What’s green and crinkly and threatens civilisation as we know it? The all-conquering Hollywood dollar. Derek Malcolm takes a sceptical look back at the movies of 1996
I’VE recently seen, though you haven’t yet, Barbra Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, in which our beloved if narcissistic star is supposed to spend three-quarters of a long movie looking like an Ugly Duckling and the last quarter like Cinderella at the ball. The fact that she actually looks quite pretty as the duckling and fairly awful tarted up ‘ la Hollywood as Cinderella doesn’t alter the fact that The Mirror Has Two Faces expresses almost perfectly my experiences as a film critic during 1996.
Three-quarters of the time it was a bit like purgatory. One quarter of the time it was, if not heaven, at least better than going to the office every day. It was, in fact, a weird year in which Hollywood produced a bevy of films that hit the box-office with such a clatter that they may well figure in the lists of all-time popular successes. Unfortunately, most of them appeared to be braindead, except where professional technique was concerned.
The characters were plastic, the screenplays simply a matter of getting them from one piece of action to another, and only the special effects were left to entertain anyone who admires popular films.
The most successful of all was Independence Day which, at the last count, has raised $306- million in America and $391-million in the rest of the world. Why so? Well, the very skilful and pretty expensive hype contributed. So did the fact that it was patriotic, feelgood and spectacular. America needed something like this weightless trump card for the anxious mid-nineties, and where America goes so do the rest of us.
The other huge swingers of the summer were Mission: Impossible, Twister, The Rock and The Nutty Professor, with Eraser and the animated Hunchback of Notre Dame and Toy Story not far behind. Each of these films had production budgets of around or over $60-million, and none of them could possibly be said to be in any way memorable from the moment you left the cinema.
No, it was not a good year for quality in Hollywood, though you could certainly say that the City of Dreams managed, most of the time, to bask in the glory of one movie or another that gave world audiences, if not critics, exactly what they appeared to want.
That, of course, is its job. But if the mood changes and something different and possibly more substantial has to be offered, can Hollywood now manage it? On present showing, it’s doubtful. But then on present showing, we don’t seem to require anything else. And what’s the use of a good screenplay when half the world doesn’t speak English and still goes en masse to Hollywood movies?
That’s the real change in the last few years. Hollywood has finally realised that it can make more money abroad than at home. And that, to do so, you have to hone everything down into its simplest, most visual form. Variety magazine, the bible of the industry, recently found something rather peculiar about all this. It was that the most and the least costly films do best at the box-office. Of the 20 releases in 1996 which had production costs of more than $60 million, fully half are expected to generate profits of at least $50-million and only five look likely to lose morerver told Variety: “The major studios want to knock off a bank, not a candy store.” It’s thought to be much better to gamble and gain big than to make money slowly at a dollar a time. So, peering into the future, we are very likely to see more huge epics than less, with the lust for blockbusters like Space Jam, The Lost World and Batman and Robin, let alone the planned new Star Wars, continuing unabated. a candy store.” It’s thought to be much better to gamble and gain big than to make money slowly at a dollar a time. So, peering into the future, we are very likely to see more huge epics than less, with the lust for blockbusters like Space Jam, The Lost World and Batman and Robin, let alone the planned new Star Wars, continuing unabated.
For the sake of our more intelligent selves, we should hope this changes, and that thought-provoking mid-range products like The People vs Larry Flint, The Crucible and The English Patient will have enough success to make the men in suits alter their attitudes. Fortunately, it looks as if Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient might do so, since it has opened well in the United States.
But it’s doubtful at a time when stars are demanding more and more, and costs are thus spiralling out of control. And in a way they are right to be demanding, since if Jack Nicholson or Michelle Pfeiffer are in a popular movie they are worth every dollar.
And what of the stars? As usual, some went down and some went up the pecking order. Demi Moore (Striptease), Geena Davis (Cut-Throat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight), Keanu Reeves (was Speed a fluke?) and Julia Roberts (Mary Reilly) went down. And up came Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas, for which he got the Oscar, and The Rock, for which he was paid millions), Brad Pitt (Seven, Twelve Monkeys), Samuel L Jackson (never bad, in a lot of movies), and Sean Penn (Dead Man Walking).
Two people reinvented themselves — Madonna (as a lookalike Eva Peron in the forthcoming Evita) and Eddie Murphy (as the fatso in the highly successful The Nutty Professor, after a string of failures). And John Travolta’s comeback continued with Phenomenon and Get Shorty. Newcomers to stardom included George Clooney (From Dusk Till Dawn and now as the new Batman), Matthew McConaughey (A Time to Kill, Lone Star), Kate Winslet (Sense And Sensibility, Jude) and Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting, Emma, The Pillow Book). And perhaps Branagh will clear the memory of Frankenstein with his four-hour Hamlet.
But when all is said and done about star power, one can only find a very few even near top-quality American films. And, of these, hardly any were properly Hollywood products. There was Martin Scorsese’s Casino, which proved that Sharon Stone could perform as well as look sexy; there was Michael Mann’s impressive Heat, which gave De Niro and Pacino a chance to act cat and mouse together for the first (and possibly last) time, and there was Dead Man Walking, an intelligent attack on the American desire for vengeance against criminals, preferably by death.
There was also Fargo, one of the best films the Coen brothers have produced since Blood Simple. And John Sayles, great man of the American independent scene, wrote and directed Lone Star, his best for some time. The surprise was David Fincher’s Seven, a violent but holding thriller camped up with literary references and darkly memorable visual effects.
Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke, Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, Oliver Stone’s uneven but highly watchable Nixon and Todd Haynes’s Safe make up the list of good US films. Of these, Safe — an impressive tale of a woman suffering from an acutely physical form of ME — seemed to me one of the best films of the year.
It was generally left to the Brits to save things for Europe, which they did by winning the Berlin Festival with Sense and Sensibility (actually an Anglo-American production), Cannes with Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (largely financed by the French) and further plaudits for Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Michael Winterbottom’s Jude and Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book.