Like many, maybe most people, I love movies. I continued loving them past the period — mid ‘70s? late ‘70s? — when Hollywood’s marketing focus began shifting toward the demographic of easily entertained adolescent boys.
Over the past 40 years, Hollywood’s adolescent boy focus has broadened to include adolescent girls and, much more significantly, teeming and growing throngs of technical adults who retain the entertainment tastes of adolescents, if “tastes” is the right word.
During this period, Hollywood also learned how to minimize the risky search for new movie projects, telling moviegoers, in effect:
“Thanks for spending nine bucks — maybe another nine for popcorn, etc. — to go to a theater and buy a ticket for a movie about a comic book character or some phantasmal war featuring supernatural or extraterrestrial creatures or maybe just lots of explosions and car chases. Hey, wouldn’t you like to see another movie about that?! Something like Elasticboy II or Cataclysm III or The Ferrari From Hell IV or Batman & Superman vs. Godzilla V?
Sure, you would! You better. We spent $150 million on this blockbuster, $25 million of that for a big star you want to see — anyway, you better want to see . . . .”
The movies once included adaptations of great novels and original screenplays by talented writers like Robert Towne and Billy Wilder. Hollywood today doesn’t want to spend $150 million on such projects, which seem almost as dangerous as asking people to read.
Original, excellent movies are still being made. I’d say the 2008 drama Gran Torino was one of them and the arrested-development comedy Step Brothers was another. You could probably pick quite a few. They’re there.
But maybe the picks have become harder to find. Maybe you’ve considered this week’s choices at your local multiplex and decided that, even if you’re young at heart, your movie choices should not continue to be mostly those favored by an easily entertained adolescent. So here’s a little suggestion. It would involve a Netflix subscription, although you’d pay about the same for a month of Netflix as you would for a visit to the multiplex to watch X-Men With Extra Y-Chromosones.
My suggestion is a feature-length documentary, but stay with me, because it offers good drama and entertainment: a 2019 doc called Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator. Popcorn recommended, maybe some Pepto-Bismol on the side.
As I watched this documentary about a cult established in the western U.S. by a fraudulent, lecherous guru-type from India, it reminded me of another intriguing documentary: a 2018 Netflix series, Wild Wild Country, chronicling a cult established in the western U.S. by a fraudulent, lecherous guru-type from India. One cult was yoga-based and the other was orgy-based, but the look in participants’ eyes in both cults was similar.
Apparently urgently-searching Americans just love fraudulent, lecherous guru-types from India.
Even though these two gurus were different people (not an ingenious impersonation by one), they did have a common interest: Each guru collected a fleet of Rolls Royces purchased with generous contributions from worshipful Americans. I’m not making that up, not even exaggerating.
Maybe you’re less interested in actual documentaries than I am? OK, there are shorter, even more entertaining variations on the documentary genre, also via Netflix. They’re in a series by Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, Documentary Now!, that parodies some famous documentaries. The cult documentary parody in this series is called Batsh*t Valley. There are other hilarious ones in the series, including brilliant parodies of Grey Gardens, Salesman, and The Kid Stays in the Picture.
Sure, these documentaries and doc parodies are reality-based, thus maybe more challenging than movies about super-human spiders and cosmic laser battles. But they’re actually more interesting, more entertaining, and won’t shrink your brain.