The Chicken Little of the Movie Industry; Children of Men and Other Mexican Films

I finally got around to reading last week's New Yorker, and was surprised to read this strangely nostalgic and highly pessimistic piece by David Denby, one of the magazine's two regular film critics (the other is Anthony Lane).

Denby predicts that, because of increasing home viewership of movies on home theatre systems and the terrible video iPod--particularly by young people--the "movies," that is, the actual experience of going to the theatre, may become a thing of the past. He also says that movie theatres themselves aren't helping, describing them as having "become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture." No joke:

The concession stands [are] wrathfully noted, with their "small" Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit...add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries--anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand... If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies... a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you've seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.

First of all, where the hell are you watching your movies? What is a "kitty-kat club"? And who in the world doesn't like previews? But Denby isn't all negative, instead, he looks back fondly at the days of the "old downtown picture palaces,"

a faintly remembered dream from childhood of cathedral lobbies and ushers in red uniforms with gold braid. The palaces had names like the Alhambra, the Luxor, the Roxy; the auditoriums were evocative of pagoda pavillions or Persian courts or some celestial paradise with flocks of fleecy blond cheribum suspended in blue ether.

I've been to movie theatres like that. They creep me out. I frankly don't need a sixteen year-old wearing a fez and a bellboy suit selling me candy.

But Denby's biggest problem isn't nostalgia. He contradicts his own arguments in the course of the article. While he strongly implies that movie-watching is about to drop off, and blames this potential decrease on teenagers and their crazy movie-watching gizmos, he admits that (A) movie attendance at the moment is "holding up," (B) "almost half of the audience but only twenty-five per cent of the population is aged between twelve and thirty," and that (C) it is, rather, the lack of attendance of older people that is problematic, both for revenues and for the types of films being made.

Denby really needs to relax. No one is going to stop going to the movies--especially young people. To be honest, I've personally only seen people using the "video" on their iPods in (A) the first week or two after purchase, and on (B) planes, trains, and buses, where they function more as crutches to avoid awkward social interactions than sources of entertainment. If movie theatres are poorly maintained, a competitor will open a better one. That's precisely what happened here in New Haven, where the Brattle Theatre--where whole seating sections used to be blocked off because of roof leaks--closed down when my beautiful baby Criterion Cinema moved in.

Separately, here's one movie that suggests that the movie industry's sky is not, in fact, falling: Children of Men. Holy Mother this movie is great. It does so many things: it is a dystopian thriller, in the vein of 1984 or 28 Days Later, but also the sharpest critique I've seen of Guantanamo and the anti-immigrant sentiment coursing through America. It needs to be seen on the big screen and judging by the numbers, people are doing exactly that.

Let me note that Children of Men was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the same guy who brought you Harry Potter, Great Expectations, and Y Tu Mama Tambien. As Anthony Lane notes in the same issue as Denby's article, with quality films like Children of Men, Babel, and Pan's Labyrinth all coming from filmmakers south of the border, "[s]omething is afoot in Mexican filmmaking."

Final digression: While linking to all of these films, I noticed that Pan's Labyrinth has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes--87 positive reviews out of 88 reviews total. Wow. I don't think I've seen that before.