MovieMonday: Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs

This 83-year-old Disney movie was the first full-length animated feature.  If you haven't seen it since your childhood, you might want to give it another look.  It is beautiful and sincere and still relevant to its intended audience, children and their parents.

The plot generally follows the lines of the familiar Grimms' fairy tale, but it was customized to appeal to young viewers, chiefly with the addition of very nice birds and forest animals, plus seven dwarfs -- small, bald, bearded men, each with a childish personality quirk that is revealed as they and Snow White get to know each other.

When the evil stepmother sets out to kill Snow White, the animals and dwarfs join forces to save her. This disharmonious part of the movie, and its resolution, are much shorter than its satisfying (to children) set-up.  Of course, all ends well.

What is remarkable is that the film gratifies the basic wishes of children -- for people to be nice and to be accepted by nice animals, for good to triumph and, along the way, for silly characters like the dwarfs to provide laughs that relate to children's own experiences.


Moviemakers with Small Children

It's tempting to guess that the birth of Walt Disney's first child in 1933 informed some of the sincerity of Snow White and its broad appeal to families of that time.

In a similar way, think of the first Toy Story movie, released in in 1995.  The film came from Pixar, then owned by Steve Jobs, who married in 1991 and had his first child with his wife the same year.  Similarly, Pixar's chief creative officer became a dad in 1992.  The Pixar team included several other parents raising young families.

Toy Story didn't reach back to Grimms' Fairy Tales for material but rather to the fond memories of its creators' youth -- a cowboy hero, plus Slinky Dog, Mr. Potato Head, Etch a Sketch and Tinker Toys.  The sharing of such nostalgia must have struck a chord with other Boomer parents' progeny, the so-called Boomlet that peaked in the mid 2000s, and no doubt gratified their parents as well.

I don't know who is running Pixar now (it was acquired, like all franchises, by Disney) but my sense is that Pixar films are little less sincere these days, possibly because they are made by people less likely to have small children around the house.

In addition, I'd guess that films like Snow White, as long as they are available on Disney Plus or other streaming services, will resonate longer because their themes are more universal and less reliant on consumer products.

This is one reason to be happy that films like this one still can be found on streaming services.


And by the Way

I was motivated to see this movie by the book at right, an unusual one by a man named Dean Sluyter. The subtitle is Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.

The author, a self-described old hippie and longtime Buddhist, treats film as literature and discusses many famous movies, interspersing his analyses with religious observations drawn from sources as varied as Eastern religions and the New Testament, and also with bits of autobiography.  The combination may sound odd, but it worked for me.

The first movie discussed in the book is Snow White.  Sluyter opens by noting that the heroine is perhaps not as appealing to current tastes as, say, Mulan or Moana -- "no talents but housekeeping and no interests beyond pining away for that Special Someone who will someday come and solve all her problems."   

(Ed. note: The prince of Snow White's dreams isn't exactly an action hero himself.)

Sluyter contrasts Snow White, who views her image in the rippled reflections of a well, with the evil Queen/stepmother who obsessively asks a mirror for reassurances of her beauty.  The writer suggests that Walt Disney may not have been a dharma devotee but that he was thinking along similar lines.

From the essay:

The words narcissism and narcotic come from the same root, and the Queen is hooked, a mirror junkie with an expensive habit. The plot is set in motion when the Spirit puts Mommie Dearest in a rage by revealing that Snow White is now fairest of all. 

The further discussion of Disney and the care he put into the making of this film, and then how Disney films evolved from there, is also engaging.

In fact,  Cinema Nirvana has many thoughtful discussions.  If you find yourself housebound and tiring of the tedium, watching classic movies and reading what this writer has to say about them could be a helpful diversion.  

Talking about Toilet Paper

Above is an advertisement for the sort of machine that in recent weeks would make its owner popular in any American neighborhood.  One of the most puzzling responses to the coronavirus outbreak has been the hoarding of toilet paper.

As one raised in the Pacific Northwest, I am more familiar with the forest products industry than many.  And, as an avid fan of industrial plant tours, I have been privileged to observe a more advanced version of a similar machine in action.

The machine I saw has an automated feed of long "parent rolls" of rolled paper and also an automatic cutter function.  Once cut, the smaller rolls are packed in 96-unit boxes and shipped to industrial customers and government organizations like school districts.

As it happens, the machine is one among many different types in a paper factory founded by a longtime friend.   His business model is to buy large volumes of raw paper and fashion them into products sold in bulk, not in retail stores.

I called my friend recently after reading of a toilet paper heist: Thieves had shattered the rear window of an expensive automobile and made off with two 12-packs of Charmin Ultra Soft.

