http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/m...act.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&pagewanted=print
A few weeks ago, I was invited onto morning television to discuss the fact that an unusually high number of very expensive movies had failed to make as much money from American ticket sales as their distributors had hoped. That was not exactly how the matter was framed, of course.
Fast-hardening conventional wisdom has declared 2013 the year of the flop, as one box office catastrophe has followed another, and would-be juggernauts with big stars, huge budgets and endless merchandising potential have proven to be flightless turkeys.
After Earth, White House Down, R.I.P.D., Pacific Rim, The Wolverine, Turbo, Elysium and of course The Lone Ranger these are among the releases that were, if not outright disasters, then at least far from the hits they were expected to be. The critics hissed or shrugged, and the public did not turn out in sufficient numbers to put a dent in the nine-figure production and marketing budgets such projects now routinely command.
Disappointing and underperforming are among the gentler euphemisms that the news media has applied to these summer slackers. Some analysts have cautioned that international receipts may tell a different story, and that a number of movies Man of Steel, The Heat, Despicable Me 2 have done very well. But nuances are no more welcome in discussions of blockbuster entertainment than in the movies themselves. My morning-show host summed it up concisely: Its the summer of Ishtar!
In more ways than one, as it happens. This month, Ishtar, Elaine Mays 1987 road comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as a hapless pair of songwriters, was released on Blu-ray, a few weeks after President Obama awarded Ms. May a National Medal of Arts. She is a beloved if still terribly underrated cultural figure, recalled fondly for her comedy routines with Mike Nichols and insufficiently recognized for her brilliance as a screenwriter and director.
But Ishtar has entered the lexicon along with Heavens Gate, Waterworld and Howard the Duck as shorthand for large-scale cinematic unsuccess. Which is fine, except that Ishtar is a really good movie that suffered, in its infancy, from very bad press.
This is not such a contrarian claim, by the way. Over the years, a slow but steady tide of revisionism has taken hold, and Ishtar has been rehabilitated by critics and cinephiles, who have been able to see, through the lingering cloud of bad press, a sly absurdist farce with keen psychological insights and prescient geopolitical implications. The plot is a wonderful shaggy-dog contraption that follows the swaggering Chuck Clarke (Mr. Hoffman) and the shy Lyle Rogers (Mr. Beatty) on a tour of North Africa, where they tangle with C.I.A. operatives, left-wing militants and their own unerring ineptitude.
It is worth noting that the one of the central themes of Ishtar its very premise, in fact is artistic failure. This is announced in the astonishing opening sequence, which shows Chuck and Lyle hard at work composing the inspirational ditty (written, along with the rest of their oeuvre, by Paul Williams) that serves as the movies de facto theme song.
Telling the truth can be dangerous business, they croon. Honest and popular dont go hand in hand. There is an element of pre-emptive excuse making in this lyric that can be applied both to the song and the movie, a defiant equating of unpopularity with integrity. But the next lines, in classic May fashion, toss a banana peel in the path of sublimity and send the song tumbling into ridiculousness: If you admit you can play the accordion/No one will hire you in a rock n roll band. To Chuck, who is more articulate in his ambition (and everything else) than Lyle, they are every bit as good as Simon and Garfunkel or Bruce Springsteen. The world, for some reason, has declined to notice this. But it will.
At the time, though, the world may have mistaken Lyle and Chucks creative lapses for Ms. Mays. Roger Ebert called Ishtar a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. The reviews were not uniformly negative, though. Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin found the movie a likable, good-humored hybrid of small, funny moments and the pointless, oversized spectacle that these days is sine qua non for any hot-weather hit.
She also noted that it was impossible to discuss the movie without noting the extravagant rumor mongering that has surrounded its making. Reports of budgetary excess and on-set difficulties found their way into most of the reviews, and may have influenced the opinions of critics and the instincts of ticket buyers.
Ishtar isnt Heavens Gate, Ms. Maslin cautioned, but the parallel has persisted. Both movies have taken their place in the annals of troubled productions whose flopping was a foregone conclusion. Both have also enjoyed a measure of rehabilitation in the DVD era, though Heavens Gate has never quite been hailed as the great work its director, Michael Cimino, so fervently hoped it would be.
The fates of these and other films maudits a useful French term for movies that are accursed, slandered and otherwise disreputable can be taken as cautionary tales with conflicting morals. They illustrate either the consequences of creative hubris or the cruelty of a media herd eager to punish originality and aspiration.
Not every notorious filmmaking folly turns out to be a misunderstood masterpiece, but the possibility of such an outcome haunts the discourse of box office tea-leaf reading and cinematic schadenfreude. Vertigo was widely panned and barely seen in 1958, and 55 years later it is officially according to the decennial Sight & Sound poll the greatest film of all time.
The hope of such a reversal of fortune may not soothe studio executives contemplating pools of red ink and fearing professional execution, but it is tantalizing all the same. The judgments of critics can be corrected by time, and the blindness of the public can give way to enlightenment.
