The Noughties: Film. Part Two.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls

An apparent film construct, and originally so named by Nathan Rabin in this seminal AV Club article, I’ve known a fair view manic pixie dream girls real life and if I’m being really honest, been in love with most of them. Which is why it’s entirely gratifying that the noughties has seen the exponential increase in their appearance on film. You know the type, the mysterious, funny, beautiful girls next door who turn up in some geek’s stolid existence and give them the experience which turns their life around. In old Hollywood, typecasting led to some actors playing cops, lawyers, doctors and politicians their entire lives. Some actors (female and oddly male) spent the noughties playing manic pixie dream girls (or boys) over and over and over again.



The holy trinity are arguably Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst though as Rabin notes, Elisha Cuthbert could be added, and not just for My Sassy Girl – what about Love Actually and The Girl Next Door? But there have been some one hit wonders. Rie Rasmussen in Angel-A (assuming her height doesn’t disqualify her). Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights. Kat Dennings in Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. Amy Adams in Enchanted. Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation. Even Maggie Gyllenhal has a sinister twist on the type to her name with her unruly gold digger from Don Roos’s Happy Endings. Though we have to be careful with definitions. Do these stop being Manic Pixie Dream Girls if the films shows us too much about them?

Film Journalism

In the Noughties, everyone became a critic. I should know. At the risk of repeating a hundred op-ed columns on the subject with the advent of blogging and later twitter it’s possible to read thousands upon thousands of voices giving their opinions on new films. If the latest studio financial experiment is indeed rubbish, you’ll know about it weeks or months before you get to see it, even something like Avatar which is about as locked down as films can be. When Ang Lee’s underrated Hulk opened, it flopped overnight because of people texting their friends to tell them not to go. Since Twitter went mainstream, that is not a rare occurrence. Film writing as a discipline has eroded and paradoxically, despite the increased availability of material, an understanding of basic concepts is simply missing from this kind of discourse. Too often I’ll read reviews from people who’ve missed what the director was trying to do or will dismiss a work as boring or pretentious simply because it’s not treating the audience with contempt and with some intelligence (like Ang Lee’s Hulk).



Which I still find myself returning to those professional critics, and especially those critics or groups of critics with years of experience, with a track record. Mark Kermode (even though he’s wrong about Synecdoche, New York and a great many other things). Sight and Sound for independent, international and historical releases. Empire Magazine out of habit and for blockbusters. Time Out for the second opinion and because they’ll often review a film based on whether it’s a good example of its type. Beyond all of that and if I’m in a hurry or I just want a spoiler free percentage of star rating (it happens), it’s the aggregated but still informed opinions at Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics or Metacritics. The instant opinion of peers has its place, but there’s nothing quite like the informed opinion of someone who’s seen more films than you and can see where Sandra Bullocks’s new opus fits within film history. The importance and regard for that has reduced during the noughties and when it’s something very precious that should be preserved.

Cinema

This was the decade when I stopped going into cinemas. During the nineties, this was a weekly pursuit, often greeting three films in a day. But somewhere in and around 2003 I got out of the habit and it’s very rare that I’ll see the inside of an auditorium now. Initially this wasn’t a conscious decision, but a string of poor experiences over time have led me to consider the proper release of films to be on dvd and to look forward to Lovefilm sending me a copy. Often I don’t even know when something is being released at the cinema unless I hear Mark Kermode reviewing it. Which is quite a change from someone who actually kept a diary, diligently copying them over from Empire Magazine each month.



The cost of tickets has skyrocketed; there’s really no justification for charging eight pounds to see a film, especially if it will then be available at roughly the same price or cheaper two or three months later (factoring in travel expenses). Attending the cinema is a different experience of course, but at home there’s less chance that you’ll have to deal with total strangers talking all of the way through the film, running around the auditorium and laughing inappropriately during tense moments (all of which happened during my first viewing of The Dark Knight). I’m not sure if cinema audiences have got considerably worse behaved over the time or if my tolerance level has reduced, but I really can’t understand why someone would pay those prices and then not bother to watch the film.

Getting It Wrong.

Both of which lead to my most surprising discovery of this decade – that all too often studios, some critics and even other humans don’t seem to know anything about film. Time and again, over and over, there have been films this decade which I’ve been beguiled by, which I’ve thought were impressive, interesting, even classic additions to the canon, which others have dismissed out of hand, marked as artistic failures or which haven’t managed to find an audience for one reason or another. I mentioned some of them in my old Forgotten films project. Arrogantly I assume it’s because I have an innate ability to see what the director or writer were trying to achieve which others don’t, but it’s more likely that I’m just different. 'Twas forever thus.



Just for the record, here are some of the films this decade which I’ve loved against the tide of popular and critical opinion and this is just what I can see on my dvd shelf from where I’m sitting: My Blueberry Nights, Hollywoodland, Heaven (Twyker), Tristan & Isolde, Easy Virtue, AI, Intolerable Cruelty, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Family Stone, Planet Terror, Across The Universe, Rent, The Fountain, The Beach, Angel-A, Paris J’Taime, Kate & Leopold, Music & Lyrics, Sunshine, Stranger Than Fiction, Superman Returns, Jersey Girl, King Arthur, 13 Conversations about one thing, Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, Bubble, Elizabethtown, Full Frontal, The Island and The Italian Job (remake). I’d include The Happening too but I’m still not sure what “Night” was trying to do. Why would anyone do that on purpose?