Image Credit: Cop Out: Abbott Genser; Crazies: Saeed AdyaniThese days, a lot of the movies that get singled out for awards are described in terms that make them sound — often unfairly — less than commercial. They are “serious,” “dark,” “adult,” “quirky,” “cerebral.” And, quite often, “small.” Actually, though, the most telling thing about them is that they’re unclassifiable. They may be about love or war or 3-D alien forest natives, but what they are not, as a rule, is genre movies. (If anything, they’re genre-busting movies.) I had a reader take me to task for calling Up in the Air a romantic comedy, and she was right, but what the heck do you call it? A happy-go-lucky-bachelor-meets-the-economic- crisis-and-finds-love-but-not-really comedy? And Inglourious Basterds, while indisputably a World War II movie, is really, in every frame, a Quentin Tarantino film (more than an auteur, he’s his own genre, his own form), which means that the movie is really two things at once, and therefore unique enough to transcend genre imperatives.
This weekend, however, the moviegoing audience was lured by three pictures that play, quite happily, by orthodox genre rules. Each of them filled a niche (in one case, a fairly outsize niche), and that translated into success. I suppose you could say that Shutter Island, in its way, has a touch of that form-straddling uniqueness I was talking about, yet quite honestly, without the opening credits, I don’t think I ever would have guessed that its director is Martin Scorsese. In its strong second weekend, the film has continued to play to audiences eager to see a mind-bendy mystery-thriller with sprinkles of horror-film dread. I certainly think that it’s the closest thing to a higher-popcorn genre exercise that Scorsese has ever directed (Cape Fear looks like Taxi Driver by comparison), and that perception could well end up pushing it past the $132 million made by The Departed to render it the top-grossing movie of his career.
Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, with its guns and buddy banter, is as much of a pure genre offering as megaplex movies get, and that makes it a major gear shift in Smith’s career, especially given that the film connected with audiences. It’s not as if he was stuck in the indie ghetto before — his most successful movies, like Dogma (1999) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), made $30 million apiece — but considering that he didn’t write Cop Out, it opens the door to Smith redefining himself as a different brand of filmmaker; potentially, it sets him up as a major studio player. If you want to get a fascinating X-ray into Smith’s thinking, check out Patrick Goldstein’s interview with him on the Los Angeles Times blog, in which Smith says some extremely candid things about what brought him to this juncture of his career.
Then, of course, there’s The Crazies, which might just as well have been called Generic Zombie Thriller Freak-Out of the Month. In a world where the official stamp of genre reliability now rules, no genre can be counted on to satisfy the consumer needs it provokes as perfectly as the horror film. Blood, shock, rabid stalking humanoids, good actors (Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell) slumming, sudden booms on the soundtrack, the threat of power-tool mutilation: The Crazies serves up all of these things, so it hardly matters if the movie isn’t very interesting or well-made. People came out to see it because they knew in their guts that the last thing a horror movie has to be is good to deliver the goods.
I can classify this article: “filler”. Not really much of a point here…
@Lisa and Owen. Is it just me or this past week, your *movie critic* post have all included some sort of disguised hate towards SHUTTER ISLAND? You guys really didn’t like it THAT much? You’ll think this was another TRANSFORMERS.
Marty picked a book that doesn’t try to be anyting but a solid high-art, popcorn, mystery-thriller and he did a pretty awesome job at adapting it. It may not be an oscar catnip, but it’s still WAY above the meager fare we get in movie theaters these days and that’s why people are flocking to it.
I didn’t read Lisa’s piece, but I don’t really think you could accurately classify Gleiberman’s reaction as “hate”. Perhaps more genre-reliable, but that’s not necessarily all that dismissive, especially considering he thinks so highly of Cape Fear as a genre movie. Plus, a B review is far from hate – he’s been harsher on Scorcese movies than that. “Not typical Martin Scorcese” is hardly the most scathing thing ever written.
Actually Transformers and Shutter Island BOTH got a B from EW… so they are apparently liked equally.
(BTW, I do like Owen and Lisa’s writing… but the high marks for the shameless studio dreck of Trans2 still baffles me…)
This isn’t exactly breaking news here. Genre films have done well at the box office for ages now. Dramas are the kind of films that rarely make much money anymore.
And The Crazies has gotten fairly good reviews – better than most films out now.
Breaking news? It’s a blog. You know, where people write their thoughts? I don’t recall seeing this filed under news.
