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Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See

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For an insightful, entertaining and stirring indictment of the current movie scene, look no further than Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars. This is a must have for anyone who purports to like independent cinema, and he reconstructs the phrase "independent cinema" to what it truly meant before the Weinstein's mutated the concept and suddenly turned independent vision into commerce. For those who think that Tarantino means independent, think again.

Rosenbaum is in one of the few film writers in America who has the lucrative position of writing for a major publication, yet still can get away with writing about any kinds of films he wants.. including experimental or independent films which disappear from the screen faster than GIGLI. When you think about it, not even Roger Ebert has that much power- when was the last time you saw him write about an Ernie Gehr film... and he's in the same city that Rosenbaum is! Rosenbaum is of course aware of this privilege and he makes ironic use of that fact by bringing to light the dichotomy of the so-called free press being constrained to cover merely mainstream films.

To be certain, Hollywood surely gets a wagging finger pointed at for not only monopolizing the multiplex screens, but for dumping films like hot potatoes that don't perform well in opening weekends, thereby frustrating the chance for them to be seen by people who would genuinely like to see them. (Remember back in the old days- movies like ERASERHEAD would take years to find an audience? This film wouldn't have a prayer today!) A favourite motif of his is to compare the glut of THE PHANTOM MENACE versus Joe Dante's SMALL SOLDIERS, a much wiser film that disappeared in the ocean of summer blockbusters.

Rosenbaum keenly paints a canvas of this information saturated culture that we live in- where Hollywood and the mass media are not only culprits in how smaller independent films get squeezed out of the marketplace, but they are also victims that cannot stop the monster they've created.

Also, Rosenbaum includes a chapter which reprints his Chicago Reader article that is a rebuttal to the AFI's infamously shallow Top 100 Films of All time list, with his own crawl of 100 titles, ranging from experimental shorts to Hollywood genre pictures that had fallen off the radar. Like the rest of the book, this piece is snarky, darkly humourous and wise.

Rosenbaum also writes about such specialty filmmakers as Hou-Hsiao Hsien or Abbas Kiarostami, whose works were actually picked up for (however marginal) distribution in 1990's. Reading this book a few years after its initial release, one gets another layer of irony in that new works by such world class filmmakers as these are even more harder to see. While Movie Wars documents why things were rotten in the late 1990's, the state of things is even worse now.

Rosenbaum's book is an incisive critique of the social and industrial forces that circumscribe the American movie landscape. In his view, the major (and major "independent") studios, film festivals, and the US critical establishment are all part of a terrible process that relegates exciting new films (esp foreign films) to virtual non-existence, while lavishing attention on big budget, heavily-promoted American films of (often) dubious artistry. There is nothing at all surprising about this insight; what makes "Movie Wars" compelling is less the sophistication of his analysis (although his chapter on Orson Welles as "ideological challenge" is eloquent and credible), than the depth of his anger (at lazy critics, at cowardly and/or sinister studio execs, at compliant festival promoters, etc.) and the strength of his commitment to movies as art. Rosenbaum's book is full of outrage--which might partly account for the other Amazon reviewer's wariness about his critical tone--but, truly, the book is anything but cynical. Its polemic is distinctly at the service of promoting a kind of open-mindedness about the cinema and its contemporary achievements and possibilities. It is easy, Rosenbaum suggests, to claim (as many critics do, year after year) that movies are terrible these days, if your only experience of the state of the art is what is playing at the multi-plex. Rosenbaum's excitement about Taiwanese, African, and Iranian directors, his celebration of overlooked or misunderstood American auteurs like Joe Dante and Orson Welles, and his provocative alternate list of the Top 100 films of All Time--a withering riposte to AFI's blandly conservative choices--give the book a kind of moral center (while also offering the reader copious numbers of lesser-known films to look out for). While Rosenbaum's jibes at Miramax seemed to me almost de rigeur (whether or not warranted), there were many other moments in the book when I felt almost exhultant that a critic operating more or less in the mainstream of American film journalism would take such risks with what is usually perceived as "consensus" public opinion--e.g., in the aforementioned assault on AFI. Although his writing never achieves the buoyancy of Pauline Kael's at her best, he has her verve and frequently her insight, and this volume can hold its own with her similar, epochal rants for the New Yorker ("Why are movies so bad? The Numbers," "Are Movies Falling to Pieces," etc.).

I'm going to be short because others have done him justice already. At last someone has put together a thorough, cogent, and richly illustrated argument explaining why Hollywood studios have been so bad for the movies in recent years.

