And The Food Tasted Better, Too

Another Woe Is Me And Woe Is Movies piece, this time from Jon Podhoretz.  He's lamenting how films don't matter like they did in the 70s.  Which is funny, since I'm pretty sure people were lamenting how bad movies had become back then, too.

When I first became interested in them, in the 1970s, they seemed to matter very much indeed. [....S]mall-scale movies that today would be consigned to art houses and tiny grosses and limited runs—M*A*S*H, American Graffiti, Midnight Cowboy, Shampoo, Network, Coming Home, Kramer vs. Kramer, even The Graduate—not only provoked general conversation among the chattering classes but became major popular successes.

That doesn’t happen any longer. [....] Consider The Hurt Locker, which won the 2009 Oscar for best picture. Without question, this piece of highly kinetic and suspenseful filmmaking on the literally incendiary topic of an American bomb-defusing squad in Iraq would have been a huge hit in the 1970s. Even in the mid-1980s, Oliver Stone’s disgustingly pernicious though admittedly exciting Vietnam melodrama Platoon made $138.5 million. But The Hurt Locker earned an astonishingly paltry total of $17 million.

Actually, most of the quirky, intense little films made in the 60s and 70s were not big hits.  And if they had no stars, like The Hurt Locker, they had even less chance of scoring. And a good portion of the hits back then were, like today, dismissed by serious critics as being mindless fun.

Meanwhile, if you get to pick and choose, like Podhoretz is doing, the past 15 years or so (I'm assuming Podhoretz laments back that far) offer plenty of  movies that "mattered"--that provoked discussion and were still hits. (BTW, I'd say that Network and Coming Home weren't huge hits in their day.)

Such as?  Well, let's eliminate wild comedies, though there have been some great ones.  Let's forget intelligent, well-done, but conventional action films. Let's cross off documentaries, though we've had some surprising hits in that area. Let's ignore animation, though for the past generation we've been living through a golden age, far superior to what was available in the 60s and 70s.  Let's even toss out hundreds of art house hits that made a decent profit but not tens of millions or more.  We've still got titles like:

The King's Speech, Black Swan, Inglourious Basterds, Inception, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Titanic, Juno, American Beauty, The Pursuit Of Happyness, Pulp Fiction, Apollo 13, Jerry Maguire, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost In Translation, Saving Private Ryan, The English Patient, As Good As It Gets, Good Will Hunting, The Truman Show, Shakespeare In Love, Brokeback Mountain, Gran Torino, The Blind Side, Million Dollar Baby, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Catch Me If You Can, A Beautiful Mind, The Sixth Sense, The Departed, Sideways, No Country For Old Men, Traffic, The Help and Erin Brockovich.

You may not like all these films.  You may even think some are jokes.  I agree.  The point is there are still plenty of big hit movies--and some of these were blockbusters--that excite discussion and win critics awards.

I admit things have changed. Back in the 70s, cinemas were the only place you could easily see movies, and the studios had smaller openings and longer plays (since, for one thing, there was no rush to get them out to home video).  Now we can watch them any time, anywhere.  In that way, they're arguably a bigger part of our lives, but as they become more everyday things, we lose some of the romance and mystery.

Also, TV has taken over much of the great middle.  In fact, drama on TV (as Podhoretz notes but tries to dismiss) has done some amazing things in the past decade or so. Meanwhile, movie technology has improved which has meant, sometimes, an emphasis on special effects over dialogue (which is what TV is for).  And with TV, not movies, being the dominant form of entertainment, studios spend more time trying to serve the younger demographic that loves to go out over the older people usually stay home (and who wait for weeks to see something and only then after several friends have recommended it).

But things change.  Always have.   Podhoheretz ends his piece saying movies were better then.  This is not analysis, this is wallowing in nostalgia.

PS  Interesting special pleading here:

One mark of a work’s pop-culture influence is whether the names of its characters move from the screen into the real world, when the young people who loved it have children of their own. Thus, when the TV show Dynasty became popular, thousands of babies came to be named “Krystle” after its lead character. A chart on the website BabyCenter.com indicates that the name Luke was barely in use before Star Wars and then took a vertiginous climb into the top 50, where it has remained ever since.

But what of Avatar? Its heroine is named Neytiri—gorgeous, lithe, sexy, brave, noble, though with blue skin and a tail. The name sounds fun and exotic, and given Avatar’s astounding box-office take, should have made the same transition from screen to Social Security baby list as Krystle and Luke. It didn’t. According to Baby Center, Neytiri was the 25,501st most popular name for girls in the United States last year.

Really?  And how many kids do you know named Han or Leia?  Or Obi-wan?