Arundell Mill’s Movico 24
After indulging in a weeks worth of movie watching at Arundell Mill’s Movico 24 Egyptian theatre, I am now fairly confident to say that I feel aware of what a typical American person would choose to experience when they buy a ticket stub at the movies. Though my week of movie watching only portrays a glimpse of what other films the rest of the year has to offer, I still feel like I managed to become familiar with a cross section of what pop culture is playing a roll in today’s cinema. By viewing each movie I saw through a sensitive lens, I was able to understand what was present and what wasn’t present in each. Throughout the presentation of this limited, yet dynamic variety of movies, I was able to understand what each featured as a whole. This whole was ultimately lacking in the material I was looking for.
I was looking for an adequate representation of what it meant to “Think Green” in today’s cinematic realm, surrounded by a world constantly being infiltrated by a conscious effort to be more environmentally aware. In today’s world, everyone is ready to jump onto the “Green” bandwagon. Being “Green” is a marketable thing to many people, and now many individuals are responding to this new fad. Whether its conscious or unconscious, people are tending to respond to today’s major issue: the world’s ever heating climate and growing efforts to live more sustainable lives in order to combat this dire issue. It is true that companies and franchises are doing the best they can to market themselves after this model. With the help of a graphic designer or an advertiser, what wasn’t “Green” to begin with will magically become earth friendly because of a green type setting or an illustrated leaf. This is our trend in marketing and pop culture today. By attending screenings at Movico 24 I have been attempting to discover whether or not this same popular phenomenon has graced today’s movie screens as well.
After watching a total of ten movies in a week, I can safely say that I feel surprised by my findings. More movies than I anticipated featured a sort of “Green” mentality, though none of them conveyed a very dire need to make an effort to change the way we live and function as Americans. Through the means of popular American cinema messages and stories were told and plots unraveled, but I can’t say that much of an effort was made to explain today’s global warming battle, or what we have to do to stop it. The movies I saw either casually mentioned “Green” issues without providing an answer to their problems, or didn’t reference anything sustainable or “Green” at all. True today’s movie industry is tending to respond to what is marketable and trendy, but why not use the magic of a moving image in a movie to make a creative narrative as an attempt to use film to make a difference on a larger scale.
Efforts were made, but none were as successful as I would have hoped. At least four out of ten movies had a direct or indirect reference to something being “Green” within the context of the film. Frankly, I found that there was a higher count of movies referencing “Green” culture than what I was expecting to find, but none of the movies took it the step further to confront the viewer about what can be done in today’s world to stop wasting as much energy.
Even within the context of the movie theatre energy was wasted. To complete this project affordably, I often had to sneak into movies after I had purchased a ticket for the previous film. Many times I was the only person in the theatre and I hadn’t purchased a ticket. Even if no one was in the theatre, they would have wasted the energy to play each film regardless of whether or not each movie had an audience to view it at all. Avoiding screening each movie if there wasn’t an audience would be an obvious first step towards making the movie theatre itself more energy efficient. In terms of each movie’s content, it was obvious to see that many movies had jumped onto the “Green” bandwagon, some refrecinces being subtler than others.
The first movie I saw was Alien VS Monsters in 3D. I was given a pair of glasses when I purchased my ticket and then made my way into the theatre. I was the only person there, sitting in a huge stadium seated theatre. Before the movie began and after the previews I was pleasantly reminded to “Please Think Green” and recycle my glasses after I wore them when I exited the theater so that they could be reused. This was a refreshing change from being reminded to turn off my cell phone. This was a great beginning to my project, but as I continued to watch the movie I found that for the most part there wasn’t anything else sustainable featured in this digitally animated children’s movie. There was one surprise in the movie though. In one scene a character resembling a fish-like lock ness monster finally puts his feet on ground for the first time in decades after having been locked up in a monster prison. His first comment after walking on the pavement is, “ Is it true that the earth is getting warmer? That would be a very convenient truth.” An attempt was made to be “Green” by referencing the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on Al Gore’s campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide. This reference probably wasn’t understood by children watching the movie and probably only some parents picked up on the nod to Al Gore, so even thought this was a “Green” reference, it wasn’t successful in teaching children or parents alike to be more conscious of the way we live to combat the crisis of today’s global warming.
