Marketing is the Death of Movies

Today I had an epiphany.
I realize that I keep expecting Hollywood to give us better movies. This is like expecting McDonald's to serve filet mignon with truffles. It ain't gonna happen. So why not go with the flow. Why not accept, finally, that what Hollywood does is roll out product, in the same way as Procter & Gamble rolls out a new and improved detergent or Hasbro a new toy. With marketing and focus groups and certain approved ingredients. Same thing rehashed over and over, not much deviation, just a brutal hunger for dominance of shelf space.
This was brought about by this maddening article in the NY Times Magazine by Daphne Merkin (behaving like a wide eyed innocent in LaLa Land) about Nancy Meyers and the movies she makes for women.
Merkin is amazed that Nancy Meyers, who is a reliable hack, is about the only woman that gets final cut for her films. The reason is simple: her bland, unrealistic, embarrassing, formulaic movies about "empowered" middle aged women, come with studio pre-approval already factored in. There is nothing creative to fight about.
The only movie of hers I like (and was surprised to find it was by her and her ex, Charles Shyer) is Private Benjamin. That is a great comedy (or so I remember it). But why should there be movies for women? I am a woman. I watch movies. Period. I don't watch movies that are expressly designed for me, like sanitary pads. Same goes for chick lit. It's offensive. Yes, there are film genres that women like better, but on the whole I think women are far more amenable than men to watch a variety of experience, from romantic comedies, to dramas to gangster films to whatever.
However, the industry itself has conditioned the audience to behave like this, to box themselves into marketing categories. This is understandable for detergent (are you a scent seeker, or a clean freak?), but it's tragic for filmmaking. It debases the art form. I saw The Bicycle Thief yesterday. I'm still recovering from the devastation to my heart (for the third time). Made in 1947, it is as true and real and timeless and miraculous today as it was then. I bet Vittorio De Sica did not run around like a headless chicken wondering if his movie was going to appeal to women and the 15-24 demographic.
He made a movie about poverty, desperation and human dignity, about the loss of innocence, about a society without compassion. Who is the demographic for that? Everybody, that's who.
But here in the US, people are obsessed with genre and demographics. Every time there is a Q&A with a foreign filmmaker, invariably somebody asks in puzzled bewilderment "Who is the audience for this movie? Is this a comedy? Is this a thriller?"
Does it really matter that much? We should all be able to enjoy good stories well told, regardless of their genre or the sex and age of their protagonists. I understand the film industry is a business. It should be a successful business. But it looks like in Hollywood the business side has run out of control.
Somehow, Pedro Almodovar makes kitschy gay movies for everybody. He is wildly successful. Lucrecia Martel, one of the most interesting filmmakers in the world today, makes great movies, not movies for women. Here, Judd Apatow smartly invented the bromantic comedy (we need to classify it somehow), only to find it quickly cheapened by endless repetition and bad imitations. Hollywood raids other people's stories and steamrolls them until they are inhuman and unrecognizable (sort of like processed foods). Most of the time, you see a Hollywood extravaganza of marketing-induced fakeness, and you may be entertained for a little while but you always get a funky aftertaste, a hole in the pit of your brain, the opposite of satiety, a dreadful feeling of wasted time and of being patronized, disrespected.
There is no escaping the fucking marketing.
The only way out is to ignore it. To continue watching deeply nourishing and satisfying films that are not made like detergent.

The Year In Movies

Best Movies of the Year
The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke
Mother, Joon Ho-Bong
Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino
The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel
Lebanon, Shmuel Maoz
Bright Star, Jane Campion
The Maid, Sebastián Silva

Best American Movies
The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow
Where The Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze
The Informant! Steven Soderbergh
Adventureland, Greg Mottola
The Messenger, Oren Moverman
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson

Good Small Movies
Still Walking
The Damned United
Summer Hours
Ponyo
A Single Man
Crazy Heart  
Adam
Two Lovers
Cold Souls
Paranormal Activity

Disappointments
A Serious Man
Up in the Air
Brothers
Duplicity
Funny People
Julie and Julia
The Soloist
Public Enemies
Moon
An Education
Brüno

Bad Movies
Beeswax
The Limits of Control
Public Enemies
Drag Me To Hell
Away We Go
Shrink

Hollywood Dreck
Invictus
The Hangover
Brothers
Up in The Air
Public Enemies

Best Docs of the Year
Anvil, The Story of Anvil.
Food, Inc.
American Casino
Tyson
Valentino, The Last Emperor

Disappointing Docs
Capitalism, A Love Story. 
La Danse

Bad Docs
This is It
Every Little Step

Infommercial Docs 
The September Issue
It Might Get Loud

Self Indulgent Auteurs
Antichrist, Lars Von Trier
Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodóvar
The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmusch
Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino
Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz

Best Old Movies Seen in Theatres
The Fallen Idol, Carol Reed
Small Change, François Truffaut
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston
The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio de Sica

Avatar: Review of a Movie I Haven't Seen

The trailer made it look and sound utterly stupid. But now my curiosity is piqued, mainly because critics are showing it some love. However, what I'm hearing is not reassuring.

