Movie Magic: When Bigger Is Better

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This year the box-office king was a knight. The Batman drama, spurred by the performance, and untimely death, of Heath Ledger, raked in just about a billion dollars worldwide, including $530.8 million in North America. It now trails only Titanic on the all-time domestic list. (Admittedly, that's in today's puny dollars. Adjusted for inflation, The Dark Knight wouldn't crack the all-time Top 25.) So you can expect ever more action films as well as a bunch of snazzy CGI cartoons. Also Judd Apatow--sponsored raunchy comedies, which have proved an excellent return on investment. And dog movies. With Bolt hitting $100 million, Beverly Hills Chihuahua not far behind and Marley & Me breaking the box-office record for Christmas Day, Hollywood is sure to start up remakes of Old Yeller, Turner & Hooch, Beethoven and possibly Cujo.

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What didn't seize the mass-movie audience was American independent films. For a couple of years, a few indie movies--spurred by critics' raves, Oscar nominations and old-fashioned word of mouth--earned robust box-office results: Little Miss Sunshine, No Country for Old Men and, most remarkably, Juno, the teen-pregnancy comedy that, on a $7.5 million budget, outgrossed such pricey, massively promoted (and popular) superproductions as Prince Caspian and The Incredible Hulk. But recently, relatively, nothing.

Aside from low-budget horror movies (Saw V, The Strangers) and stoner comedies (Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay), the top-grossing American independent picture of 2008 was the redemption drama Fireproof, made for a minuscule $500,000 and amassing the elusive Christian Fundamentalist movie bloc to earn $33 million. The next most popular indie film was Fireproof's opposite: the Bill Maher anti-God docucomedy Religulous, at $13 million.

These two films succeeded by playing to their bases. But audiences connected hardly at all with the traditional indie movie of the Sundance type: the drama or comedy whose microscopic, sensitively acted take on modern life manages to strike chords with the larger group of, so to speak, unaffiliated voters. A critics' fave like The Visitor couldn't graze the $10 million box-office ceiling. Rachel Getting Married, bedecked with year-end awards for actress (Anne Hathaway), supporting actress (Rosemarie DeWitt) and screenplay (Jenny Lumet), just sneaked over the $10 million mark.

If 2008 proved anything, it's that the action film--with hits like Iron Man, Wanted and The Dark Knight and the underperforming but exhilarating Speed Racer--is where most of the talent has gone: into the technique and technology of pure moviemaking, of getting the viewer's blood racing by making worlds collide. Even so-so action pictures--Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk, Death Race--interrupt their attitudinizing with set pieces that are figuratively or literally dynamite. They're like an old Astaire-Rogers movie that comes to soaring life when the couple starts dancing.

In Iron Man, which was way smarter than it had any need to be, director Jon Favreau showed a subtle sense of where to lead the camera and the audience. He guided his talented cast, while the stuntmen and CGI wizards got the movie to pop for the kids. That's teamwork, group art, of a high order. Fusing all these elements fulfills the original definition of the medium: to make cinema kinetic--to make movies move.

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