Skip to main content

Oscar-bait no more: why serious-issue dramas are floundering

Worthy movies such as Dark Waters used to be the toast of Hollywood. But is the audience for them drying up?

Dark Waters must be the least Todd Haynes film Todd Haynes has ever made. Based on the true story of a corporate lawyer (played by Mark Ruffalo) who switches sides to expose pollution by the DuPont chemical company, it is powerful and creditable, but does not feel like the work of the man who gave us the lush, stylised likes of Carol and Far from Heaven. It feels more like an Oscar-bait issue movie in the mould of Erin Brockovich. Except with Dark Waters, the awards panels didn’t bite and neither, going by US box-office numbers, have the public. The formula has stopped working, but the films keep coming.

Which is why we need to talk about Participant Media. Participant was founded in 2004 by eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll with the noble intention of producing movies with “socially relevant themes”. By many measures, it has succeeded. Participant has received 74 Oscar nominations and 19 wins. Its documentaries have included An Inconvenient Truth, Citizenfour and this year’s Oscar winner, American Factory. It has also had a hand in hits from Good Night, and Good Luck to Lincoln to Roma, and often backed up its movies with campaigning on the issues they raise.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PhMQPk
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more