As a movie, it’s a searing thriller.

As an account of real-life events, it’s pretty dangerous. 

The Movie has everything.

It’s an of-the-moment masterwork from Bigelow that is as thought-provoking as it is bone-chilling. Argo is a solid thriller, but Zero Dark Thirty is a scorcher.

When a film tackles topical—or at least recent—events, if expertly done, the results can make for an important film that encapsulates the atmosphere of the time in which we live. Zero Dark Thirty is the Social Network of the twenty-first century American military. I can think of only two other films have reached this magnitude of importance to the 9/11 era in the last decade: United 93 and Bigelow’s own The Hurt Locker.

With screenwriter Mark Boal, Bigelow manages to condense 10 years of history into 160 minutes (at once impressive as it is the movie’s big downfall), and the result is an engrossing, methodical, challenging picture. At its heart is a fierce performance by Jessica Chastain, who until now has already been Oscar-nominated for her sprightly turn in The Help, and could win here for this polar opposite performance at February’s ceremony.

Zero Dark Thirty should be praised for other reasons too, specifically as a triumph of feminism. Chastain hit the nail on the head in her Golden Globe speech Jan 13, thanking Bigelow:

“You’ve said that filmmaking for you is not about breaking gender roles. But when you make a film that allows your character to disobey the conventions of Hollywood, you’ve done more for women in cinema than you take credit for.”

Bigelow and Chastain do astonishing work in a film genre that traditionally defies femininity.

That all being said, Zero Dark Thirty is also dangerously misguided.

Movies remain in the social conscience as historical artifacts. Lincoln will work wonderfully as a piece of historical filmmaking (let’s hope schools don’t use Django Unchained in the same way).

Undoubtedly, Zero Dark Thirty will be a part of the post-9/11 film catalogue, and to some degree this is rightfully so. But as historical documentation—which so much of this film purports to be, in style and content, it’s a dangerous artifact.

Much has been said about the film’s depiction of torture. None dispute that the torture occurred, but rather the impression left by the film—that torture was the key means to locating Osama Bin Laden. Yes, the torture plays a small part in the running time of the film. But an equally small portion is the “Canaries” sequence when the SEALs break into the Bin Laden compound. This is not a film that gives importance to running time.

In an expansive piece on AlterNet, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) outlines his reasoning for calling Bigelow and Boal “irresponsible and inaccurate,” due to the film’s style, the truth of the matter, and what the filmmakers don’t say. Gibney argues that by using documentary style filming and ignoring the truth—that Bin Laden’s courier was not discovered by means of torture, and, well, that torture is proven to be mostly ineffective—they have missed a dramatic opportunity, to give the torture debate some nuance.

It is well known that Bigelow and Boal had highly privileged access to the CIA in making Zero Dark Thirty. While this type of access is perhaps unprecedented, the relationship between Hollywood and the military is long-standing. The Pentagon has a film liaison unit (yes, it’s true) to approve scripts and oversee the production of films to which they grant inexpensive access to equipment and resources (Black Hawk helicopters, uniforms, even proper army lingo).

Filmmakers want the real thing for cheap, and the military wants their guys portrayed nicely. Though some films have forked out the cash in the name of criticizing the military, the expense of critique is unattractive to Hollywood bigwigs.

Zero Dark Thirty undoubtedly portrays the military as heroic. Bringing the horrors of the film’s opening soundbites to a close with the mid-night death of the man who started it all—it’s movie gold, and gold propaganda.

Bigelow and Boal are sworn to secrecy about their talks with high-up authorities, but it’s easy to wonder: Is this a case of filmmakers accepting privileged access at the cost of truth?

What do you think?

The Impossible

The immense talents of Naomi Watts notwithstanding, there is absolutely no reason for making this an English-language film. The real family it is based on are Spanish. As is the director, Juan Antonio Bayona, and most of the film’s crew. They all made an amazing Spanish film five years ago called The Orphanage. 

The reasons for the English makeover perhaps lie in some failed ambition of making a Hollywood blockbuster. So far, most of its impressive $60 million gross has come from Spain, completely trouncing any reason for “Anglophiling” the story.

Though the Belon family’s struggle for survival after the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 is indeed spectacular, what it boils down to is the story of a Western family’s ruined Christmas vacation. As such, it makes some sense to make the family white and English—if you’re going for the bad vacation angle, you’re already playing to the lowest common denominator.