(Sorry for the length here, but here is goes…)
We all know the political catch phrase: It’s the Economy Stupid. Well, after reading this I felt like making a sign that says: It’s Quality of the film Stupid. This is a really pointless article from an otherwise thoughtful journalist. I don’t know if Owen truly realizes what he is saying here. What he is essentially saying is that: the appeal of genre films is that they are more easily consumed by audiences because of, not in spite of, their simplicity of form and therefore they deserve special credit for this very reason. And my response TO THAT is: duh! tell us something we already don’t know. This is a fallacy along the lines of: people like good movies because they are good. I thought the job of a critic is to tell us whether a movie IS any good or not since we can all agree that art isn’t a science and despite the subjectivity of our tastes in any particular art we often times DO like to read and learn from other peoples’ opinions. I’m not making a case for true objectivity here. Quite the contrary: If you’re a critic and you want to advocate on behalf of a film then, fine, go ahead. You want to use the film to comment on the state of the industry or the culture it came from? More power to you. But since when does the audiences’ reaction to a film change whether or not a film is any good or not? lol And that’s exactly what Owen is saying here, and he is being quite insincere in suggesting otherwise. I’m one of those people that believe in SOME objectivity of art insofar as artistic truths go (i.e. beauty and taste that transcend form and personal opinion, etc.) And I think this is never more evident than when critics may go against the grain of popular opinion as they did when presented with the box office flop “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Though completely dismissed by audiences it is no doubt a great and effective movie when it DOES get exposure, even if that means forcing your lazy friend to sit down and watch it with you just because they initially dismissed it out of hand for being, at face value, just another attempt by Jim Carrey to make a serious movie. So what? Because the movie is STILL good regardless. In other words, just like critics can be totally wrong in the praise of a movie (like when Peter Travis liked “Panic Room”) or totally wrong in their hatred of a film (like they were when they panned the otherwise spectacular masterpiece “Natural Born Killers) I think we all know that the audience can be wrong too, and for the same reasons that critics are sometimes wrong. In either case, whether they connect or not on this view seems to be a matter that is independent of whether or not a particular piece of art is any good. While it is certainly cool when both audiences and critics connect, like when they did when “The Dark Knight” is cleaning up at the box office, I don’t think it would’ve changed the fact that the movie was anything less than great had audiences rejected the movie out of hand or vice versa. And I suppose the value of the relationship of the critic and the audience is to tap into this mystery behind that nexus between everyone’s subjective opinion and the objective truths about art. So I think the REAL motivation behind this incredibly insecure article is that Owen is suffering from critic-sweat. He once coined the word flop-sweat to suggest when a director is making a film for money after a couple of his/her films didn’t do well at the box office, in that case he was speaking about Tim Burton’s strange choice to make a rather conventional version of “Planet of the Apes” as opposed to a film in his wacked out style that we are normally used to. So if this feels like critics-sweat to me it is because the two genre films Owen is speaking about here were movies that he recently panned, in a very harsh manner. And I applaud him for that. But apparently he is back-tracking here. And why?Both “Cop Out” and “The Crazies” are indeed simplistic genre films. And regardless of that fact, they both suxed. One is a buddy cop drama and the other a zombie flick, and both are arguably not very good despite an attempt to cash in on their simplicity, intentional or otherwise. Does that mean if Kevin Smith had made a better film, with better writing and a more complex vision that would’ve artistically transcended the genre, that suddenly this movie might’ve done bad business at the box office? Would this have robbed the buddy cop genre of its easy-to-digest value as Owen is implying here? One my fav genre movies is “The Godfather”, precisely because of what Owen is arguing against here. On one hand “The Godfather” is just another gangster film. But on another hand, the film works on SO MANY levels that it turns out to be about the immigrant experience, the existential dilemma of murder and misogyny for human beings, a character study about sociopaths, etc. And its true triumph is that it is that rare film that can be one OR the other. It’s great art, period, because it can be so many things at once so effortlessly. What Owen is arguing here is against multi-exclusivity. And that represents an about-face from him and critics like him. So when we are presented with a lousy film like “Cop Out”, that it fails to work on multiple levels or even on its own terms because it simply sucks, that doesn’t mean it matters what the filmmakers intentions were or not when they made this film. It’s probably a clever spin by those filmmakers to suggest that the filmmaker “meant to do that”, kinda like when Pee-Wee Herman falls off his bike doing a wacky stunt. It’s an excuse, a cop out (pun intended), and totally irrelevant here. So despire Owen’s suggestion otherwise, it seems less likely that it is the genius master stroke of a filmmaker who wanted to make a bad movie because bad movies are in vogue now. I think it’s just another attempt by a filmmaker to spin his way out of critic disdain for a movie he made because, honestly, who likes to hear that your