Why Hollywood Sucks

Hi,

I couldn't have said it better myself!!

Tony

Brain drainers
June 17, 2005

Popcorn cinema is insulting our intelligence. So why do audiences turn up in droves to watch Mr & Mrs Smith make a killing? Jim Schembri explains.

Well, it did its job.

Over the past weekend, Mr & Mrs Smith, the $US100 million ($A130.9 million) action comedy romance starring Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and more fireballs than a bad day in Baghdad, positively raked it in.

It was a worldwide hit, easily topping the box office charts in Australia with a $4.7 million take, in Britain with $7.1 million, and in the US, where it made more than $US51 million ($A66.7 million).

This was great news for Jolie and Pitt. It's the biggest film either has ever headlined.
Same goes for director Doug Liman, who's never had a hit this huge. It's great news for filmgoers too, as it's now more than likely that Pitt and Jolie will team up again soon to make a sequel to this monumental piece of crap.

The box office performance of Mr & Mrs Smith, of course, came as no surprise to any of the bean counters at its studio, 20th Century Fox.

The film simply had to do this well on its opening weekend to justify the enormous cost of making it and - much more importantly - of promoting it to the nth degree, so that even the emperor penguins of the Antarctic were phoning up for tickets.

Producers of mass-market multiplex mulch like Mr & Mrs Smith are not interested in relationships with audiences; they are interested in one-night stands. In fact, the relationship doesn't have to go the whole night. All they require are the few moments it takes to purchase the ticket at the box office.

In the modern era of the hyper-hyped corporate blockbuster, this basic transaction has taken on added symbolic weight. For unlike almost any other product on earth, a movie ticket, once purchased, cannot be refunded merely because the film didn't deliver on its promise. Once you've forked over your hard earned, the marketing has done its job and you're on your own.

The weekend a blockbuster opens is the one that counts. Indeed, there is now so much emphasis on how a big film opens that the term "opening weekend" has become somewhat dated.

Nobody ever hangs out hoping for great second-weekend figures, because by then the film's fate has been well and truly sealed. Big films can't afford the luxury of growing or finding audiences.
In fact, the vigour of a blockbuster's performance over its theatrical run is calculated by the rate of the audience decline - or "drop-off" - over successive weekends. After its record-breaking opening weekend, Hulk was declared a dud because of the record drop-off in its second weekend.

If films don't hit large straight out of the gate, recovery is extremely unlikely. That first-weekend take is what matters. So films are geared to maximise that initial bite at the mass-market pie.

Thus it is that we have films like Mr & Mrs Smith. And Miss Congeniality 2. And Catwoman and Hulk and The Day After Tomorrow and The Stepford Wives and Oceans Twelve and Planet of the Apes and Independence Day and Tomb Raider and Godzilla and so on and so forth and such like.

These films are designed and packaged to hoover in as many megabucks as they can as quickly as they can before the next blockbuster lines up for its share.

Big films are not sold on whether there is a story worth telling, let alone whether the story is well told. This is why the art of big-screen storytelling has been in such dire condition, especially since the headache-inducing dopiness of Independence Day in 1996.

Once-important elements such as plotting and internal logic are simply irrelevant to popcorn pulp. How else could a studio have the gall to release The Stepford Wives?

In the case of Mr & Mrs Smith, we have a story premise that is an insult not only to the art of
story, but to Charles Darwin.

Jolie and Pitt play two professional assassins who are married but who keep their real jobs secret from each other. That is, however, until they are sent on the same job. And why are they sent on the same job?

The reasoning given in the film is that their rival employers finally discover they are married, think the arrangement is awkward and so decide to eliminate them. This they hope to achieve by sending them on the same assignment, where, having suddenly discovered the truth, they will promptly kill each other instead of their target.

This conceit is a prime example of a Hollywood blockbuster not giving a shit about story. There are a dozen other examples in Mr and Mrs Smith of narrative holes you could sail an Essex-class aircraft carrier through - not the least of which is why any agency that specialises in killing would choose such a clumsy way of killing two killers.

And if they're professional assassins, why are they such bad shots? Why do they continue trying to kill each other after they realise they've been married for six years? And how can you like a guy who is so happy to subject somebody to torture? Is Mr & Mrs Smith actually trying to be the stupidest Hollywood film since Catwoman?

