Posted on 11/27/2005 2:39:45 AM PST by goldstategop
To judge from the way the weekend's box office is breathlessly reported in the news bulletins on Monday morning, more people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies. Evidently, Hollywood's now recovered from this summer's all-time record "box office slump." Or at any rate news stories about the box office slump have themselves slumped. In a breathless dispatch on the opening weekend of ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the Associated Press reported that ''the latest Potter movie led a lineup that helped reverse the Hollywood box-office slump."
I wouldn't say the boy wizard and his Hogwarts chums exactly "led a lineup" of slump-reversers. When you look at the weekend numbers, ''Harry Potter's'' $101.4 million is more than the gross of the rest of the top five movies combined and doubled. Indeed, the rest of the top 10 between them managed $66 million. ''Harry Potter'' is an industry apart, and tells us nothing about Hollywood's general malaise, or alleged recovery therefrom.
I chipped in my own 20 bucks or so of that hundred mil. Went to see it opening weekend. Had a miserable time. Nothing to do with the movie. Everything to do with the theater I saw it in. It was a multiplex operated by a New England chain called Entertainment Cinemas of South Easton, Mass., and they really should make critics see the films in these kinds of joints. It was a small screen at the end of a dingy room with unraked seating and, instead of letting you lose yourself in the dark to the magic of the silver screen, they keep half the lights up for the movie. I e-mailed "customer service" at Entertainment Cinemas to inquire why, but received no response.
Small multiplexes apparently save money by hiring one projectionist to run several screens. The drawback is that one or other of the semi-unmonitored machines will jam, leading the projection lamp to burn a hole in the print. To lessen the risk of this, the projectionist expands the space between the gate and the lamp -- i.e., he shows the film slightly out of focus. I don't know whether that's why the Harry Potter I saw was so dark and blurry, but, after reading about all the lavish effects-laden set-pieces Mike Newell had put in the movie, I did rather feel that I was seeing the cinematic equivalent of a digitally remastered symphony concert played back through a 1950s transistor radio.
The average multiplex is surely not long for this world. Already, 85 percent of Hollywood's business comes from home entertainment -- DVDs and the like. Suits me. Or so I thought until, on the way home from the hell of Harry Potter, I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the ''Looney Tunes Golden Collection.'' Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: ''Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups,'' she tells us sternly. ''These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today'' -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages.
I don't know what Whoopi's making such a meal about. It's true you don't see many positive images of people of color on ''Looney Tunes,'' but then the images of people of non-color aren't terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don't think about hitting the "Next" button and skipping to the cartoons: You can't; you gotta sit through it.
A Hollywood that's ashamed of one of its few universally acknowledged genuine artistic achievements is hardly likely to come up with any new artistic achievements. As the instant deflation of that Whoopi cushion reminds us, the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump. Say what you like about those Hollywood writers of the '30s and '40s, but they were serious lefties. Their successors are mostly poseurs loudly trumpeting their courageous ''dissent'' while paralyzed into inanity. This year's Sean Penn thriller, ''The Interpreter,'' was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. And instead the bus got blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. ''We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way,'' said Kevin Misher, the producer.
But being so perversely ''non-political'' is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qaida butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, ''Hey, we'd rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change.'' But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being ''encumbered,'' it starts to look like a pathology. And by the time Hollywood released this summer's ''Stealth,'' some studio exec must have panicked that, what with all this Bono/Live8 debt-relief business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. So ''Stealth'' was a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane.
That's right: An unmanned computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is -- stop me if this rings a vague bell -- a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.
This is the pitiful state Hollywood's been reduced to. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let's make the plane the bad guy. No wonder it's 20th century Britlit -- ''Harry Potter,'' ''Lord of the Rings,'' ''Narnia'' -- keeping those Monday morning numbers up. It's Hollywood's yarn-spinning that's really out of focus, and in the end even home entertainment revenue won't save a storytelling business that no longer knows how to tell any.
I'm not sure about this. I don't know if a computer generated actor can be soley used in real live settings successfully. There's a certain element to live action with REAL people that you will never get with CGI.