One of Rosenbaum's main themes is that Hollywood isn't even "giving the people what they want." The hare-brained garbage the big studios regularly produce is the product of a completely self-contained, self-referential industry that is driven by marketing ("push" in business terminology) far more than it is driven by customer demand (i.e., "pull."). One of my favorite examples is Rosenbaum's discussion of the extraordinary success of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, a massive box office success that many, if not most, people thought was just extraordinarily bad. Rosenbaum goes into great detail about how marketing deals ensured the extraordinary financial success and long movie house runs of this almost complete loser.

In a wonderfully ironic support of Rosenbaum's thesis, try typing "movie wars" into [a bookeseller's] search engine. At least when I tried it (10/20/02), the first roughly 50 books the search engine returns are collateral materials for Star Wars, none of whose titles contain the phrase "movie wars." Hollywood marketing strikes again as thoughtful criticism is, as usual, pushed into obscurity.

Movies are made for people who don't watch a lot of movies. Jonathan Rosenbaum's book is his frustration over two things; the lack of foreign films in the United States and the anti-intellectualism of this culture. He is a critic for the Chicago Reader who writes the longest, most complicated reviews for movies that you'll ever see. This is both a positive and a negative style. Positive in a sense it shows he cares for films and works hard to find the overall truth in them. Negative in a sense that very few people would care for what he has to say. Movies, for the most part, are an escape for most people. A chance to forget about life for a little while. That is why awful action movies are constantly on top of the box office. Films are an artform, but for the most part, they are an industry, a business. Mr. Rosenbaum feels there is a lack of foreign films in the United States. This is very true, but it is a problem a very small minority care about. Exposing the American public to more foreign movies might be good, but who will ulitmately watch them and take them seriously? Another segment of the book deals with his attack on the AFI and their '100 Greatest Movies'. This "chapter" can also be found on his website. Once again, only a real movie critic could argue with such a list. How many people have enough time on their hands to evaluate a 2 dozen or even a dozen movies, let alone 100!! He makes his own seperate lists of '100 Greatest'. The big problem with this list is that most people have never even heard of most of these titles. And I'll guarantee most people will have a hard time finding them. Mr. Rosenbaum has made some strong points, and this is a very enjoyable book that won't take long to read. But ultimately, Mr. Rosenbaum is shaking his fists into the wind. The problem he is concerned with is a luxury problem. Most people don't have that luxury to begin with.

If you've ever wondered why terrible movies are being shown on thousands of screens while Abbas Kiarostami's latest gem is barely seen, or thought that the latest Mirimax pablum is getting inexplicably positive reviews, or simply wondered whether or not movies were getting worse and worse (they're not--it's just that the good ones are harder and harder to see), this book is for you.

Rosenbaum magnificently skewers studio conglomorates and overrated critics in equal measure--David Denby in particular is taken out to the woodshed--and passionately defends the oeuvres of everyone from Robert Bresson to Joe Dante.

Although Rosenbaum may seem to be tilting at windmills at times, the final chapter--about what can actually be done to correct the situation--is daringly optimistic, a nice change from most polemics. If you care about movies, read this book.

Movie Wars is a powerful and lucid corrective to the intellectual laziness that distinguishes 90% of film commentary in North America. As the chief film review of Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum is one of the few sources of lengthy, intelligible prose (as opposed to the tenure seeking obscurantism that distinguishes so much of contemporary film studies) about world cinema. What I like about Rosenbaum's writing is that he makes you want to seek out films that may eventually surface on video and DVD if you live outside the Festival-Cinematheque circuit because he communicates the beauty, intelligence, integrity and mystery of these films through his writing (keep a notepad handy when reading this book to jot down titles). Rosenbaum is never an art-house snob in his approach. His appreciation of Joe Dante's Small Soldiers in this book reveals that Rosenbaum is happy to pay credit to a genre-busting auteur when the work merits it. Movie Wars deftly analyses the collusion between studios and mainstream critics to limit viewer choices. It is a polemic informed by a profound knowledge of film history and a keen sense of what film (US, European, Third World, etc.) can be when audiences aren't underestimated. Above all, this is a book for film lovers who haven't let their cinephilia blind them to the fact that the best films always connect with the world beyond the screen.