But surely such questions are too nit-picky. It's all just throwaway, comic-book stuff that doesn't take itself seriously. Come on, hombre. Lighten up. Where's your suspension of disbelief? It's just a popcorn movie. Story doesn't matter.

Yes, it does - especially in popcorn movies.

The refrain "suspension of disbelief" has become the flimsiest, most overused excuse for bad cinematic storytelling in the past decade. Suspension of disbelief is fine but it is not the same thing as suspension of intelligence.

Whether a serious drama or a throwaway piece of multiplex fluff, a story has to make sense on its own terms. However outlandish the premise, there must be an internal logic.

An illustration: We watch a Superman movie and there he is, flying about and fighting evil. We buy it. That is suspension of disbelief. Now, if we see Superman eat a Kryptonite hamburger, drink a Kryptonite smoothie, then fly about and fight evil, we don't buy it. Why?

Because we know Kryptonite is the only thing that drains Superman's powers. To accept such a thing in a movie is not suspending disbelief, but allowing ourselves to be treated like idiots.

Story logic matters. Or it should. But in films like Mr & Mrs Smith, story doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the package. Deals are what sells films in Hollywood, not stories.

Sign up big stars, get a mid-list director eager to please the corporate overlords, throw in lots of money to get those universally understood production values and never mind the story.

It doesn't have to be good - hell, it doesn't even have to make sense - it just has to include all the standard elements of the mono-dimensional global narrative template common to most blockbusters: extreme personal conflict, large-scale disaster, romance, visual comedy and, most of all, action.

Present it in a high-gloss, frenetically edited mish-mash of explosions, gunfire, colour and movement. And with as little dialogue as possible, please.

Why the emphasis of movement over dialogue? After the success of Jaws in 1975, foreign countries became a big part of the business, and you can't draw in big audiences if all they're going to do for two hours is read subtitles.

The intent is to blitz the eyes, rattle the ears and provide plenty of close-ups of those big, expensive stars. Pummel the audience with the package. Overwhelm them with starpower and firepower.

That's what audiences are being sold now - not films, but deals.

This dumbing down of movies - it's still very hard to believe that Miss Congeniality 2 actually does exist - has been accompanied by a dumbing down of audiences.

This condition is achieved courtesy of the studio film marketing behemoth. Fortunately, this dumbing down is not a permanent condition, nor is it foolproof, as the occasional mass-market rejection of the odd blockbuster attests: RIP Hulk and Catwoman.

It is, however, testament to the famous observation made by Canadian satirist Stephen Butler Leacock, who stated: "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

Applying the same principle, and to paraphrase slightly, film marketing is the art of mesmerising audiences long enough to extract from them the price of admission.

So why do film audiences file in to see such staggeringly expensive showcases of mediocrity? Because they have to. Or, more accurately, because they feel they have to.

Publicity blitzes have always been a big part of pushing big movies onto the public. The 1939 classic Gone With the Wind is one of the earliest examples of a film that achieved the ideal of 100 per cent market awareness.

But never before - never - has marketing a movie been so intense, so relentless, so unavoidable as it is today.

With Mr & Mrs Smith we couldn't turn in our beds without seeing signage. TV ads, cinema ads, radio ads, magazine ads, cross promotions on Big Brother, billboards the size of Godzilla, profiles on 60 Minutes.

And that extensive tabloid coverage of the nothing story about how Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were - get this - not having a relationship. The media is so eager to be part of the next big movie "event" it seems even a non-story qualifies as a story.

Then, of course, there's all the carefully co-ordinated collaboration with print outlets to play up Angelina Jolie's glam factor. Her visage presently sports the covers of Cosmopolitan, New Woman, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and OK.

The exposure has gone beyond saturation marketing, it's virtual wallpaper.

You can't even wait for a bus. As animator John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, recently said of the Shrek 2 marketing tsunami, it's so full-on it feels like your eyeballs are being raped.
It all serves a form of social conditioning that impels people to see the film not because they necessarily want to, but because they feel they need to.

After all, who wants to be the only one on Monday in the school yard or in the office kitchen who hasn't seen the latest big movie event?

And if the machine has done its job, you get figures like Mr & Mrs Smith got last weekend.
And the film doesn't have to be good. It just has to be good enough so that audiences don't talk it down to their friends and so generate the one thing Hollywood filmmakers have no control over and no defense against - bad word of mouth.

Mr & Mrs Smith is now showing