I’m willing to bet that automobiles are not blown sky high every 15 minutes in the serene splendor of Beverly Hills. I’d also guess that marauding gangs do not run about blasting away at each other with automatic weapons in Malibu.
Yet these movie moguls have somehow got it in their heads that Americans can’t get enough of such high-decibel cacophony.
They seem to think that the enticement of two hours of non-stop Kabloom!!! Kapow!!! — plus relentless exposure to the grinning visages of Tom Cruise or emaciated pizza waitress Julia Roberts — is all that draws us into movie theaters.
It hasn’t dawned on them that there might be a logical reason only one of the 140-some big studio movies last year got nominated for a major Oscar.
I recently went to see “The Devil’s Own,” involving one of the very few things I know anything about — the war in Northern Ireland.
But first I had to sit through four trailers for forthcoming films. It was like sitting through the opening of the first Battle of Somme.
One was for Jon Voight’s new summer-release movie “Anaconda,” in which the villain is a monstrous, people-devouring snake. But apparently the snake is also something of a demolitions expert because half the trailer was devoted to things blowing up.
The next trailer was for a new Bruce Willis film, “The Fifth Element,” set 250 years in the future. It’s a time so advanced that cars fly through the air, but — guess what? — they still get blown up.
Then came a trailer for “Air Force One,” which has a bunch of bad guys and President Harrison Ford shooting at one another and blowing things up aboard the presidential jet. The last was for “Men in Black,” with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith playing special cops whose job it is to shoot and blow up aliens!
“The Devil’s Own,” surprisingly, is for the most part a taut, suspenseful, very human motion picture, with a riveting performance by Brad Pitt and first-rate, authentic portrayals by Harrison Ford, Margaret Colin and newcomer Natascha McElhone.
The opening scene — a man getting shot to death in front of his family by a masked gunman — is straight off the front pages of the Belfast Telegraph and puts all else into perspective.
But that’s just a couple of rounds. It’s followed by a ridiculous Belfast street battle, the like of which I never heard of in my days in Northern Ireland. In another bout of carnage, Pitt is able to wipe out a warehouse full of gunrunners.
A Disney exec recently told me that they sent Rick Moranis’ new “Honey We Shrunk Ourselves” straight to video (“I’m thrilled it went straight to video,” said Moranis. “I hope the next one goes straight to radio.”). A medium-sized picture like that, said the Disney exec, “can’t compete with the big event movies that now dominate the theater screens.”
“We’re making more pictures and building more theaters,” MGM Chairman Frank Mancuso complained at a recent convention, “yet people aren’t going to the movies more.”
Indeed. For all the industry carping about competition, the number of movie theater screens in this country has actually increased to 29,731 from 22,365 in the last 10 years.
But here’s a clue. You don’t really have to blow things up for your audiences, or shoot at them with high-powered guns. With all those screens, you could find room for more films like “Il Postino” or the Oscar-nominated “Shine” or Stanley Tucci’s restaurant picture, “The Big Night.”
True, “Shine” has made only $31 million and “Big Night” only $11 million. But, you know what? If you don’t have all the pyrotechnics, computer-generated exploding buildings and monster star salaries, you don’t have to spend so much making them.
I must confess I do appreciate the explosions in Stallone’s movies, however. They drown out his words.