Sounds almost identical to the Hays Office guidelines, during which period HW produced some pretty good cinema. (Along with a great deal of garbage.)
From what I understand, it is more about the Israeli respone, which included tracking down and killing the organizers. Unfortunately including a mistaken identity case in Norway where the Mossad murdered an innocent, non-political waiter.
I'll be real interested to see how the movie handles this tragedy. I'm expecting a lot of moral equivalence. As if accidental deaths of innocents is the same thing as their intentional targetting.
But I'm just speculating.
This point needs to be driven home. One of my favorite movies of all time is The Hunt For Red October. Everything in that movie from the cinematography to the acting is beautifully done. And the story is the best part!
There has already been a movie about a virtual female movie star, "Simone" I believe was the name.
I truly think that it is this Islamophobia that has kept publishers from accepting my novel, which Jeff Head has read and endorsed. It is called "September Day," and with one exception, every editor admitted the writing was good, and obviously I have a proven track record of sales (more than 40,000 copies of "Patriot's History of the United States" in just 10 months). But they all shied away from the "topic" (i.e., 9/11). I think what they really were shying away from was I made the Muslim terrorists look like, well . . . terrorists.
The U.S. government put out all sorts of propaganda on our friends, the Chinese. They were never depicted in a derogatory manner.
They are afraid if they show Foghorn Leghorn again, people might think of Dem senators like Fritz Hollings or "Sheets" Byrd.
This, in turn, is DESTROYING the plots in Hollywood. "We'll get some cute Penguins and have them walk around, farting and doing funny things." That doesn't make it as a plot.
Which is another reason why the wrong targets were hit on 9/11.
Rent the DVD's. Get "Shrink DVD" and you can remove the "prohibited operation" or just not copy the file with ol Whopa## Goldberg on it.
You raise one of the paradoxes that I've tried to figure out for years, and that is, the Michael Medved "school" says that Hollywood can make money by appealing to "G" audiences, but that for political reasons, it won't; but others in Hollywood argue that they have to at least have a "PG" rating to ensure success with teens. Which do you think it is?
Obviously they have a political agenda. But do they just finance movies so they can subsidize their politics, or are they so blind that they really think their politics are the "majority?"
I submit that the latest crop of CGI/"animation" children's movies is a clear example of how they simply have run out of plots, because they exclude 2/3 of the plot lines available to them out of political bias. Rather than film live actors and develop real stories, they think they can generate some cute penguins and have them fart and that it will suffice for a "childrens'" or "G"-rated pic.
BTW, I LOVE "Star Wars." I am a "Star-Wars" nut. But while I liked Episode I, and loved Episode II, despite the critics' raves, I thought III had some of the WORST writing ever, morphed Annakin's character into pure evil way too fast; and took shortcuts with the plot at every turn.
In my forthcoming book, "America's Victories" (Sentinel, May 2006) I detail the radical difference between Hollywood then and now. Even future lefties like Henry Fonda served, and many, many were war heroes. (Most people know that Jimmy Stewart flew B-17s, but few know that his radio operator was Walter Matthau, who won six bronze stars).
"Their list of grievances is endless and Liberals will go to their graves by the thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands before they admit their very existence offends the Arab world. "
If only there were some way to move them to the head of the line...
Spielberg didn't pull any punches with "Schindler," so I'm optimistic. When it comes to the Jews, Spielberg seems to forget his leftist politics.
I won't---it's still with my agent. But Jeff Head, who has had tremendous success with "Dragon's Fury" without a major publisher, is tutoring me on how to do e-books if necessary. "September Day" was originally intended as a screenplay, but I didn't know how to write one, and I thought it might be easier to adapt a screenplay from an existing plot rather than have to do the plot AS I wrote in an unfamiliar genre.
I understand that you cannot get "Song of the South" except in bootleg editions. It really was an innocent, cheerful confection, iirc. I think the Blackbird scene ["I Seen Everything When I Seen an Elephant Fly"] has been omitted from Dumbo. The "Splash Mountain" ride at Disney World uses the characters from Song of the South, but in a totally inoffense, bland guise. It's as if all the character's loaded up on Posner's skin lightner and hair straightener.
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