First and foremost, I’m a movie lover. Nothing competes for my attention in this regard, including dollar rentals and the like. But I’m just not buying anywhere near the number of new releases I did just ten years ago. Obviously, this is anecdotal evidence, so make your own comparisons:

1998  – I purchased 15 of the top 20 money makers…

1999 — 18 of the top 20.

2000 — 16 of the top 20.

2001 — 14 of the top 20.

And nothing’s changed. My tastes are the same. I still enjoy and don’t regret a single purchase (well, maybe “Planet of the Apes” — but I keep watching thinking it will get better). Now flash-forward to the last few years  and the numbers collapse:

2006 – 5 of the top 20.

2007 — 9 of the top 20.

2008 — 6 of the top 20

2009 — 6 of the top 20 (thus far, that I intend to purchase)

Box office attendance has been much steadier than DVD sales, so the crash in the home video market might have something to do with the ”fool me once” rule. Gambling, sight unseen, on a night out at the movies is an American tradition – something to do — a kind of event. Purchasing the same film to take home with the idea of watching again and again is a completely different buyer’s decision, one where you ask yourself if you want to relive your theatrical experience.

In my case, increasingly, the answer’s been no, and in many cases, hell no.

Sometimes the simple answer really is the right one … or the one the industry just doesn’t want to face.

Tough times for leftie Hollywood. Nothing’s gone right this week. None of this is their fault, of course. In order to understand that it might not be a good idea to rally around a child rapist, bash religion in a religious country or trash capitalism in a capitalist country you have to live in the real world…

Steve Mason:

Michael Moore’s CAPITALISM tanks!

Ricky Gervais has launched his second consecutive box office bomb as The Invention of Lying (Warner Bros) only mustered $2.2M or so to start the 3-day. The comedy should finish #5 with approximately $6.5M for the weekend. …

[B]ut the biggest disappointment of the weekend is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture). After a $57K per theatre average on 4 screens last weekend, the picture broke to a wider 962 locations with terrible results. The “documentary” only sold an estimated $1.3M in tickets to start the weekend, and it will finish at about $3.9M for a PTA of less than $4,000. That soft opening will almost certainly make Capitalism Moore’s weakest-grossing movie since 2002’s Bowling for Columbine ($21.5M domestic gross).

As if all this isn’t enough for our friends on the left to take in, you have $800 billion spent to get us to 9.8% unemployment, the *poof* of the public option, and a nine-month World Apology Tour resulting in Rio getting the Olympics.

And what can we expect as a result of these “teachable moments?”

What’s that phrase again…? Oh, yeah: More Of The Same.

I considered that a potentially baleful eventuality, considering that the new comedy seemed likely to be very anti-business, given the scenes shown in the trailers and the presence of politically active Damon and Soderbergh (director of Che, which lionized the Cuban Marxist revolutionary). I haven’t seen it yet, and so will reserve judgment on that score, but perhaps it makes sense that although The Contender did better than expected, it was clobbered by the animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Meatballs brought in a very healthy $30.1 million in North American ticket sales in its first weekend during the past three days (50 percent more than industry analysts had expected), far outpacing The Contender’s take of $10.5 million. The Damon-Soderbergh comedy finished just ahead of Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which brought in $10.1 million in its second weekend. Another comedy, Love Happens, finished fourth.

With three comedies leading the pack and two highly promoted horror-suspense films with attractive female stars in the lead roles tanking with unexpectedly low ticket sales (Jennifer’s Body, Whiteout), it’s apparent that U.S. audiences are tired of downbeat material and want a more positive, optimistic type of entertainment,

That’s especially important with the economy remaining in bad condition long after recovery typically begins (average of ten months after onset) and Congress and the President considering a multitude of expensive new initiatives guaranteed to make the situation even worse.

With so many comedies to choose from, the weekend’s total U.S. box office was up 14 percent over the same weekend of last year and 17 percent over the previous weekend. Clearly, the Hollywood studios would be smart to press their filmmakers to move toward a more optimistic, positive, pro-American, classical liberal approach to the stories they tell.