The real problem here is that in choosing this story, Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sanchez neglect the hundreds of thousands of local families whose lives were changed forever. To make the family English assumes that I won’t identify with a Spanish family; and to do this story at all assumes that I won’t identify with a South Asian family.

In The Impossible, Thailand remains an exotic location inhabited by people we can’t possibly understand.

Just because this true story is on record and easily accessed, doesn’t make it the most appropriate—or the best.

With the moral complications out of the way, The Impossible is visually impressive and Watts is spectacular as the mother of a family washed away from their Thai resort. But it all just happens too quickly. Not often do critics ask for more hours from a film, but this is one that might have had more of an impact at 3 hours instead of its slim 113 minutes. This monumental event needed a monumental film.

Instead, the tsunami hits the resort in the film’s first 30 minutes, and while these moments are harrowing to watch, it happens all too soon.

We know nothing about this family. We know Lucas likes cola and Maria is afraid of airplane turbulence. We know Henry (Ewan McGregor) is stressed about work, but little else.

The disaster happens too quickly and we’re made to connect with them on a physical level instead of an emotional one. Luckily for director Bayona, that’s plenty for a visceral viewing experience. As Maria and Lucas are whipped around and bloodied, it’s hard not to feel for them, even if it’s only in a physical, ouch-that-looks-painful sense.

What could have—and should have—been a tragic examination of disaster on an epic scale is instead a film centred entirely on build-up to tear-jerking Hollywood reunions.

2/4

More than 500 books were included on the year-end lists.

Do you agree with the most-mentioned books? Find out after the jump…

Books shown are those that have been included on at least 10 lists. One point for every inclusion on a list. While Metacritic assigns extra points to those items with top rankings, this chart does not, as most best-of lists surveyed here did not declare a winner. However, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to Ms. Boo.

Bubbling Under: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

What’s for certain is that both have huge performances at their centre. Where Meryl Streep’s was a talented impersonation, I’m inclined to herald Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln for the fact that he had no YouTube clips to study, only 150-year-old notes on the President’s character. He does a stunningly good job of inventing a man out of the notes and portraits we’ve all seen before. The praise is not out of left field; the acting—excuse me, Acting—is the film’s biggest strength.

The performances are grand, often operatic. I expect this was a conscious direction on the part of Steven Spielberg, as one dramatic verbal bout is literally followed by an opera. Luckily, both Day-Lewis and Sally Field, playing the First Lady, are up for the task and it works well.

The political story, though rightfully at the centre, is a bit of a challenge. 

It should be simple enough: abolish slavery or don’t. And the movie is just that in its big third act moments, but for the first two acts of the film, I couldn’t help feeling like a dog in a room of humans, grasping basic instincts but confused by the other-worldly language buzzing by. I expect history professors and political science majors will aptly and enthusiastically drool over all of it.

But when Ulysses S. Grant (Mad Men’s Jared Harris) steps in and out of the picture, I know the name, but know not about much else. When a man named Bilbo (Boston Legal’s James Spader) is the frequent comic relief—though he’s pretty much Alan Shore—I can’t help but think about Frodo and the Shire, because that’s what that name means to me.

When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones, in a performance as enjoyable as Day-Lewis’s) takes a political document and folds it to bring home, I understand that this is probably an Easter egg of a historical anecdote—but I don’t know it. That’s my fault. This movie is for the buffs of American politics.

Superior to the meandering Iron Lady from last year, the film is mostly about the politics. Where the Streep film spent too much time on the deterioration of a fascinating woman, forgetting what made her fascinating, this Day-Lewis film is the opposite. Perhaps it’s because we know less of the day-to-day details of Lincoln’s personal life, but the film is better for it, inventing what it needs to, and staying tremendously accurate to the history and the thrilling politics.

It works best as a nice study of Lincoln the politician, more than Lincoln the man, and as a stand-alone moment of historical documentation. The 20th century held some of the cruelest years for African-Americans—Lincoln’s triumph was just a step, albeit a triumphant one. Spielberg’s movie doesn’t try to be anything more than a biopic of Lincoln’s final fight in office, and that’s fine.

3/4

Rust and Bone

Some will find its the-worst-gets-worse indie tendencies somewhat grating, but the film’s style and the leads’ powerful performances make it a certain Oscar contender.