The next movie I saw was called 17 Again, which starred today’s most popular preteen hunk Zac Affron. The movie began on the court of a high school basket ball game in 1984. The main character stops playing ball because he realizes that his girlfriend is pregnant. This speeds up to the future and shows himself working a hard job with a wife and two kids in the middle of a divorce. He wants nothing more than to retrace his steps and keep playing basketball. Eventually Zac Affron’s character is then again transformed to what he looked like when he was in high school because the school’s janitor granted his wish. This movie had nothing sustainable or green minded featured in the movie whatsoever. There was a mild example of a need to grow and plant in the earth because the mother in the movie was striving to become a landscape designer. Throughout the movie she was shown planting a showroom in her backyard complete with a new fishpond and new gazebo. There wasn’t a vegetable garden in her suburban back yard, only flowering shrubs colored lights.
The movie State of Play was about a reporter for the Washington Post, played by Russell Crow, trying to find the answer to a mystery. After researching some deaths, he finds himself involved in a larger story. He is a true to life reporter, totally obsessed with finding the truth. He lives alone and doesn’t seem to care about material objects. He only has a 15-year-old computer and drives an old beaten up car. He lives for the story and doesn’t have a family to call his own. His friend in the film, played by Matt Damon, is a political man is attempting to make corruption less challenging, but at the same time is connected to the outcome of the killings at the beginning of the movie. This movie is a tangle of events all driving off of a single plot story of a conspiracy theory about the American Defense system and Homeland Security. This movie had absolutely nothing to do with sustainable issues.
Obsessed, Haunting in Connecticut and Observe and Report also had nothing to do with climate change or sustainability. These were the two movies furthest away from being even vaguely related to being “Green”. Obsessed was about a deceiving temp hired to serve as a man’s secretary. She becomes fanatically obsessed with the man she works for and does everything in her power to make her boss love her. She is unsuccessful with her efforts and by the end of the movie she has to deal with her boss’s wife, who is played by Beyonce. There is only one mild example of “Green” culture in this movie. When Beyonce’s husband eats lunch at work he takes a boxed salad and Whole Foods Brand soda out of the refrigerator.
Haunting in Connecticut was a typical horror movie about a family that moved into a haunted house, which previously served as a funeral home. The house’s curse puts the family’s lives in danger and nearly kills a boy with cancer living in the house. Eventually throughout the movie the boy with cancer finds a way to free the spirits living in the house and without surprise, all ends well.
Observe and Report was a dark comedy directed by Rud Apatow. This was critique about how many people live and work in America today, ultimately unhappy and conflicted by the need for material culture. This followed the trials and tribulations in the troubled life of a mall security guard, trying to find some sort of meaning in his life. After a streaker is caught tormenting the ladies of the mall, he believes that his ultimate calling is to find and hunt down this individual and stop him from exposing himself. In the mean time he drives a two-seater security car and when he’s not working he drives a motorcycle. This was a bad movie and it had no examples of anything “Green” except for the way he used transportation.
The next movie I saw was I Love You Man. This movie was the best example of a group of people who would probably like to have done something better to fight the efforts of climate change but who are forced to live within the confines of traditional Los Angeles ways of life. This movie was infiltrated by today’s vague notion of what it means to be a person attempting to be better for the earth. This movie documented today’s convoluted notion of what it means to be a good person using less energy while still living a normal life. The movie starred a couple of typical 28-36 year olds, and though the movie wasn’t actually trying to focus on portraing semi-environmentally conscious people, in my mind it successfully did so.
This was also another Rud Apatow movie primarily about a man who didn’t have a best man to be at his wedding. He didn’t have a friend to call his own besides his wife to be. In order to find the perfect “man friend,” his family hooks him up on dates attempting to find him a guy for him to be buddies with. His brother makes him try hanging out with a weird man from his gym, and his mom makes him have dinner with a family friend’s son, who ends up being gay and awkwardly kisses him passionately after they eat a casual dinner. When he returns home he explains the situation to his fiancée and she politely suggests that he use some “TOMS” in the medicine cabinet. He responds saying that he feels like he has to use chemicals this time, and then proceeds to brush his teeth to get rid of the taste of the man’s kiss. Not often in a mainstream movie to you have reference to the use of naturally made toothpaste. Paul Rudd’s character even takes a thermos to his office to drink coffee out of. Though the movie doesn’t actually state these things for a fact, these are small examples of conscious efforts to live a better way of life, by effectively attempting to help the earth little by little. These are the efforts made by a normal person like myself.
