A.V. Club Blog

It’s been a slow start to the moviegoing year and I expect things to pick

up in the second half, but if 2006 ended right now—and considering the increasing

odds for global catastrophe, that’s not so remote a possibility—here

are my Top Six films, in alphabetical order: Brick,

The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu,

Down In The Valley,

L’Enfant,

Lady Vengeance,

and Neil Young: Heart Of

Gold. Cumulatively, they’ve grossed about $3.6 million total to

date, which is roughly what Larry The Cable Guy: Health Inspector made

in its second week. And the bulk of that money (approx. $3 million) has

been netted by Brick and Neil Young, which were probably both

modest successes in relation to investment (certainly Brick, which was

made for under $500,000). And L’Enfant, at half a million, has

far outgrossed any other movies by the Dardenne Brothers, though not even the

support of a major studio arm (Sony Pictures Classics, the only one that really

bothers much with foreign films any more) could push it into that magical $1 million

territory that’s lately seemed an Everest-like goal for foreign films. As

for the other three, they’ve only just started rolling out now, but they’ve

been performing dismally on a few screens (a mere $60,000 total for all three

and counting), and it seems unlikely that business will be picking up any time

soon.

Now I’m not usually one to sweat too much over box office; I have no investment

in a great film’s financial success, other than the hope to see more films

like it, and I’m generally just grateful it got made and distributed at

all. And in the case of foreign-language films, North America is such a pitiful

little slice of the overall pie that their impact in the states matters only to

the folks who have kindly taken up what is essentially a lost cause. But I can’t

help but feel a little depressed about it anyway. With the possible exception

of Down In The Valley, which hasn’t gotten all the copious praise

it deserves, each of these films has received outstanding reviews. Three of them

(L’Enfant, Neil Young, and Lazarescu) are among

the Top Six best-reviewed of the year according to Metacritic.com, and there’s

definitely a cult audience out there for Brick and Lady Vengeance,

both genre films par excellence. And yet there’s apparently nothing

that can be done to coax people into seeing them in the theaters. Does this mean

they’ll have a new life on DVD? Possibly. God knows that every one of them

will linger in our collective conscience longer than Larry The Cable Guy.

But if a film’s impact remains limited to the number of people who hole

up in their living rooms and save it for their Netflix queue, what does that say

about film culture? And, gulp, what does that say about the diminished

value of critical advocacy?

Earlier in the week, I was informed that Century Centre, the major Landmark multiplex

here in Chicago, would not be opening Down In The Valley as planned.

(Chicagoans can still catch this fine film at CineArts in Evanston and the Esquire

downtown when it opens on May 19th.) Why? Because Century Centre will be devoting

three of its six screens to a scrappy little arthouse film called The Da Vinci

Code. Now, it should be noted upfront that I’m not one of those people

who decry the Landmark chain as the Starbucks-ification of art cinema. I have

little nostalgia for the run-down, single-screen arthouses of my youth; and I’ve

never seen any evidence that the Landmark chain has been less willing to take

on challenging fare than any true independent theater. Needless to say, a Tom

Hanks movie based on a best-selling phenomenon of a book doesn’t conform

to any mission statement Landmark could have possibly drafted for itself. It’s

a screwy experiment, obviously intended to counter the current malaise in arthouse

grosses, but if successful, I imagine the added revenues will encourage further

experimentation in mainstream Hollywood fare. And given the stranglehold Landmark

has on the market, this could become a serious problem for independent and foreign

films.

So is it just me or are marginal films becoming more marginalized than ever? Is

the arthouse experience dead? Are the independent and foreign films of the future

going to be relegated to home theaters? I have fond collegiate memories of caravanning

from Athens, Georgia to Atlanta on odd weekends with friends, catching a double

or triple-feature at the arthouses, and then arguing about them over pizza. Do

people still do this kind of thing anymore?

Discuss.