Empire Magazine
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Hollywood Unhinged – Why cinema needs to reclaim its epicness
August 14, 2012 By
Darren Aronofsky may be looking to redefine the modern epic in New York State. The Black Swan director is working on his new film, biblical drama Noah,
which stars Russell Crowe as the eponymous boat-builder. As fans of
epic storytelling will know all too well, Noah and his ark are pretty
much a package deal and so Aronofsky’s having one built.The first official photo from the film – which isn’t due in cinemas until 2014 – shows Crowe in gruff, windswept mode, but it’s anyone’s guess where on the epic scale of epicness Aronofsky’s film will fit.
Cinema needs more epics. The producers of the Bond franchise may be yapping at his heels when it comes to exotic international locations, but otherwise Christopher Nolan is about the only contemporary filmmaker with both the power and the inclination to take his production teams all over the world in search of epic scale. He even shut down Pittsburgh for a month last year and turned summer into winter for a Tumbler car chase and associated bat-related carnage in The Dark Knight Rises.
The other big hitters of modern Hollywood may finally be starting to come round. Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg have both recently been considering separate spins on the ancient tale of infamous sea-parter Moses. Cecil B DeMille set a pretty stunning precedent with that story back in the mid-50s, with a certain Mr Charlton Heston providing Moses’ square jaw, so there’s a lot to live up to.
James Cameron may be happy to take an historic dip in the Mariana Trench, but he minimises the physical risk factor in the workplace using pixel power to create Pandora’s alien landscapes in Avatar. Building an entire alien planet using complex combinations of ones and zeros is all very well, but is there still room for an old-school approach?
Studio Boss might find himself feeling nostalgic for the epics of the past after a night of vivid dreams in the Hollywood hills. He’ll arrive at his palatial office and address his subordinates on the PA:
“Dear Minions: I have had a dream. And I remembered it, which is quite unusual. The ghost of Cecil B DeMille himself appeared before me and told me he’s less than impressed with modern Hollywood’s interpretation of ‘epic’. He gave me some tips chiselled in stone and instructed me to read them aloud to you all. I’ve actually had them typed up on file paper because A5 stone slabs crossing from the spirit world are still surprisingly heavy and impractical to carry to the office in my low-clearance sports car.
“But I digress. DeMille wants less of this ‘computer-generated
malarkey’. He reckons it takes the challenge out of the operation and
makes for really dull behind-the-scenes documentaries. Nobody wants to
watch a 20-minute Making Of where a guy in jeans and sneakers explains
how he animated an entire army using a digital exoskeleton, digital
muscle layers, shadow and wind effects! Snore! You know there are places
in the world outside a computer where you can get shadows, wind and
gravity for free!“Back in the day, film crews would head to the most remote locations in the world and build a city out of paper-mache on the side of an active volcano. They’d hire a million extras and tell anecdotes for years about how the hard-as-nails director realised his stunning vision wielding a megaphone in one hand and a cutlass in the other as he dueled with local revolutionary dissidents between takes. That was the Hollywood way!
“Okay, so none of this comes cheap, but it’s all a small price to pay
for grand narratives told in broad brushstrokes that can deliver some
variety in IMAX cinemas around the world. Rather than showing the same
movies in the IMAX on a loop for months on end, imagine having a new
epic every week! An epic that doesn’t even have to be blown up for IMAX –
it’ll be so big they’ll have to hire trolls to wheel it into the cinema
on a massive mahogany chariot and jump on it a few times to make it
small enough to fit on the screen!“There was once a vision that was epic cinema – it can be ours once more. Plus, the Olympics has finished now so we could use something epically brilliant to cheer at on a weekly basis!”
Studio Boss leans back in his immense leather office chair and smiles to himself in quiet reflection; size does matter.
KStew, RPatz, Aniston and the Unfortunate Reality of Today's Movies
Risk has been abandoned
Before that the big story was Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson with her Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders and surely the recent death of Whitney Houston will be used to sell this weekend's new opener Sparkle as the late celebrity's final onscreen performance.
Additionally, Pattinson has his own movie coming out this weekend in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, and we've already been made well aware that after he learned of Stewart's cheating ways he stayed with his Water for Elephants co-star, Reese Witherspoon, for a short spell. Witherspoon, again, is another actor that's enjoyed some time in the gossip rags after her public break-up with Ryan Phillippe.
What's most interesting about all of this, is that none of it has helped at the box-office. Where it has helped is in making these actors money as they are now perceived as stars when they are anything but.
The idea of the movie star is essentially dead outside of a few unique exceptions. Stewart isn't a movie star and yet, Forbes pegs her as today's highest paid actress ahead of Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker, Meryl Streep, Kristen Wiig and Jennifer Aniston. Stewart defenders will likely point to Snow White and the Huntsman as evidence she can indeed open a film, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Snow White and the Huntsman is hardly the hit some would like to pretend it is, having made only $389.2 million worldwide on a massive $170 million budget before advertising, let alone accounting for theater splits. Sure, it will make some money for Universal, but we're not talking "hit" here folks. Looking at the rest of Stewart's releases there's nothing to suggest she should be paid any kind of real dough to open a film, and her number is obviously inflated as a result of what Summit had to pay to keep her and the rest of her Twilight co-horts together to finish off that franchise.
However, was that a necessary choice?