• It's like when Star Wars came out:
I was 14 when that happened, stood in the sweltering Mexico City sun for two hours to be able to get in and HATED every single minute of the movie except for the cantina scene with the funky extraterrestrials having drinks at the bar.

• It's like Dances With Wolves but with blue people:
Dances with Wolves is not, in my book, an admirable movie. If you are going to steal a story, that is rather low on the totem pole.

• The CGI is a game changer:
Sounds like a theme park ride rather than a movie. If I approach it like this, well maybe. I'll pay 15 bucks to go on a rollercoaster and save myself the whiplash (but apparently not the nausea).
Movies have become stories about merchandise and video games. That people are not horrified by this is beyond me.
I blame George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for creating the blockbusters that ruined the small movie and created the Hollywood we have today. Spielberg did some nifty things; Lucas, I am not a fan. We have them to thank for the bloated, morally suspect extravaganzas that destroy everything else in sight (2012, for instance). I fear that this may happen with Avatar. Now we can expect a barrage of stupid, expensive motion capture 3D theme park rides with terrible writing. If indeed it does well. So far, more than $200 million dollars worldwide this weekend; $73 million stateside with half the country buried in snow. It cost like $500 000 000.
I'm tempted to see it because I suspect that it will be easy to tear it a new one in terms of its own hypocrisy (it's supposed to have an ecofriendly message).
I'm just glad I saw The Bicycle Thief again today.

• The music includes pan flutes:
And this, my friends, is all we need to know.

The Dude Abides

I don't think the Oscars have ever broken my heart more (in a long history of absurd expectations from my part) than when Jeff Bridges was not even nominated for The Dude in The Big Lebowski, one of the most magnificent comedic performances of all time.  Now it's time for redress.

Jeff Bridges is quintessentially American. You could not confuse him for anything but. He could be the living embodiment of the state of California. But in movies like The Big Lebowski, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and now Crazy Heart, he is the American who fails at being American. He fails at success. But he has also played, equally well, Americans who succeed (or at least try, like in Tucker), or in Seabiscuit. He has also, magnificently, played an alien, in Starman. Whether he is a magnate or a bum or from outer space, he is always totally believable. And this is because he is one of the most psychologically intelligent actors we have. Plus, he has charisma and sexiness to no end.
Jeff Bridges is, like Gene Hackman, one of those actors in whom you cannot see the acting wheels turning (as opposed to other great actors like De Niro, Pacino and Sean Penn). He's not showy, does not call attention to himself with big dramatic gestures. He just is. Whatever it is he does, he invests the characters with a strong and psychologically sound core.
In Crazy Heart he plays Bad Blake, an aging, disillusioned Country music star who has just given up. He is broke, playing dumps and drunk. We've all seen that one before. But there is a character in this man. He is pathetic but there is no self pity in him. There is rather an ornery pride in keeping life from intruding on his self-destruction, which he indulges with wonderful panache. Bridges is the absolute master of the who gives a fuck attitude. In this case, he is not a benign fuck up, like The Dude. He is a proud, yet insolvent, drunk. He looks like shit and feels like shit and is so down on himself that he shows no respect for the audience anymore, he can't see why they like him.
Bridges so totally owns the performance that you forget he is acting. He is not a convincing drunk. He is a drunk. Alcoholics are showpieces for actors, but I think they are very hard to fake. This man here is a full blown, fighting alcoholic. He refuses to be pathetic, he is just proud and extremely out of touch with life. That's the drunk part. Then there is the Country singer part.  His singing voice is not big, but it is fine and it has heart. He plays guitar well too, but what amazed me was how he behaved on stage: like a man who has played music in front of people for ages.
The movie is a big cliché. It's not a bad cliché, and it has some great moments, but also some groaners. Bad has not spoken to his son since the kid was four, he has made mistakes, etc. In less capable hands, it could have been painful, but Bridges refuses to let Bad down easy. He barely registers hurt, yet, you can feel it swimming in liquor somewhere down there, bubbling up to the surface quiety, devastatingly, as yet another awful disappointment.
And then there is that speaking Bridges voice of honey and whisky and ash. There is a wonderful scene where he gets to play a big venue and he has a pissing match with the sound engineer. Bad is not about to become all meek and cooperative just because someone is giving him a chance. Half the scene is played with the camera behind him, but everything is in the voice: tired, knowing, ironic, proud, stubborn, insistent. "I'm an old man", he says in the end, "humor me."
There is a lot of wonderful talent at the service of a movie that were it not for it, could be quite pedestrian. Maggie Gyllenhaal is very good (though in some scenes, annoyingly mannered) as Bad's love interest. They have a wonderful chemistry, and real intimacy. Robert Duvall plays Bad's old friend. The two of them together are a wonder to behold. The music by T Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton is excellent.
But there are misses. Colin Farrell shows his lack of chops, playing a Billy Ray Cyrus kind of country star. Next to Bridges, he doesn't quite cut the mustard. The little kid that plays Gyllenhaal's son is annoying and hammy. These are problems of direction.
Then there are problems of writing. If an alcoholic decides to quit the booze, this is as heroic as it gets. There is no further need to redeem himself. But the movie ends with a really corny coda that is totally unnecessary and strained. Had it ended with Bad playing his new song quietly in his porch, it would have been more true to the authenticity and the generosity of so much talent.

