Sudhir Muralidhar proposes a striking new theory of the failure of the recent crop of anti-war films to bring in the bucks at the box office: The movies are no good.
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Why Such Flops
29 Nov 2007 01:43 am
Comments (19)
It's almost impossible to make a good Iraq movie at the moment.
One of the few viable strategies available would be to copy MASH's lessons from 1970 and make an Iraq movie set during a previous war. The trick would be to make something like Three Kings.
"I rather liked "In the Valley of Elah"
That's because you have no taste, Sailer. It's the root of the same reason you think being a creepy racist is something to be proud of.
I honestly think "In the Valley of Elah" is a truly great film. Paul Haggis is one heck of a director.
As a director, I think Haggis's strong suit in "Elah" was that he wasn't impressed by his screenwriter's two Academy Awards. So, he cut a huge amount of the dialog out of the finished cut, making it radically different in style and tone from "Crash."
I thought "Rendition" fairly good, and "In the Valley of Elah" among the best I have seen this year. The real problem is the absence of taste and intelligence in the American movie-going public.
An interesting Iraq movie would be a sequel to Three Kings. In that movie, we were the bad guys for leaving Saddam in power. In the sequel, we could be the bad guys for deposing him.
"The movies are no good. "
It's quite possible, though I haven't seen any of them.
Most movies are bad. If you browse through IMDB, you find something interesting. Even good actors usually make bad movies. That's just the way the business works.
Another thing - The better anti-Vietnam War movies were made well after the war was over - '78 and later. This allowed the filmmakers to do whatever the hell they wanted, rather than making sure they performed some duty or avoided going too far. Not worrying about the consequences makes for better art.
I'm in too much of a hurry right now to provide and find links, but this is not much of a "new theory." Most of these movies have gotten poor reviews, especially the Redford/Streep/Cruise one. (I can't even remember its title.)
This is a ridiculous theory.
Since when has a movie not being good prevented it from raking in big bucks at the box office?
For once, I have to agree with Sailer. In the valley of Elah was really a superb movie. Muralidhar doesn't discuss it at all -- it's easier to make the case that the current crop of anti-war movies are no good, I guess, if you leave out the good ones.
Petey -- why didn't you like it?
I'll wait until next year's David Simon and Ed Burns (Yes, from The Wire) HBO adaptation of the book Generation Kill. My friend served in the Marine Intel Recon unit captured in the book after it was written. I expect Simon to actually be able to make a movie that is real and sounds like the experiences that I've heard from my friends who have served, fought, and worked as journalist's in Iraq. All this other claptrap seems like Hollywood liberalism at its worst.
I agree with peep. The idea that a movie's success at the box office correlates in any way to how good it is seems pretty strained.
Moreover, I can see a few of the movies being no good. But all of them? Should one of them turn out to be good just by accident?
To follow up: the top 5 movies at the box office so far this year: Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, Transfoermers, Pirates of the Carribean, Harry Potter. I haven't seen any of them, but the idea that these are all good movies seems pretty weak.
Some movies people see out of sheer interia (the sequels and adaptations Al lists, three of which are terrible and two of which are mediocre). But most movies released around this time of year need another reason to be seen, and being widely perceived as being good is one of them. This system isn't foolproof by any stretch, as mistakes are certainly made, but being not good is certainly one plausible reason people might decide films aren't good and not see them.
(Haggis's new thing is good? Really? After suffering through the unspeakable awfulness of Crash, it didn't even cross my mind that such a thing was possible...)
People don't like having their stupid mistakes rubbed in their faces.
It's that simple.
No Iraq movie will be successful at this point unless it's some John Wayne "Green Berets" bullshit that tries to make the right wing feel good. That would pull in another morons to make a buck, even if the liberals never went to it at all. Got at least thirty to fifty million morons in this country who'd see it.
Ten years from now, you still won't be able to make an Iraq movie - unless it's about how US forces were trashed there when Bush attacked Iran. Sort of a "Pearl Harbor" movie...
s/b: "pull in enough morons"...
It is very interesting that they lead with In the Valley of Elah and Rendition, but then don't really discuss them.
Rendition was extraordinarily well done, and I personally liked it a great deal. I haven't seen Elah but the people I have talked to have seen it all agreed it was well made, even though not all of them liked it.
APS
IIRC, there were only one or two movies made during the war in Vietnam that were directly about the war-- The Green Berets being one. Coming Home was more like Elah, I suppose, but I can't remember what year it was made in (and IMDb's blocked here).
Comments closed December 13, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I rather liked "In the Valley of Elah," but I suspect I'm biased by having teenage sons. It certainly wasn't very entertaining, although Tommie Lee Jones's performance was tremendous.
Posted by Steve Sailer | November 29, 2007 2:14 AM