“REAL ART ENDURES” blared a printed United Artists sales pitch to theaters in 1920. “Art is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of popular selection. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is a more powerful attraction today than when it was first shown last Spring, because people speak of it, they see it again and again, and those who have not yet had the opportunity are looking for it. They feel it is the one film they must not miss. That is why Broken Blossoms is a more compelling box-office feature for you now than ever before. It’s name above your theater entrance means big business and prestige for your house.”

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten. (more…)

I don’t recall liking much of Nora Ephron’s work other than “When Harry Met Sally.” In fact, if I knew she made “Julie and Julia,” I probably would have avoided it, since “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” just kind of mash together in my mind. But “Julie and Julia” is more than good: it’s brilliant cinema.

The first thing that grabbed me was the character work. The hero, Julia Powell (her real life blog is here) is a foodie blogger played by Amy Adams. I’m used to watching Amy Adams over my kid’s shoulder in “Enchanted,” which plays in our house on continual loop. I didn’t know Amy knew how to turn down the volume and play a “plain-Jane, yet interesting”… but she’s awesome. This isn’t her usual glowing, perky role where she turns it on like a fire-hose. And she doesn’t turn invisible like when she played a piece of cardboard in “Doubt.” (more…)

Hollywood execs seem to be waking up to the power of women at America’s multiplexes. The success of He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) and this weekend’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) can be traced to Meryl Streep’s witty riff on the tyrannical Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada in the summer of 2006. Prada opened to a $27.5M weekend on its way to a $124.75M domestic cume (Streep also earned an Oscar nomination).

Then in July of 2007, New Line grabbed an almost identical $27.47M with the opening weekend of the female-skewing Hairspray, translating to $118.87M domestic. Also Enchanted, starring Amy Adams, was a hit for Disney over the holidays reaching $127.8M domestic.

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