In an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, a publication that often inspires readers to compare what's in its highly esteemed, award-winning news coverage to what's being professed on its op-ed page and come to the conclusion that somebody's nuts, has published an analysis of the state of the movie business by Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, and someone named Tom Snyder, who I'm guessing is neither the late, much-missed host of the Tomorrow show not the guy who did Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, but really, who the hell knows anymore? If there's one thing I've picked up on in the course of doing this job, it's that life's full of surprises, put it that way. Anyway, Baehr is a big wheel with Movieguide, a family-values organization that promotes better living through morally correct movies or something. Part of his op-ed amounts to a press release announcing that Movieguide recently "held its 17th Annual Faith & Values Awards ceremony", where they saluted such entertainments as Fireproof, "which received a $100,000 Epiphany Prize for the Most Inspiring Movie of 2008, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation." Even more valuable was the information we released in our Report to the Entertainment Industry, a detailed survey of what kinds of movies made money last year, and why. Regular readers of the Screengrab will immediately recall that we did our best to cover the Fireproof experience, because we, too, want to "help families who want to find movies and TV shows that stay within the perimeters of biblical principles", to use Baehr's pithy phrasing, and because opportunities to update readers on the state of Kirk Cameron's career don't come along every day. But the most exciting news to come out of this year's Movieguide report on the state of the art is that Baehr and company have figured out how to keep the entertainment industry solvent in these perilous times. (If you can keep Kirk Cameron solvent, you can do anything.) "With media conglomerates, from Time Warner to Disney to News Corp., reporting big losses," write Baehr and Snyder, "few can afford to ignore proven recipes for box-office success. And when it comes to movies, what succeeds is capitalism, patriotism, faith and values...Once again, family-friendly, uplifting and inspiring movies drew far more viewers in 2008 than films with themes of despair, or leftist political agendas. Sex, drugs and antireligious themes were not automatic sellers, either. Among the 25 top-grossing movies alone, 14 out of 25 had strong or very strong Christian, redemptive and moral content, and nearly all had at least some such content."
These results are based on a close examination of "more than 250 major films from Hollywood studios and independents for their social, political, philosophical, moral and religious content. When all the information -- categorized by dozens of criteria -- is in a database, we calculate which movies took in the most money at the theatrical box office in America and Canada in 2008." We have no doubt that the good people at Movieguide have gone about their work with great devotion and seriousness of intent. But in their efforts to connect with the money changers of Hollywood, they may have come too close to embracing that time-honored but morally dubious practice known as Hollywood accounting. For instance, Movieguide makes a point of claiming that movies with "anti-Communist" messages made a hell of a lot more money this past year than the usual flood of high-profile commercial releases that nakedly proselytize for Communism. If you spend any of your time listening to the right nationally broadcast conniption fits, you will of course agree that, barely ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of a Communist takeover of the West is a major issue, one that demands that filmmakers take sides. And as Movieguide sees it, Americans would much rather see anti-Communist movies. As proof, it offers a list of what it terms anti-Communist message movies--An American Carol, Fly Me to the Moon, City of Ember, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--and notes that, as a group, they "averaged $71.8 million at the 2008 box office in America and Canada." Compare that to the group's list of pro-Communist propaganda movies--Che, Gonzo, The Children of Huang Shi, Trumbo and Vicky Cristina Barcelona--which "averaged a measly $7.9 million in 2008." However, as Jim Emerson points out at his great film blog Scanners, the "average" $71.8 million figure for the anti-Commie films seems to have been arrived at by spreading the wealth around and giving An American Carol and City of Ember, which cost, respectively, $20 million and $55 million, and which each took in about $7 million, some of the credit for Indiana Jones's $317 million gross. (I confess to never having heard of Fly Me to the Moon before. Turns out it's a Belgian-made 3-D animated feature that cost $25 million and had a domestic gross of $12 million, though it managed to make enough worldwide to cover its costs.) By contrast, the standout film on the "pro-Communist" side of the roster, Vicky Christina Barcelona, was made for somewhere between $15 and $20 million and has grossed more than $85 million worldwide. Many people, some of whom invested in An American Carol, would say that this counts as profitable, but apparently Movieguide feels there is a special kind of math that is "within the perimeters of biblical principles" and another kind that is not.
Then there is the problem of how Movieguide defines its terms. A certain round peg-square hole quality can be felt. For instance, why is City of Ember, a children's fantasy film in which the corrupt mayor (Bill Murray) of a dying city is seen stockpiling canned goods for his own selfish use while the people he is meant to be governing do without, specifically "anti-Communist"? Movieguide simply says that it must be because it's a movie in which "a tyrant steals from the people", which could just as easily (and just as weirdly) justify calling it a veiled attack on Boss Tweed. Similarly, in what way is Vicki Christina Barcelona pro-Communist? It is true that it features a character who identifies as a political leftist, and it is true that although this character's life is a self-destructive mess, at no point is there a scene where he is struck by lightning. Similarly, the basically apolitical (and largely unseen) The Children of Huang Shi, which is set in China during the Japanese invasion, features a swaggering, charismatic Communist Chinese guerrilla fighter played by Chow Yun-Fat. Put all this together, and you might be forced to conclude that Movieguide thinks that it's a dangerous political act to ever have a Communist character played by somebody hot. But then you remember that they approve of Cate Blanchett's Commie dominatrix with Louise Brooks bangs and that theory gets shot to hell.
The politics of Movieguide and the Journal's op-ed page are no secret, but if you'd never heard of either one, you wouldn't have any trouble guessing what they are from their attitudes towards certain movies. These are people who, faced with an admiring portrait of a genuine hero like Milk, only see the "licentious content"; who think that the documentary Gonzo must be pro-Communist because its hero, Hunter S. Thompson, didn't approve of the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon; who see the humanistic, one-world attitudes of The Visitor as an expression of "anti-Americanism." (These are also people with so little sense of history that their list of liberal-minded dirty movies includes an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited; that noise you are hearing is the sound of Evelyn Waugh trying to claw his way out of his coffin so that he can get his hands around their throats.) Risible as all this is, it's also kind of annoying, because this is a time when a changing economic reality might make it possible, and desirable, to have a real discussion about the morality of the movie culture, and how that culture might enhance its own profitability by addressing people's actual concerns on a real-world level instead of wasting more and more money on thinner and tawdrier fantasies. So it's frustrating to see more of these silly circle jerks whose sole purpose is to give the jerkers a chance to claim solidarity with what they think is the core of the mainstream culture and cite its "success", whether that success is real or imaginary, as evidence that tomorrow belongs to them. Among the other movies that Movieguide sees as on their side is the animated feature Bolt, which is about a dog that has spent its life performing in a TV show and bounds out into the real world believing that it actually has super powers, and which is said to embody "such moral values as loyalty, sacrifice and doing the right thing," values that you might think transcend politics but that Movieguide identifies as constituting specifically "conservative content". I guess if you think that An American Carol provides a blueprint for financial success, it's only natural that your idea of a moral example would be a delusional dog on a power trip.