In brief, Rust and Bone, based on a series of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, follows the complicated attraction between a killer whale trainer (Marion Cotillard) and an unemployed boxer (Matthias Schoenaerts). But to reduce the film to a sentimental romance isn’t fair—it’s anything but. Rust and Bone is a complex story of the scars that shape us. 

The film’s muted Bon Iver-accompanied opening introduces Schoenaerts’ Ali, an unemployed boxer who finds himself responsible for his young son, a job for which he is entirely unequipped, and frankly, horrible at. The film opens with his sister reluctantly taking them into her home and Ali finding work as a nightclub bouncer. Enter Cotillard’s Stephanie, a beautiful dance-floor temptress who gets in a bloody scuffle. We soon learn that she is also an orca trainer at Marineland in Antibes, France (unaffiliated with the now-controversial MarineLand in Niagara Falls, to be sure), and her home life is where she is the least commanding of the beasts in her life, in this case, her demanding boyfriend.

Following a tragic accident during a killer whale show, Stephanie and Ali form an unlikely bond, a broken body and a broken soul working to heal one another. Director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) manages to avoid the sentimentality of the “saviour becomes the saved” with his beautiful, realistic style and a moving score by Alexandre Desplat (Harry Potter, The King’s Speech). Even the inclusion of Katy Perry’s “Firework” manages to be surprisingly moving under Audiard’s direction.

The film’s stunning performances generated critical praise at the Cannes premiere, and with screenings at TIFF and VIFF, the leads should continue to receive Oscar buzz in the coming months.

A string of roles in popular fare from Inception to The Dark Knight Rises followed Cotillard’s Oscar-winning performance as Édith Piaf in 2007′s La Vie en rose. With Rust and Bone, the actress is back at what she does best. It’s a pleasure to see her outside the mainstream again. If Cotillard was fierce and showy as Piaf, her performance in Rust and Bone is a work of remarkable restraint.

Schoenaerts is masterful as Ali, frustratingly unlikeable but damaged all the same. His many failings pile on like wounds throughout the film until the intensely moving final scenes. With Oscar’s recent recognition of France’s Jean Dujardin for The Artist (and Cotillard’s from 2007), it’s clear that the Academy likes the French. Schoenaerts intense performance deserves as much recognition as any American performance by a lead actor this year.

Rust and Bone is a tour de force romance of the kind audiences are only graced with frequently at film festivals. If you’re lucky enough to find this at a local cinema, take a chance — and some tissues.

3.5/4

Starring Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as the stroke-ridden wife and her saddened husband, the legendary French actors give stirring performances in what may be one of the greatest movies about ageing ever put to film. 

Georges and Anne have lived a full life. Amour isn’t a dying drama about regret and missed chances. The couple quarrel, joke, and share stories like young sweethearts. Every inch of their apartment is covered with a life filled of joy. Walls adorned with photographs of family and paintings of landscapes that hardly capture reality as well as Haneke’s intimate portrait of a couple in love.

It all should be a recipe for tear-jerking sentimentality, but it’s not. That doesn’t mean tears won’t be shed as the film reaches its wrenchingly sad conclusion. But with Haneke’s direction, there’s no Hollywood manipulation here.

Haneke with Riva and Trintignant

Amour is muted and intimate, an incredibly stark contrast to a film like Funny Games, Haneke’s jarring, frustrating commentary on sadism. The camera in Amour rarely leaves the couple’s Paris apartment, and moves slowly when, and if, it moves at all. The stillness of Haneke’s lens creates a realism so intimate, underscoring his unsentimental approach. That realism is Amour‘s most powerful effect.

Amour is a picture done by masters. Haneke’s directing is tender, his script stunningly poetic, and his actors amazing. Riva delivers one of the bravest performances in recent years as Anne. It’s always difficult to talk about “brave” acting, but if there is such a thing, this is it.

As Georges, the film’s aching centre, Trintignant is as heart-wrenching to watch as the pained spouse of a dying woman as the dying woman herself. These actors, in their 80s now, should be top contenders at next year’s Oscar ceremonies for their work in this triumphant film.

