Back in 2008 I wrote a review on The Dark Knight, claiming that it was a “balanced, perfect chord that Nolan and his cast and crew [struck], a chord that few have touched or even come close to” and that the film “will be legendary by its own respect to the comic and movie medium, and moreover, by its respect for the general audience.” It was my first movie review, and I wrote this final statement without the same knowledge of film I possess today. Watching a unconventional superhero story unfold, being awestruck by Heath Ledger’s haunting performance, becoming enthralled with Nolan’s film noir-esque vision of Gotham – I wanted to defend this movie on a critical level immediately. Commercial success was inevitable, but I didn’t want the movie to become shanked* from the Oscars because of its undeniable popularity; I wanted to defend the movie on a intellectual level, a critical level so detractors and “film snobs” wouldn’t deny Nolan’s Batman lore of the credit I believed it deserved.
It’s about two years later and I’ve stopped writing reviews regularly in favor of writing on this blog (also, these days I don’t have time watch movies expediently to write a relevant review). I know much more about film today, from its production to its history, and have even increased my regular online reading from Roger Ebert to the likes of Todd McCarthy, A.O. Scott, Emanuel Levy, Michael Phillips, and more recently Jim Emerson, David Bordwell and Dennis Cozzalio (amongst other writers who acquaintances and friends have introduced me to; I haven’t listed them because I usually read a minimum of three to ten articles – depending on the word count or subject – before citing them as regular reads). I’ve even stumbled across books and academic articles on Film Studies across the net, such as Bordwell’s generous free download of his book on Ozu and an entry linking academic papers on Nolan on the blog “Film Studies for Free.” The internet is a vast world out there, and persistent searching (coupled with a undeniably stubborn attitude that is possibly paired with procrastination) leads you to amazing finds. Most recently it brought me to some interesting commentary by film professor, scholar and critic, Emanuel Levy:
How do you evaluate the artistic and popular dimensions of a particular movie year? For example, was last year, 2009, a good, mediocre, or bad movie year? When can you say with some degree of assurance and coherence that 1959 was a better year than 1958? And what will be the evidence to substantiate our claim that 1939 was the best year in Hollywood’s history? As a film professor, scholar, and critic, I have been struggling with this question for decades.
Levy’s comment and subsequent examples of successful films got me thinking on a tangential thought: how do you critique a commercially successful film? Critics and cinephiles alike talk all the time about independent and foreign films and how they oftentimes receive less attention than they deserve; but on the polar opposite, how are you supposed to talk about films that might possibly get more attention than anyone could foresee?
I find the these two questions more difficult to answer since it’s easier to highlight the excellent qualities of an underdog film to a wider consciousness than to castigate the qualities of a well-funded, widely-distributed film that’s in the immediate public awareness to any effect. For instance, The Hurt Locker was the lowest grossing film to win the Oscar for “Best Picture” so far, and became well-known because of word-by-mouth reviews by acclaimed film critics around. Then you have the opposite fold, where films like Transformers 2 commercially succeed no matter how much you hack off the shiny lacquer of Megan Fox and Baysplosions hoping that people will realize the movie is a heaping pile of dung.
Precious minutes of my life were wasted on this. These are moments where I wish I had a TARDIS.**
Sometimes in my bitterness, movies like Transformers 2 make me wonder if people just prefer to throw away priceless seconds of their lives to see junk food excuses of cinema; but then I hold myself steady, take a breather, calm down and think “whoa there, buddy – people are smarter than that” and my optimism:pessimism ratio shifts back to the normal 55% and 45%, respectively. Call me naive, but I like to believe that people want to see good movies – why else would they going to theaters in the first place?
Films are an experience, and personal ones too. They tap into our innate consciousness and subconsciousness, and oftentimes the films that we deem “personal favorites” are incredibly revealing of who we are as individuals. For instance, my list of favorite films currently includes Andrew Stanton’s Wall•E in 2008 and Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights in 1931: I loved the elegant and effective simplicity of the physical performances without (or with minimal) sound, notwithstanding the stories themselves which I found uplifting, charming and uncannily sweet. Obviously this sentiment wouldn’t carry on over to someone who’s primarily a fan of, say, Michael Baysplosions, but that goes to show how different and diverse our respective tastes can be.
