Movies 2007 Roundtable Spectacular

Part III: Audience expectations and Am I a movie snob?

Click here for Part I of this roundtable
Click here for Part II of this roundtable

I’ll follow Colbinski’s format:

The Best
No Country For Old Men

Highly Recommended
An Unreasonable Man
The Host
Brand Upon the Brain!
Paprika
The Bourne Ultimatum
In-Between Days
Lust, Caution
There Will Be Blood

Recommended
Zodiac
300
Hot Fuzz
SiCKO
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Superbad
Eastern Promises

Good but Flawed
Ocean’s Thirteen
Time
Juno
Stardust
3:10 To Yuma

Disappointing
Grindhouse
Spiderman 3
I am Legend

In my previous post I forgot to add Stardust as disappointing me. For much of the same reasons you list. (Although I call it the Hollywoodification of movies rather than the Hollywoodization.) Nevertheless, Stardust and 3:10 to Yuma make the Good but Flawed list rather than Disappointing because I did enjoy both. They just could have been so much better – if they trusted the source material and if they didn’t have to subjugate themselves to the lowest common denominator, poll-tested type of studio movie-making. Back to Stardust. Neil Gaiman is my favorite author and the ending of Stardust (the book) portrays exactly why he is a master story-teller. The bombastic, predictable ending tacked on is the problem with Hollywoodification. Just as the sugary ending to I am Legend is problematic.

I understand that many people want to "feel good” leaving a movie theatre but are they really that stupid to be fooled time and time again by lack of originality in Hollywood endings. Which is one reason (of several) why No Country for Old Men is the best movie of the year. I remember talking to you after reading the book and mentioning how they can never make a movie that does justice to the book. But they did. They did superbly. So much that happens is opposite of how it happens in Stardust and I am Legend. Everything isn’t spelled out for the slow-witted. Plot isn’t contrived to bring us to a climax. In fact, we can probably argue over what is the climax of No Country or if there is one. Now No Country had the strength of source material written by one of the greatest living American authors and a screenplay by two brilliant filmmakers. It worked because of this. Some movies can have nice and tidy endings – even happy endings – and be great and satisfying. Although looking over my Highly Recommended list I see that none of those movies really have happy endings and in movies like Bourne and In-Between Days the story doesn’t exactly wrap up – you leave knowing there’s more to tell as the credits roll.

This begs the question “Am I a movie snob?” I say no although I have been accused of being such especially after passing up opportunities to see something like Adam Sandler’s latest (“He’s gay! With the King of Queens!”) In looking at the Top 10 highest grossing movies of 2007 I have seen five of them and I will see The Simpsons Movie one of these days. So I will have watched more than half of the most popular movies put out this year. Hardly snobbish behavior, I’d say. (Now, having declared myself non-snobby I need to ask who are these people going to see Wild Hogs?) I look forward to serious, artsy, and foreign films. But I also like lowbrow stuff. We grew up watching Saturday afternoon kung-fu and B-monster movies. We’ve seen many of the movies shown on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on their own. I just try to reject the middlebrow. I get no satisfaction from it. It’s worse than mindless entertainment. It’s insulting. I think the problem is that good, enjoyable cheesy movies aren’t really made much anymore. So I veer toward highbrow. So if I am snobbish it is due to attrition rather than any inherent movie-viewing habits.

I like to think this has to do with audience expectations. Audiences expect movies to be sugar-coated and mindlessly predictable so they show up. It’s not what they want, necessarily, but they have just bought into what Hollywood does. Since they show up Hollywood interprets this as them wanting exactly what they have been putting out. Am I giving audiences too much credit? I think audience expectations partly explain the laughter during No Country. The movie had some funny moments to be sure. But other times I think certain members of the audience were expecting something different. Perhaps, they were expecting a scene to veer off into Fargo or Big Lewboski territory and they laughed prematurely. They expected No Country to be a Coen movie. While it certainly was it was also a Cormac McCarthy movie. So they were looking for laughs in the wrong places. Like No Country, there were some funny scenes in There Will be Blood. (Both movies do not have funny ha-ha scenes but rather scenes that elicit laughter as a way to break the tension found through each movie.) I recall most of the laughter in There Will Be Blood as coming when the young preacher was on-screen. I took it more as a liberal NYC audience laughing at the backwards, Jesus freaks. But I could be wrong.

Enough for now. I still want to talk about watching Brand Upon the Brain! as a live movie (best movie-going experience of the year) and The Bourne Ultimatum (best action movie ever). Also I want to compare two movies about teenagers – Juno and In-Between Days – which I am sure will bring out certain snobby prejudices I have against "American Independent” cinema.