If not, they may find themselves in a recession of their own.

After his big international success with the superb martial arts saga “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Chinese-born film director Ang Lee continued in the eclectic manner indicated by his earlier films, jumping from genre to genre and style to style. Over the years he has directed the genial “Sense and Sensibility,” the thoughtful historical film “Ride with the Devil,” the gloomy family drama “The Ice Storm,” the homosexual love story “Brokeback Mountain,” and the inept superhero action film Hulk, among others.

This eclecticism and the tendency toward a rather downbeat style have kept Lee from developing a large following among U.S. moviegoers, as has the fact that he tends not to work with the top stars or in popular genres. Thus it was perhaps to be expected that his latest, the historical comedy “Taking Woodstock,” didn’t do much business at U.S. movie theaters in its opening weekend, taking in only $3.7 million and finishing ninth in the box office standings.

Released without much hoopla other than the general publicity surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock concerts, the film simply hasn’t generated much interest among audiences. A serious comedy with a homosexual lead character plus a cross-dressing Marine and a variety of other cute, quirky types is just not any kind of an original idea these days. The movies are full of such characters, and we’ve all heard just about enough about Woodstock.

Despite the odd variety of subject matter, time periods, and geographic locations of his films, Lee has in fact been consistent in one way: conveying modern antinomian-individualist platitudes and shibboleths. For years he has functioned as the champion of the social outsider–a position guaranteed to earn plaudits from the contemporary media elite. Thus his Academy Award-winning and ecstatically praised “Brokeback Mountain” was perhaps the clearest distillation of the point of view evident in all of his films.

Although Lee’s passion for individualism to the point of antinomianism has sometimes had very interesting results–as in “Ride with the Devil,” with its open sympathy for the Confederacy–it has more often resulted in compendia of social-liberation cliches.

“Taking Woodstock” follows this template exactly. It assumes the U.S. elite’s accepted point of view of Woodstock as a critical event in the nation’s much-needed process of liberation from stifling bourgeois conformity, etc., which ushered in a new world of greater authenticity that has unfortunately been continually thwarted by forces of repression, especially business people and those vile and pesky fundamentalist Christians who still somehow infest the republic despite freely available abortions.

This cliched and indeed platitudinous notion was boring and silly when Milos Forman brought it to the big screen in “Hair” in 1979, and it is particularly obsolete today, when there is an entire genre of stoner comedies about young people living the Woodstock life while enjoying the benefits of bourgeois comfort and prosperity, plus a wider genre of zany comedies centering on the amazingly free and indeed feckless lives of American young people. If today’s young people are being oppressed by Puritan witch-hunters, there’s very little evidence of it. The public schools, run by an aggressively secular government, are in fact the real bane of their lives.

Thus the idea of Woodstock Nation as something distinct from the rest of American life and in fact quite heroic is simply absurd and fatuous in a nation populated in good part by what columnist David Brooks calls the Bohemian Bourgeois–people who are able to live as freely as hippies in their free time while still enjoying the prosperity and stability of bourgeois life.

No, the real story of the contemporary United States is not a yearning for liberation from repressive Christian theocrats. On the contrary, as the Tea Party movement and related phenomena make clear, the real concern is for liberation from the strangling hand of an elitist government and a desire for a more bourgeois–and family-friendly culture.

In such a context, there should be little wonder why audiences don’t rush out to subject themselves to a couple of hours of cute, smug, elitist cliches. They get enough of that on the nightly news.

Look, I applaud Sylvester Stallone’s heroic stance against human traffickers and kidnappers – for I know there will be quite an outcry especially from the large and very influential human trafficking and kidnapper lobby.

Of course, this movie comes on the heels of two other edgy ventures: The G.I Joe flick – which turned a gritty American icon into an airbrushed Benneton ad, and “Inglourious Basterds” a fantasy that has average Jews hacking Nazi soldiers to pieces.

