A prevalent attitude out there was: Come on, is that something the mass audience would give a damn about?īut I think that kind of dismissiveness misses the actual problem. (In truth, it has the heat of a thriller and is eminently accessible.) “The Fabelmans” was about Steven Spielberg’s parents’ divorce and his teenage adventures in filmmaking. “Tár,” we kept being told, was “cold” and enigmatic. To me, the most painful aspect of the fall movie season - I’m tempted to call it tragic - is seeing the extraordinary films that underperformed, like “Tár” and “The Fabelmans,” treated as if they were subtly alien, as if there was something not inviting enough about them. I, too, am desperate to see more movies like that, but what we also need are the movies that grease the wheels of the theatrical experience: the friendly bread-and-butter formula films for adults that audiences can depend on, that can keep them hooked on the act of moviegoing. But how easy would it now be to come up with another “Maverick,” another “Elvis,” another “EEAAO”? They proved, and can stand as symbols of, the viability and transcendence of the theatrical experience. Neither is “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” These were movies that adults turned out for. “Elvis,” too, as much as it was a must-see biopic-on-Baz-Luhrmann-overdrive that earned its success ($150 million at the domestic box office), is not a film to generalize from. (In 1986, if you’d suggested that “Top Gun” should have won the Oscar, or even been nominated, you’d have been looked at like someone who’d lost his marbles.) It’s a movie whose very essence hinged on 40 years of pent-up 1980s nostalgia, now uncorked like some ironic blockbuster equivalent of fine wine. When it comes to analyzing the box office tea leaves and what they say about where moviegoing is headed, the excitement that got pinned to the phenomenon of “ Top Gun: Maverick” is fully justified, but it’s far from the whole story. I’m glad they got a movie attuned to their feisty antennae.īut here’s why all of this is the magic key, a path to the future of movie theaters that has not been duly recognized. As for “80 for Brady,” it has its funny moments, but mostly it’s star-driven sitcom comfort food for a too-often ignored demo. “A Man Called Otto,” on the other hand, takes off from a potentially good premise - Tom Hanks as a man warped by cynicism - and fills it in with a contrived backstory, “healing” situations too prefab to believe and enough feel-good tropes to make you feel force-fed. One reason it was such an effective vehicle for Julia Roberts and George Clooney is that these two old pros could relax into the tropical formulaic shenanigans of it - they turned hitting their marks into a pleasurable form of slumming-as-showmanship. It’s a picture that has no illusions about itself. I thought “Ticket to Paradise” was the purest candy-corn rom-com kitsch, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not all mediocrity is created equal, of course. I would argue that it’s been a sizable chunk of the movie pie - and that movies, as an industry, depend on mediocrity more than we might like to think. Mediocrity has its place in the multiverse of movies and always has. But maybe I can take the sting out of it by admitting that, like many moviegoers, I’m not some automatic hater of mediocrity. I’m sorry, I really am, for how totally patronizing that sounded. That, in fact, is the secret of their success. I’d say it relates to the most essential thing about them: All three are defiantly mediocre. Yet there’s a larger lesson to be gleaned from the success of these three films, one that has largely gone unremarked upon.
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