Oscar winner and Boss Coffee drinker Tommy Lee Jones served as president of the competition jury at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. where photographers begged him to “smile!” Onstage at tonight’s closing ceremony, Jones did smile at least once, and he shared these comments about film festivals:
“Film festivals at their best are, I think, meant to relieve filmmakers and audiences from strict commercial demands. We require no car crashes. No pistols pointed into the lens. No exploding, frozen, or flooding cities. No damsels in distress. And no adolescent superheroes. Well, of course, we’re not here to say that car crashes and pistols and exploding cities and distressed girls and adolescent superheroes are all bad. They’re simply not required. And at our best, film festivals will not relieve the cinema’s responsibility for narrative coherence, visible beauty, and the duly diligent improvement of an audience’s time.”
This is an interesting way to codify the ideal programming for a film festival, since it positions it halfway between the extremes of blockbuster spectacle and the kind of artsy-fartsy fare some people might associate with festivals. The emphasis Jones puts on “narrative coherence” and “improvement of an audience’s time” puts the onus on independent filmmakers to not abandon lucid — even audience-friendly — storytelling as they operate outside the mainstream multiplex.
Doing press coverage of the festival as a freelancer for the first time opened my eyes to some of the “strict commercial demands” Jones mentioned, too. It made me aware of how the cottage industry of movie news is not so different from the actual movie business, at least when it comes to marketing stories to audiences (in this case, readers).
Of the jury’s deliberation process, Jones said, “We speak five different languages, and we needed five different interpreters. It felt like the United Nations.” Writing for a predominantly American audience, I’ve faced the hard truth that, in an editor’s eyes, not every quote that comes out of an actor’s mouth or foreign film that screens at a festival is going to be worthy of a write-up. First, you have to pitch them and sell them on how the story will appeal to readers before they’ll greenlight it. Then, you might see them slap a headline on it that will appeal to the lowest common denominator of pop-culture interest.
The ‘Marvel Age of Heroes’
Jones co-starred in Batman Forever and Captain America: The First Avenger, so he’s no stranger to superhero films, of course. Yet it feels like those have become more of a dominant force, culturally, in the six years since the latter movie hit theaters. We’re now into Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Marvel Studios bumping up its output from two to three films this year. The studio’s latest offering, Thor: Ragnarok, released just yesterday, right as the film festival ended here in Tokyo. It’s already on track to give Marvel another $100 million opening.
Earlier this year, the Tokyo City View sky gallery, located in Roppongi Hills — the same venue where the film festival took place — happened to host an exhibition dedicated to the “Marvel Age of Heroes.” A huge Iron Man statue towered over visitors as they entered the sky gallery, and you could see the Marvel logo everywhere. While not intended as a commentary on the state of Hollywood, it served as a reminder of how the landscape outside the film festival circuit is overrun by superheroes.
This bleeds into the kinds of questions filmmakers get asked at media events. When you hear a journalist lob a superhero question at them that’s unrelated to the movie they’re promoting, that may just be an attempt to tap into the current cultural obsession and drum up reader interest. I myself recently submitted an article with festival quotes from Steven Soderbergh about his new HBO project and his drunken Oscar night experience, only to see the headline reframed as something superhero-related.
Maybe moviegoers are fickle, or maybe, as Jones implied, festival films just need to up their narrative game and keep the audience in mind, hooking it with more compelling human stories that don’t indulge in navel-gazing (or superheroes).