With the now thoroughly corporatized studios churning out heavily test-marketed, lookalike movies every weekend, American cinema for the most part is as insipid as fast food and as depressing as mass tourism. Homogenization has proceeded apace ever since Jaws and Star Wars and the monochrome platitudes of Ronald Reagan.
Test-screening audiences are treated like corporate shareholders who must be appeased first, last and always, meaning movies are altered to suit the whims of housewives, students and truants. The rating system dictates that most movies must fit within the confines of the PG or PG-13 rating (lose a third of your take if you snag an R-rating).
All these things, along with the perennial problems of creative bankruptcy, executive timorousness, and plain old rotten filmmaking, have led us to this summer, which offered US audiences a dumbass action movie and a laugh-lite comedy each weekend, and precious little else to leaven a starchy diet. All energy is expended on that first weekend, after which the audience either finds out how bad the movie is and stays away in droves, or misses a great movie that can't be adapted to a throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to marketing.
Globalization and the primacy of American exports mean that, whether or not these movies succeed domestically, they are then force-fed to the world market, clogging two or more screens per Ukrainian, British or Greek multiplex, cancelling out space and appetite for domestic products.
And the films that we make, if we wish them to succeed in the American market or to net a US TV sale, must adhere as closely to all these narrow parameters as possible, thus feeding the decay, internationalizing it, making it the standard. You send us your crap; we'll slavishly imitate it and sling our homemade or subtitled crap back at you.
So it's their fault, but it's also ours. If British cinema is reduced to a library of old movies -- from which the invaders wish to steal only the premise, the best jokes or just the title - -- then we are as much to blame as they are. We have permitted our movie industry to become a supplicant to a gargantuan and scarcely human corporate movie culture that sees us as carrion to be picked over.
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