Anyone who tells you that there’s a formula for producing successful Hollywood movies is a liar. If there was such a formula, then every comic book film that has come out, such as Thor, Captain America, The Green Lantern, etc., would have been a huge financial boon, and then studios could go back to taking chances on more interesting, smaller movies. But, of course, there’s no way to predict how the public will respond to anything, so movies are made by people who operate entirely out of fear.

The formula works as such; there’s no reason to make a $40 million movie that will take $50 million to promote and make prints for. It’s cheaper to either not make the movie, or if you’ve inherited the property, to just bury it. But if you have a $200 million movie, you can’t afford not to throw money at it.

The reason we have so many comic book adaptations now have nothing to do with their potential, but because in 2008, the top two grossing films were Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and so the safest bet for a studio head trying to keep his job was to make more of "those." "Those" films could be just about anything (disaster movies? 3D? Buddy-Cop movies?), it’s why the notion of trends in Hollywood is just fodder for the editors of Entertainment Weekly, not a reality. Trends = Fear + Coincidence.

In the summer of 2007, when Judd Apatow was the only influence that mattered in movie comedies (on the heels of Knocked Up and Superbad, as well as the last four Will Ferrell movies), the studios tried to copy what supposedly made Apatow so successful. The Ferrell/John C. Reilly vehicle Stepbrothers (produced by Apatow) became the template: Hire two actors who can improvise/creatively use profanity and have them make up scenes on the spot, regardless of how much sense they might make in the context of the film. Make references to the early 1990s. Throw in as many narrative and dialogue non-sequiturs as you can. Hope that the negative reviews pointing out the stop-start pacing and how repetitive everything is are drowned out by the laughter in the theater during the first weekend. Move on.

And because these "trends" take a while to kick in, 2011 became the year for us to see the results.

But because Apatow had fallen out of favor after the expensive flops of Funny People and Year One (not to mention the Apatow derivations flopping around in films like Observe and Report and the long-shelved 2009 production Your Highness), a new, cheaper source had to be found. So what are the biggest influences in movie comedies today? Why, it’s the two major sketch groups of the mid-1990s, The State and Upright Citizens Brigade.

You’ll find members of these two troupes somehow involved in every comedy of the last few years, whether they’re on the writing staff (Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant), directing (Ken Marino, David Wain), or acting (Lennon, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser). It’s still the same formula of improvise and curse, then make a bizarre reference to something unrelated, jamming random scenes together with no sense of how they might fit in the overall picture, all shot in the newfangled visual look of all mid-budget comedies, where the only colors on screen are gold and purple, and everyone’s face looks flushed and splotchy. That's why I call it Splotchy-Vision.

This formula explains why all of the studio comedies of 2011 played like one long, poorly edited movie. Call it The Bad Teacher who needed 30 Minutes or Less to get a Hall Pass for The Change-Up and went to Cedar Rapids with his Friends With Benefits to avoid their Horrible Bosses while in search of Our Idiot Brother who ended up at A Good Old Fashioned Orgy … Part II.

Is that why theatrical grosses are down, and going to the movie theater for anything other than something derivative (seriously, the top seven grossing movies of 2011 are all sequels) is a waste of time? Are we all going to end up at home using video-on-demand or Netflix streaming for our entertainment? Isn’t that what we’re already doing?

That’s why I’ve been running Medium Rare Cinema at the Video Library for the past year. I’ve stopped reviewing new films entirely for the past six months, which has allowed me to stop traveling into Center City to be disappointed. The only movie I really liked, lately, was the energetic and enthralling Drive. At Medium Rare Cinema, we show films that aren’t on DVD in the US, and I’d have to honestly say that the three best films I’ve seen this year were ones we screened*. 

It’s not the unavailable tag that makes the films special. It’s that I’d never show a movie I personally thought was boring. We keep a balance of low and high art for those who want to be serious or silly. That you also get prizes, free popcorn, an essay I’ve written about each film, short films, and, most importantly, discussion[!] after the movie is nice, but it’s just a bonus to the actual film.

I hope to see you there at some Thursday night in the future.  

* Those three films would have to be Burn!, Death Watch, and a tie between School on Fire, Barbarosa, Gravehopping, and Comfort and Joy.