So if this is the summer of Ishtar, which movie is Ishtar? The leading candidate would seem to be The Lone Ranger, some of whose makers and stars tried this month to jump-start the process of reassessment.
The strategy, aired in several post-mortem interviews and usefully summarized in a Variety article, was to blame critics, who were accused of prejudging The Lone Ranger based on news reports about its costs and an early shutdown of production. According to Johnny Depp, the reviews were written when they heard Gore and Jerry and me were going to do The Lone Ranger. Jerry Bruckheimer said the critics were reviewing the budget, while Mr. Depps co-star, Armie Hammer, cited World War Z, another movie that arrived in theaters on a cloud of bad industry gossip and unflattering news reports. In his telling, when the critics failed to eviscerate that picture, they decided to slit the jugular of our movie.
Criticism can be a bloodthirsty enterprise, but the example of World War Z contradicts rather than confirms the notion that reviewers are incited to sharkish feeding frenzies when they smell blood in the water. That movie received mostly positive notices, and has made nearly $200 million domestically and more than $500 million worldwide.
And critics were mostly kinder to Pacific Rim and Elysium than audiences were. So the notion that the public, which is generally happy to ignore critical opinion when it comes to big commercial releases, was suddenly compelled to obedience in the case of The Lone Ranger seems a bit dubious.
The fate of that movie rather seems to be a rare case of convergence, the mirror image of the nearly universal embrace in past summers of favorites like Up and The Dark Knight. But my point here is not to trace the discrepancies and alignments between my own professional cabal and the ticket-buying public, a perpetually fascinating subject. I want instead to entertain the possibility that time might prove all of us wrong.
Ishtar is now entirely free of summer-blockbuster expectations, and what might have looked 25 years ago like oversized spectacle has an appealing modesty. The fast-moving, surreal, behind-the-beat verbal wit that is Ms. Mays specialty may be easier to appreciate at a time when her influence, acknowledged and implicit, permeates so much television and Web-based comedy. And the director herself, caricatured as fussy and obsessive and also, somehow, as undisciplined and indecisive in the mid-80s press, looks in hindsight like a heroic underdog, a visionary whose only crime was a stubborn belief in the integrity of her vision.
The ambition that was punished has now been pardoned. This is the retroactive moral of quite a few stories from the 1970s and 80s. In most cases Heavens Gate, Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club, New York, New York the first draft of history was a tale of unchecked directorial self-indulgence. The studio system that had constrained the egos and budgets of filmmakers was gone, and a New Hollywood more receptive to auteurism had arisen in its place.
In retrospect, the high-profile failures of the pre-Ishtar decade exposed the weakness of director-driven cinema as a business model and also provided a pretext for its dismantling. There is a degree of nostalgia, as well as a sense of delayed justice, in the retroactive embrace of the old films maudits, whose artistic virtues were obscured by their commercial failings.
But the turkeys of 2013 have taken wing under a different business model, one that favors carefully engineered sameness over wild originality. What is striking is how many of the failures are action movies less-than-great comedies like The Heat and Grown-Ups 2 have done very well, as have animated sequels and how interchangeable their elements seem.
You want a fight on a train, a guy in a big metal suit, a pair of mismatched buddies, a major city blown to smithereens? You could have had that almost every weekend this summer, but you would also have had to endure all of that, again and again, to find flashes of freshness or surprise. It can hardly be said that summer movies suffer from a surfeit of individuality, or that critics and audiences rejected them this year for being too original.
Maybe in the future it will seem that way. The Lone Ranger may yet ride again, and sooner than you think. Whispers of revisionism have started to come from France, where some critics are much more favorably disposed toward it than their American counterparts.
(Chinese audiences have embraced Pacific Rim, which has made more money after three weeks in theaters there than in six weeks here.) The French have a long history of appreciating our popular art sooner and more fully than we do, something that has been the case with movies in general and westerns in particular.
The Lone Ranger has so far upheld this rule, finding its most passionate defense in the pages of Les Inrockuptibles, a savvy and irreverent publication that might be described as a hybrid of Entertainment Weekly, Gawker and The New York Review of Books. The Inrocks critic, Jacky Goldberg, found not only constant surprise and incalculable joy, but also an unexpected political resonance, an astonishingly progressive discourse, especially on the part of the right-wing producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
Noting the films depiction of an America founded on slaughter and exploitation in the name of rapacious capitalism and nutty religion, Mr. Goldberg wondered if Mr. Bruckheimer had been reading the works of Howard Zinn and Karl Marx.
That is an intriguing possibility, one that may distract right-wing culture warriors from their preoccupation with the alleged socialism of Elysium. And perhaps somebody will claim that the failure of The Lone Ranger is an example of the American people rejecting Hollywood leftism.
But there is another way to think about Mr. Goldbergs interpretation, which sees the Lone Ranger and Tonto as figures of resistance fighting back against the forces of corporate domination. The audience may already be on their side, and may have avoided the movie for just that reason. Perhaps this will change. History is full of surprises, and predicting the future can be dangerous business.