Now we’d all like to believe our favorite films are, in fact, great films. However, I prefer to amend this sentiment: favorite films and great films can overlap, but they are not necessarily the same. I say this because films are simultaneously about tastes and judgement. Now personally, I’d love to believe The Dark Knight is a classic, flawless movie that deserves a “great films” slot; however, I’d be in the purgatory of denial if I didn’t acknowledge legitimate criticism about the film’s flaws, and that while the film might be “awesome” that does not necessarily mean it is “great” (as stated by Stephanie Zacharek with regards to Nolan’s Inception). However, when I hear statements like these by Jeff Wells – that a commercially and critically successful film doesn’t need to be nominated for Best Picture to be great, and thus voters should vouch for films that are less noticed – I want to hit my head on the desk and write a letter to the Academy asking “what’s the bloody point of calling it ‘Best Picture of the Year’ if you’re just going to ignore commercial successes anyways?” My annoyance begins boiling again, but then I remember that the Oscars are always politically driven, and as A.O. Scott stated eloquently regarding the 82nd Academy Awards:
The “Hurt Locker”-“Avatar” showdown is being characterized as a David-versus-Goliath battle, but melodrama and rooting interests aside, it is really a contest, within the artificial arena of the Oscar campaign, between the mega-blockbuster and the long tail. That last phrase, the title of a 2006 book by Chris Anderson, already has a bit of an anachronistic sound, but Mr. Anderson’s idea, shorn of some of its revolutionary overstatement, is still compelling. As digital culture makes more and more stuff available and spills it faster and faster into an already swollen marketplace, some works will establish themselves slowly, by word or mouth, social networking and serendipitous rediscovery.
That hypothesis is likely to be tested more strenuously than before in the movie world. The money to produce and publicize the kind of middle-size movie that has dominated the Oscar slates in recent years is drying up. Cheap acquisitions can be turned into hits — last year’s best picture winner, “Slumdog Millionaire,” being the most recent long-shot example — but there are likely to be fewer luxury goods for the prestige market.
Only one of the current crop of best picture candidates, “Up in the Air,” fits that description: it has a polished look, an established star, a literary pedigree and a medium-size budget. And it looks — all of a sudden, after a strong start in Toronto and in spite of perfectly good box office numbers — like an outlier, a throwback.
Which is to say nothing about its quality. The Oscars are never about that anyway. They are about how the American film industry thinks about itself, its future, its desires and ideals. Right now it is thinking big and small, trying to figure out how to split the difference, and hoping we will keep watching. Wherever and however we do watch.
Can a film be “awesome” and “great” simultaneously? More specifically can a film be commercially and critically successful at the same time? My naive self again would say yes, but would qualify the statement with an additional “–but very rarely does it happen.” I say “rarely” because when faced with inevitable commercial success, wide-release and blockbuster films are more prone to backlash for the very qualities that made it so successful and wide-appealing (note: when I speak about “commercial success,” I’m indicating films that pull in the box office numbers, which by extension is a numerical indicator of the film’s popularity amongst moviegoers, but not necessarily its critical reception). Take Juno, for instance: it was a hit at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, yet when it came close to Oscar season there was enormous backlash from people who felt that Juno’s pop-slanging shenanigans were unnatural and unrepresentative of how teenagers actually talk and act, and that the film sent a “immoral” message to teenagers about sex and teen pregnancy.
I think Juno is a fine movie with slick, witty writing. But do I think it deserves a slot in “great films of all time” lists? In its own respect, I believe so, yes. To be perfectly honest, Juno is not exactly my cup of tea: I like Jasmine tea, but in the end I prefer the taste of Green tea simply because of my personal preferences – and in this case, Juno is Jasmine tea. No, this doesn’t detract away from my appreciation of the film; actually, it compels me to be even more holistic when looking at movies, and to make a conscious effort to differentiate (but not separate) between movies that I believe are great and movies that I personally adore to no end. So if I were to compile a list of movies I believe were “great,” I’d make an effort not only to appreciate films that aren’t necessarily my favorites and what they do well, but to also defend and argue for films that are my favorites if they are also included. This gives me room to relish movies that are cheesecakey goodness and include them in my list of personal favorites (i.e. Kung Fu Hustle) and extoll movies that I find artistically and technically outstanding which also happen to be in my list of personal favorites (i.e. My Neighbor Totoro). I like to imagine the differences, similarities and variance between “great” and “favorite” movies like this: great movies are your greens for cinematic fiber, favorite movies are your candy for cinematic sweets, and movies that great and personal favorites are fruit.
