December 20, 2009 Film Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience By MANOHLA DARGIS IT was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very

December 20, 2009
Film
Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience By MANOHLA DARGIS

IT was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very good year for Paramount Pictures. Two of the year's biggest hits, "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," have helped the studio climb out of its financial hole with a combined domestic take of more than $500 million. Both movies are deeply stupid, often incoherent and hinged on the principle that the spectacle of violence is its own pleasurable end. "Transformers" is also casually racist. But hey, that's entertainment.

Or, more specifically, that's Hollywood entertainment in the conglomerate age. The major studios have long been in the business of serving sludge to the world, but now the reek often spreads around the globe simultaneously with massive coordinated openings. "Revenge of the Fallen," for instance, opened the same day on more than 4,000 screens in the United States — about a 10th of all the screens in the country — and soon about 10,000 more abroad. "Angels & Demons," the sequel to "The Da Vinci Code," opened on some 3,500 screens domestically and ate up more than 10,000 internationally. The French film "Summer Hours," meanwhile, the best-reviewed release in The Times that weekend, opened on two screens.

The question of consumer choice becomes all but moot when the Top 5 box office movies are playing on more than one-quarter of all the screens in America, as was the case during the first weekend of May, when "Star Trek" opened. That weekend 10 movies dominated 67 percent of the country's screens. Three of those titles were released by Paramount. Warner Brothers and Disney had two movies each; 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures and the independent company Summit Entertainment each had one. (It's worth noting that National Amusements, the company that has a controlling stake in Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate that in turn runs Paramount, owns more than 1,500 screens around the world.)

The problem isn't blockbusters per se or certain kinds of genre movies or inflated budgets: "Star Trek," wittily directed by J. J. Abrams, is an entertaining rethink of a defining science-fiction brand, and the even pricier "Avatar," from James Cameron, is in a class by itself. But these remain exceptions to the flashier, noisier, dumber rule of much of today's mega-budget entertainment. Movies have always been segmented among different audiences, but the disparity between the work that earns most of the critical love at release — and awards — time and much of what fills the multiplex on a weekly basis seems greater than ever. Paramount sells the audience "G. I. Joe" and sells Oscar voters (and critics) "Up in the Air."

That divide between the studios' bulk product and their prestige items has become even more conspicuous because so many specialty units have been closed, absorbed or downsized in the last two years, leaving executives with fewer reasons to go to the Oscars. (Just two years ago Paramount Vantage, the specialty unit of Paramount, released "There Will Be Blood," one of the finest American movies of the past 50 years. Vantage has since been folded into big Paramount.) A few specialty units remain, however, including Fox Searchlight, which might be why 20th Century Fox feels free to release so many stinkers, including franchise leftovers ("X-Men Origins: Wolverine") and female-minstrelsy shows ("Bride Wars"). The same holds true over at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which would have been largely an aesthetic wasteland this year without Sony Pictures Classics.

Big Sony did women wrong with "The Ugly Truth," but it did everyone right by giving us Meryl Streep as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia." (It can keep Julie.) Warner Brothers gave us one of the worst of the year ("Watchmen") and one of the best ("Where the Wild Things Are"). Disney tried to rectify decades of racism by giving an Obama-led America its first black princess ("The Princess and the Frog"). Universal had its ups ("Public Enemies"), nice tries ("Duplicity") and some solid genre diversions ("A Perfect Getaway") along with the usual multiplex fodder ("Land of the Lost" and "Fast & Furious"). It also has a coming film with Ms. Streep ("It's Complicated"), something every studio should.

Despite the bad news, Hollywood's habit of absorbing new talent does offer some hope. In 1993, when Disney bought Miramax Films, the studio ushered in a new era in American cinema.

By the time Warner joined this new specialty business 10 years later, with Warner Independent Pictures, all the studios were in the indie business. Films like Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Ones Are" and Steven Soderbergh's "Informant!," both released by Warner, might represent the end of that era. Even so, I like to believe that the industry's central irrationality (its human factor) will remain and that there will always be one madman willing to give an artist like Wes Anderson millions to make a puppet movie about a family of foxes.

