Beyond the Multiplex

Dec. 13, 2007 | When it comes to holiday-season cognitive dissonance, the Grinch, out there on his lonely mountaintop just north of Whoville, has got nothing on Hollywood. Are those traditional Yuletide carols I hear? Well, almost -- it's the traditional Yuletide bitching and moaning of insiders after a prized "tentpole" production with a Pentagon-scale budget (in this case, "The Golden Compass") has yielded a vast pile o'cash that was slightly smaller than desired and expected. As some spokesbot told the press, yeah, the results are disappointing but we'll still make money overseas, because our cyborg slaves all over the globe will slurp up whatever crap we dish out to them. OK, that's a paraphrase, not a direct quote.

It appears these people do not understand such basic concepts as economies of scale. You don't have to look far to find movies that will make money relative to their production costs: Jason Reitman's "Juno" had a smashing opening weekend, grossing more than a half-million bucks on just seven screens, while "Atonement" opened on 32 screens and garnered almost $800,000. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and "The Savages," both only available in a few big cities, are also being carefully nursed toward indie-hit status, while "No Country for Old Men" is just a flat-out hit, likely to become the largest-grossing film of the Coen brothers' career. (It's now at $28.7 million, while their all-time champ, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" made $45.5 million in 2000-01.)

Whether or not you think any of those movies measures up to the greatest work of Welles and Bergman, they were all made with grown-up viewers in mind and avoid gratuitous insults to the audience's intelligence. They're going to be racking up critical and industry awards from here to the vernal equinox, and will be eagerly Netflixed by intelligent people a year from now, while the animatronic polar bears of "The Golden Compass" sleep the big sleep among the other deceased behemoths of Hollywood history.

Here, in fact, is your Oscar scorecard to date: With "No Country for Old Men" winning the New York and Washington critics' awards, and Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" (to be released Dec. 26) winning in Los Angeles, we've got two surefire best-picture nominees. Throw in "Atonement," probably Tim Burton's forthcoming "Sweeney Todd" and a dark-horse candidate ("Diving Bell" or "Juno" or "Into the Wild"), and the category's full to bursting.

Shall we digress from my so-called main point into random Oscar gossip? Yes, let's. Grab your cuppa cocoa and pull up a chair. It looks very much as if the Coens, Anderson and Julian Schnabel ("Diving Bell") will fill three of the five best-director slots. You can count on best-actor nominations for George Clooney ("Michael Clayton"), Frank Langella ("Starting Out in the Evening") and Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood"), with the latter far and away in the lead. Julie Christie ("Away From Her") has pretty much lapped the field for best actress, although French actress Marion Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") will also get a nod. Amy Ryan ("Gone Baby Gone") and Javier Bardem ("No Country") are the front-runners in the supporting categories, where you can expect to see several wild-card nominations from smaller films. (Cate Blanchett for "I'm Not There"? Hal Holbrook for "Into the Wild"? Vlad Ivanov for "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"?)

I have no analysis to offer here beyond the dunderheadedly obvious: Big Hollywood studios have largely outsourced the production and distribution of Oscar-worthy, adult-oriented pictures to their specialty divisions and to independent producers. To a large extent, this was a conscious decision, and even a business strategy. But instead of doing what they allegedly do well (i.e., create grand spectacles for kids, teens and young-adult daters) better and better, the studios are getting worse at it all the time. As I frequently complain, there are too many indie releases, week in and week out, and the really special ones often don't get enough time or space to build an audience. But the real problem with the film bidness is not the strugglers and stragglers on the bottom rungs, most of them (believe it or not) talented and honest people who want to make a living by making good movies. As is customary in biology, politics and capitalism, the organism is rotting from the head down.

On the subject of things that don't quite work out, I'm going to dispense pretty briefly with Marc Forster's no-doubt-well-intentioned attempt to turn Khaled Hosseini's bestseller "The Kite Runner" into Oscar fodder. All the day-and-night cranking of Paramount's publicity machine can't transform this earnest, leaden picture from a news footnote into a viable work of art or entertainment. At the other end of the spectrum, we find the likely best-documentary nominee "Nanking," an upsetting, riveting and innovative chronicle of one of World War II's worst atrocities, and the peculiar grab bag of Western observers who tried to stop it.

If you're eager for a perverse little bulge in your Christmas stocking, let me recommend Adam Rifkin's thoroughly sleazy surveillance-camera ensemble drama "Look," which plays like a dirtier and more mean-spirited version of "Crash." (Which is to say I enjoyed it immensely.) We close with two seductive little documentaries, one about the "singing revolution" that led to Estonia's independence -- I know, it sounds like a joke, but it's very moving -- and another about a former lover and collaborator of Andy Warhol's who disappeared both from art history and from the world of the living.

Next page: Does "The Kite Runner" fly?