As a few critics and commentators have pointed out, 2011 will see more sequels released than any other year in American movie history. The amount of tut-tutting, tsk-tsking, and “you've got to be fucking kidding me”ing is relatively low. It'd seem as though by this point in the unfolding of the great narrative, we're all beaten down. The “Hollywood doesn't have any original ideas” meme is as old as the industry itself. The second movie ever made was a ripoff of the first, when you get right down to it. I'm actually kind of glad that people aren't doing a ton of impotent bitching about it; the fact that the reaction to the “2011 is the Year of Sequels” news was a shrug is less than satisfying, but fuck it, if revolutions happened every day they wouldn't be called revolutions.
There comes a point where, not to be too much of a dick-limpener, one has to wonder if there will ever be another revolution in American movies. The fact that anyone, most of all me, is even expecting one is Peter Biskind's fault. His 1997 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls had a massive impact in my life and love of movies, to the point where I wrote a play—still unproduced, pending a couple drafts that make the fucking thing performable, which'll probably also turn it into a movie, like it really should be—called Hollywood, Mon Amour a couple years ago that ripped Biskind off so bad that, after the interminable goddamn reading, all my friends politely came up to me and smirked “You really like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, don't you?” Well, yes, I do. I even have an ownership history with that book; my mom bought it in hardback and said “fuck you, it's mine,” when I wanted to bring it back to Bard with me, only to have a paperback copy magically come into my possession when someone left it unattended in a dorm bathroom (Ed. Note: it's not theft when you steal from hippies).Completely aside from the sentimental materialistic associations with the physical book itself, there are wonders contained in its pages. Biskind's writing itself is engaging, articulate, and profane—I haven't consciously emulated him, but he can't help but have had some influence on yours truly—but really, it's the stories people tell him. Holy shit. His fucking interview technique must involve cocaine, tequila, and sodium pentothal, because man. A surprisingly small number of the juiciest quotes and anecdotes are anonymously attributed. For the most part people just sit there and go, “Sure, I fucked her. Sure she was fifteen. But hey, Pete. It was the 70s. You'da hit it too.”
That's the book's most lasting achievement: contributing to the mythologizing of the American cinema of the 70s, which it characterizes as the American New Wave. There's all kinds of excitable talk like that in the book, about how it was a revolution, how for a brief shining moment auteur directors were handed the keys to the car, which they promptly crashed. The book ends on a decidedly wistful “that'll never happen again” note.
Periodically, though, I get on trains of thought where I compose hazy metaphors involving pendula and start playing a little bit of that “history is cyclical” jazz on my axe and start wondering if the paralytic aesthetic conservatism of Hollywood will lead to another systemic collapse, and another influx of auteurism and originality to the industry. I mean, come on, eventually the populace will rise as one and rebel against the endless litany of remakes, sequels, franchise tentpoles and shit, right? Right. . .?
The reason why Hollywood almost collapsed in the 60s was because they briefly completely lost the ability to make hits. The problem with all these pictures everyone complains about being so shitty nowadays is that most of 'em make pots and pots of money. Of course, there are marketing costs and all that to factor in, and the budgets are Donald Duck-in-a-straitjacket crazy, so it's not like when Johnny Depp carries on like a rum-sodden trollop in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean thing Disney takes home the whole billion dollars it grosses. Still, it's not like the Liz Taylor Cleopatra picture that cost the equivalent of $300+ million in modern bux and in spite of being the biggest hit of the year still lost the equivalent of $100 million. Hollywood's making mountains of money these days.
As long as they continue to do so, we're going to continue to see more of what's working. The movie business is business, after all, and as long as enough consumers are willing to pay for a consumable good, it remains profitable to produce said good. We can be all clever and play on words all we like about how the good in question isn't, that movies suck all year until at least fall and usually December where if we're lucky we get a couple decent, ambitious pictures. But remember, movie business. The movies they're making are making money, and there's no tangible reason to alter course. So, even leaving aside the fuckton of remakes this year we get Harry Potter 7.5. Fast (and the Furious) Five. Final Destination 5. Spy Kids 4. Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Scream 4. Mission Impossible 4. X-Men 4. Twilight 4.1. Paranormal Activity 3. Transformers 3. Alvin and the Chipmunks 3. Cars 2. Sherlock Holmes 2. Happy Feet 2. The Hangover 2. Kung Fu Panda 2. Shit, Apollo 18 and Super 8 are fucking around having numbers in the title hoping people will think they're sequels and pay shitloads of money to go see them.
All this has been said before. Sequels don't necessarily have to suck, nor do remakes, nor do adaptations of pre-existing entities from other media. The fact that so many do, hey. Whaddaya gonna do. A handful aren't bad, or are at least competently enough executed to be enjoyable. What many bemoan, and I will guardedly (not to say half-assedly) join in, is the neglect in Hollywood of smaller pictures. Sure, Oscar season sees a whole bunch of less-expensive pictures each year, but if you look closer almost all of those are independent productions acquired by Fox Searchlight or Sony Classics or Focus (Universal's equivalent) or somebody. It would be nice if more studios produced “Oscar bait” pictures or anything with any ambition beyond the visceral, but hey. You can see why they don't, since bigger investments (in this case movies) offer bigger returns. Swirl that argument around your snifter a little bit more and what you end up with is a variant on the complaint that life isn't fair. And, really, at that point, stop messing around and just drink the fucking brandy.
