Friday, December 30, 2005

The Great Divide

Ostensibly the moviegoing experience is a universal one. Common thinking goes like this: movies are a populist artform. They're supposed to reach across all social strata, race, and religion. But there's something about 2005 that seems to have been frozen in the amber of 2004: the balkanization of movie-loving.

Read more on the triple prism through which we view the success of movies. Later today, the underappreciated and the runners up to my top ten list.

3 comments:

Glenn Dunks said...

Wow, that was a really great read. So true. Well done.

And on the first three choices for underappreciated? I've only seen In Her Shoes and I agree. However, I blame 2 things:

1. Distributers releasing a plethora of female-oriented films at once
2. The marketing. That trailer was awful. You can usually predict the path of a chick flick - Shoes didn't follow it; however, the trailer made it look like it did. Hence... it appears on your underappreciated list.

But, keep it up

Middento said...

I think you're assessment of films is dead-on. What do you think were some of the recent films (say, last five years) that measured up in all three categories? I can only think of a handful -- say, The Incrdibles or Mystic River.

Glenn Dunks said...

In my limited years as a movie-obsessive I must say that through research I find it very sad that just ordinary people dramas can't go on and make $200mil like Kramer vs. Kramer as you said. They need to be big special effects bonanzas.

JMR mentioned Mystic River, I think that if we were in the same time as the '70s both that and Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby would have been much higher grossers.