Stop Blaming 'Jaws'!

Required reading for Control and Ambler.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stop-blaming-jaws.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Agreed with what she said a lot, though her examples such as PACIFIC RIM are kind of flawed since that's a movie more in the vein of Japanese monster movies thus has entirely different goals from a thriller like JAWS. Still, it is true that there are too many studios now trying to put out big budget films. There's so many in the market these days that the lifespan continues to get much shorter. There's too much competition.

Largo's Shark wrote:

Required reading for Control and Ambler.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stop-blaming-jaws.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

I was going t blame the boogie!

Good article though subtlety is not in vogue atm and is sorely missed - there will inevitably come a point where we have to redress scale and focus in mainstream movies.

Quote :

Cut to: Army helicopters swarming overhead as soldiers load semiautomatic weapons on the Marina Green in San Francisco and Chloe and Xander are briefed on what is happening across the country. A Navy admiral shows them footage of a shark jumping out of New York Harbor and biting the head off the Statue of Liberty. “At least they can’t invade dry land,” Chloe says.

“Think again,” the admiral says, then points to the video: the shark has legs.

“They’re mutating!” Xander gasps.

“Or evolving,” the admiral says.

Nice article. It's interesting to look back and see how Hollywood was forever changed (for the worse). I don't blame JAWS, though. It's a good film. One of Spielberg's last masterpieces.

We all know who the real culprit was...

Today, as the article pointed out, Hollywood could never produce or profit on a film like JAWS. First of all, I imagine that modern audiences would become bored without blatantly seeing the shark. They'd also be underwhelmed by the lack of senseless violence. JAWS is a violent film, but not compared to today's standards. Maybe audiences have been reprogrammed over the last 30 or so years. With a lot of the big blockbusters today, they seem to pay for having everything shoved down their throats. And they love it.

Thank you, Sharky. Ambler is a great and valued poster if only for variety's sake, but I occasionally find the "Star Wars ruined all movies forever from 1977 on and no one who was born after Star Wars can appreciate good movies" schtick a bit tiresome occasionally.

I think if you needed to pick a film that "ruined movies forever", STAR WARS would be at the top of the list.

Prior to STAR WARS, Hollywood directors were producing thought-provoking pictures that also earned good money at the box office. When Lucas stepped in, not only did his fantasy epic generate significant numbers at the box office, but also earned plenty off-screen, especially with the toy line. That could be evidence that STAR WARS was more directly aimed at kids, rather than adults. After that, it seemed that directors needed to adapt to that formula. Today, doesn't every blockbuster have a toy line? BATMAN, SUPERMAN, THE AVENGERS, COWBOYS AND ALIENS, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN probably do. I'm surprised James Bond doesn't (although, I think they sell replica toy vehicles from the films).

It's all interesting, nonetheless. I think it's obvious that, for the most part, Hollywood's target audience is no longer adults. Instead, they target the kids and the adults come second. Hell, you barely see any R-rated horror films anymore. Nolan's movies, however, and even SKYFALL worked against that idea, though. So maybe things will start to transform in the future.

It's not fair to blame Star Wars. The filmmakers were not on the set laughing and high fiving eachother saying "yes, our master plan worked! We destroyed Hollywood!" It's ridiculous. It's like blaming Bond for Spymania and even then they were guilty of selling toys. If anyone should be blamed, it's studios for jumping on the bandwagon. They deserve all criticism for having a low opinion on audiences and only producing films that are primarily made to make money. Guys like Lucas and Spielberg aren't blame, it's guys like Simpson and Bruckheimer who were so brazen about how they were always in it for the money.

I wouldn't even call most blockbuster movies kid films. That implies that no adults would ever watch them, which is false. Star Wars may have a toyline, but the films themselves are largely aimed at people of all ages, families. It is a shame that less adult films are made in the summer season, but they still have their place during the Fall. In the end, it's the studios that truly steer where movies go and sadly it's greed over art that is hurting Hollywood more than Star Wars.

Python wrote:

I wouldn't even call most blockbuster movies kid films.

Kids and manchildren would be a better description. You know, the type who hang around Ain't It Cool News:, Empire, Comic Cons and Hero Complex.

I'm not placing you in that box, Sykes. Like Harms, you're a well read, educated guy who happens to like comic books and some of the films adapted from said books.

FWIW, I find Nolan's films pretty adolescent. Throwing around big words, crane shots and lofty ideas doesn't mean you understand them.

Python wrote:

I wouldn't even call most blockbuster movies kid films. That implies that no adults would ever watch them, which is false..

