Into a different world

MOVIE-GOING EXPERIENCE

But, just recently, I took a week off and found myself, on the autumn Saturdays that bookended my staycation, shoving cash through a slot at the bottom of a plexiglass barrier and shouting my preferences through little round holes, with accompanying gestures in case the person on the other side had trouble understanding. “Megamind. One adult and two children.” “Two for Unstoppable. ”

What was I doing there? Partly, it was a matter of professional due diligence, the regular duty of catching up with movies I have not reviewed. But also, and more deeply, there was the combination of curiosity, inertia and obedience that is the most common and perhaps the least understood motive for movie attendance. I was bored. The kids were bored. A trip to Megamind or Unstoppable was easy — a relatively inexpensive excursion we could all agree on that was unlikely to leave anyone too disappointed. Very few movies are so bad that they ruin the experience of movie-going, which itself is engineered to fulfill modest expectations and to mute rather than inflame enthusiasm.

To say that movies are — and are intended to be — merely good enough feels at once like a statement of the obvious and a heresy. Don’t we want movies to be great? Aren’t they supposed to at least try? Some of them, yes, at least as a matter of marketing and publicity.

At this time of year, the machinery of movie hype runs on parallel tracks, one aimed toward prestige, the other pointed at maximum profit. It is not hard to tell which is which: as the holiday season unfolds, the segment of the entertainment press charged with handicapping the Oscar race will churn out features, blog posts and learned essays on Black Swan, The King’s Speech and a handful of other potential contenders. Meanwhile the quantifiers of box-office business will dutifully assess the fortunes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Little Fockers and the flurry of 3-D family releases soon to litter the multiplexes.

It is safe to predict that when the Academy Awards are handed out on February 27, the axes of prestige and corporate populism will converge, as they usually do, in a spasm of anxiety and wish fulfillment. The relatively low cumulative box-office totals of some of the leading candidates in major categories will cause professional worriers to worry anew that the Academy has lost touch with the mainstream audience, while the rulers of the Academy and the producers of its annual broadcast will strain to find new ways to bring that elusive audience together for at least one night. The main nominees will include at least a few genuine blockbusters — Inception, maybe, or Toy Story 3 in what was, last year, the Avatar slot — and a cluster of movies with box-office numbers in the respectable upper-middle range. The Town? The Social Network? We’ll have to wait and see.

But of course we already know that the ceremony itself will consecrate the idea that movies, American movies at any rate, are for everyone, a universal popular art form with the magical power to turn division into consensus. It is a beautiful article of faith, and Oscar night is like a religious holiday that even the lapsed and the skeptical can take part in. The old ritual still has its appeal.

But before we get too caught up in the cynical, gullible spirit of the season, it is worth meditating on the state of the congregation, a body of the faithful riven by schism, factionalism and contradiction. Which brings me (and my children) back to the multiplex, where we were looking, if not for universal appeal, then at least for a workable compromise. We ruled out the old, weird movies that Dad sometimes prefers, and also the more narrowly pegged genre entries (Jackass 3-D, Paranormal Activity 2, Saw 3-D) that teenagers don’t really want to see with their parents. And we got what we paid for: a brightly coloured 3-D animated pastiche with celebrity voices and busy visuals and an action movie with Denzel Washington and a very big, very fast train.

The pleasures and limitations of these movies are instructive, since each provides a snapshot of commercial filmmaking in 21st-century Hollywood. Megamind, from DreamWorks Animation, offers the latest evidence that 3-D cartoon features, in addition to representing the most reliably lucrative kind of movie, are also the most sophisticated. DreamWorks, in particular, has made the kind of allusive, parodic cultural self-consciousness that used to be called postmodernism safe for the whole family. Megamind, like the Shrek movies, subjects age-old archetypes (in this case the ubiquitous mythology of superheroes and villains) to tweaking and mockery without entirely undermining the sentimental comforts of the genre.

It reminds you of a lot of other movies, including most obviously The Incredibles and Despicable Me. The epic battle between good and evil is more a game than an allegory: that the stakes in the fight are so low is part of the fun, even though your emotional investment in the story is correspondingly modest.

Unstoppable makes you care a little more, since its setting is the noisy, clanking real world, or at least a credible rendition of it — a blue-collar, Rust Belt stretch of Pennsylvania immune to the kind of winking pseudo-subversion that animates Metro City in Megamind. The film’s absorption in practical matters is exhilarating, and also startling. Unstoppable seems to have no subtext, no larger meaning, no political implications or psychological mystery — in short, none of the trappings of importance that weigh down so many movies, both of the crowd-pleasing and the awards-trawling kind.

And in this it resembles nothing so much as 127 Hours, a movie with Oscar pedigree. The scale of the problem may be smaller — an arm caught against a boulder, rather than a freight train heading for a population centre — but the solution is as ingenious and as crazily plausible, and Danny Boyle, like Scott, refrains from offering deep thoughts or heavy themes. Instead we have, in each case, a movie that reflects what it is about, namely a set of complex physical challenges that require both imagination and fanatical attention to detail. Which may be a good enough reason to go to the movies.