Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XIX

As the title suggests, so forth.

I will show you how to adjust for inflation

(In the spirit of Wolfgang Schauble) Will this nonsense never end? IMDb once again showcases an American website shilling for a major corporation flagrantly lying. Adjust for inflation! It’s not that hard. Go to boxofficemojo.com. Type in Inglourious Basterds in the search box, and when it pops up, click on it, and then copy its opening weekend figure. Now go to westegg.com/inflation/ and paste that figure, then set 2009 as the initial year and leave 2018 unchanged as the final year. The inflation numbers for 2019 aren’t available yet, you see. The opening weekend was $38,054,676 in 2009, which comes out as $45,546,434.47 in 2018 terms. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just made $41,082,018 on its opening weekend, which as you can see is less than $45,546,434.47. But of course if you don’t adjust for inflation then you have a ‘story’ to run. It’s a good story, it’s just a pity it’s not true.

Contours of the Decade: Au Francais

The low-level meltdown continues vis a vis constructing a Films of the Decade list. Frankly there is a strong possibility that there will be no Talking Movies Top 10 Films of the 2010s. The vistas start to open up wide and appalling in all directions when you start to think about it. Films in French sets you time-travelling back to 2010 and considering what came since then: Gainsbourg, Of Gods and Men, Little White Lies, Incendies, The Monk, Monsieur Lazhar, Goodbye First Love, Cafe de Flore, Therese Desqueyroux, Populaire, Something in the Air, Paris-Manhattan, Bastards, Tom at the Farm, Love is the Perfect Crime, The Blue Room, Stranger by the Lake, Paper Souls, Goodbye to Language 3-D, Mommy, Clouds of Sils Maria, Eden, The Childhood of a Leader, Things to Come, It’s Only the End of the World, Les Combattants, The Past, Personal Shopper, 120 BPM, Maya, Jeune Femme. Where to begin? Where to end?

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XVI

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

 

Oh Disney, oh dear

Ahab has not any comfort while Naboth hath still his vineyard. Back in early 2016 I noted that we were being lied to, repeatedly and with purpose, by massive entertainment corporations using a media all too happy to shill for the sake of Hollywood glamour driving traffic numbers, and that I had been critiqueing this for almost as long as I’d been writing the blog. I was commenting then on Andrew O’Hehir’s attack on the nonsense surrounding The Force Awakens, and now Disney are at it again; re-releasing Avengers: Endgame, while it’s still playing, in a desperate attempt to beat Avatar’s ‘all-time’ record. O’Hehir said of The Force Awakens, “it’s not quite as ginormous and culture-dominating and universally beloved as Disney wants us to think it is … the idea of its bigness, is a central element of the Mouse House strategy to spin … a marketing, merchandising and entertainment empire.” Thank God for Morgan Friedman and the West Egg inflation calculator. The British National Lottery has a campaign at the moment promising to set you up for life with 10k every month for 30 years. Well, my first thought was that inflation will corrode that very badly. So to West Egg I went. Plugging in a 30 year period of relatively low inflation (1988-2018) I found that what cost $10k in 1988 would cost $21,427.27 in 2018. That is to say inflation at a low level would make 10k a year worth less than 5k in real terms by the end of 30 years. In just 8 years inflation made Avatar’s 2010 takings of $2,787,965,087 worth $3,284,278,512.18 in real terms. And yet Disney is insistent that Avengers: Endgame, with a year’s grace of inflation statistics that can’t be computed right now, and standing right now on Boxofficemojo.com at $2,774,567,541, is within spitting distance of catching Avatar. No, it’s not. It’s not within $13 million dollars, it’s over $500 million dollars away. And Avatar isn’t the most popular film of all time, because nobody wants to adjust for inflation for it either; because Hollywood can’t handle the fact that people are historically uninterested in cinema-going.  I think it is the mania of monopoly that drives Disney to such desperation and such mendacity. It’s not enough to dominate cinema takings in North America to the extent that the 5 biggest films of 2019 are Disney or part-Disney. It’s not enough to digest 20^th Century Fox, now Fox cannot be allowed to have had any record; there was no success in cinema before there was Disney. Every time you hear Disney trumpeting how uber-successful everything is, remember you’re hearing a desperate plea for relevance rooted in monomaniac nervousness and think of Sally Field.