I'd argue that most of them are marketed for children, above all. I'm not saying that every adult who sees a blockbuster has the mind of a six-year-old, though. The studios obviously see a lot of dollar signs when it comes to aiming movies at kids.

Quote :

In the end, it's the studios that truly steer where movies go and sadly it's greed over art that is hurting Hollywood more than Star Wars.

Indeed. The studios are to blame today. I'm sure a studio exec would green light a film about a walking, talking turd if it promised to rake in a lot of money.



Related to this year's blockbusters, I see that PACIFIC RIM is now in theaters and at Toys R Us:
http://www.toysrus.com/buy/action-figures/movies-music-tv/pacific-rim-6-inch-action-figure-knifehead-kaiju-31832-19789966

Except those "manchildren" are a small number, most adults that went to the AVENGERS are folks who never go to those sites. If the "man children" were such a major demograph, Kevin Smith movies should have been gigantic hits. Once again, this condescending attitude towards these genre films is so ironic to see in a James Bond site (dedicated to a film series just as guilty as any other major franchise).

I've yet to any film based on a Marvel or DC comic more adult than top teir Bond.

You won't, but then again most Bond films aren't all "adult top tier". Even with SF, Mendes made the film out of his desire to make a film that boys and men could enjoy. There's a reason folks cheered when Bond brought out his Aston Martin, it appealed to the inner child. DC/Marvel is more fantastical, but still made by filmmakers who want to make these for themselves as much as for children.

Python wrote:

You won't, but then again most Bond films aren't all "adult top tier".

I never claimed that.

Python wrote:

DC/Marvel is more fantastical, but still made by filmmakers who want to make these for themselves as much as for children.

But not adults.

I'm mainly trying to debunk the idea that adults do not enter the equation when it comes to this type of films. There hasn't been any made exclusively for adults, but so what? There are other movies that are produced for adults exclusively, you just won't find them all that common in the summer because that's when families are on vacation and such. That seems to be the point of this article, that summer films have been taken over by families. Adult cinema isn't dead.

I'd argue that adult cinema never died because adult cinema never existed in a popular form. Popular filmmaking depends on a wide audience, essentially making them family films. That style demands a sort of immaturity that we see in big blockbusters of today, or a Christian chaste-ness that is visible in popular pics of the past. Are we forgetting the huge popularity of Westerns and Pirate films in the 30's and 40's? Or Chaplin's shorts and features in the 10's and 20's. Or the sweeping epics in the 50's and 60's. Even in the midst of New Hollywood in the early 70's, the most popular genre of films were disaster flicks, which are on a similar level as the action spectacles of today.

"Adult cinema" will always exist, but aside from a few breakout hits here and there, it will never become mainstream.

Tubes wrote:

I'd argue that adult cinema never died because adult cinema never existed in a popular form.  Popular filmmaking depends on a wide audience, essentially making them family films.  That style demands a sort of immaturity that we see in big blockbusters of today, or a Christian chaste-ness that is visible in popular pics of the past.  Are we forgetting the huge popularity of Westerns and Pirate films in the 30's and 40's?  Or Chaplin's shorts and features in the 10's and 20's.  Or the sweeping epics in the 50's and 60's.  Even in the midst of New Hollywood in the early 70's, the most popular genre of films were disaster flicks, which are on a similar level as the action spectacles of today.

"Adult cinema" will always exist, but aside from a few breakout hits here and there, it will never become mainstream.

Well said.

THE NEGATIVE INFLUENCE OF COPPOLA’S “THE GODFATHER”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/08/godfather-negative-influence.html

Quote :

If “Jaws” and “Star Wars” are the movies that reconfigured Hollywood for a young audience, then the first two “Godfathers” are the pillars of nostalgia for the so-called “adult drama”—for the idea that nineteen-seventies America represented an apogee of artistic achievement within the Hollywood system. But the ultimate effect of Francis Ford Coppola’s grand diptych was to do, for adults, the same thing that Spielberg and Lucas would do for kids: Coppola single-handedly, mightily, and enduringly shored up the ruins of familiar but outmoded conventions: performances of a poised dramatic accuracy, images of a burnished, low-light luxuriousness, shots composed with a fluid precision, a script that foregrounds the action to express the story’s strategic, psychological, and political implications. The accomplishment was great; its negative effects endure.

Hmm... That's underselling THE GODFATHER. It's a very much a product of New Hollywood and is quite radical once you get beyond the superficial formalism of it. It has more in common with Bertulucci's THE CONFORMIST and Penn's BONNY AND CLYDE than any period pictures of previous decades.