Rant. I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher this week and Kathryn Bigelow was a guest, she was there to talk about her animated film about elephant hunting for ivory, but during their conversation Bill took a side conversation to talk about the highest grossing movies of all time and compared how what used to be the standard and with adjusting for inflation were movies like Gone with the Wind and the Sound of Music, but now all the top grossing movies have superheroes and aliens and such, and the basically swung it all around into the question of, have we gotten dumber as a culture and more childish in our tastes, and he asked her if she thought there was a real deficit in our culture for loftier or more important movies, which she agreed there was. This isnt a new position for Bill, its been a pretty consistent position that hes held in the entire time that Ive been watching this show, I remember him saying similar things about Lord of the Rings. Theres also a lot of holes in the figures he chose to cite, considering Star Wars is number 2 behind Gone with the Wind, and in the top ten are also E.T., Jaws, The Exorcist, The Ten Commandments, and Snow White, he was really selective in which titles supported his argument. Okay, so Im bringing this up because Ive heard this argument a few times, I even unfriended someone over a version of it last summer when Guardians of the Galaxy came out. There seems to be this very cultural elitist point of view that any and all movies or art that have fantasy or science fiction elements are immediately less legitimate forms of art than those that don’t have them, which is just absurd to me. Science Fiction has been responsible for a wealth of social commentary in the last century or so, and supernatural elements as allegory for real world issues and figures has been a mainstay of literature throughout human culture. I’m not saying that the highest grossing comic book movies or even Star Wars are “high art.” There are some movies that are just purely entertaining movies. What I’m saying is that none of the movies in that top ten highest grossing films of all time, adjusted for inflation, are. I’m saying that Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music and Doctor Zhivago aren’t any more mature or elegant of films than The Avengers or Star Wars or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2. They’re just the genre films of their day. What I’m saying too is that it’s not that people have gotten dumber but rather that these more fantasy-based movies have gotten better. The technology exists in 2015 to make movies that can actually push the limits of what we can imagine. Compare that to say, 1978 when the biggest selling point of Superman: The Movie was not that there was a movie about the famous super hero, but that the technology existed to make him appear to fly. That was literally the tagline for the movie: “You will believe a man can fly.” Consider too that the box office gross of a movie has very little to do with how much the overall population actually feels about a movie. All it means is how appealing the movie seems to the widest audience of people. A lot of people saw Avatar, but I can’t name one person who would tell me that it was their favorite movie. Which leads me to the other aspect of this conversation that really frustrates me and a big part of what got me mad at my friend last summer. There’s this implication that if you like “lower” movies that you can’t also appreciate what they consider the finer stuff. When GotG came out and my friend was so adamant that she didn’t want to see it, fine, I have no issue with you not wanting to see a movie you don’t want to see. I’m probably not going to see American Sniper, it happens. The issue was that she also acted like I was making an affront to her sensibilities because I had seen it. The phrase “at some point you need to grow up” was used. She said rather than watch the Guardians of the Galaxy I could have seen the new Woody Allen movie like a grownup. For the purposes of this conversation I’ll table the allegations against Allen that were pretty flared up last year when Magic in the Moonlight came out. Instead I’ll focus on the fact that I’ve seen and enjoyed a lot of Woody Allen movies and also found a lot of them to be terrible or mediocre at best, and by most reviews Magic in the Moonlight fell into that latter category. So just because I chose to see a movie by James Gunn whose most recent work has consistently been enjoyable, doesn’t mean I’m incapable of understanding the complex work of Woody Allen; who at this point no longer holds the position of being a filmmaker whose work I’ll always check out based on previous Goodwill. The fact is that most of the people I know who are into the really geeky stuff, the people who can appreciate the differences between The Avengers and say the two previous Fantastic Four movies in terms of quality, usually do also appreciate higher quality movies. And I think this is a pretty representative observation when applied to the masses as well. My basis for this opinion is the Top 250 on the IMDb. I think it is safe to assume that among the sample of people who take the time to rate movies on IMDb is a significant amount of the same moviegoers who go to see the highest grossing films of all time. Yet when they rank the movies on their votes, which are then weighted to make the results more indicative of the general population, the top ten best movies of all time only include one super hero movie (The Dark Knight) and one fantasy movie (Return of the King). There really is no argument that somehow movies and audiences have gotten dumber than they used to be. The truth is simply that there is a much wider marketplace for any and all art these days and as such there will be a bigger and bigger disconnect between the types of work that appeal to specific audiences and the types of things that have broader appeal. There’s also a whole other point that I won’t get into here that the smaller more character driven work has migrated to television, giving writers more power and the ability to spread things out over a longer timeline, leaving stories that hit with a bang and can best be wrapped up in a few hours to the the multiplex.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 19:27:02 +0000
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