4/4

She gave away bottle after gold-plated bottle of champagne to lucky fans on her 777 binge-tour airplane. She’s entirely naked in pretty much every photo these days, with the exception of a perfectly-placed leaf or two. She has a giant tattoo under her breasts dedicated to her grandmother. She wanted a tattoo on her face. And most of all, she likes to duet from time to time with her former abuser, Chris Brown.

But hey, she’s Unapologetic apparently.

Now that her latest duet with Brown has leaked and it’s actually pretty good, the question must be asked: is it acceptable to enjoy the Rihanna-Chris Brown duet?

Well, sure it is. If you can completely separate music from reality. In some cases, it’s easier to do that than others, and this duet is not one of them. 

Rihanna opens the song, a track on her latest album, singing to Brown and their haters:

You’ll always be mine, sing it to the world
Always be my boy, I’ll always be your girl
Nobody’s business, ain’t nobody’s business

Love conquers all, people. Even abuse, apparently. Whether or not the pair are actually back together or not is a question mark, but the duet effectively becomes a 21^st century read-between-the-tabloids version of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss” from 1962.

What “business” they’re singing about isn’t clear in the lyrics. Of course, it is not literally about Mad Men-era domestic abuse as with The Crystals track. As a stand-alone song, they’re singing about carefree love. And that’s fine. But can a duet between Chris Brown and Rihanna ever really be a stand-alone song? No.

We know too much. The “business” they sing about becomes that tabloid mess of 2009. The leaked photos become part of the narrative.

When Amy Winehouse sang about going to rehab and saying no-no-no, it became increasingly difficult to separate that singer’s real-life woes from her narrative ones. Maybe Winehouse’s case was a little more dire than Rihanna’s, but in terms of public support, the separation of music and life could have more consequences here.

They’re right—their love ain’t nobody’s business. But if they want us to separate their music from their life, then maybe they should do the same.

Washington watches his movie crash

Denzel Washington gives a great performance in Robert Zemeckis’s Flight, but he can’t save the film from crashing harder than the plane he saves so thrillingly in the first 20 minutes.

Flight is a miscalculated mess about an alcoholic pilot under scrutiny after a terrifying crash landing (no, you won’t see this on your next in-flight movie menu). But Flight doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, hopping from awkwardly placed John Goodman sketches to candid explorations of addiction. 

The plane crash is an intense bit of filmmaking, and easily the film’s best moments. The trouble is, it’s all in the first 20 minutes. The physics of it – apparently accurate, says Zemeckis – are jaw-dropping to watch. Washington makes the decision in the eleventh hour to roll the craft upside down in order to level out the nose dive. Thrilling stuff. But unfortunately, after the crash scenes, the movie begins a nose dive itself.

The movie is at its best when it focuses on the investigation into the spectacular crash landing and the legal manoeuvring of the pilot’s reps. But this is surprisingly less in focus than the character’s addiction and his relationship with a recovering heroin addict, played by Kelly Reilly.

Zemeckis and Washington

It’s all unexpected based on the trailer, which places more weight on the crash and lawyering. The focus instead on alcoholism plays out more as a disappointing misfire than an acutely measured character study, which some will likely tell you it is. Really though, Flight is a moralistic yawn.

It takes a swift hand to inject the funny into a story about alcoholism, which Flight really is, and it’s clear by the time Goodman’s character walks in to the Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy For the Devil” that Zemeckis is not the one to do it.

1.5/4

There’s nothing wrong with that, everyone wants a breezy summer read (but maybe those who read the latter should hold a little guilt). So in the spirit of wishing summer was still on so that you could do those things you forgot to do like reading better books, here are a few recently published gems you could grab for your extended summer.

These boys are breezy, but they’re smart. A perfect balance for an extended summer. 

Beautiful Ruins

Dare I call Beautiful Ruins the perfect summer novel? If you want love and mystery, sunsets and beautiful people, then try out Beautiful Ruins. It’s no Nicholas Sparks or James Patterson, and it’s certainly no Fifty Shades, but Beautiful Ruins could make you cry and laugh all the same. Put down your Steig Larsson, you can get to that later (the next movie won’t be out for a while anyway). Read something new and great.