There is a possibility, that wishful thinkers who'd like to see the early 70s come back, that multiplex audiences will tire of threequels and fourquels and fivequels and post-production 3D making shit unwatchable and toy commercials and comic book movies and vegetarian vampires and all that fuckin mess and the industry will need auteurs again. Really, though, we're never going to see the same kind of upheaval the movie business experienced in the late 60s and early 70s, not without a parallel paradigm shift in society itself of the same scale. And, if you want a real wince-inducing confrontation of harsh reality, not until people actually start giving a flying fuck about cinema again.
I don't mean movies. Plenty of people love movies, and with the increasingly interconnected world there's a lot more access to good ones. But the actual study of what a movie is and what makes it that way is a dying field. The very same interconnection of the world that increases access to movies increases access to movie criticism, and not to launch another jeremiad against the critical community, but the increasing dual tendencies toward a) emotionally-based geekouts over genre pictures and nostalgia pieces and b) tweedy namedrop porn are making that already endangered species, the critic, even more so.
There's nothing wrong with either a) or b), except that each need to be presented with the challenge of cultivating the other's strength. If you genuinely love that genre picture, or that thing you've loved since the 80s, you should be able to defend that love intellectually, and with a knowledge of why it's good cinema, or if it's not strictly speaking good, how it—as cinema—is enjoyable. “But I just like it” isn't an argument, it ends the argument. There's no possibility for argument unless both parties use reason. I'm not saying you need to break down every single favorite movie shot for shot or anything like that, but at least be able to tell the difference between a good script and good direction, or know that the reason why a particular sequence is cool is because of the editing. Basic shit. And for fuck's sake you need to be able to admit that something you liked might not be good. This is a huge problem for a lot of people, who'll start blubbering about taste being subjective. Sure, taste is subjective. But you can see technique. It's a physical fact. Whether or not you like it is up to you, but “I liked it” and “It's good” are sometimes separate states of being.
Which brings us to the tweedy fuckers. Rapping the knuckles of the proles because they fail to recognize the genius of Terry Malick or Michael Haneke or Hou Hsiao-Hsien or Satyajit Ray or somefuckinbody gets no one anywhere, and it just alienates the chastised. Getting all pissy about how such-and-such brooding meditation on the human condition failed to find a mass audience is, even before we get to how annoying it is, excessively Utopian and just as much of a critical failure as the “But I just like it” people. While making it as clear as I can that I'm not pissing on any of the four above-mentioned directors (well, except Haneke; he knows what he did, the bitch) critics faulting mass audiences for not having the time or concentration to flock to artistically or intellectually demanding pictures as they do to visceral thrill ride Hollywood stuff are not critiquing movies. They're positioning themselves as sophisticated intellectuals and creating a false dichotomy between art and entertainment, and, ironically, are themselves largely to blame for preventing the average person who “likes movies” uncritically from letting him/herself enjoy art pictures.
In setting things up so you're the retard if you don't like some hauntingly fucking poignant picture from Eastern Europe where everyone gets persecuted by the secret police before getting killed in the end, the critic is not doing what s/he, arguably, should: advocate for great art. This is why, when The Lives of Others came out and everyone heard “East Germany” and “communists” and went yawning for the exits I ran around obsessively advocating it as entertainment. The fact that I had to throw in so many “yeah, but”s was frustrating (ex. “Um, it's about a fuckin East German communist dude in the secret police and all he does is spy on the playwright dude?” “Yeah, but the way it's done is awesome and you really end up caring about them.”) I submit that if you replace all the shit in the reviews about how important it was with how spellbindingly tense the whole fucking thing ended up being, you get a lot more civilians interested. And you get a lot fewer civilians talking about how critics are meaningless; really, if all critics are doing is nattering about how important the movie is, and by extension how smart they are for understanding, they're signing their own death warrants.
This all ties back into the preponderance of sequels and remakes and so forth these days, and into the surprise twist ending I'm going to spring on you: I don't particularly give a shit that 2011 is the Year of the Sequel. I mean, clearly, it interests me enough to have written about it at this length, but not in any kind of “woe is us” doomsaying kind of way. The big thing that links the two well-flamed straw men above, the emotionals who can't defend their positions and the intellectuals who do so with nuclear warheads, is their prejudice. Both have already decided whether or not they like a movie before going in. The emotionals make some vaguely dissatisfied noise about “meh, sequels,” and the intellectuals go batshit talking about how originality died with Godard, leaving me to point out that The Empire Strikes Back was a sequel, and Godard is still alive. Which is to say, respectively, smarten up and calm the fuck down.
Watching movies, we should know what they are, but not spend so much time analyzing that we forget to enjoy ourselves. There are gradations to enjoyment, keep in mind. Sometimes it's from watching Donnie Yen get pissed off and insist on fighting ten guys at once, casually reducing them to broken, mewling viscera with his bare hands. Sometimes it's from watching Fellini observe il Vitelloni cinque trying to make some sense out of their lives. Sometimes it's even from watching a sequel. But no matter which of the myriad ways movies can entertain is the one working its magic in a given moment, we should always know, or at least care, why.
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