..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

..Pride, Unprejudiced: ..The Blog

So, a penguin walks into a snack bar…

The business pages of the metropolitan dailies, which the arts pages often can pass for as well, love the cascading success of The March of the Penguins as it passes Bowling for Columbine to become the second-highest-grossing documentary in movie history, still multimillions behind Fahrenheit 9/11. Cute, easily anthropomorphized yet still mute and mysterious, these sleek Emperors are a template for whatever the imaginations of children, adults and reporters might need them for.

Another 2005 story that's even more insistent is an alleged box-office slump. The statistics have been sliced, diced, fried and reheated to prove some sort of aborning case for the death of movies as we know them. DVD players saturate American households, that’s a “maturing” market, the sales of DVDs are falling. The amount of time between a movie opening in theaters and arriving in older viewers’ Netflix queue is reduced to a matter of weeks.

But what if they gave a summer and the movies all stank? Or at least, somehow failed to inflame the mass mind? This is a recurrent problem with the analyses, AKA “think pieces,” or better yet, “thumbsuckers,” that the New York Times or the LA Times or the or the Chicago Tribune are cycling out on an almost-weekly basis: presumptuous analyses of the studio system and particular products that happen to be released on a given Friday or in a certain month as if all the factors were as stable and reproducible as in science. But who knows why The Island, a mishegas mishmash that I enjoyed with only a minimum of caffeine in my system, did not gross enough to pay for even its publicity costs? Confused marketing? A lack of gleaming, established stars? A disinterest in the topic of cloning by a mass audience primarily composed of teenagers? DVDs? PS2? ADD?

You can argue for days with fervor for fun: In the Monday morning blame-assigning, director Michael Bay said his best movie had to be his worst, since it didn’t make money; co-producer and DreamWorks executive Walter Parkes was variously quoted as saying it was a terrible title, although he was in charge of the movie and could have changed it, and that Scarlett Johansson didn’t have the draw of a tween TV star; Johansson’s representatives asked why, if the movie was troubled, Parkes took an incommunicado Italian vacation for three weeks right before the release date. Ooooh, there’s drama. There’s the kind of soap that ought to clean up. The story behind the story: the types behind the archetypes.

A half-dozen to a dozen new movies open most weekends in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, not including those at the hundred-plus film festivals each year. (If a stirring documentary about an Argentinian labor conflict opens at the Music Box and there’s no one there to buy a ticket, did it open at all?)

Increasingly, with many star-driven, concept-heavy movies—the bulk of stuff that costs over $50 million to produce, ones that don't rely on performances for their content—the studios have chosen to make them only selectively available for preview across North America. While Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper get access to whatever they might review on their show (and later on local television or in the newspaper), a movie like Disney’s Valiant might be shown on a Monday night for other reviewers, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, despite good word-of-mouth from the East and West Coast and reviews this weekend in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, is being shown on Tuesday night, a couple of hours after this was written.

Sometimes I’m asked why I write about so many “arty” movies. Don’t I like “big” movies? (Yes, please, more BOOM, more THUD and ZOWIE; I’d be happy to sit through Stuart Little 3) I like all kinds of movies but some weeks, like this one, reading the reviews I’ve published you’d think I’d made a conscious choice to write about only about imported product. The reason is less about taste than what’s there. It’s the small distributors like Strand Releasing that reach out to make sure that a movie like Tropical Malady, by the brilliant young Thai-born, School of the Art Institute-trained painter and filmmaker Apichatpong (“Call me Joe”) Weerasethakul, a jungle-set love story that may or may not be between a man and a tiger, gets some sort of ink. It’s work that needs to be elucidated, celebrated, and discussed, rather than merely advertised and marketed after having any sense of human life or mystery patterned and test-screened out of it. There need to be more voices than metro daily critics filing weblogs from Cannes or Sundance or Toronto. But is a good review just another outlandish scream in the jungle dark?

Another inkling about the shifts in moviegoing habits is about just such foreign language movies, dispatches from other cultures. Even if there are a half-dozen “new waves” washing up on our shores, with screens being taken up by earnest, scruffy, American documentary projects, where are the eyeballs to take in movies like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s era-shattering love story, Three Times, which debuted at Cannes and will likely never seen American theatrical distribution? (This even with the word from critics and filmmakers that I trust being that it may not only be one of Hou’s best movies, but an unassailable masterpiece that could influence the way movies are made for decades to come.)

Are these movies like poetry? A young friend asked the other day, why read poetry? Who reads poetry? She meant the question sincerely; poetry remains a foreign language to her. Other writers require poetry, I insisted, catching myself just shy of a bark. Poets need poetry, moviemakers need poetry, and I threw out examples of novelists who grasp for the diamond clarity of language in lines, film directors who look at a certain wild sunset and recall a line from antiquity.

Meaning: who is the audience for all this beauty? Only those who crave the potential to themselves one day construct more useless beauty? Reviewers, at least for this brief moment we have, enjoy an exotic privilege; getting to see the movies they most admire in ideal circumstances, and increasingly, being denied the chance to reprove cynical, hapless attempts at recycling the content of past successes. I made a list for myself of the movies that screened after my deadlines this year, which I didn’t feel compelled to catch up with once they opened, even though I could see them without paying, or by paying only the cost of the hours of my life. There are about twenty-five, and I don’t feel a moment’s longing to witness a single one of them.

August 18,, 2004

- Email Ray Pride