“10 Lessons I Learned From the 2009 Box Office”
An upcoming Time magazine article by film critic Richard Corliss, featured early on The Tracking Board.com:
The 2009 summer-movie season began the first weekend of May with the prequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and is ending before Labor Day with Halloween 2, a sequel to a remake. That pretty much sums up the artistic ambitions of summer movies. Familiarity breeds contempt only among critics; the mass audience keeps paying for more of the same. They may see the “new” movies while wearing 3-D goggles, but the product is the same: cinematic Pringles.
At the end of a busy season we present the 10 lessons these movies teach — the dictates Hollywood lives by and the reasons movies are so … similar to other movies. But don’t blame Hollywood bosses; blame the audiences. So conservative are moviegoers, they punish stars who try something different. In Funny People, Adam Sandler went deadly serious — and into the box-office commode. Sacha Baron Cohen was nearly lynched for putting an oily edge on his Brüno character. (Baron Cohen is not a star; Borat is.) For once, comedy actresses, Sandra Bullock and Katherine Heigl, sold more tickets than the big comedy actors — by sticking to the basics of funny romance.
Ticket sales have been up this year, and so were some of the films: Up, for instance. Others showed the only kind of ingenuity that pays off: twisting genre conventions into new forms. That what Neill Blomkamp, the season’s big discovery, did with the sci-fi District 9, and what Quentin Tarantino did to the let’s-kill-Hitler war-movie plot in Inglourious Basterds. Both films found large audiences, which is nice. But a flat-out original idea, brilliantly imagined? Save that dream for Oscar season. Just kidding!
Here are Corliss’ 10 lessons learned (many of which we’ve been discussing on GITS for months now):
#1. FORGET THE STARS
#2. GET ANIMATED
#3. SPEND MONEY TO MAKE MONEY
#4. IGNORE THE GROWNUPS
#5. BUT DON’T FORGET THE WOMEN
#6. OUT-APATOW JUDD APATOW
#7. SEND A GET-WELL CARD TO INDIES
#8. SEND IN THE DINOSAURS
#9. MAKE SEQUELS AND PREQUELS
#10. WOW THE FANS ON FRIDAY
Nothing that we haven’t discussed already, but interesting to see some of these memes [i.e., Twitter bomb] entering mainstream media’s consciousness.
What did I learn from this summer’s movies? There are few things better than sitting beside your child, sharing a movie with them — even if it’s a poor one. The conversation on the walks home are great opportunities to get a glimpse of the world through their eyes as well as a chance to talk story with this ‘new’ generation.
What did you learn from this summer’s movies?
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