Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have it. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender have it. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have it. Will Ferrell and his Anchorman news team had it. Nicole Kidman’s most recent film was taken out of competition at Cannes partly because of not having it. Joaquin Phoenix had it with a voice and a screen. Sherlock Holmes has relied on it for years.
The thing that such a diverse range of situations has in common? It is of course the great building block of human life: Chemistry.
At an early Academy screening of The Wolf of Wall Street, a screen-writer approaches Martin Scorsese after the movie and screamed at him, “how could you? You’re disgusting.” We can only imagine that Scorsese’s first thought was, “No, I’m Martin Scorsese.” Whether it be mob politics, child prostitution, the weighing of show girls, or highly controversial interpretations of some fairly important religious texts, the director has always handled morally dubious material. The only difference with The Wolf of Wall Street was that this time it looked like a lot more fun.
It’s so far so good at the moment for James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy; reports from early press screenings are glowing, and the rest of the world seems to have abandoned all its previous caution and thrown itself into a joyous frenzy of anticipation. All along, Guardians has seemed a bit of a risk, not least because this is a major title in phase 2 of Marvel’s long-term movie release plan (James Bond villain plans for world domination are less far-reaching than this) - and it is resting in the hands of a fairly inexperienced director.
When people are asked why they watch films, the answers are all fairly predictable: To see different worlds, to learn something new, to relate to something, to widen their perspectives, to escape... But whether moviegoers are after the cerebral experience, or are simply out for easy entertainment, there is one basic thing that connects all these reasons together. This is that what we essentially get from a film is something to look at. A cinema screen is big and optical because we watch it (and because if it was small and acoustic it’d be a radio). The visual element of a movie –of a motion picture – is literally essential.
There is a lot of talk about horror movies in the non-horror-movie-watching community. Many of its films are simply kept at a respectful distance, non-horror fans politely avoiding them on the basis that they just do not see the attraction in voluntarily frightening the life out of oneself. But over the last ten years or so, certain types of film have gained a different sort of notoriety among non-horror audiences. These are, of course, those films whose content is noticeably extreme; films such as The Hills Have Eyes, Saw, Hostel and various remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are among the most obvious titles. Aversion to the graphically bloody, the excessively violent and to the dependence on worryingly disturbing storylines has grown, with concerns that such movies are losing regard for the boundaries of decency echoing frequently through the film world. The advent of horribly descriptive terms such as ‘torture porn’ hasn’t exactly helped, either.
"Hype" is, by definition, a pretty great thing. It increases awareness and creates excitement. It brings people together and generates new understandings. It encourages new interpretations, inspires new ideas, and so on. Also, every once in a while, hype occurs because something is actually good.
