Apparently there is some dramatic disconnect between young people and the seeking out of good films. Says Ebert:
The obvious implication is, younger moviegoers don’t care about reviews and have missed the news that “The Hurt Locker” is the best American film of the summer. There is a more disturbing implication: word of mouth is not helping the film in that younger demographic.
Many of the readers here are very young and all are, I might say, very well-educated about film and will seek out the best ones available in their area. The problem is that, short of illegally downloading them, many people connected to the buzz are outside of areas where the film is playing. A conclusion simply cannot be drawn this early.
Ebert goes on to defend younger crowds:
Of course there are countless teenagers who seek and value good films. I hear from them all the time in the comment threads on this blog. They’re frank about their contemporaries. If they express a nonconformist taste, they’re looked at as outsiders, weirdoes, nerds. Their dates have no interest in making unconventional movie choices. They’re looked at strangely if they express no desire to see that weekend’s box office blockbuster. Even some of their teachers, they write, are unfriendly to them “always bringing up movies nobody has ever heard of.” If you hang around on these threads, you know the readers I’m referring to, including “A Kid,” who writes so well that if she hadn’t revealed her age (just turned 13) we would have taken her for a literate, articulate adult.
If I mention the clich√© “the dumbing-down of America,” it’s only because there’s no way around it. And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans. It has nothing to do with higher educational or income levels. It proceeds from a lack of curiosity and, in many cases, a criminally useless system of primary and secondary education. Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can.
Jeff Wells’ Hollywood-Elsewhere also took this on, responding to this article by the LATimes’ John Horn.
On the notion that younger people weren’t heading out in droves to see the movie, Wells writes:
“Excuse me? The Young and the Empty are paying to see big-studio CG crap but they’re steering clear of a genuinely cool, gripping and seriously thrilling film that is unquestionably among the year’s best and which runs circles around the filmmaking chops of Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers? And the youth of the nation can’t be bothered? There’s really and truly something wrong with these guys, honest to God. A deficiency in their souls.
Ebert offers up, perhaps, a deeper explanation to the state of things – that children are, in effect, being farmed to view entertainment a certain way and that there is nothing really to be done about it in the short view:
This trend coincides with the growing effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns to impose box office success on heavily-promoted GCI blockbusters, which are themselves often promotions for video games. No checks and balances prevail. The mass media is the bitch of marketing. Almost every single second of television coverage of the movies is devoted to thinly-veiled promotion. Movie stars who appear as guests on talk shows and cable news are almost always there because they have a new movie coming out. Smart-ass satirical commentary, in long-traditional in places like Mad magazine and SNL, is drowned out by celebrity hype. It was Mad that first got me thinking like a critic and analyzing popular culture.
No critical opinion–indeed, no opinion at all–is usually expressed by the hosts of these programs. The formula is rigid: (1) “Thanks for coming to see us,” as if it’s a social call; (2) “I hear you play (fill in description of role);” (3) “What was it like working with (name)?”; (4) “Do you think (this film, even if a comedy, sends a positive message?); (5) “What are you doing next?” This formula is interrupted for one (1) film clip and some funny remarks by the guest, which have been prepared and discussed in advance and are cued by the host’s straight lines.
My take is that I think people who bag on young people ought to spend some time in our schools. They ought to spend some time around young people and see how and why this whole phenom is taking place. Kids are doing what come naturally: they are chasing down the fun. What hasn’t changed are the way kids chase down fun – this includes myself as a young girl being dropped off at the multiplex to watch Star Wars three times in one day. What has changed is that kids now have the money and the power. This did not used to be the case; parents had to be pursuaded to let their kids go to see these films. The power has shifted so that now entertainment is is there not to be filtered at all through an adult but to go straight to the kid – and they do that quite easily; advertising during children’s programming is higher than at any other time. We are now seeing the fruits of what was really started fifteen years ago.
The beauty of the situation is that there is now the internet to help change people’s minds. Kids, more and more, are getting their social information from the net. And that will continue to evolve in a positive direction. As usual, with everything, education is the only answer. Ebert’s writing about this will have an impact.
Finally, what the Hurt Locker offers isn’t so much something a 15 year-old would like particularly. I took my eleven year-old daughter to see it and she was intrigued by it but much of it went right over her head. The thing she liked most about it was that it had been directed by a woman. And yes, younger kids will flock to films with stars in them. That also hasn’t changed. So much of it is about stars or special effects. I think it’s asking too much to expect them to appreciate a film like The Hurt Locker – which is something to be appreciated by audiences over decades. But maybe I’m just thick.