When he finally meets the man of his dreams he finds a person who is even more earth conscious than himself. His new friend drives a Vespa and lives in a house that appears as though it wouldn’t actually use much energy. In casual conversation when they are getting to know each other they quickly mention the idea of hybrid cars and say how great they are. Later on he also claims that his dog’s poop is good for the earth, so he never picks it up. This causes comedic relief throughout the movie because people often step in his dog’s poop when they walk by it. Later, once they have become better friends, they go on a long day hike in woods in the county on Los Angeles. These are the kinds things that people do who want to do more things “Green” but don’t have the ability or means to do so. Though they didn’t vocalize this need to be green in the movie, it was obvious that if their characters carried on in real life without being on film, they would have shown more examples of them vaguely following this issue. These characters reminded me of my friends and my own attempts at “being green.” Depending on our situations, there are only certain things that people can do to change our lives into sustainable ones, while living the lives that we all live now. For Jason Segal and Paul Rudd’s characters, they had to live in Los Angeles, the driving capitol of America. Jason Segal’s character combated this by driving a Vespa, but like any other typical young 30 year old, Raul Rudd’s character drove a Volkswagen station wagon. There is only so much a person can do, especially living in Los Angeles in today’s vaguely “Green” conscious world.
Fast and Furious is about exotic cars racing across Los Angeles and through the Mexican desert. Staring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, this movie is about avenging a notorious drug lord ruling a heroin trade in Los Angeles and Mexico. With the use of tricked out high speed cars, it is their job to out drive the traffickers and beat them at their own game. The beginning of the movie features a successful run at hijacking three full fuel tanks on the highways of the Dominican Republic. Dominic Toretto Vin, Diesel’s character, who was also considered to be an international criminal, refers to the fuel they stole as “liquid gold” in the film. This is the only consideration the movie has to the way that it supplies it’s cars with such expendable amounts of energy. It was the most extravagant movie I saw in terms of the energy waste depicted in the film. The cars featured were some of the most indulgent cars I’ve seen in real life, but also in film. Obviously it wasn’t the movies aim to promote the use of hybrid vehicles, it was promoting gas guzzling high speed machines, the complete opposite of an eco-friendly engine that turns off when it stops. This movie was complete with explosions, guns, chase scenes and tricked out machines bulging out from under the hoods of pimped out cars. Fast and Furious predictably was a car man’s racing dream and nothing else.
Knowing is a movie based around conspiracy theory of a page of supposed random numbers written by a seemingly mental disorder/mentally disturbed girl from 1959 who could predict all of the national disasters of the future. After her page of numbers is recovered from a time capsule, the little girl’s curse is given to another little boy who’s father is a professor at MIT, a man played by Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage’s character is able to decode the page of numbers and is then able to realize that the numbers are a list containing the dates and death tolls of every major disaster, natural and man made, that has happened over the past 50 years, with three that have not yet occurred.
Eventually he realizes that the third and final sequence of numbers is an attempt to give a warning of the end of the world. He realizes that a large solar flare from the sun is going to sweep up and incinerate all of the planet, piercing the ozone layer by the over productivity of the sun’s violent damaging heat rays. This fact is eventually spread across the world and in a scene depicting a news flash broadcasting the Nation’s president, he explains in a live video feed that, “The heat that we are experiencing is getting worse and solar damage has become more of an issue than the world had realized.” He advises everyone to be with his or her families and remain underground, capturing on the way people react to today’s very vauge interest in the sun’s damaging capabilities. In the mean time, following the movies Sci-Fi routs, a group referred to as the whisper people has chosen Nicolas Cage’s son. They ask him leave Earth on their ship in order to start a new world. Eventually his son boards a ship, which departs from Earth. As anarchy reigns in New York City and Boston, Nicolas Cage’s character arrives to be with his parents and sister just as the solar flare strikes Earth and incinerates all life on the planet leaving it a fiery star. Though it was fanaticized, this allowed the audience to believe for a minute that maybe people do need to tend to the earth more considerately; otherwise the sun’s powerful beams could actually destroy life on earth forever.
