Actor Tommy Lee Jones served as president of the competition jury at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. During his parting speech at tonight’s closing ceremony, he shared these comments.
“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 that some people might associate with film 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.
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. Yet it feels like those have become more of a dominant cultural force 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, went into release 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 the same venue where the film festival took place, happened to host the Marvel Age of Heroes exhibition as well. 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 movie news, too. Take it from a freelancer who just submitted an article this week with festival quotes from Steven Soderbergh about his new HBO project and his drunk Oscar night experience … only to see the headline for that article reframed as something superhero-related. While that angle might drum up more reader interest, it seems like a symptom of a larger trend whereby the media will do anything it can to tap into the current superhero obsession. This includes asking filmmakers like Ridley Scott unrelated questions about superheroes when they’re out promoting their new biblical epic or what-have-you.
Maybe audiences 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 before they gaze too far down their own navel.