movie sux? If Kevin Smith had made a better movie, then certainly the people marketing the film could’ve still marketed it as just another dumb 80s buddy cop film and we wouldn’t have been the wiser. And would audiences turn up their noses up at “The Crazies” if it was a better crafted and, dare I say, topical movie? They sure didn’t ask for a refund when that movie was once called “28 Days Later”. That film tapped into our fears of the Sars epidemic which was in full swing at that time and it was also, at the same time, a good ole fashioned scarefest at the movies. The studio simply marketed that ‘genre-offering’ as just another zombie film and didn’t seemed worried that the movie transcended the genre. They left that work to the critics. So what Owen is doing here, quite ironically and unintentionally, is explaining then why we don’t need critics at all. That’s a “Cop Out” if you ask me (pun intended). And if “Cop Out” and “The Crazies” are failures at art, then I doubt that they were failure because a couple of filmmakers thought that they found some secret code to unlock the financial success of a movie in genre terms. It’s a silly factor to weigh in since we all know that movies are such a gamble in the first place. It would be like be a sports announcer who covers people who play slot machines. In other words, who cares. It’s kinda pointless, kinda like this article. So why did such an opinionated, intellectual anti-populist critic like Owen write this apologist pro-populist, anti-intellectual defence of studios spinning their awful bad movies as genre films intended that way for the audience? It is really because he thinks that a filmmaker like Kevin Smith didn’t do his very best to make the best movie he could, and that was part of some strategic plan to win over audiences? Can’t we let the studios do that sort of spinning themselves? I’m not a mind reader, but if I’m right, and Owen is just doing spin control here while pretending to debate the merits of genre filmmaking, then I would guess that he is doing this because he no
w regrets being so harsh on those genre films he reviewed in the first place. I think a more honest and appropriate article would be about how and why critics sometime ultimately buckle to popular opinion when they fail to have a thicker skin when criticizing what the public wants (and is wrong). They can’t retract their review so they write something like this. Because that’s what Owen is doing here. And that the REAL lesson here, duh!
Future note to EW – limit the word count on the comment box!!!
Did anyone read that comment? I certainly didn’t. Just saying.
I do wish at least one of EW’s critics was at all familiar with or had any affection for the horror genre. The kind of glib dismissal of The Crazies exhibited here is just lazy writing. Didn’t like the movie? Fine. Glib, heavy-handed dismissal of a genre? Lazy.
I’m fine with it. Horror is a genre that is are often guilty of putting much more emphasis on formula than on plot/characters. Romantic comedy is a runner up. Which doesn’t mean there are not good movies in both genres: they are just genres containing too many lazy writers/directors, and with too many built in fans.
i’m pretty sure in the past Owen has written about his love for horror movies… but that doesn’t mean he likes bad ones.
Dag nabbit good stuff you wihppreasnppers!
the crazies was a good, smart intelligent movie…owen is just a snob who cant connect with the public
Why are you people whining about the lack of importance of this — or the fact that it’s just a casual thought by the author? This is a blog, you dumbbells. That’s the point.
owen is clueless on the correct definition of the word ‘zombie’ – which he incorrectly repeatedly used in reference to the biological-weapon stricken folks in The Crazies. Next, he’ll be referring to anyone who has/had ebola a ‘zombie’ as well. owen is the WORST movie reviewer – ever. Period.
Zombie definition control freaks really need to calm down. It’s not like he’s calling an elephant a horse because it has four legs and can run fast. The whole debate surrounding zombies and what they are and what they can and can’t do is really stupid. I haven’t seen The Crazies, but to say that something like 28 Days Later isn’t a zombie movie is kind of ridiculous.
p.s. I know Michelle didn’t say that, I’m just kind of assuming she would.
Nobody seriously considers Cop Out to be an entertainment or financial success. A Bruce Willis action comedy should have opened with 40 million, not 18. Poor showing. Poor comedy.
I disagree with this post being called filler. I find the critics’ insight (even when I disagree with them or, better, when they disagree with each other) fills a need I have. Call it Genre Web-Surfing. And thank goodness for the written word. I am tired of having to watch video of everything online.
This story is pointless, Cop out and The Crazies proved that genre movies work? What’s next weekend lesson going to be, that Alice in Wonderland is very popular? or that 3d movie tickets cost more money than regular movie tickets? If the point of the story is so obvious that you have to put (duh) at the end of your headline, why even write it? Also, was it really neccessary to use the last line to randomly knock on the horror genre? There are plenty of good horror movies and The Crazies was actually the best reviewed film of the weekend.
thanks
i like that owen says he wouldn’t've known “shutter island” was a scorsese film if not for the opening credits. i know he’s not speaking literally. but as a journalistic with two decades of film observation, it seems silly he couldn’t pull all of the scorsese-isms out of such an overtly scorsese-ized film.
I believe that Owen is providing a criticism of the state of mainstream horror movies because it is a genre that he actually likes. Plus, I agree that there are a ton of horror movies released that barely seem distinguishable from each other.
Is that a picture of the Bare Naked Ladies singing group?