Spanning more than fifty years, Beautiful Ruins tells the story of Pasquale, a hotel owner in a small Italian town secluded from the tourist hot spot Porto Venere on Cinque Terre who meets a dying American actress on a brief leave filming Cleopatra in 1962 (reading the production history of the film will enhance your enjoyment here). Pasquale’s story is told opposite the Hollywood glamour of the twenty-first century, with wrinkling studio executives and burnt out  musicians blending into Pasquale’s love story. Read and watch Waters weave these decade-spanning stories together with the grace of a master. If unconvinced at first with its seeming melodrama and romanticism, Beautiful Ruins will grab hold of you soon enough, and by the last paragraph you’ll be amazed at how the story came to its final beautiful moments.

The Red House

Mark Haddon, most popularly known for his breakthrough novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, is no stranger to the weaving of multiple threads. His follow-up novel to Incident traced, like The Red House, the various members of a family in turmoil. Though the “turmoil” of A Spot of Bother was portrayed through a much more comical lens than The Red House, the interweaving is done similarly here. The novel tracks back and forth between two grown siblings’ respective families: Angela’s is the young family of five invited to stay at her brother Richard’s summer home of the title.

Full of dramatic revelations and burning inner turmoil, the novel’s most shining moments are in the sections that follow Benjy, the 8-year-old boy. Nearly half a dozen references to Harry Potter and other shimmering fairy tales alone brighten the mood, but even Benjy’s sections are gloomy at times. One memorable moment has the boy reflecting on the “adult secrets” he hears in the news like war, murder, and the tonnes of garbage found in a whales stomach. But even in the novel’s darkest moments, the boy’s innocence is an anchor.

Haddon’s third novel comes across more serious in tone than his previous, and often reminds the reader of a Jonathan Franzen novel at times with the tumultuous and complicated relationships between parent and child as in The Corrections, and the creaky sins of adultery as in Freedom. But Haddon’s third novel is a mere 264 pages long. If he is trying to pull off a Franzenian quality here, it works at times but often ends up being a bit more Franzen Lite than full-on Franzen.

Fans of Haddon’s previous novels may find The Red House somewhat of a departure. Though it resembles A Spot of Bother closest with the multiple storylines, in such a limited time frame, the characters seem but passing glimpses at the close of the cover. Even if just as acquaintances, to nestle in the dysfunctional warmth of these characters is an enjoyable summer cruise.

Swamplandia!
A 13-year-old girl tries to save her family’s crocodile-wrestling theme park.

That’s the premise of this whimsical adventure, and if that doesn’t intrigue you in the slightest, then try for one of the other two first. Swamplandia!’s opening pages have all the whimsy and technicolour of a Pixar movie, but believe me when I say, Swamplandia! is not a Pixar fairytale. Not even close. Soon enough the story darkens with cancer and bankruptcy and it takes on the feel of a rollicking Wes Anderson flick, and, at times, a less-violent Coen Brothers vehicle.

But this is a book we’re talking about, and a damn good one at that. Set in the Florida everglades, Karen Russell’s first novel brims with lush imagery of the swamp island inhabited by the Bigtree family, croc wrestlers who own the title park. Ava, naive as any 13-year-old, but brave all the same, she puts total faith in her family even when they fall in love with ghosts, pursue lost causes on the mainland, and formulate bankrupting plans to save the family business. Ava Bigtree sprouts off the page as one of the most enjoyable voices and protagonists in recent years.

Swamplandia! is a summer novel with landscapes you can almost feel, whimsy to make you laugh, and outright horror that will leave you shivering in your extended-summer sweat.

Whether or not the film’s weaker-than-expected initial weeks were somehow related to a fear of being shot post-Colorado massacre, The Dark Knight Rises stands to make a lot of money. But who cares? Sure, it is pretty hard now to disassociate the film with the infamous “Batman shooting,” and yes, some arguments point to a mythological “Batman curse,” and OK, the last one probably made more money because people were sad about Heath Ledger. So, “Who cares?” Well, it is fairly obvious that a lot of people care. Box office analysts, to be more specific, and some fans who have a strange urge to see their favourite franchise earn a lot of many as though they will somehow own a share of that money simply by remaining loyal fans.

The Dark Knight Rises has and will continue to break various box office records. Analysts cite the trend of “front-loaded” moviegoing in which the majority of a film’s money is made during the opening weeks of buzz and midnight screenings—but with TDKR‘s “slow” start, the film is bound to break some more records at some point.

