Tag Archives: Woody Allen

Why Films Are Getting Stupider (Probably)

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When DreamWorks’ CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, stated last month that 2011 had so far been one of the worst years for cinema in recent memory, it was easy to see where he was coming from.

Sure, the CEO of DreamWorks complaining about the quality of filmmaking does reek of hypocrisy (this is the man responsible for the unforgivable Shrek sequels) and yes, this year is probably not worse than 2010 but still, it’s hard to imagine 2011 being remembered as a golden year for cinema (or une année d’or if you want to be all Cannes about it).

How will it be remembered?

Perhaps as the year Harry Potter part 7 part 2 was able to stake a legitimate claim to the title of ‘Best Film of the Summer’, or the year Hollywood was running so low on ideas that they made a freaking Smurfs movie even though no one asked for one and scientific studies (probably) showed that most people would rather have a knitting needle shoved into their eye than have to pass posters emblazoned with the vacuous faces of the smug blue bastards on the tube everyday. Or perhaps 2011 will quite simply be remembered as the year cinema got even stupider.

The central problem with cinema today is that the film industry is no longer making movies for adults. I believe that the blame for this can be attributed to one little word: ‘demographics’.  For a long time now, the balance between ‘show’ and ‘biz’ has been out of whack. Studios are so focused on revenue that films are increasingly being made solely to appeal to the broadest possible consumer demographic, forsaking little things like quality and integrity.

It seems that some marketing genius somewhere has also decided that people over the age of about 15 don’t go to the cinema anymore.  In addition to this, it’s common knowledge that the young, perhaps due to their not-as-yet-entirely-formed brains, are much more inclined to buy the ‘merchandise’ that movie studios are busy fashioning out of cheap plastic and the tears of orphans in some factory in the Far East. This has led to film studios pouring huge amounts of time and money into films aimed at teenagers and, God help us, tweenagers. (It should be noted at this juncture that this demographic of course deserves to be rewarded for its valuable

Unnecessary and irritating

contribution to our flagging economy and for the fact that it isn’t comprised of ungrateful squatters insistent on milking dry our society’s bizarre idolisation of the young).

This not only leads to more films being made specifically for a younger age group, but also to the tweaking of films that traditionally might not have been aimed predominantly at a youth market (this is why every big Hollywood film now has to have a seemingly unnecessary and irritating teenage character who makes wisecracks and adds little or nothing to the plot).

In addition to this, there are countless examples of screenwriters having their work butchered because Hollywood execs are worried that this youth market won’t understand words of more than two syllables or be able to focus on the screen for 15 seconds without an anaemic chase sequence or a cutesy CGI rabbit prancing around.  In short, they are attempting to make movies so stupid that even the stupidest person in the room can enjoy them.

Of course, this is based on the mistaken assumption that teenagers and children are idiots. I don’t believe this and I’m sure you don’t either. In fact, in my experience kids are more equipped than most to follow the plot of even the most byzantine blockbuster because not having student loans to pay off or a job to worry about means that they are able to focus much more energy on understanding the intricate details of a fictional world.

Naturally, some children are idiots in the same way that some adults are idiots (children and adults share many similarities like this, something the use of ‘demographics’ fails to elucidate) but on the whole, children are pretty smart. If you don’t believe me, just ask any little boy about his love of Star Wars or James Bond or dinosaurs and I guarantee that he will amaze you with an answer so extensive and detailed that even Temple Grandin would probably think it was a

All it takes is one strong gust of wind...

little over the top.

No, I don’t think that the youth market is stupid and neither do you, but as we all know, conventional wisdom has no place in Hollywood and clearly they think the little darlings are as thick as box of rocks.  Don’t believe this? Don’t believe that movies are getting stupider? I have a statistic: the average shot length (ASL) of US films in 2008 was 2.5 seconds (the most recent statistic I could find). This means that roughly half the time in 2010, movies could not go 2.5 seconds without cutting to a different shot. The average movie studio believes that we can’t go more than about three seconds without the under-15s getting distracted and leaping around the cinema trying to catch imaginary butterflies.

If this is not an absurd underestimation of our collective intelligence then I don’t know what is.

