Word: hollywoodized
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...Hollywood, there are movies (the ones made to make money), and then there are Oscar movies (the ones made to win awards). Only in rare cases, like Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, do the two genres intersect. For 2006, for example, the five live-action movies that grossed more than $200 million at the domestic box office - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Da Vinci Code, Night at the Museum and Superman Returns - received not a single major nomination among them. (Cars, the top-grossing...
...polylingual perversity, has totaled only about $24 million in North America but nearly $40 million abroad. Little Miss Sunshine, made for just $8 million, has grossed nearly $60 million at home and $30 million abroad; that's the kind of arithmetic that gets cheers from the Academy (and from Hollywood). The Queen couldn't have cost much more than Sunshine, and it has earned $72 million worldwide - another smart investment in a quality film...
...horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar--amnesia in Nolan's Memento, obsession in Aronofsky's Pi--but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood--and different meant better...
What's saddest is that the ersatz indie drove out the previously dominant alternative to Hollywood: the foreign film. Fellini and Truffaut are dead, but there are still exciting, challenging movies being made in Europe, Latin America and especially Asia. Some of these films get theatrical release, but to see many top films from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and India you need to rent them. A good video store or a specialty DVD catalog is the new art house. Trying to get your intellectual fill with Sundance films is like choosing homemade popcorn over the concession-stand variety: higher...
Sure, there are good Sundance movies, with fine actors providing glimpses of behavioral truth. But in general the films are way too cozy. Instead of the high-budget sequels Hollywood deals out, the indie scene offers virtual remakes of earlier, more vibrant films, the rehashing of familiar feelings. Sundance used to be a daring, occasionally dazzling alternative to Hollywood; now, it's just a different sort of same...