These three movies have two things in common:
1) They avoid present, real danger in the world and instead choose villains that are not just safe, but politically correct to hate. You’d think it would be easy for Quentin Tarantino to find a present day enemy for the Jews (like, say, a terrorist group that denies the Holocaust and wants to wipe Israel off the map), but maybe none exist! And what of those guys who flew planes into the World Trade Center? I suppose in the era of the “unclenched fist,” we must be more sensitive to “backlash” than barbarism.

2) They want to make money. And to make money these days, it means putting the world first, not America. Global tickets sales mean eliminating any scent of American justice – that evil Cowboy mentality that reminds the world we’re reliably awesome. But most important, it’s distasteful to consider a battle between good and evil when it’s happening today.

Because then, you have to choose.

Tonight we’ve got the lovely Lauren Sivan, Carl Cameron, Ron Geraci, and Dr. David Tolin, from the great show “Hoarders!” (love that show)

Following on the heels of the strong opening weekend for the relatively intelligent alien invasion story District 9, Quentin Tarantino’s World War II adventure Inglourious Basterds opened at number one at the U.S. movie box office this past weekend, taking in $37.6 million.

That’s the most, by far, any Tarantino film has brought in during its first three days, greatly outpacing the $25 million for Kill Bill, Volume 2. Coming in second on the week was District 9, last week’s top attraction, with just under $19 million.

While those aren’t quite G.I. Joe/Transformer numbers, they’re definitely solid and suggest that audiences are looking for more than superficial thrills as the young ones head back to school. Even though Inglourious Basterds manifests Tarantino’s stylistic self-indulgence and evidently vastly greater interest in movies than in reality, the film does have a real story line and more interesting characters than the great majority of summer blockbuster contenders.

Joining Basterds and District 9 in the weekend’s top five were two strongly character- and story-driven films, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Julie and Julia. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra fell to third with an unspectacular $12.5 million.

Although Tarantino provides plenty of sensational and bizarre scenes in his films, they typically include vivid, interesting characters, occasionally clever dialogue, and strong story lines–while adhering to the contemporary cinema’s cavalier attitude toward both logical and psychological plausibility, its preference for the sensational over the sensible, its penchant for bad taste, its admiration for personal willfulness, and its advocacy of hedonistic utilitarianism.

Meaning: the strengths of Tarantino’s films lie in their similarity to the best of modern American dramatic series television, while his weaknesses are those of the contemporary Hollywood cinema.

Funny People showed much less audience draw than the great majority of Apatow’s and actor Adam Sandler’s previous efforts, and its failure to connect big with audiences cannot be blamed on any recent disappointments. Apatow’s Knocked Up and Sandler’s Bedtime Stories were both excellent films that did very well at the box office.

The magnitude of the disappointment for the Funny People writer-director and its star was summed up well by Reuters:

* This will likely be the eighth straight movie that Apatow produced that failed to top $100 million. (”Step Brothers” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” the latter of which he also wrote, just reached the mark but didn’t surpass it.)

* Opening weekend has been a hallmark of Apatow in his robust years. But only two of these past eight films opened to at least $30 million — after the three previous pictures all did.

* This month marks exactly two years since Apatow Prods. had a bona fide breakout along the lines of a “Talladega Nights” or “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” — the Greg Mottola-directed “Superbad,” which earned $121 million.

* After “Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” Apatow was touted for his rare ability to bring overseas audiences to U.S. comedies. That was then, this is now. Outside of “Zohan,” none of his previous seven pictures have topped $150 million internationally. “Funny People” isn’t likely to change that.

