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The Movie: Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters, directed by Bill Couturie
Recommendation: Me
Reason: A documentary about what makes movies great, and what makes them bad! Finally, some insight!

I'm developing some really awesome hindsight here. It's like...I didn't need to see this movie. Like I already knew most of the 'amazing revelations' about the creative process. Maybe it's just my work as an admittedly unsuccessful writer, maybe it's my developing love of film. Maybe it's just that a lot of what the interviewed artists talked about was common sense. Yes, in fact, you do need a good script, a good director and some good actors to make a successful movie. However, the people in the film seem to have confused 'good' with 'famous'. They kept pushing out Nia Vardalos and John Singleton as though the pair of them were idiot savants when their first films were as good as they were. As though Vardalos wasn't a good writer, and Singleton wasn't a good director.

For a documentary that claimed it was going to address what makes movies flop, they didn't discuss a lot of flops. They talked a lot about some really great movies, and how those films were almost never made because of strange concepts or off-the-wall casting, but aside from some good natured ribbing about Howard the Duck and Morgan Freeman's soundbite about Bonfire of the Vanities, there wasn't a lot more ammo fired at the movies that sounded great on paper, but blew it at the box office. They didn't talk to the Coen brothers, so obviously they couldn't discuss The Ladykillers. Nobody asked Tarantino what he thought, so he couldn't really address the success of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill versus the relative failure of Jackie Brown. No Robert Rodriguez, who could have offered an interesting perspective on filmmaking for children versus filmmaking for adults. I could go on about the silliness of leaving off M. Night Shyamalan (to examine how ego annihilates otherwise potentially good filmd) or Baz Luhrmann (though they did at least address the unlikely success of Moulin Rouge).

If you're new to the film industry and want to hear a few tidbits about box office unpredictability and some anecdotes about Jaws (because they talk about Jaws a LOT), then sure, watch this. If you're not new or you don't have your ears plugged and your eyes closed, find something else. If anyone has any suggestions along that vein, I'm all ears.

-46/365 down, 319/365 to go