But what is all this breaking of records anyway? Is it all that it appears to be? Even amid all the talk over the last ten years of the declining movie industry and the revenge of the “vast wasteland” that was TV, we’ve witnessed some of the most astonishing box office successes in Hollywood history. When commentators grumbled that no one was seeing movies anymore because they were watching HBO more than ever, The Matrix Reloaded was breaking Thursday intake records and Shrek 2 was becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever. This happened again the next year. And the year after that. And with the release of TDKR, we came to yet another momentous moment in Box Office History: though it narrowly missed smashing the three-day record previously held by May’s The Avengers a mere two months earlier, TDKR earned the most money for a 2D film in one weekend ever. Ever. The most popular word in box office analysis.

Is the Dark Knight‘s success impressive? In dollars and cents, sure it is, but is that the most telling statistic of success? I’m not preaching some quality-over-quantity argument (though some critics suggest the film’s successes are fewer than its box office haul). Comparatively speaking, the movie industry’s success metre is a bit out of whack. To know that Fifty Shades of Grey was atop New York Times best-seller lists again this week would seem boring information to box office devotees, but do we really need more than that? No, I’m not about to say we should squash the cash-pull numbers all together—for our purposes here, the Times bestseller lists could do with some kind of nominal figure outside the rankings. Say, number of copies sold?

It’s nothing new to literature. When that series about broomsticks and the boy with glasses hit the top of the Times best-seller list for ten years, it was never accompanied with a dollar figure, save perhaps the price of the brick itself—and maybe Rowling’s personal intake. It was always units sold. That precious exchange at the cash register was always most exciting for how many people visited Snape the cashier, not for how many dollars were put into his register.

TV ratings are a constant source of fascination for industry watchers, but again few dollar signs are factored into the equation. To know that viewership dropped 21% after the latest season premiere of Breaking Bad tells us more than any dollar figure could. Dollar figure charts serve to tell us how big the pockets of Hollywood megacorporations are getting. At least, viewership only implies such things. Of course, TV has always been uniquely about attracting “eyes to advertisers,” so an eyeball tally is warranted. If we can then say that the movies are less about the advertisers (which we can’t really) then the movies would seem the purest art form, no? But where is the art in the dollar figure?

In music, everyone’s favourite broken heart called Adele had one—or two—helluva-years. Since the release of 21 in early 2011, the singer’s sophomore album became, among other honours, the first album in U.K. chart history to sell 3 million copies in one calendar year. In movie box office terms this might have factored out to be somewhere in the $50 million range, but the 3 mill was plenty for the music industry. To be fair, the movies don’t have the same entrenched award system as the music industry—The Dark Knight Rises isn’t going to receive any framed Platinum discs during its box office run—and maybe if music didn’t have these awards, we’d be seeing more movie-like numbers in Billboard magazine.

I’m sure music industry moguls in this Megaupload age would love to see some higher numbers on the charts. Their system just isn’t quite allowing for that kind of good PR. The movie system is, in a way, the perfect one for industry PR. No one will think the movies are dying if they keep seeing records broken month after month. Keep death out of moviegoers minds and the vacant theatres will look as full as ever.

Of course, that little thing called inflation is the reason for all the record-breaking. Rising ticket prices and the strategic explosion of 3D releases is why we see film’s biggest records broken in the last ten years. Adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing movie chart looks a bit different. Eight of the Top 10 films in the non-inflation-adjusted list are from the last ten years, while only one measly little film called Avatar remains in the Top 10 after adjustments are made for inflation. What records are we really breaking here?

1939 – Gone With the Wind

2009 - Avatar

1977 – Star Wars

1997 - Titanic

1965 - Sound of Music

1982 - ET

1956 - The Ten Commandments

1965 - Doctor Zhivago

1975 - Jaws

1937- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A system fix is not without its own problems. According to Carl Bialik of The Wall Street Journal, “Converting box-office totals to tickets sold involves guesswork. Since the studios don’t tally tickets sold, box-office grosses have to be divided by average ticket prices, which weren’t reliably tracked until 1989.” Even still, leaving the system as is has its benefits for the industry. Unadjusted for inflation, and with rising ticket prices, today’s films have an undeniable head start in the box office race.

To this skeptical box office observer, the weekly analysis seems only a greedy form of self-promotion. Everybody loves money. And the movies are making a lot of money. Box office analysis is the Kardashians of industry analysis. We drool over the money, but dig a bit deeper and things start to look a bit phony.