I haven’t yet seen the film, but it seems likely that this is a misstep on Apatow’s part and not a portent of inevitable things to come. It’s always tempting for comedians to attempt overtly serious projects, but Funny People is nothing like Woody Allen’s lugubrious and overwrought Interiors.It’s clear that Apatow tried to be funny in this film, and the inclusion of serious themes is certainly in line with the other films he has directed, The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

Sandler, of course, has done films such as Punch-Drunk Love and Spanglish but always managed to get back to what he does best. Both Sandler and Apatow have exemplified the contemporary habit of conveying positive ideas and moral messages through works of culture employing vulgar and trashy surface elements. The shortcoming of Funny People was an evident failure to assure audiences that the vulgarity and messages would be placed in an enjoyable dramatic and comic context.

That suggests that Funny People is more of a bump in the road for both filmmakers, and that they’ll both be able to move forward from the relative disappointment of their current film. However, the trailers and other publicity for their next project will have to make it clear that it offers audiences the same sort of enjoyment and edification their previous films have given.

Filmmakers in general must learn that vulgarity, explicit sexual content, absurd story lines, mad violence, and the like are not what appeal to most of their audience film-goers attend movies with such content because of the other good things in the films, specifically the positive messages and aesthetic enjoyment to be found behind the trashy surface nonsense. Emphasizing the former is the way to both artistic and audience success.

In a culture that openly celebrates vulgarity, mistaking it for authenticity, it’s difficult for artisans and audiences alike to see what really makes for good culture, including good popular culture. But the market sends strong signals, and filmmakers and other culture-makers do well to listen and learn.

With a haul of $16.6 million, “Angels & Demons” nabbed the top spot from “Star Trek” yesterday, but fell short of “The Da Vinci Code’s” $28.6 million Friday debut in May of 2006.

Compared to “Spider-Man,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Narnia,” and “National Treasure” this is a pretty steep drop for a sequel, but while everyone saw “The Da Vinci Code,” have you met anyone who liked it? For a sequel to perform close or even better than the original, it has to engender some goodwill and on no front did “Da Vinci” do that.

According to Steve Mason’s weekend projections (available here), “Demons” is looking at a $45M opening weekend, which is nearly $30M short of its predecessor, which opened at $77M.

The newly released, highly derivative thriller Obsessed finished first at the U.S. office this past weekend, bringing in a surprising $28.5 million. That’s twice what industry analysts had expected and a good deal more than the film’s relatively low $20 million production budget.

It’s also emblematic of a central problem facing Hollywood today: the decline of serious drama.

First-weekend audiences for Obsessed were undoubtedly swelled by the presence of singer Beyonce and the prospect of a catfight between her and homewrecker Ali Larter (Heroes). Undoubtedly the film did not disappoint in that regard.

Also surely interesting for many viewers were the racial angles to the film, which add some small amount of flavor to an overripe story line. Critics and social advocates used to complain that black characters were too often shown as villains or subservient in media portrayals, which was true. Today the opposite habit is the fashion, and it is just as unthinking and stereotypical as its predecessor.

The previous week’s box-office champion, the lighthearted Zac Efron comedy 17 Again, finished second this time, while another genre film, Fighting, opened at number 3. The earnest Jamie Foxx drama The Soloist came in fourth, bringing in less than the studio would have hoped. That follows the lack of success of recent dramas such as State of Play and Duplicity.

Analysts have blamed these poor performances on audiences’ unwillingness to watch serious films, especially because people tend to want to escape from their problems during economic hard times.

I think that’s not the case at all. The reality is that Hollywood’s theatrical film wing has largely forgotten how to do good dramas, and the central problem is the ever-greater politicization of Tinseltown in recent years.

Comedies, action movies, and other genre films have been largely free of the incursion of left-wing politics, due both to their genre expectations and the audiences to which they’re pitched, especially the young, who are less energized by politics. And those films are doing very well.

Dramas, on the other hand, aimed as they are at more mature audiences, have been thoroughly overtaken by progressive politics. The poor box office performance of the numerous dreary and politically slanted antiwar films of the past few years exemplify this trend, as do the numerous tracts against bourgeois normality and for sexual radicalism and other outlier attitudes evident in Milk, The Reader, Transamerica, and other such filmic delights of the past couple of years.

