A Bad Time For Good Movies

by Scott Tobias
May 11th, 2006
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.

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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?

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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.