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.
bttt
"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 read an essay a few years back that theorized that the reason was that the big names weren't really making movies to make money. People like Woody Allen already have enough money. What they want is the acclaim of their peers.
In Schindler, Spielberg was demonizing the Nazis.
Not much conflict there between leftism and Jewishness.
Because if he does, it can be said of him that he will laud Jews if they are victims in concentration camps, but he rejects the image of the strong, vital Jew defending himself.
I'll bet they got hit with a huge liability settlement from some klutz who fell down the stairs in the dark after a trip to the bathroom, and now their insurance company forces them to keep the lights on.
I'd rather watch a movie in my living room in peace.
This is Rush's "cocktail party" theory---that they just want to be able to go to parties and be praised for their "courage."
Gollum in LOTR is generally accepted as the most effective CGI character yet. He was created by essentially copying the digital input over a human actor who provided the acting. There were times when watching him that I forgot he wasn't "real."
I doubt this could ever be true of a "straight to digital" character.
This is exactly what I expect will happen.
Yeah. He was good. Same with the Ewoks, who were midgets.
I saw that film. It stunk. And it was VERY political and pro-UN. It was all about politics. So the producers cherry-picked the political arena in which they wanted to play. The only thing that made the movie watchable was Sean Penn. As much as a pinhead he is in real life, he's a superb film actor. Every emotion shows on his face and the camera truly loves him. And every emotion is true and honest.
A lot of that comes from the "victim as morally superior because he is a victim" mentality.
Someone who refuses to be a victim sort of slaps that myth in the mouth.
"I was looking forward to possibly seeing "Munich" which is supposed to be about the 1972 Olympics and the murder of Israeli (Ees-rah-ail-ee to islamics) athletes by islamic terrorists. Guess I should expect something like peaceful nativehyphenamericans murdered by evil white Europeans."
No....I this case, they murdered Israelis...so it's OK to tell the truth.
Exactly. I don't expect Spielberg to challenge that very strongly. Of course, I could be wrong.
They just want to be hip. They are mortified that someone may not think they are the coolest thing around.
"This is Rush's "cocktail party" theory---that they just want to be able to go to parties and be praised for their "courage."
Well, great minds, etc. etc.
"They just want to be hip. They are mortified that someone may not think they are the coolest thing around."
Which goes a long way toward explaining why there's so little talent in Hollyweird.
I'm not sure that "bootleg" is correct. "Song of the South" can be purchased from UK video stores. Once you get it, look up a local business that makes wedding videos and the like. They have a conversion process that takes the UK PAL format and transfers it to the US format.
We did this years ago because my father-in-law wanted a copy of the movie.
Legally, the video business can only make you one copy so you find another business to make an additional copy if desired.
I must warn you, I believe that the film was only released once on video so none of the available copies are new. Right now we have a VCR that plays both US and PAL formats and I've been meaning to play our original tape on it to see if its much better than the copy.
p.s. I just thought of something else...maybe there's a digital copy of it via BitTorrent on the web someplace.
"As much as a pinhead he is in real life, he's a superb film actor. Every emotion shows on his face and the camera truly loves him. And every emotion is true and honest."
You really think so? I never thought much of his acting.
Much of what Rabbi Kahane wrote and talked about had to do with that issue. Dear World....
PS - Nothing happening today would surprise Rabbi Kahane. Certainly not 9-11, etc.
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