I share Rosenbaum's sorrow over the choice of movies being presented to the public and the lack of publicity being given to such films as Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man which I just happenned to stumble upon while browsing through Blockbuster Video and thought I'd give it a try. Otherwise I would have never known about it. Like Rosenbaum, I bemoan this fact. But I question his contention that we frequently don't hear about great films because Hollywood and it's supposed lackies in the media hide them from us. He never does say exactly why. He just alludes that if Hollywood and the media were as generous in promoting such great films as Dead Man, they would be as much of a blockbuster smash as George Lucas' putrid creation called the Phantom Menace. Maybe so, maybe no. I doubt we'll ever know. But I highly recommend this book in spite of it's unanswered questions for the simple reason that it does confront a very real problem in American cinema, that being that we are being forcefed crap while we can only imagine what masterpieces we're being denied because Hollywood is, apparently, afraid to take a chance on them.

Is the cinema really dead, or are modern films better than before? Movie Wars examines how movies ar promoted, packaged and distributed, and how potential movie viewers are treated with contempt. Industry secrets - such as how movie distributors stifle movies and competition - are revealed in the course of an intensely critical examination of the methods and ethics of the movie industry.

For years now there have been two kinds of movie critics: those who like the movies that win the Academy Award for best picture and those who are actually worth reading. Rosenbaum as a critic clearly falls into the second category and his book is invaluable for the perspective it presents on modern cinema. Hollywood has become increasingly depressing over the past two decades. The autopsies of Pauline Kael in 1980 and Mark Crispin Miller in 1990 have been vindicated in spades. The Academy Awards, instead of honoring the usual middlebrow works such as Amadeus, goes for such lowbrow historical works as Braveheart and Titanic. To the isolated critic, the appearance of such films as Fargo and such companies as Miramax appears as an oasis. The value of Rosenbaum's book is that it shows that this is a mirage.

The problem, says Rosenbaum, is not that there are not good movies being made anymore. The problem is that most of them are foreign movies and both Hollywood and the media take an obtuse and philistine approach towards them. One could simply look to the Village Voice Critics List and one would see such films as Beau Travail, The House of Mirth, Yi Yi, The Wind Will Carry Us, L'Humanite, and Time Regained all in the top 10, but they would be virtually unknown to the rest of continent. Rosenbaum is particularly fond of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the Portuguese Manuel De Oliviera. But these and many other directors that Rosenbaum mentions do not get the attention they deserve. Miramax concentrates on "feel-good" foreign films, such as Life is Beautiful or Chocolat. Rosenbaum's description of Miramax's version of The Wings of the Dove, as middlebrow soft-core porn that traduces its source, emphasizes the problem. Miramax picks up the distributing rights to more challenging fare, not to show them, but to prevent other companies from seeing them. Rosenbaum is particularly cutting about how Mirimax executives monopolize media discussion at Cannes by putting down other movies and appealing to xenophobic and philistine instincts of American reporters. Critics are often obtuse about films. (Rosenbaum is particularly cutting about the cheap Francophobia of such well respected writers as David Denby and James Wolcott). This unpleasant isolationism is all the more dangerous because the American industry has such an enormous influence on the rest of the world's movies.

Rosenbaum emphasizes the self-serving illusions of Hollywood hacks who say they only make what the public wants. After all, they claim, people won't watch movies with subtitles or in black and white. As Rosenbaum points out, audiences had no trouble watching subtitles in Dances with Wolves, and watching black and white subtitles in Schindler's List. The basic problem is that the movie testing machine is designed in such a way as to give the audience limited choices and to verify the prejudices of studio heads. The book is not perfect. One may feel that if one needed to defend a Hollywood picture you could have a better choice than Small Soldiers. Likewise, one may wonder whether Paul Verhoaven is a brilliant satirist or just deeply cynical. And if you think that Casablanca, or Quientin Tarantino are better than Rosenbaum suggests, you will not find much counter-argument here. But if you have never heard of Robert Bresson, you must read this book.

For anyone who cares about film as an art form (even if that seems like a quaint concept these days), Jonathan Rosenbaum's MOVIE WARS is must reading. Rosenbaum incisively and wittily dissects the way that the large body of filmgoers have become little more than puppets of studio marketing departments, manipulated, pandered to, treated with contempt and condescension, and ultimately given fewer and fewer real choices about which movies to watch. This is a disturbing and darkly humorous book that says a great deal about our materialistic society. It should serve as a cautionary tale as we ponder the future of culture in this new millennium. Will films survive as an art form? Read Rosenbaum and think seriously about the question.