Screen Machines

A curious thing happened in May. I was staying in a Travelodge (other low-cost hotels are available), bored and flicking through TV channels, when I stumbled upon the National Movie Awards on ITV. The nominees were being announced for the ‘Most Anticipated Film of the Summer’ award; the winner was Twilight: Eclipse, and actor Peter Facinelli accepted the honour on its behalf. That may all seem pretty unremarkable (particularly if you were a teenage girl, hoping to catch a glimpse of RPattz or Taylor Lautner); not very curious at all, you might say. However, to put it another way, I had just watched a man walk on stage to accept an award for a film that no one had actually seen yet; an award credited purely on the hype surrounding a film, rather than any particular merit of the work itself. That is remarkable. Peter Facinelli didn’t deserve to collect that award any less than Robert Pattinson, Kristen Bell or even director David Slade did. It didn’t belong to any of them.

Fan anticipation is an abstract – it cannot be adorned with statuettes. It is fuelled by distributers, advertisers and, on occasion, the machinations of transparent awards ceremonies, conveniently held on the cusp of June. The National Movie Awards were merely celebrating a machine; a machine in which they themselves were a cog. Outside, it may have been raining, but watching TV inside my budget hotel room, it was clear that summer had arrived.

Cut to Friday the 9th July, and Fountainpark Cineworld in Edinburgh is offering patrons 22 screenings of Twilight: Eclipse per day at the weekend and 19 on weekdays. The film topped advance ticket sales lists for 2010 and since it’s unlikely that many shows went unattended, you could argue that this wealth of screenings is a simple case of supply meeting demand. There’s a similar, familiar argument. It goes that once there was a village with no sweet shop. Then someone built a sweet shop on the corner. Now the children of the village buy sweets there every day, so, it follows that they must have wanted sweets all along.

Seventeen years ago this summer, thousands of us queued around the block outside small cinemas, in pre-multiplex towns, to see Jurassic Park. A big film at a modest venue requires endurance, but we got there in the end; we just had to brave the harsh elements of the British summer a little longer than we would now. Offering audiences the option of 22 time-slots a day may result in smaller queues, less condensed screenings, and greater accessibility. But those who truly want to see the film will do so regardless of how often or how seldom it is made available to them. The luxury afforded by the multiplex is the sweetshop we might have done without; we choose to attend the 11.21am screening because we can, thereby justifying its existence. But that convenience comes at a cost. The mass distribution and exhibition of the Hollywood blockbuster dictates the manner in which smaller budget independent films are dealt with: they are, if you will forgive the pun, eclipsed by it. Greater quantity leads to lesser choice, and at no time is this more apparent than during the summer.

Gemma Arterton is a young British actor whose star status is steadily rising in Hollywood. While you may not be familiar with the name, chances are you’ll recognise the face: as well as playing Bond girl, Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace, she starred in St Trinians and its sequel, which although released last year, can still be seen advertised on the buses making their way up and down Princes Street. This summer, she starred in two of Hollywood’s biggest budget outputs: Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The number of lacklustre reviews heaped on these films seems to have been matched only by the masses of screen time afforded them in UK cinemas.

During Clash of the Titans’s run at the box-office however, Arterton had another film on general release: The Disappearance of Alice Creed. An intelligent low-budget British thriller, the film screened at the London and Toronto film festivals and has been well received by critics both here and across the pond. Yet while the former enjoyed multiple screenings up and down the country, the latter was virtually unreachable unless you lived in the city. I have three regional multiplexes within 15 miles of my home, all different chains, and the film wasn’t to be found at any of them. This may have been justifiable were it an obscure art-house piece, but the sad fact is that the film, which also features established and emerging British talent in the form of Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston, received a reasonable level of exposure in the press; reasonable enough to warrant sufficient availability, and to cause frustration when that availability was denied.

Problems like this are not exclusive to the summer months. All year long, there are those campaigning within the British film industry for a system similar to the one put in place by the French, who dedicate one screen of each multiplex to home-grown output. But summer is the point at which cinemas reach saturation point and 2010 in particular, looks to be a particularly ‘popcorn’ heavy season. Cinema has sustained heavy losses during the last four weeks with the market apparently down by 25% on an already poor year, and in the next two months it will strive to recuperate its losses.

With the World Cup now over and all traces of British sunshine looking to have dissipated with it, the arrested development of the summer blockbuster season looks ready to break free. Spain barely had time to sober up on Monday morning before UK television was flooded with advertisements telling us to ‘get behind a different team’. Distributors of the A-Team seem to have timed their release meticulously, so as not to lose out on their target male audience, and this is equally true of the film’s main competitor: Sylvester Stallone’s similarly-themed The Expendables. And while the younger core audience of Shrek Forever After and the onslaught of animated films that it heralds – including a higher concentration of ‘talking animal’ movies than any one season deserves or should be able to withstand (see Marmaduke, Furry Vengeance, Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) – may not have been affected by a little football tournament in South Africa, the unfortunate souls who shall have to accompany them will find that they no longer have any excuse. In that respect, attendance figures should definitely begin to improve, perhaps to the level that they should have been throughout June. But what about the standard of material on offer?

Of course, suggesting that a blockbuster is necessarily poor quality would be over-simplifying the matter. Pixar rarely disappoints, and if the EIFF previews are anything to go by, Toy Story 3 will be another welcome addition to the franchise. Meanwhile, there is considerable expectation resting on Christopher Nolan’s shoulders to recapture the ‘intelligent blockbuster’ success of 2008’s The Dark Knight. Little has been revealed of his high-concept thriller Inception, but the cast is first-rate and the trailers suggest a film which both pushes the boundaries of visual effects and relates an innovative story. When it’s done well there are few cinema outings as exhilarating as the blockbuster experience. But the format is in decline. It’s not just the queuing for miles outside that has passed, but the thrill that accompanied it. There seems very little to get excited about this summer, unless of course you are selling popcorn, in which case, make hay while the sun is shining. Or at least for the duration of the Eclipse.

John Gibb