The occasional Christian-oriented film such as Fireproof or nonpolitical drama such as The Pursuit of Happyness does very well at the box office, but Hollywood has largely killed serious drama by insisting on equating it with progressive politics.

Why? Flush with money from the nonpolitical genre fare, the studios are content to allow their big stars, directors, and other key players to establish their progressive artistic, political, and, yes, sexual bona fides for the progressive elites by making these politicized dramas audiences don’t want to watch.

That means these sorts of films will continue to be made as long as the studios continue to do well overall and the nation’s elites remain repugnantly leftist—but it doesn’t make it right.

—S. T. Karnick

Here’s another lesson.  During an unpopular war, a popular star risked everything to bring a bestselling book to the screen about American fighting men battling a cruel and vicious enemy.  In 1968, you might think an unabashedly pro-war movie where the Americans were the heroes and the enemy the villains would have been soundly rejected, and it was – by the liberal elite. 

Roger Ebert, who never saw a film trashing the American fighting man he didn’t praise, still lists John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” as one of his most hated films forty years later.  But the public welcomed it, a film that could tell good from evil, and turned it into a hit.  It even spawned a hit song.  Where is the next war movie that outrages Roger Ebert while lining audiences up around the block?

This is not just about doing the right thing – as a lawyer who has worked with Industry people, I would get farther talking particle physics to my terrier than right and wrong to an agent.  It’s about the one thing everyone in the Industry understands – money.

There is good money sitting on the table waiting to be picked up by the filmmaker who dares to buck the Hollywood tide and make a film about the War on Terror that shows the struggle for what it is, a struggle of good versus evil with clear heroes – us – and clear villains – al Qaeda, the Taliban and all the rest of that sordid crew of thugs.  Americans understand this instinctively.  They will embrace films that do as well.

Simplistic?  No.  See, the American public – the ones you want to buy tickets to your movies – understands that our enemies are evil.  The public also understands that our service members are on the side of good.  And they have thoroughly rejected every film that could not face up to this very basic truth.  That’s why Redacted, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah and all the rest gather dust in the Blockbuster remainder bin.

So, Americans just want smiley-face propaganda?  You Hollywood types need to get out of the 310 area code more often.  HBO’s “Taking Chance,” a movie that portrayed the true costs of the war in a respectful and emotionally raw way was a big hit.  “Generation Kill,” with all its many faults, also found an audience, though it might have been bigger without the endless scenes of characters bickering and whining.  But nearly eight years after the War began, there has been no non-documentary film that unabashedly celebrates our fighting men and women even as it depicted their experiences in combat.

It is not as if there are no stories to tell.  Five Americans have earned the Medal of Honor in combat during the War – two of them Navy SEALs.  Dozens have earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, or the Silver Star.  Thousands have earned the Purple Heart.  Many veterans have penned their memoirs. And those are just the real-life stories. 

There once was a time before all movie material had to come from old TV shows, videogames or comic books – excuse me, “graphic novels.”  As odd as it may seem, once there were films with original stories set against the backdrop of historical events.  You might have heard of them – films with titles like like The Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone and Casablanca.  Apparently, they met with some small success.

As Tom Tapp recently reported here on Big Hollywood, at least one studio is giving it a try.  Judging from its killer trailer, The Hurt Locker might just break through.  But it is not exactly a traditional war movie. It’s about explosive ordinance demolition specialists, folks so nuts that when one of my lieutenants told me he was going to try out to be one I almost ordered him a psyche eval.  The question of whether a straight ahead modern war movie can succeed remains.

As with so much in life, John Wayne provides the answer.  In his 1968 review, Roger Ebert slammed The Green Berets as “old-fashioned.”  I bet the Duke was crying all the way to the bank.  The fact is that John Wayne understood that the American public wanted and deserved a movie that showed them the essential truth of a conflict the media at best ignored, a movie not afraid to take a side – our side.  They still do, as our national celebration of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips demonstrates.  The question for Hollywood is this:  Why are you leaving money on the table?