SUNDAY, MAY 24. I’m at an old movie house in Brooklyn, the kind that people used to call a “nabe” — a neighborhood theater, far removed from the grand palaces downtown, where moviegoers went to see a double-feature with a cartoon and a newsreel for a quarter. But there are no double-features anymore, and everything that plays at the present-day movie palaces now shows simultaneously in the nabes. It’s Day Five of Godzilla, the $ 160 million monster movie that opened on 7,363 screens, and I kept insisting to my Brooklyn friend that we had better order tickets by phone because it was sure to be sold out. “Nothing sells out in Cobble Hill,” he said, and he was right.
But he was also wrong, because Godzilla was supposed to sell out everywhere it showed. Sony Pictures arranged that Godzilla would be showing on one of every five movie screens in the United States to take advantage of those sellouts. That’s why it was made; indeed, it’s the only reason Godzilla was made: Nobody was compelled to remake a 1954 Japanese-American hybrid about a dinosaur that stomps on Tokyo.
But the original Godzilla: King of the Monsters and its sequels have played on television for decades now, and thus Godzilla has something studios usually need to pay tens of millions of dollars to create: name recognition. What could be better, after Jurassic Park and The Lost World, than a movie about a dinosaur with a famous name made by the two men responsible for Independence Day? It would be tempting to say root-canal surgery, except that after an excruciating ninety minutes, Godzilla has an entertaining last half-hour.
But unlike Independence Day, which was a high-spirited romp of a war movie, Godzilla is glum, dank, and bizarre. In the course of Godzilla, probably one hundred thousand people are killed as the dinosaur attacks New York, but we see only a couple of deaths. Otherwise, Godzilla just runs and runs through a tiresome maze that is supposedly the East Side of Manhattan photographed from above, and you never quite get a handle on how big he actually is. At one point, you would think he’s about sixty feet tall, at another about a hundred and twenty. He seems able to breathe fire like a dragon, but since he does it only twice, maybe it was just a car blowing up near him.
The natives are restless at the 8:25 showing of Godzilla in this Brooklyn nabe. They keep stomping up the aisle to get candy or go to the bathroom. This kind of activity in the middle of a movie is so rare that you can tell everybody is feeling gypped, particularly since — though it’s a beautiful day in the real New York — the onscreen city is as rainy and dark as Seattle (the better to hide the cheesy special effects). My sister told me that her thirteen-year-old son isn’t very excited about seeing Godzilla, and that’s telling: If he isn’t interested, who could be?
And why should he be interested? After all, the original Godzilla movies are among the most asinine films ever conceived — memorable only for their stupidity and the hilarious incompetence of their special effects. One thing Sony Pictures didn’t count on is that sometimes name recognition isn’t a good thing. Would anybody want to see The Sidney Blumenthal Story?
MONDAY, MAY 25. While Godzilla is tanking at the box office, there’s a movie called City of Angels that has done better than anybody expected in the past few weeks. It’s a metaphysical romance between a surgeon (played by Meg Ryan) who falls into despair after losing a patient on her operating table and the angel (Nicolas Cage) who comes to escort the soul of that patient to the afterlife.
It’s soupy and drippy and humor-less, but immensely entertaining because — in a world of Godzillas — a simple, cliche-ridden love story seems like a precious bauble. And even though the movie is about an angel and a surgeon, it at least features recognizable human emotions. Godzilla and the summer’s other would-be blockbuster, the equally turgid Deep Impact, are about nothing but their special effects.
In the heyday of the Hollywood studio, back before demographics and market surveys, the powers-that-be divided the world into men and women — or, more precisely, into “men’s pictures” and “women’s pictures.” Men were the primary audience for most of the so-called “genre” films: the gangster movies, the westerns. The only genre that appealed to women was the musical, but there was also a generic “women’s picture,” what the slangy show-biz weekly Variety called a “weepie.” The classic weepies are such films as Stella Dallas, in which a loving but slutty mother gives up her beloved daughter to the girl’s rich father, and Dark Victory, in which Bette Davis discovers she is dying and finds true love before she meets her Maker.
These weepies are so overdrawn and manipulative that they have become totems of the ironic pseudo-religion called Camp, and most men hated them. In the pictures aimed at men, all emotions except hate were suppressed. The proper response to the gunsel who growled, “Why, I oughta fill ya full a lead,” was “Oh yeah?” The ideal man in a men’s picture was self-contained, a cowboy who needed his horse more than a woman.
The old-fashioned men’s pictures were plain, while the women’s pictures were operatic. That’s why the men’s pictures generally strove for realism, while the women’s pictures came across as stylized. But that has all been turned on its head nowadays. The pictures made to appeal to a male audience, like Godzilla, are all outsized and sensational: Their purpose is to make you feel as though you’ve been on a rollercoaster. It’s the women’s pictures that at least try to tell stories about real people, even when they feature special effects or gimmicky plots.
Another (and far superior) new women’s picture, the delightful Sliding Doors, features a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow as a Londoner whom we watch leading alternate lives — one in which she catches a train and finds her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and another in which she misses the train and thus remains in the dark about his affair. The supernatural gimmick doesn’t take away from the movie’s very believable human dramas.
Of course, the most memorable movies transcend the gender divide. Gone with the Wind was basically a collaboration between the great women’s-picture director George Cukor — who was fired because he was a homosexual and Clark Gable couldn’t stand him — and the men’s-picture director Victor Fleming. Cukor filmed the early scenes with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in all her petulant glory, the stuff that made Gone with the Wind the ultimate women’s picture. Fleming caught Gable’s rapscallion charm and off-hand bravery, not to mention the grand scope of the Civil War — the stuff that made Gone with the Wind the ultimate men’s picture as well.
Now, of course, movies are made for boys and girls, not men and women. Just as advertisers crave a youth market because kids are malleable and easily influenced, so film marketers crave a youth audience because they hope to put out the kind of film (Titanic and Star Wars being the best examples) that will so capture a teenager’s imagination that he will see it fifty times.
That’s why, in 1998, any adult male who likes to go to the movies to see an involving story about characters who bear even the most passing resemblance to real people has no choice but to attend films his fathers and grandfathers wouldn’t have been caught dead seeing at the local nabe — or anywhere else, for that matter.
A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post.
