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Hollywood Sends in the Clones
Last yearís blueprint is this yearís carbon copy. "New" episodes of Star Wars and Star Trek will look as old as mold. Richard Corliss gazes into his crystal ball, and weeps
This year’s Star Wars feature is called Attack of the Clones. Honestly, now, could there be an apter title for Hollywood 2002?
In their quest to go where every man, woman and lonely 14-year-old boy with too much spending money and nothing to do on a Friday night has gone before, the big film studios will assault you with the 10th Star Trek film (Nemesis), the 20th James Bond adventure (as yet unnamed), the third Austin Powers ripoff of Bond (Goldmember), plus sequels to Men in Black, Spy Kids and Analyze This. You’ll also see the second episodes in the world’s top-grossing tandem of 2001: the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises.
Maybe the signature title of Hollywood in its current, post-interesting phase should be The Mummy Returns. Ancient ideas! The walking dead! A sequel to a remake of a minor film from 1932! Why bother to look ahead when movie-makers settle for looking back?
Commercial filmmaking isn’t an art; it hardly rises to the level of entertainment. It’s a business. And when The Mummy Returns improves on the box office take of its 1999 predecessor by 30%, and Rush Hour 2 (sequel to the surprise Jackie Chan hit of 1998) outgrosses the original by 60%, the writing is on the ledger. These were the fifth and sixth top grossers of the year, just ahead of Jurassic Park III, remakes of Planet of the Apes and Ocean’s Eleven, and one "original" film — Pearl Harbor. Don’t ask if anyone, anyone at all, enjoyed these pictures. Ask if Hollywood, when it lucks into a product people will pay to see, can be blamed for making more of the drab same.
Before movie lovers get out the imaginary cutlery to apply to their real wrists, we should announce the good news. Forget the beastly films; remember the beastie ones. The four biggest hits of 2001 were fantasies suitable for the young or very young: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and the computer-animated comedies Shrek and Monsters, Inc. Three of these (the last three) were terrific movies, full of wit, vigor and loving detail. They made lots of folks happy — not just the studio accountants.
Still, the artistic and financial success of Lord, Shrek and Monsters raised some nagging questions. Computer-animated films (so-called cgis) have been hot hot hot ever since Toy Story in 1995; but the rise of this format has coincided with — and may have accelerated — the decline of traditional animation. Now it’s dormant, as proved by the failures of Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire and DreamWorks’ The Road to El Dorado. That’s a shame, because cgis are still limited graphically (they can’t persuasively show humans) and thus dramatically. The returns on Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (an impish comedy) and DreamWorks’ Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron (sort of: if Pocahontas were a horse ...) will be closely watched, to see if traditional animation has a future.
Next question: If big-studio moviemakers can pour all this artistic energy into fantasy films for kids, what’s keeping them from making good live-action films for grown-ups? To judge from the critics’ year-end laurels, the worthy films were on the fringe: Mulholland Drive, In the Bedroom, Gosford Park. Serious mainstream movies (A Beautiful Mind, I Am Sam, The Majestic) were damp inspirational fables that went for the weep over the deep. That’s okay for a few films, but there must be other subject matter to attract serious moviemakers.
So we look to the premium auteurs to lift us from the slough of despond. Perhaps The Gangs of New York, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis out-toughing each other in the 1850s, will justify the 20 years of preparation Martin Scorsese has put into it. Maybe DiCaprio, who looks to have ended his four-year vacation from the big time, will pair smartly with Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. Spielberg works with Tom Cruise in the summertime Minority Report, from the story by Philip K. Dick; and Hanks plays a hitman in The Road to Perdition, due in July from director Sam Mendes (American Beauty). Looking for intelligent "mindless" fun? Perhaps Sam Raimi will weave a web of ingenuity around Spider-Man.
The ornery truth is that Hollywood bosses aren’t the only people mesmerized by sequels. So are the compilers of early-year forecasts like this one. We go on brand names, and on big projects by young or middle-aged directors. But we need to remember there’s a world of surprises in store, from countries of every size and auteurs of all ages.
It’s good to know that Manoel de Oliveira, who turns 94 this year, will present a new film, Trésor de Famille. And that Leni Riefenstahl, the notorious, supremely gifted German documentarian who hasn’t been able to finish a film in nearly half a century, promises to release Underwater Impressions on Aug. 22. What’s so special about that date? It’s Riefenstahl’s 100th birthday.
Whatever these two films may turn out to be, or however little they dent the worldwide box office, they both are guaranteed to provide unique visions from irreplaceable talents. You can’t clone genius. .
The Oscars
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