每年的暑期通常是商业片泛滥的时候，这些不追求内涵只注重票房的影片又被称为“爆米花电影”（Popcorn movie），意思是适合边吃爆米花边喝可乐，消磨时间时看的电影。这种影片通常集合了多种商业元素，如当红明星、知名导演、眩技特效、巨额投资，甚至全球同步上映等等。
我们并不排斥商业片的存在，许多经典的商业片不仅至今仍被影迷津津乐道，还推动了电影本身的发展。然而时至今日，片面追求票房收入的趋势使得越来越多的所谓大片变成了一堆堆“华丽的垃圾”，甚至反过来阻碍了小成本高质量电影的发展。
暑期电影的路越走越狭窄，长此以往，其出路又在何方？
THE SUMMER of 2008 is shaping up as an unusual one for me. I’m actually looking forward to seeing several of the films on offer.
After all, who wouldn’t want to see the first Indiana Jones film in nearly 20 years, the wonders the gifted 1)Guillermo del Toro has cooked up for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Russian director 2)Timur Bekmambetov’s American debut in Wanted or what director 3)Christopher Nolan and Batman 4)Christian Bale have in store for The Dark Knight?
Even comedies are looking more promising than usual. Will Smith as a 5)grumpy superhero in Hancock, Steve Carell as secret agent Maxwell Smart in Get Smar and Adam Sandler as a Israel agent turned Manhattan hairdresser in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan look to be ideally cast (fingers crossed, of course, about the movies themselves). And a new picture from Pixar (this one’s about a robot named WALL?E) is always the best bet of any season.
It used to be that every summer held this high degree of anticipation for me. In fact, I used to look forward to everything coming out, no matter what the season. Though critics are often
6)derided as people who don’t like films, the truth is you couldn’t have this job unless you cared passionately enough about movies to sit through the waves of nonsense that routinely get tossed at today’s audiences.
But over the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in what the studios were doing with the
summer, the season Hollywood counts on for
making most of its money. In a business in which the average cost of making and marketing a studio film is more than $100 million, the summer movies have been tailored more and more to the mindlessness often associated with the tastes of young males, still Hollywood’s most loyal audience.
This youth-pandering has become so relentless that it has 7)put a crimp into one of my favorite rituals: walking through theater lobbies in the spring and looking at the posters for upcoming summer films. In some years things got so 8)dire that I couldn’t find a film I even wanted to see, let alone review.
As if this tendency weren’t bad enough in and of itself, it began leaking into and infecting the rest of the year. The reality is that, except for the 9)ghettoized adult window in the fall, this dumber-is-better attitude is threatening to take over all of the major studios’ output. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the summer is killing American movie culture.
With corporate owners demanding predictable profits, the studios have understandably narrowed their focus to the kinds of undemanding entertainments favored by the 25-and-younger audience that dominates theatrical attendance. And they are not just doing it during the summer, they’re doing it almost year-round.
本文为全文原貌 未安装PDF浏览器用户请先下载安装 原版全文 In all likelihood that tendency is even contributing to the nationwide loss of film-critic jobs that’s been so commented on of late. With so many films coming out that don’t really demand serious examination, and an
aging readership that is going to fewer and fewer movies, newspaper editors in cities where (unlike Los Angeles, New York and a few other places) films are not an
10)intrinsic part of local culture are probably figuring
that it’s not worth the expense of paying anyone to examine them. And if critics go, the mechanism for encouraging audiences to go to good small films, for creating a demand for alternatives to what critic 11)Richard Schickel has called Hollywood’s “big clanking machines” goes with them.
Is there any way out?
If this summer turns out the way it might, it could encourage the studios to give films to people who could actually do a good job of writing and directing them, not just to the latest music video or commercial phenomenon who likely as not has as much interest in the human condition as a stone. As always, it would help enormously if the adult audience did its part to patronize intelligent films, even at the risk of going to ones that they might not like.
The kids who made 12)Prom Night the No. 1 film in the country a few weeks ago didn’t 13)agonize about how satisfying it might be or whether perhaps a more involving film might be
14)coming down the pike the following week. They saw the name and they went. That’s why another Prom Night movie is probably in the works and the people who made 15)Stop-Loss are trying to figure out why their audience didn’t show up.
