Movies, Sequels, Netflix
Hollywood cares about money and awards so you have sequels. Well, remakes may not win many awards, but they beckon as safe commercial bets — even if they don’t payoff as hoped, who can question bringing out another version of something already approved by popular interest? Nothing guarantees the popular taste though — even familiarity.
The mercenary impulses of the culture industry always have a plausible populist basis: DreamWorks Animation and Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer and Marvel Studios and all the other serial peddlers are giving us what we want — what they know we like. And this is hardly new. The current era of big-budget, mass-market movie sequelization dates back to the 1970s, when the personal cinema of the New Hollywood spawned, almost as a byproduct, a handful of nostalgic baby-boomer adventures, horror movies and action spectaculars that eventually took over the business.
This is true about the popular culture in general — TV, music, and a portion of the commercial art bureaucracy, which is really an extension of the popular culture — in particular. Formulas are synthesized into “new” vehicles. It isn’t influence. It is just lifting an idea and combining it with another lifted idea. Many Indie movies instantiate this approach. They aren’t Indie at all, just conventional remakes.
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After a long hiatus we’ve been sampling Netflix to tryout the streaming feature. We’ve hit on some interesting movies — which is pretty good considering the Netflix streaming library is large but mostly unsatisfying.
Passengers was a good remake of The Sixth Sense. It was actually better in many ways, because Anne Hathaway brought a layered warmth to the role that made the movie more appealing. Speaking of The Sixth Sense, we watched Signs, another M. Night Shyamalan movie that was panned on release. A bit grim and slow moving although M. Night is a talented and bright fellow — you can see his intelligence on the screen. He needs to find some humor, fun, and energy in his movies. His source material is the pop culture but his movies lack that foundationalist quality of junk culture.
A movie called Man, Woman, and the Wall was offbeat but held our attention. About an audio voyeur. That’s a new category. Apparently the walls in many apartments in Japan are thin and it is common for people to listen in to their neighbors. The main interest in the movie was the insight into Japanese society: the casualness with which the main character, a young guy, discussed his obsession with his friends who accepted it without judgment or crudeness. The sexual material was devoid of Western guilt. Japan may be a repressed society, but not sexually. The sexual scenes — sped up by Netflix to keep themselves family safe, a weird decision — was actually sweetly portrayed, when the voyeur and object of his adoration finally began to relate.