It's no secret the Twilight films are bad, but watching this woman to the right cry and scream as she lets go of her emotions upon hearing of Stewart's cheating ways she says something rather revealing, "I'm a fan of [Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson] because of the movies. And I'm a fan of them because of their acting in the movies, and the books and Stephenie Meyer." In short, these rabid Twilight fans aren't showing up to see Stewart or Pattinson, they're showing up to see Bella and Edward and their obsession with these characters has stormed the Internet. Their perceived "celebrity" gives a multitude of blogs reason to use their names in headlines to attain clicks and pageviews, which feeds advertising and pays the bills. (I am just as guilty of this as many others.)
So here we sit, with interest in movies on the decline and interest in tabloid gossip, rumors, story spoilers and the thought of sequels before a film is even released on the rise. Films with stars such as Stewart and Pattinson are fueled by gossip headlines and I expect even Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master will enjoy its own share of sensationalism to help it creep into the mainstream by using Scientology to sell its secrets.
Admittedly, I'm largely talking about Internet fandom, which is to say a small portion of society where there is a proclaimed appreciation and excitement for upcoming movies. But it's also a place where fans obsess over only a select few movies with superhero flicks and anything from Christopher Nolan gaining the most attention over the last few years.
I watch as attempts to spoil the story are not only read, but sought after. It happened with Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises and I won't say I wasn't part of the problem because I was, posting rumored plot details for both of those films while doing my best to not spoil the films for myself. That said, is it any surprise neither was declared the life-changing cinema most expected considering the infinite lengths people went to know everything about both films before going in? Both generated conversation following their release, but derision fueled the conversation just as much, if not more, than anything else.
With The Dark Knight Rises an endless number of bloggers listed off what they disliked about the film, one blogger suggesting to me it was a good move because it got "over 700 comments". In the case of Prometheus, initial conversations were fascinating, exploring the themes and ambiguity of the film but as quickly as fans were apt to discuss the pros they were just as swift to deride it while also hoping for a sequel. Gimme more! But before you do, tell me what it's about and how it ends and I'll tell you if you're on the right track.
We live in an age of instant gratification. We want to know everything now. As we've seen, the news media is guided by this idea of first and even comment sections on websites can often be found with people rushing to be "First!" Thought is absent from society, patience non-existent and the idea of the unknown is scary to both studios and audiences. Risk has been abandoned.
This isn't a new idea and even Pauline Kael at one point wrote, "There's no audience for new work." She wrote that back in 1974. She, of course, was a little different than the rest of us in more ways than one, palling around with directors and also, notoriously, never seeing a film more than once. But she had a point, there is no audience for new work, at least there is rarely a large one.
Studios don't like "new" because it's a risk. There's an idea you have to spend inordinate amounts of money to bring in the audiences and you spend that money on known quantities. Look at the money spent on Snow White and the Huntsman, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Alice in Wonderland, the Harry Potter films, Spider-Man, Pirates of the Caribbean, Men in Black 3, etc. And when risks are taken and the films ultimately fail everyone looks to point the finger, such as the case with John Carter earlier this year while Battleship was able to only receive bits of shrapnel by comparison.
What surprises me out of all of this, and I feel this kind of a change is coming, is that studios don't take money spent on some of these films and just distribute it out to a collection of talented filmmakers to make smaller budgeted features. Why spend $125 million (the questionable budget reported for Total Recall) on one film when you could spend $20 million on six films?
Several films as of late were made for less than $30 million, films such as Magic Mike ($7 million), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ($10 million), Moonrise Kingdom ($16 million), The Devil Inside ($1 million), Young Adult ($12 million), Margin Call ($3.5 million), Contraband ($25 million) and Haywire ($23 million). Right there you have eight films for only $94 million and $31 million left for marketing or just a nice dinner out. Eight films for the price of one Total Recall. And if the idea of celebrity is still a big thing to you, with those films you get the likes of Channing Tatum, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Charlize Theron, Kevin Spacey, Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Fassbender, Tom Wilkinson, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy. However, I'd suggest finding fresh faces as it will keep talent costs down and production values and originality high. No, not all of them are going to be hits, but that's par for the course and in this case it won't cost a ton of money.
Recently a commenter took me to task for mentioning how films such as Total Recall and The Bourne Legacy were nothing more than cheap knockoffs of films that came before them. It was suggested I "pretend" each film exists on its own without any prior influence, as if each new film is a new experience. In a blissfully ignorant world that would work just fine, but as humans we are informed by our experiences and crave something truly "new" although we might not always know it. Studios would prefer to continue feeding us the same junk.
The majors have become the McDonald's of cinema, feeding us Big Macs with super-sized fries and only occasionally attempting to serve something that's not fried. People are comforted in this food, they know what they're going to get, so they keep coming back even though it isn't very good and not at all good for them. This is to say, yes, people can tell what's good and what's bad, but they will also tell you they don't care… just look at the obesity rate in both our population and our summer blockbuster budgets. Feeding us the same old, focus-grouped junk with the latest "celebrity" packaging.
As someone that has seen plenty of movies in his life, and still not nearly as many as more seasoned critics in the industry, I pray for something new. I want every film to stand on its own. Directors are informed and influenced by the past and I love to see that shine through in today's movies, but not in the form of copying such as you find in Total Recall or failed attempts at an homage such as Cop Out. Give me the Hitchcockian nature of Source Code or The Adjustment Bureau, the Kubrickian stylings of Inception or the French New Wave influence found in Moonrise Kingdom.
Instead, however, what we're getting are reports on what actors are being sought for The Expendables 3 before The Expendables 2 even hits theaters. If this is where the majority of interest lies it's going to be a long road ahead, but sooner or later the bubble will hopefully burst and someone with the power to change will step in and ask, "Why?"
