[UPDATE (Monday, 22 March 2010): Feel my sorrow. Hear the podcast]
In the latest episode of our weekly podcast, which will hopefully viagra usa be online for mass consumption by the time this article is posted, we reviewed The Man Who Fell To Earth. This film stars English rock icon, David Bowie, and is about an alien from outer space who tries and fails to steal the Earth’s water and then records a music album about it… I think. It was a strange movie.
Also, it was my pick (for those of you who frequently listen, you know that each of us on the show get a chance in turns to pick the feature review).
It’s not the first odd movie I’ve selected for us to watch and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But the response it received from my co-hosts made me wonder, why are we so averse to sitting through anything that we deem as too strange?
I’ve received mixed, and even openly hostile (vis-à-vis The Butcher Boy*), comments from them for some of the movies that I’ve selected in the past. This last Wednesday night was different. Bottles were thrown (well, maybe they were just raised at menacing angles), fists were shaken and threats were made. I am currently in hiding. Please understand, I cannot say more for fear that they find me. But my question still stands.
Week after week, the box office is dominated by the ordinary and the mundane. True, every once in a while something unexpected will take the lead in the race for the gross margins, but in the end the average prevails. Of the top 10 grossing films four are children’s movies (or at least based on material originally made for children), six are action films, five are sequels of popular originals and almost all of them have theme park tie-ins.
- Avatar
- Titanic
- The Dark Knight
- Star Wars
- Shrek 2
- E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
- Spider-Man
- Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
We can look back at the last five years of weekly box office winners (that’s about 260 weeks worth of movies) and eliminate the usual suspects:
- Sequels / remakes
- children’s movies
- action
- romance
- based on popular books / tv series
- big stars in lead roles
After the elimination, we are down to 18 films. Of those 18, six are horror movies and Damion will be pleased that one was directed by Roland Emmerich. So, in the last five years, only seven per cent of the time did the ordinary lose to the extraordinary (though I’m not sure how many of the 18 can be called extraordinary).
But what are your thoughts? Do you think movies that are a bit out of the ordinary aren’t given enough attention? Or should they be watched only by bohemians and film snobs?
* Listen to the Butcher Boy episode here. Another quick note, for those of you wondering what’s the deal with the title image for this article, it’s the picture (a piece of it at least) that Damion sent me in an email titled GO FUCK YOURSELF!!! before we did that same episode.