Compare this to the fact that in 2000 it was 4.7, in 1994 it was 6.8 and in 1972 it was a whopping 8.6 seconds and you have categorical proof that films are getting dumber and it’s children’s fault.

 

Of course, the fact that so many films are being so heavily targeted to the youth demographic means that anyone over the age of 15 is skipping the cinema and staying home to watch Game of Thrones on Sky Atlantic instead. This means that when the marketing guy checks the figures again, he naturally comes to the conclusion that no one over the age of 15 goes to the cinema and so he reports that the studio should be even more heavily targeting their output to the youth demographic who are of course all suffering from ADHD, anterograde amnesia

Did you know that if you watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon whilst simultaneously listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon it actually drowns out the piss-poor dialogue?

and crippling stupidity. This in turn, leads to more stupid movies and even fewer intelligent adults going to the cinema. The marketing guy then checks the figures again and so on and so forth. It’s a vicious circle, but I’m sure you’ve got that now (unless of course you’re a teenager, in which case we’ll be here for hours).

Compounding this problem is the fact that films getting steadily stupider means that cinemagoers (on the rare occasions that you do go to the cinema) are becoming less demanding, indoctrinated by this widespread idiocy. This means that the bar for what people will pay to see at the cinema just keeps getting lower. So when you forked over your hard-earned cash to see Transformers: Dark of the Moon (even the title has a typo) because ‘y’know it passes the time of day and there are like some real cool ‘splosions and such’ you were actually creating a demand for more horribly inane movies to be made. Basically, it’s your fault.

By now this relentless negativity, this somewhat condescending end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it attitude that I’ve adopted has started to wear you down and you’re probably left asking firstly, whether things are really as bad as I’m making out and secondly whether we can do anything to prevent cinema’s seemingly inevitable descent into idiocy.

Well, the answer to the first question is a tentative ‘not really, I’m being dramatic’. While on the whole, studios do seem to be churning out more and more movies that are little more than products designed to generate revenue, all is not lost. This year alone has seen

Apathy is bad

many surprising, heartfelt, challenging brilliant films such as Win Win, True Grit, Tree of Life, Beginners, Bridesmaids and Submarine so we definitely shouldn’t give up hope yet.

And the answer to the second question is ‘yes’, you can prevent it by going to see the films I listed above because demand creates supply.

If more people go to see intelligent and well-made films, then more intelligent and well-made films will be made, it’s basic economics. Now, I’m not saying that we all need to be watching Eastern European art house films with inexplicable costumes and ugly people crying, just choosing the better option.

If you’re going to the cinema this evening, don’t go and see Transformers, go and see Super 8 or Tree of Life instead. And later this year don’t go and see Final Destination 5 (5inal Destination, seriously?), go and see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Have some self-respect and demand something from cinema. Demand to be challenged, to be moved, or to laugh. Demand to be exhilarated or befuddled. Demand to be angered even.  Just don’t allow yourself to be yet another pile of laundry who just sits in that dark room feeling nothing for 90 minutes and then immediately forgets about it afterwards because you are better than that and you deserve better than that. After all, we are lucky enough to be alive at a time when the likes of Terrence Malick, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are still making movies. Let’s take a moment to be grateful for that.

If you want to try to counteract the ill-effects of the cinematic junk food you are being force-fed, then please check out our new semi-regular feature, ‘Have you seen… ‘. The first of these is about the 1998 film Happiness and can be found here:    Have You Seen… Happiness?

Have you seen… Happiness?

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In the first instalment of a new series of articles highlighting films that have you might have missed, Charles Rivington tackles Todd Solondz’s controversial 1998 ensemble piece, Happiness.

 I want to start by stating quite simply that Todd Solondz’s Happiness is not for everyone. It seems odd to say this given that I am meant to be encouraging you to watch it but I feel compelled to tell you that there is a good chance that you will hate Happiness. I have shown Happiness to a large number of friends and while half of them

       

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lara Flynn Boyle form an unlikely bond in Happiness

have loved it and raved about it (never the ones you expect), the other half have branded it ‘tasteless’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘immoral’.  These people aren’t bible-bashers or Daily Mail readers either, they are well rounded and open-minded and yet they still take moral umbrage with this film. To be honest it’s not hard to see where they are coming from. Happiness presents us with a veritable smorgasbord of deviant and disturbing behaviour: sexual abuse, suicide, murder, masturbation, dismemberment and, most prominently and most upsettingly, child rape. And yet it if you can cope with these issues being discussed and alluded to in a film (for the most part they occur mercifully off-screen), Happiness is a brutally funny, unexpectedly moving and thoroughly rewarding experience.