Yet while the studios seem to be in retreat from challenging adult films, at least for now, and while nonstudio companies, particularly those in foreign-film distribution, continue to have a rough time (New Yorker Films shut down this year, a tremendous loss), there are some promising signs. Companies like the newly revitalized Cinema Guild (which this year distributed celebrated features from Agnès Varda, Claire Denis and Jia Zhang-ke) and larger ones like IFC Films continue to release tremendous work. Other companies have reconfigured to fit the lean times, as evident by the recent merger of Kino International and Lorber HT Digital, which joined forces to become Kino Lorber. Long may they brighten our screens.

Despite the shake-ups and bad economic times there are now more choices for dedicated movie lovers than at any time in history, though only if you live in a major film market like New York, have access to a cable outfit like the Independent Film Channel, which shows some of the best movies around, or own a region-free DVD player on which you can play international discs. (DVDs only play on machines manufactured for specific zones, a barrier you can bypass by buying or hacking a region-free machine. In March, President Obama gave the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, 25 American DVDs that Mr. Brown couldn't watch at home apparently because he didn't own a region-free machine. You should.)

And even with all the seismic industry shifts there were movies to love, even from Hollywood, and moments to remember, including the dust that clings to Anthony Mackie's eyelashes in "The Hurt Locker," as he waits in the Iraqi desert, gun at the ready, for enemy fire. And Colin Firth's face crumbling like pulverized stone as he receives the awful news of his lover's death in "A Single Man." Some of the greatest filmmaking of the year was represented by the story of a happy marriage, which was represented with breathtaking narrative economy and a great depth of feeling in four sublime minutes in "Up." The rest of the movie left me fairly indifferent, but those four minutes will play on a loop in my head for years.

Other images, other memories: the bodies of two teenagers being transported by a backhoe operated by a mobster in the Italian film "Gomorrah," a backhoe first glimpsed in a scene in which the boys exult over the crime that will lead to their demise. The phosphorescent flowers fluttering like sea creatures on the surface of the alien world in "Avatar." A restless camera tracing lines of love among grieving family members in "Summer Hours," a French film poignantly true to everyday life and emotions and almost impossible to imagine being made in America if only because of its insistence on ambivalence as a condition of human relations. A young camel riding in a motorcycle sidecar amid an extraordinarily choreographed whirl of human and animal motion in "Tulpan."

Here then are a baker's dozen of my favorite films of the year, in order of their domestic release: "Gomorrah" (Matteo Garrone, Italy); "Tulpan"( Sergey Dvortsevoy, Kazakhstan); "Summer Hours" (Olivier Assayas, France); "The Hurt Locker" (Kathryn Bigelow, United States); "The Beaches of Agnès" (Agnès Varda, France); "Public Enemies" (Michael Mann, United States); "Beeswax" (Andrew Bujalski, United States); "Ponyo" (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan); "The Informant!" (Steven Soderbergh, United States); "Where the Wild Things Are" (Spike Jonze, United States); "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (Wes Anderson, United States); "The Sun" (Alexander Sokurov, Russia); and "Avatar" (James Cameron, United States).

Other favorites: "Of Time and the City"; "Frontier of Dawn"; "Tokyo Sonata"; "Sugar"; "Léon Morin: Priest"; "Julia" (the Erick Zonca with Tilda Swinton); "Star Trek"; "Anaglyph Tom"; "Séraphine"; "The English Surgeon"; "You, the Living"; "In the Loop"; "Import, Export"; "Lorna's Silence"; "A Perfect Getaway"; "The Baader Meinhof Complex"; "Big Fan"; "Unmade Beds"; "Crude"; "A Serious Man"; "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire"; "The Messenger"; "Big River Man"; " 35 Shots of Rum"; "Up in the Air"; "A Single Man"; "Invictus"; "Police, Adjective." Many of these titles are either already available on DVD or will be.
Film - Films 2009 - Independents’ Resilience Amid Studio Product - NYTimes.com (27 December 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/movies/20dargis.html?pagewanted=print
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