Editor's Notes
A few years ago, I heard in an NPR interview that the majority of movies out of Hollywood were made for teenage boys. Teenagers make up the majority of viewers in theatres and, in social situations, it is believed that boys make the decision on what to see.
If you’re one of those people who still go out to catch a flick regularly, take a look around you next time at how young the audience is. There are many reasons why older folks don’t go out to the movies, now more than ever.
I remember hearing the story of my grandparents stepping out to see a movie once. It was 1970 and they hadn’t walked down Congress Street from Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine to catch a flick in years. However, a new popular film caught their attention. My grandfather, an immigrant from Sicily, was a proud American veteran. He served in U.S. Navy and U.S. Army and saw action all over the world. As a kid, I remember him telling stories about his time in Siberia during the invasion (yes, the U.S. kind of invaded Russia - look it up) when fellow soldiers lost fingers and ears to the cold.
So, when he heard about this popular, important film that accurately detailed what war was about, he took my grandmother to see it. The film was M*A*S*H. They were horrified. They complained about it for years and passed on their kvetching to their children and their children’s children.
What does this episode tell us? That New Englanders are dull, bitter people who can’t stop complaining forty years after sitting through a crappy flick? Yes. But also that movies are made for kids, kids who hold low levels of expectations.
Older people become parents and parents don’t go to the movies. They don’t have the time. They don’t have the money. They can order them from their television for a fraction of the cost and are too tired to give a crap about being the first one on the block to see “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”.
The bar for movies is set remarkably low. If you go to the movies a lot, ask yourself how often you leave with a positive review being, “Yeah, that wasn’t TOO bad.”
Most syndicated reviewers realize that most films are piles of crap, and compare them by using that as a baseline. “It’s better than staring at your cat’s litter box, more moving than watching the dog crap you almost stepped in at the post office. If there’s one pile of shit you spend two hours looking at consecutively this holiday season, that pile of shit should be “Monsters v. Aliens v. Hannah Montana v. The Soloist 3 – The Beginning.”
Which is why I was so excited when I finally got to catch, “The Wrestler” the other night.
Mickey Rourke is astounding in his depiction of a down-and-out fighter and the story line brought me back to my youth when I’d go to my friends’ house where they watched Bob Backlund and Rowdy Roddy Piper rant and bash one another with chairs; all the while my friends would cheer and their grandmother would yell, “Kill him! Kill him!”
Going in, I knew so little about the movie, that I didn’t know that two comedians make appearances who graced this particular magazine, Todd Barry & Judah Friedlander. For me, it was an added pleasant surprise to a great experience, much like when I was channel-surfing last week and saw Dana Gould on Bill Maher’s show on HBO.
Hollywood has a long tradition of adding comics into otherwise serious flicks. Wartime flicks like “The Longest Day” with Red Buttons or “Run Silent, Run Deep” with Don Rickles, used them more for comic relief and delivery of the smart ass zinger.
But it’s even greater when talented comics are given a chance to let their character work enhance the story, whether it’s for laughs or not. When I spoke with Tom Papa last year, he was about to start work on a Stephen Soderbergh film where he would work with Tommy Smothers and several other comics in a serious Matt Damon production. I don’t know if I’ll rush out to see it in a theatre. It’s been so long since I’ve been to one, I don’t even know which nearby are still open.
I find it interesting that my parents recently started going to the movies again. Their local theatre shows classics on weekday afternoons for seniors and charges just a couple of bucks. It gives my folks a reason to go out, meet some people their age, and enjoy a film they remember from when they were young. The theatre also throws in small buckets of popcorn as part of the deal. Popcorn always tastes best at the movies.
Ken Carlson is the editor of the Comedians Magazine.
editor@thecomedians.org