对于我来说，2008年的夏季会很不寻常，因为对今年要上映的一些电影我居然会心怀期待。
毕竟在相隔近20年之后，有谁不愿意观看第一部印第安纳?琼斯系列电影的续集呢？还有天才导演吉尔莫?德尔?托罗精心制作的《地狱男爵2黄金军团》，俄罗斯导演提莫?贝克曼贝托夫的第一部美国影片《通缉犯》，或者克里斯托弗?诺兰和“蝙蝠侠”克里斯蒂安?贝尔通力合作的《蝙蝠侠前传2黑暗骑士》？
即便是喜剧看起来都比以前要值得期待。威尔?史密斯在《全民超人》中扮演脾气暴躁的超人、史蒂夫?卡瑞尔在《糊涂侦探》中扮演特工麦克斯韦?精明，而亚当?桑德勒则在《别惹佐汉》中扮演以色列特工跑到曼哈顿去做发型师，看起来演员阵容都很完美（当然了，还是交叉一下手指，祈祷影片本身也不错）。还有皮克斯的一部新片（这部影片讲的是一个名叫WALL?E的机器人）在任何季节都是最可靠的选择。
以前每年夏天，我总是对影片抱有很高的期待。实际上，我过去常常对上映的每部影片都很期待，不论是在哪个季节。虽然电影评论家们常常像不喜欢电影的人那样极尽嘲讽，但实际上除非你对电影极其痴迷，否则你是没办法耐着性子看完现如今这一堆堆通常让观众恼怒不已的无聊影片的。
然而在过去几年里，我发现各个工作室夏季档期的影片发生了一个变化――在这个季节里，好莱坞希望能尽可能多地赚钱。对于这样一个每部影片的制作和推广成本平均高于一亿美元的行业来说，夏季电影越来越倾向于迎合不愿动脑子的年轻男性的口味，他们仍然是好莱坞最忠实的观众。
这种拉动年轻人市场的做法是如此地坚持不懈，以致于妨碍到了我最钟爱的习惯之一在春季档期行走在电影院的大厅里，观看即将到来的夏季电影的海报。有几年情况特别糟糕，我甚至找不到一部自己想要看的电影，更别说写评论了。
就像这种趋势本身还不够糟糕似的，它还开始扩散并影响了其余的档期。事实上，除了秋季专为成年人开设的窗口以外，这种沉默是金的态度正在威胁着那些主要工作室出产的影片。我并不是想上纲上线，不过夏季电影正在扼杀美国的电影文化。
由于公司的所有者要求可预期的收入，各工作室自然就会将他们的注意力缩小在那些要求不高的娱乐片上，以满足那些支配着电影院入座率的25岁以下观众的喜好。而如今他们并不仅仅在夏季档期这样做，全年的情况都差不多。
而且十有八九，这种趋势甚至还会导致全国范围内影评从业者的流失，最近人们对此颇有微词。太多正上映的影片并不真正需要严格的审查，而成年的观众越来越少看电影了，对于除了洛杉矶、纽约和其他一些地方以外的城市的报纸编辑来说，电影并不是本地文化固有的一部分，所以他们可能认为不值得花钱去请人来给电影写评论。然而如果没有了影评，那么鼓励观众去看小成本优质电影，以及要求对影评家理查德?希克尔所谓的好莱坞的“叮当作响的大机器”进行改革的机制，也都会随之而去了。
有什么办法能够解决吗？
如果今年夏天趋势有变化的话，还是有可能解决的，因为它能鼓励工作室将影片交给那些确实能够写出好剧本并擅长导演的人来制作，而不仅仅是迎合最新的音乐电视或者商业趋势，那些片对于人类处境的关心可能同对一块石头的差不了多少。同往常一样，假如成年观众能够尽其本份去支持有思想内涵的影片，即使是冒点风险去观看他们可能不喜欢的影片，那都会是极大的帮助。
数周前，孩子们让《灯红酒绿杀人夜》登上了美国的票房榜首，他们并不为这部电影有多好看，或者接下来一个星期是否有一部更有深度的电影可能会上映而苦恼。他们只是看到了这部片的名字，然后就去观看了。这就是为什么另一部类似《灯红酒绿杀人夜》的影片正在筹划之中，而拍摄了反战片《止损》的人则在试图找出为什么他们缺乏观众的原因。
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