What I thought was going to be a horror mystery about numbers, actually became a dramatic suspense filled movie about the power controlled by rays of the sun. This fanaticized narrative made a real life reference to the sun’s inevitable desecrating power and turned the movie into something more realistic than a typical Sci-Fi mystery drama.
The final movie I will talk about also made many references to the power that the sun possesses and was obviously the most “Green.” This movie was called Earth. Earth is a feature-length version of the documentary award-winning BBC series Planet Earth, following the migration paths of four animal families across the world. The first U.S. release from Disney was Earth, which debuted on April 22, 2009 – Earth Day. The Walt Disney Co. made the movie after launching a new film production unit called Disneynature, the latest entertainment company to hop on corporate America’s green bandwagon. From 1948 through 1960, the Disney studio produced a 13-film series “True-Life Adventures,” eight of which won Academy Awards, which displayed the active lives of animals around the world. Disneynature is now a striving to attempt to market a way to connect its self to its “Green” routs, which Walt Disney began at the company’s foundation.
The American version of this movie is narrated by James Earl Jones, who gracefully adapts his voice to explain the lives and tribulations of animals and their families living on our planet; the opening quote of the movie being, ”There is no better time than now to show animals trials on the big screen.” “In a world that is ever changing, we follow animals and it’s young.” The film opens with a story about a family of polar bears. Right off the bat the movie explains the danger of the sun’s growing power and how it threatens the lives of the polar bears and cubs it’s documenting. The movie explains that the sea ice is the only place where the bears can find food and if the ice melts prematurely, then the family of bears could starve and die. The movie even goes into detail describing how glacial run off mixing with salt water speeds up the melting process. Throughout the whole film the lives of the bears are sensitively documented, but specifically of the father polar bear whose job it was to retrieve food for his wife and cubs. This polar bear fails his attempt and doesn’t make it back home to his family. He starves due to a lack of food and becomes physically exhausted because the ice floor melts underneath him melted while he tried to gather food, forcing him to be lost at sea. He is forced to swim to a new part of land and when he does finally find potential prey he is too physically strained and much to exhausted to kill anything. During this moment it is stated, “Our planet is warming and is becoming an increasingly dangerous new world. With each year as our planet grows warmer, this becomes more and more of a disaster for polar bears. It will be a surprise if he survives.” The polar bear falls to the ground and is shown dying next to a flock of sea lions. This tender moment sheds light onto our current state of being on this earth. At the end of the movie a very real and true fact is stated, “This is the circle of life that most of us in our urban lives have lost touch with.”
According to the Disneynature website, the effort made to feature a more real world film is an issue in tune with our time today, “Stories that are more than stories. There was a time when most people viewed nature as something apart from themselves. In the 21st century, there is an increasing awareness that we are all a part of nature…a fact we ignore at our peril. DISNEYNATURE will reinforce an understanding of the interrelatedness of all life on earth. Working closely with conservation organizations on each film, Disneynature will not only tell the stories of nature but will let people know how, through their actions, they can affect the story’s ending.”
True this movie was an obvious attempt to get people and young children more aware of today’s dire need to focus on the issues of climate change, however the film failed to show how a person could potentially help to change the way we live in order to use less energy, effectively or indirectly, helping the conditions in which polar bears and other animals a like live on this earth. It didn’t straight up mention that something needed to be done on a personal human basis. The movie only talked about the sun’s heat as if it was only something that happened regardless of our actions as human beings. Though this movie was the most commercially “Green,” it did just as much as the others did in terms of educating the public about sustainable issues. True the other movies didn’t actually have a means to talk about the issue within the context of their plot, but Earth was directly related to the issue and failed to mention that there are ways that people can try to help the dangerous impact the sun has on our existence and the world, animals and humans included. An amazing three out of ten movies made references to the growing heat of the sun, but none of them attempted to address how to change this fact.
Like I Love You Man, Earth casually addressed today’s “Green” mentality without actually supplying an answer. Though it is a hard answer to achieve, people’s knowledge of the issue is still perpetually vague. I was amazed to see that so many moves incorporated “Green” issues into their films, but I was sadly reminded that in today’s culture typically it is only a topic of discussion and not one of action or responsibility. I am looking forward to a day when the needs and wants of the earth are appropriately voiced to the public in a straight forward, yet casual way as it could effectively do so in the setting of the silver screen.
