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December 30, 2005

Jack Mathews Has the Answers, Yet Has None

The Daily News's resident box-office visionary and Oscar soothsayer Jack Mathews spent a little time yesterday attempting to figure out where King Kong went bad, swerving from a defense of the ape's "fully expressive kisser" to having the x-billionth poke at the Slump of '05.

But Mathews is not just invoking a myth for its own sake here--he seems to be circumventing narcolepsy with a luminous coat of Tabloid Critic Crapola:

It's debatable just how much of a slump theaters have suffered in '05. The box-office gross is expected to be about 5% below last year's, and when you take into account two '04 blockbusters that weren't really movies - Mel Gibson's religious experience The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore's anti-Bush rally Fahrenheit 9/11 - the numbers aren't nearly as bleak.

Mathews has a certain logic here you have to love: A) acknowledge the rapidly evolving tastes and demographics of theatrical audiences, B) invalidate said audiences by dismissing their tastes as "not really movies." This is old-school genius at work--the type that would have you thinking March of the Penguins' $80 million U.S. take is a phenomenon unto itself, even as conventional films flounder around it in puddles of red ink. It is quite the contradiction; perhaps Mathews just means that they are not really movies because even after their smashing success, studio heads (and, um, at least one critic) are still too old-fashioned to take them seriously.

Anyway, I neither know nor care if a slump exists, but guys like Mathews and anyone else in the quasi-vanguard of figuring all this shit out might try again from square one: Has the film industry ever been anything but a crap shoot? And if not, what particular end justifies these analytical means? There is a new story waiting for us in 2006... isn't there? Please?

Posted by stvanairsdale at December 30, 2005 09:40 AM

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Posted by: Christopher Campbell at December 30, 2005 04:24 PM