A Single Man

A Single Man is based on a story by Christopher Isherwood. It's a gay movie. It is a mainstream gay movie. I was thinking, when did this happen? Since when do we have a mainstream movie with bona fide actors about the personal story of a gay man? Okay, since Brokeback Mountain, but somehow this one feels more authentic. This one  has no big heroics or politics or didactics or speechifying, or trying to make the audience feel guilty or outraged or good about itself. It's not something like last year's Milk, the Gandhi of gays, which cunningly couched the gayness in the all-American tropes of heroism and individual glory, and got some well deserved prizes along the way.  
A Single Man is private and devastating. Considering that it is fashion designer Tom Ford's first film, it is pretty impressive. He successfully creates an atmosphere, not so much of a time where objects were so much more beautiful, the early sixties, but rather of the stifling, utterly sad funk of having to live a perfectly dignified life in hiding.
And for that, you need an actor like Colin Firth, with a fierce intelligence, utter control and an ocean of feeling underneath. He is perfect as college professor George Falconer, a fastidious, closeted gay man (gay and British: doubly repressed) who loses his lover of 16 years (Matthew Goode) and is devastated. The loss is devastating in itself, but is compounded by the tragedy of living a secret life when you have done nothing to deserve the shame.
Falconer must keep his grief mostly to himself, as he is not able to share it openly. He is kept in the dark about the loss until a disembodied male voice over a telephone has the charitable gallantry of informing him there's been an accident, several days after the fact. He is not invited to the funeral. Of his partner of 16 years. Yet the movie does not express outrage. It creates the emotional atmosphere of shattering loss without pity or sentimentality.  
For the role, Firth lost some girth and he looks better than ever, unbearably stylish, sporting immaculate clothes, a fabulous haircut and big black rimmed glasses (you want to ravish him). To watch him with Julianne Moore, who plays his best friend Charlotte, is to see the contrasting styles of British and American acting of the highest caliber.  Moore is terrific as an old friend and British boozer who is in love with him, a lonely, hysterical woman grasping at straws. Feeling oozes through her pores, loose and frightening. With him is the opposite. It's all bottled up. They are both fabulous together.
Colin Firth is not particularly handsome, but he has that which makes women melt: there is warmth and vulnerability underneath the icy smartness, and we all want to coax it out of him. Like all good British thespians, he acts with his voice. He infuses a line like, "Nobody else calls me before 8 in the morning, Charlotte" with so much personal history, it is almost shocking, funny and heartbreaking. He is magnificent.
Everything looks beautifully art directed, as one might expect from a fashion designer. The movie made me horribly nostalgic for the beauty of solid state objects when I was growing up: the rotary phones, the gleaming vending machines, the fabulous sixties furniture, things made of metal and wood, things made to last. Ford has chosen a style that tries to convey the claustrophobic, suffocating anxiety of Falconer's grief, as he zeroes in on the details, which is I suppose how gay men in those days were able to make sense of who were friends and foes in the world. It's also how things feel when you are dying of grief. The focus changes to the trees instead of the forest, so you can survive the day. Sometimes the stylishness seems to get a little in the way, but the respect for the emotions and their authenticity never wavers. It's an adult, mature movie, which is very generous and moves me deeply. I really appreciate it, someone in America making such a film.
Also, all that sexual repression is terribly sexy. Sexual tension is all about delayed gratification, and in this movie there is no obvious gratification. The gratification comes from small, furtive gestures, sometimes it seems only from surprising gratitude at finding a fellow traveler. When a male student shows interest in him, even at his lowest point of desperation, Falconer knows better than to yield, even though he is immensely touched by the attention. He does not act on that unbearable frisson of passion under the surface, yet it's all there. The tension between his desire and his experience is palpable. This is very sexy.
I don't know about straight men or gay men, but women are going to swoon.