Don't gripe, get your bums on seats, urges DONALD CLARKE
YOU CAN sense a nervousness in the television commercials for The King's Speech. They don't exactly reconfigure the historical drama as a rollicking fun-fest, but the speedily cut cacophony might fool you into thinking the film has a turbo-charger concealed beneath its elegant hood.
One can understand the distributors’ dilemma. If we know anything about the movie business, it is that moneymen aim their most expensive products at 18- to 25-year-olds. And if ever a film skewed towards older demographics, it is this tale of trauma in the House of Windsor.
Go among senior cinemagoers (those born before 1985) and you will frequently hear complaints about the studios gearing their product towards corner boys and hooded ragamuffins. My mum, still a regular cinemagoer, makes the point often. “Tell those oiks to make a few less ‘space things’,” she doesn’t exactly say. “Or at least make sure that lovely George Clooney is in a few of them.”
What's missing is not just more "nice" films like The King's Speech, but sincere, sophisticated dramas with challenging themes. Related discontents, inspired by the Coen brothers' upcoming True Grit, gather round the demise of the western.
The message is clear. Film studios, in the control of deranged hippies since the 1960s, have scared adults from the multiplexes. Hooligans! Philistines! Vandals! Hmm?
The true story is, alas, a little more complex. It is true that, shouldering greater disposable income, younger adults are easier to exploit than more cautious, more grown-up viewers. But despite much evidence to the contrary, movie companies are not run by gap-toothed idiots. The sad reality is that, once children arrive and work becomes more trying, punters tend to drift away from cinemagoing.
In the early 1970s such fine films as The Godfather, The French Connectionand One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nestall won the best-picture Oscar, and each was a massive hit. Good luck trying to get a similar film to the top of the box-office charts in 2010.
Take The Hurt Locker. Despite winning the big prize last year, the film only managed to take $49 million (€38 million) worldwide. It managed a pallid No 93 in the end-of-year box-office charts (one space behind Coco Before Chanel, which is in bleeding French). What's more, the flashy Avataraside, few of the nominees for best picture did significantly better.
Here’s the moral. If you, as a non-young person, want more films aimed at your demographic, than you have to go to the cinema. And you have to go often.
Of course, if you’re reading this column, then you probably do attend the megaplex regularly. The next time, however, a friend bemoans the state of modern movies and then admits he or she hasn’t been inside a cinema for years, give the whinger a firm poke in the ribs. It’s all to do with chickens and eggs.