 

The structure of Happiness is clearly inspired by Chekhov’s Three Sisters (also the inspiration for  Woody Allen’s brilliant, Hannah and Sisters which may well be the subject of a future ‘Have you seen…’). Happiness centres around three adult sisters, their families and neighbours who all live in a nightmarish version of New Jersey that would  even make a ‘real housewife’ rather uncomfortable. Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), the eldest sister is a smug suburban housewife and mother whose psychiatrist husband, Bill (a spellbinding turn from Dylan Baker) has developed a secret obsession with his eleven-year-old son’s classmate. Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a famous poet who has become disillusioned with her success, leading her to fantasise about being raped. The youngest daughter, the ironically named Joy (a charmingly pathetic Jane Adams) is a meek, dormouse of a woman whose love life and singing career are equally as dead in the water, eliciting the smug sympathy of her more successful siblings. Rounding out the cast are Louise Lasser and Ben Gazarra as the sisters’ divorcing parents, Camryn Manheim as an overweight woman who ‘hates sex’ and a pre-fame Philip Seymour Hoffman delivering a hilariously repugnant performance as Helen’s lonely and sexually deviant neighbour.

 

While outlining the film’s plot above in such a perfunctory manner suggests that Solondz is merely attempting to provoke shock for the sake of shock (and there is clearly an element of this), Happiness’s success lies in its handling of these controversial issues and horrifically flawed characters, not only with blistering humour, but also with alarming sensitivity, compassion even . The is most striking in Dylan Baker’s masterful performance as Bill, a child rapist and the centre of the film’s most controversial and disturbing plot strand. While Bill’s actions in the film are despicable and calculated and I’d be loathe to go as far as to describe him as sympathetic, Solondz’s writing and Baker’s performance at the very least present Bill as being unquestionably human. His humanity is most apparent in a quiet yet pivotal scene  in which Bill confesses his crimes to his young son, Billy (Rufus Reed). The conversation between father and son is both deeply unpleasant and very moving; despite his heinous acts it is clear that Bill loves Billy and can’t bring himself to lie to him. It’s an unbearably painful moment that will sear itself onto your memory and stay with you long after the film is over.

 

Despite it’s disturbing themes, Solondz also manages to mine a large amount of pitch black humour from the material (Happiness is essentially a comedy, albeit a very dark one) and much of the film is laugh-out-loud hilarious and irresistibly quotable; a personal favourite being the sophisticated Helen insisting to her younger sister that “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you” to which Jane Adam’s Joy, her eyes wide and watery, meekly replies, “but I’m not laughing”.  Solondz’s cruel sense of humour is apparent right

Jane Adams looking pensive in Happiness

from the off in the film’s fantastic opening scene which depicts a horribly uncomfortable dinner date between the pathetic Joy and her even more pathetic, soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Andy (Jon Lovitz in a hilarious cameo). This remarkable scene is pretty much self-contained (it feels like a short play) and serves to lull the audience into a false sense of security, deliberately wrong-footing us so that we are ill-prepared for the horrors that await. Even if you don’t feel compelled to watch the film, I would recommend tracking down this one scene as it is very funny.

 

So there you have it: Happiness, a disturbing, disgusting and hilarious portrait of the dark side of human nature. Whether you immediately add it to your Lovefilm queue or you roll your eyes and close this browser window in disgust is entirely up to you. Happiness is not for everyone and maybe it’s not for you but even if its not can we please all take a minute and appreciate what a good thing that is. In a world where big studios spend all their time and energy chasing the broadest demographics and dumbing movies down in the process, I think we should all be grateful when a film comes along that isn’t ‘fun for all the family’, isn’t patronising, doesn’t talk down to us, is aimed solely at adults and, most importantly, doesn’t have ‘something for everyone’. Thank you Todd Solondz. Thank you Happiness.

Watch the (somewhat misleading) trailer for Happiness here:

Happiness Trailer

And the opening scene:

Happiness Opening