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Nov 20, 2008 10:44 AM CST |
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Over the holidays, I found myself in the rather absurd exercise of trying to find one word, one adjective, which would define most movies being made today. I think I found it: BLOATED. Most films today are bloated. Look at movies like Spielberg’s Munich, Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha or James Ivory’s The White Countess—too long, too self-indulgent, unruly and undisciplined, without a real sense of direction or rigor—BLOATED. You can only theorize why this is so. Once, when the standard length for films was ninety minutes, this, in my opinion, ideal length imposed a certain discipline on writers and directors. Now virtually every film is at least two hours. Undoubtedly television plays some role in this, but another reason is that so many directors now come from television, where the imperative is to “fill in” the allotted time slot rather than tell a story, as succinctly and efficiently as possible. The enormous production cost of so many films is a factor: Chronicles of Narnia, $180 million; King Kong, $207 million. Even a modest film like Fun with Dick and Jane cost $100 million. These sums were once more closely associated with the gross national product of countries than with the cost of making two hours of manipulative fluff that passes for entertainment. It’s interesting to compare this with more economical—and tighter—films: Capote,$7 million; George Clooney’s Good Night, [and] Good Luck, $7 million. The cost of actors' salaries—the $25 million plus a percentage of the film’s take that a pompous ass of an actor (Tom Cruise) received for The Last Samurai—is one factor in the bloated budgets. But I think the way technology has invaded filmmaking is another. Special effects and the digital way that so many films are now assembled in a computer, rather than on location or on a sound stage, add enormously to the total cost. But they also create a sense of unreality: an actor’s acting, delivery, hair color, or the location can all be “fixed.” The role of a film director is more a producer of “elements” which will be cobbled together later into the final “product,” rather than someone who is telling a story or relating a vision. The assembly line process takes filmmaking much closer to a factory than old Hollywood ever dreamed of. With such astronomical costs, control by corporate committee, market testing, and the influence of those who will sell the film worldwide in the filmmaking process further turn making a film into product development rather than a creative endeavor. Unfortunately this disconnect from reality is not limited to the global film production of commercial Hollywood. Many so-called “art films” are bloated in a different way. In a famous statement, Ingmar Bergman once said he would like to think of himself as one craftsman working on the building of the cathedral at Chartres. In contrast, too many filmmakers today are instant “auteurs”—self-defined and self-ascribed “artists” who have never been tested by life. Their very personal films are in reality navel gazing—inflated egos creating films on themes which are insular and narcissistic. Rather arrogantly, they assume that an audience should care about episodes from the rather empty lives of spoiled children. Lots of European art films fall into this category. I think that the bloated nature of so many of today’s films leads to a kind of desperation. The more bloated a film’s budget, the more desperate its makers are to recover the hundreds of millions it cost to create. How else to do that than to throw millions more of advertising and marketing dollars at it? This “blitz” to gain a foothold in the overcrowded film marketplace is destructive because it must obliterate everything in its path. Other studios with similarly well-financed megaproductions are of course positioned to counter the assault. Independent or smaller studio films are not. It was interesting to look at David Cronenberg’s wonderful film, certainly among the best of last year, History of Violence. It cost $32 million to produce. It was almost universally well reviewed. It was tight, well acted, suspenseful, accessible. So far, it has grossed $31.2 million at the domestic box office. Perhaps it will still be profitable. There are television rights, foreign distribution, DVD sales. But its track record shows the absurd state of film in 2006. The artificial inflation of so many films and the greed and desperation that drive the sinking ship of Hollywood have turned the moviegoing experience into an expensive and ugly one. Moviegoing costs too much. It is loud, noisy, and nasty. It is unpleasant. It doesn’t take a marketing think tank to figure out “why” box office in the U.S. is down for last year. It’s a critical juncture for the future of film. The bloat has become so huge and so painful that the film industry itself is sick. There are two solutions. The patient—film in America today—could take an antacid or pass gas and change its eating habits. This, however, would mean a complete restructure of what films are in our culture. More likely, the future of film has more akin to the subject of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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