I don’t bloody care what botanically correct scientists say: the tomato is still a vegetable in my books. And I will chuck it at whomever I wish to do so - Fresh or Rotten.
We all want our favorite films to be fruit. But realistically you’ll have to admit that your personal favorites will not all be fruit – some will be candy no matter how much you believe otherwise (i.e. Caramel apple). At the same time, claiming that you only enjoy your films of greens ignores a lot of what films of candy and fruit offer. After all, films are also about entertainment: I could sit through countless art films and analyze the brilliance of the auteurs, but if I don’t feel compelled to re-watch it like a hyperactive child it’s unlikely the movie is going to be a personal favorite of mine. A recommended film, possibly, but probably not fruit, and definitely not candy.
So how many films are actually fruit? Here, I decided to take a cue from Levy’s Four Criteria of Evaluation –
- Artistic: Critics choices
- Commercial: Public choices, films that were popular with moviegoers—for whatever reason
- Innovative: Films that pushed the boundaries (technical, thematic, stylistic) and had impact on the evolution of film as a singular medium with new potential and possibilities
- Oscar movies: The five films singled by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for Oscar nominations and awards.
– and then took a look at the list worldwide box office records of movies, and compared them respectively to their ratings on RottenTomatoes, Metacritic, and Imdb (note: click on the chart and graphs to see the full versions of these statistics, which were taken on 8/9/10; numbers are taken from here, though the numbers have changed with the addition of Toy Story 3 to the “Top 20” list as of 8/10/10):
Now with my handy dandy Excel skills, I also made some graphs so we can visually see what’s going on here (titles are Y versus X values of graph; note the highest grossing film worldwide is the first value on the X-axis – essentially it goes from #1 to #20, left to right, respectively):
All of the following findings are under the assumption that box office numbers are the best estimate we can get to seeing how “popular” a movie is – that is, how much people are actually compelled to dig into their wallets and see it for whatever reason, regardless of the critical reception before and after the film’s release. So if we were approximating a 70% as a generally favorable consensus after averaging the critical percentages of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and Imdb for the current top grossers, we find this: only 14 out of the 20 listed films are generally favored by critics and viewers alike, which means that about 70% of box office grossers will be meet some amount of critical success – this group essentially consists of fruit and candy for movies, and that they could perhaps display a minimum of three (or two) traits out of the four criteria for evaluation that Levy presents.
However, if we were to estimate what percentage of these movies would meet universal acclaim by approximating a minimum 85%, we would find the that only about 5 of the 20 titles could potentially be considered as “great films,” and that only approximately 25% of top grossers could actually be considered fruit and possibly possess all four qualities of Levy’s criteria.
There are a number of things that could be wrong with these numbers. For one, the worldwide box office numbers in this data aren’t adjusted for inflation, hence the lists consists mostly of films that are relatively recent in film history. Another thing is that these numbers are based off worldwide gross, so it accounts for films that were fortunate enough to be released internationally in addition to domestically – this invariably favors films that get lots of funding from studios, and more often these studios are big time Hollywood players. Lastly, the review aggregates are from distinctly English-speaking, so the “universality” of critical acclaim possibly only covers the general Western hemisphere while not necessarily having the same appeal in the Eastern hemisphere (i.e. the reception of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in America was much warmer than that of India, where the film was located in). Still, I think it’s important to see how box office numbers and critical consensus relate, and based on what I’ve found it all leads back to my original assertion: that it is rare for a commercially successful film to also meet universal critical acclaim.
However, if we stand back from the standards of critical acclaim and consider more holistically to the standards of favorable acclaim, then my hope and naivete isn’t unfounded: a majority of the top office grossers aren’t bad films. They may not be great, but they’re not bad either; in fact, we could even conclude that they’re the perfect amount of candy and cheesecakey goodness that most moviegoers want when they go to the movies for whatever reasons – entertainment, escapism, evaluative, everything.
