The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the “art” films of yesteryear and the people who made them. Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they’ve actually seen them or not.
The billions of you who neglected to bet against me when I claimed that The Simpsons Movie would spend a second week atop the Box Office Power Rankings look pretty foolish today. See what I did there? I was wrong wrong wrong in my prediction, and I made you the idiot.
I’ll keep this brief: If you’ve seen it, chances are excellent that you either love or loathe Moulin Rouge. But have you ever spent the time to really figure out why? In this Drunken Commentary Track, Culture Snob and River Cities’ Reader film critic Mike Schulz argue about Baz Luhrmann’s paean to love.
The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle. Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie’s opening scenes are equally Tykwer’s, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous.
I’m a big enough person to admit that I was wrong, particularly when I was wrong in such a public fashion. So: I was wrong. My prediction that The Simpsons Movie would tank was woefully off the mark, and two bottles of wine have been delivered to Mike, per our bet. I shan’t even mention the fact that Mike bought 5,632,229 tickets to The Simpsons Movie last weekend.
So Hairspray knocked the rat off its pedestal after three weeks at the top, ranking second or third in all four components of the Box Office Power Rankings to sneak past Pixar’s latest offering. But I’m more interested in The Simpsons Movie.
With its dismal first-weekend performance at the box office, Captivity offers an opportunity to bemoan (or cheer) the diminished commercial prospects for that genre we’re no longer allowed to call “torture porn.” At The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl recently argued (in the context of Hostel: Part II) that pinning that label on something “is a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work.” There are some interesting arguments here, but I reject the assertion that “torture porn” isn’t an appropriate and meaningful tag for the genre. And I don’t think the phrase is a dismissive put-down.
With no serious new-release competition, Harry Potter’s box office and generally positive reviews propelled it to second place in the rankings. Ratatouille, buoyed by stellar notices and continued strength at the box office, took the top spot for the third week in a row.
Sometimes the biggest gift a film can give us is to force us back into the real world rather than letting us escape. The German movie Requiem is about demonic possession, yet in spite of its subject matter, it’s a serious, wrenching piece. And because of its subject matter, it’s all the more effective, as the audience isn’t expecting to be challenged.
The rats still rule in Culture Snob’s Box Office Power Rankings, with the critical acclaim for Pixar’s and Disney’s Ratatouille easily overcoming the box-office power of (and surprisingly un-bad reviews for) Transformers. Michael Bay’s robot movie landed in third place, also behind Live Free or Die Hard.
