Rudo y Cursi is, of course, in Spanish, and my knowledge of Spanish is pretty limited to reading it with a low level of fluency. I can't usually detect every word when people are speaking in Spanish, but I usually get the gist of the conversation. I know enough Spanish to realize that some of the subtitles for the movie were way off from what the characters were saying, but I think that's likely to be the case regardless of the movie. Both of the lead actors in Rudo y Cursi are great, and I liked watching their rivalry develop over time as each plays for a different team. It's a pretty interesting depiction of the vagaries of fame and the evolving bonds between family members.
Departures, being in Japanese, demanded much more of my attention. I spent a great deal of time reading because I know no words in Japanese. It's a much quieter movie than Rudo y Cursi. It deals with a cello player whose orchestra folds and he must take a job preparing bodies for funerals (or "departures"). It's a beautifully delicate film in many ways, nuanced and silent at times but with touches of humor as well. Watching the rituals associated with preparing a body to be placed in a casket was quite intriguing, and I think the movie has a lot to say about the respect that we give our dead and even to the living who must work with the dead.
Having said that, I'd like to point out that when I went to see Rudo y Cursi yesterday, there were three other people in the theater. Four people total, that's all. Even in Los Angeles, with its large Spanish-speaking and/or bilingual populations, you'd think there would be more people going to see this film. People are missing a funny rendition in Spanish of the old Cheap Trick song "I Want You to Want Me," if nothing else. The audience for Departures was larger, of course, no doubt a result of its having won an Academy Award. There must have been at least, oh, twelve people in that theater.
There's an article in last week's Entertainment Weekly about how "grown-up movies" are an endangered species in Hollywood. So many movies that are targeted to people above the age of 25, say, are failing to take in a lot of money these days, so the studios are going to keep unleashing gross-out comedies and sequels and torture porn and such because those are the kinds of movies the kids want to see. But who's going to see foreign language films these days? When you can only muster about a dozen folks to see the movie that is being advertised as the surprise Oscar winner, what does that say about the future of these movies? I worry that we're going to become so insular that the market for films from other countries will only be on DVD, and even those are not easy to come by sometimes. You'd have to have some incredibly strong word-of-mouth to get people to rent a foreign language film.
I know every now and then a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon breaks out and makes hundreds of millions of dollars, but those kinds of hits are becoming fewer and fewer in number. Will there be a market for foreign language movies that have never played in a U.S. theater? I realize that Los Angeles is a major market for foreign language films, but you can count on your hands the number of such movies playing right now in the city. And compare those numbers to, say, the number of screens on which Land of the Lost or Terminator Salvation played, and you'll begin to see what I fear the most. I suppose I could just wait for the inevitable Hollywood remakes, but I plan to keep seeking out movies like Rudo y Cursi and Departures even if it means that, at some point, I'm the only one in the theater.
No comments:
Post a Comment