Michael Bay presents Explosions! By Michael Bay.
In the end, does it matter who got the higher score or raked in the most money? Frankly no; I’ll probably defend my favorite films until my deathbed and hate Transformers 2 for the rest of my life. That doesn’t mean I won’t find flaws or excellence in great, favorite and personal vendetta films either – in fact there’s a certain joy in finding things that could’ve been done better (or worse) in the films that you love or hate, almost as if you’re finding a Easter Egg that the filmmaker forgot they even put in. For instance, who knew you could so excellently incorporate sound effects “pew pew pew!” and classy comedy like humping dogs into a $200 million budget film created by full-grown, mature and enlightened adults like Michael Bay? It’s like they sympathized with my childhood where I counteracted my brothers’ reign of sibling terror with my pointed index finger after my mum told me to suck it up and fend for myself against their shenanigans (“no, I will not buy you a Nerf gun to assassinate your brothers with - go use a stick or something. And stop climbing the stair railing like a monkey - no I don’t care if you’re Quasimodo, you’re going to break off the railing!***”).
We may never know what truly is “the best film of all time.” Lists will consistently bring up the same movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca, but even then there’s a certain amount of subjectivism to any “greatest movies” list. Of course they’re always worth pursuing if the recommendation is compelling enough, but the decision is always personal and up to you alone. So while the probability of finding fruit might be low, it’s worth it after getting a palette full of greens and candy for films.
*I was one hell of an angry cat when I found it The Dark Knight and Wall•E didn’t receive Best Picture nominations that year. Hell hath no fury like a person still without a cat.
**Props to anyone who get this reference. Even bigger props if you’ve got your own sonic screwdriver.
***I like to believe this was her loving way of telling me not to fall down to my peril and death. Regardless, I still climbed those stair railings because if anyone was going to be an awesome Quasimodo, it would be ME.
…
Referenced Articles and Links (ordered with regards to this article)
• The Dark Knight: 2008 - my first movie review
• From Books to Blogs to Books - David Bordwell
• Christopher Nolan Studies - posted and compiled by Catherine Grant
• 1960: Here is Looking at You Movie Year - Emanuel Levy
• The 'Best Picture’ Academy Awards: Facts and Trivia - Filmsite.org
• Is Inception This Year’s Masterpiece? Dream On - Stephanie Zacharek
• Will 'Wall-E’ be be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars? - Tom O'Neil of Gold Derby (this is a compilation of critics’ opinions on Wall-E’s prospects of a “Best Picture” nomination; search for Jeff Wells to find his quote)
• The Politics of an Oscar Campaign - Peter Bowes
• Huge Film, Small Film: Big Stakes - A.O. Scott
• Jumping the snark: The Juno backlash (backlash) - Jim Emerson
• All Time Worldwide Top 20 - The-Numbers.com
Recommended Articles and Links (no particular order)
• Masterpieces: How to Define Great Films? - Emanuel Levy
• The Top Film Criticism Sites: An Annotated Blog Roll - compiled by Paul Brunick of Film Society of Lincoln Center
• The Fall of the Revengers - Roger Ebert
• I’m a proud Braniac - Roger Ebert
• Fade In Magazine - A nice magazine that looks into the nitty gritty workings of Hollywood business and the film industry
• Superheroes for Sale - David Bordwell
• Hey, Wall-E: Shoot for the Top (Great animation deserves shot at Best Picture) - Joe Morgenstern
• Trivia: Can The Dark Knight Win the Best Picture Oscar as a Write-In Candidate? - David Chen
Just for Fun (because comedy is the best relief for bitter film memories)
• Rifftrax: Transformers 2 – BATTICAL!
• Michael Bay presents: Explosions! – courtesy Robot Chicken
• Michael Bay Finally Made an Art Film – Charlie Jane Anders of io9
• Cat Safety Propaganda - How I reacted when I learned Wall•E and The Dark Knight did not get “Best Picture” nominations (see, cute little girl is the oppressive hand of the Academy and its innate biases against animation and comic book lore, and the cat is a cat the hell hath no fury like when it is angered… I’m not sure where I fit in here except that the cat’s reaction to cute little girl is more or less how I acted when I heard the Oscar news those years ago)