“Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema”
My favorite film critic, NY Times reviewer A.O. Scott weighs in here about Hwood’s evenr more rabid obsession with youth:
IN “Funny People,” the new movie starring Adam Sandler, the audience is treated to glimpses of a movie starring Mr. Sandler’s character, a stand-up comedian turned movie star named George Simmons. The film within a film, which looks like a variation on the venerable “Look Who’s Talking” theme, features George’s head digitally superimposed on the body of an infant, an effect that is both grotesque and funny, and also pregnant with cultural significance.
This image seems an apt metaphor for Scott:
My point is not to defend Mr. Apatow’s movie, which opened to mixed reviews and which is likely to have a rich and complicated afterlife as a subject for argument. I’m more troubled about the haste to declare that “Funny People” failed to connect with its audience. A similar rush to judgment greeted Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” last month, and in those pronouncements you can hear the sound of conventional wisdom taking shape.
Or you can see it embodied in that alarming man-baby, with the braying voice and the 5 o’clock shadow affixed to a pale, flabby, diaper-wrapped trunk. There may be no more incisive rendering of Hollywood’s self-image, and perhaps no truer, more damning mirror held up to the audience. Mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths — that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us. What do they think we want? The summer’s biggest blockbuster so far is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” an epic — four minutes longer than “Funny People” — based on a line of toys from Hasbro. And kids’ stuff has dominated the multiplexes and the Monday-morning box office tallies since May. There have been the 3-D guinea pigs of “G-Force,” the fuzzy (and 3-D) prehistoric creatures of the third “Ice Age” movie, the historical personages of the second “Night at the Museum” picture and of course the schoolboy wizard and his pals in the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series.
“Mewling, incontinent little bundles of id with dirty minds and mouths — that’s pretty much what the major studios think of us.”
Now you know one of the reasons I dig A.O. Scott so much. He knows how to use language.
What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one! (That George Simmons giant-baby comedy is called “Redo.”) Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.
That’s precisely it, isn’t it? Hwood has conditioned moviegoers into thinking about films as youth events, turning anyone over 40 into movie-not-goers.
The box office numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story either. The weekend grosses, widely guessed at on Thursday night and breathlessly reported by the middle of Sunday afternoon, record the quantity of tickets purchased, but they cannot register the quality of the experience. The aggregate of receipts shows that a lot of people like going to the movies, but not necessarily that they like what they see.
Okay, as noted in the previous post, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has grossed $811M worldwide. And it’s hard as crap to argue against that type of B.O. performance. But does anyone know anybody who loves this movie? I mean for heavens sake, its current rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 20% — which means 80% of the people thought the movie sucked. And yet it’s on its way to grossing $1 billion.
So is that it? Hwood has succeeded in its program of “mass infantilization?”
And go to Linda Holmes at NPR.org to see someone else who responded to Scott’s analysis with her piece “Forty is the New Dead”.
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