seems destined to define 2005 -- but even most of those saw its breakout success as more like a sociocultural happening or a news event than an aesthetic experience. As one cynical observer remarked, "Brokeback" takes an utterly familiar narrative (a story of doomed romance), puts it in a familiar setting (the cowboy West) and adds a button-pushing twist (oh my God, they're dudes!).
Fortuitous formula blend or not, no one could have promised in advance that Ang Lee's film would make a nickel at the box office. Movies don't come with guarantees, and as screenwriter William Goldman once observed about his business, nobody knows anything. But one thing the film's producers felt sure of was that "Brokeback Mountain" couldn't be ignored. As many people remarked to me, that gave it a marketplace advantage over most other movies that you can't buy at any price.
"I'm a passionate moviegoer," says Sasha Berman, a Los Angeles film publicist who works with a variety of independent distributors. "I'm in the business, so I see a lot of foreign films, a lot of independent films. But I also miss so many things these days, because they come and go so quickly. Movies show up and play for a week and get pushed out by something else. It's overwhelming. I think it's incredibly difficult for the consumer to figure out what to see right now, unless it's something that they already know about: It's the penguin movie, it's the gay-cowboy movie."
There you are, people. That's the year in independent film at a glance: It's the penguin movie. It's the gay-cowboy movie. Everything else pretty much went in the tank.