My friend had his own story.  One client of his, a porta-potty company, was burgled and relieved, so to speak, of its supply of toilet paper and hand sanitizers.

These are desperate times indeed.

"I don't get the tissue hoarding thing," he said, which makes sense: The Covid-19 virus doesn't seem to correlate with a need for more frequent bathroom visits.

"Honestly, I expected our hand towels to be more popular," he continued, "but maybe more people than you think do their business at work every day and now that they're home, well...."

("Doing their business" seems to be industry-speak for you-know-what.)

Perhaps I'm more cynical.  I'll bet that, till now, not many employers kept the company TP supply locked in janitors' closets.  My guess is that workers were panicked by empty tissue aisles they had seen in grocery stores and then reacted by taking employers' tissue rolls home from work.  (For the record, I do not approve of this behavior.)

Anyway, my friend's business is good.  Tissue orders have doubled, and he's turning away inquiries from potential new customers.

"I have paper when other people don't have paper.  I could sell a lot more, but I'm sticking with my regular price structure," he says.

To meet demand, he's added Saturday and Sunday overtime shifts, "but that's it. Most of our guys have families.  If one of them gets sick, I'll close for a couple weeks."

Like all my longtime friends, he's an upstanding individual.




On a Related Topic

This writer typically spends winters in a Southern California beach town; this year's visit has been extended, naturally, by the unavailability of airline flights out.

The current locale is home to a large number of homeless persons, mostly young white guys, who seem to have learned since 2019 that their confreres up north in San Francisco have been "doing their business" on local sidewalks.  The local denizens now have adopted the same practice.

I discussed this with a police officer I saw on the sidewalk last week.  "We have to observe them actually doing it to write a citation, " he said.  The expression on his face seemed to indicate a sentiment like this: I-didn't-go-to-the-police-academy-to-catch-grown-men-pooping-in-public.   But I could have got it wrong.

Meanwhile, the city's dog owners seem to have relaxed their standards in a similar way.  On the day before the local library closed, I looked out its window and saw a leashed schnauzer take a dump on the sidewalk outside.  Afterward, the dog and his owner walked away.  The schnauzer droppings were still there when I left.

(I haven't been back since, of course, and so it's entirely possible that some civic-minded person with a shovel and free time scooped up the feces and deposited them in the garbage can on the corner.)

Then, last week, on the grass space between my building and the beach sidewalk, one of my sneakers stepped into a human- or Labrador-sized pile of poop; my experience hasn't equipped me to discern which variety it was.  I walk with greater care now.

At this moment and in this location, the veneer of civilization seems thinner than a square of single-ply toilet tissue.


Note -- April 3  Turns out my friend's analysis was correct.

MovieMonday: Downhill Racer

Here's a movie that's easy to find and stream on home screens when you are stuck indoors, as so many are now.   It has beautiful scenery, athletic competition that is unavailable at the moment and a performance by Robert Redford who, unusually in his career, plays an antihero.

The film was well-received in late 1969, but it didn't get much attention compared to another Redford film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the buddy-outlaw comedy with Paul Newman that was released six weeks earlier and sold 50 times as many tickets.

Still, just now, this may be worth a look.

The story goes like this:  David Chappellet (Redford) is called to join the U.S. ski team during the European winter season to replace an injured skier.

He refuses to ski in his first race when he is assigned the 88th slot. "I'll be in ruts up to my knees," he complains.

In the next race, he is assigned number 79 and comes in fourth.  "Maybe next time I'll get to start in the top 50," he grouses afterward.

But then there is the beauty of the piece.  One spectacular scene is a skier's-eye view of a competitive downhill run that is thrilling to watch.  There are others.

To the extent we come to understand Chappellet, we see him as disaffected from his tiny home town and his equally disaffected father, aware that every time he loses a race someone else wins and disappointed when his aspirational girlfriend -- a glamor-puss who works for a ski manufacturing company and drives a yellow Porsche 911-- makes clear that she really isn't that into him.

When another U.S. skier says, "He (Chappellet) is not for the team and never will be," a third skier notes, "Well, it's not a team sport, is it?" 

Similarly there are riffs on the "justice of sport" around the time when the team's top skier, a veteran, busts up a leg just before the winter Olympic Games.  These things happen in life, and not just in the lives of competitive athletes.

The movie challenges the viewer to wonder whether a triumphant downhill skier -- handsome and skilled and the focus of much attention -- is really the sort of person who deserves our admiration.

-----

Note

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Washington, is the sort of person who deserves our admiration at this moment. 

MovieMonday: The Films of Eliza Hittman

If I had gone to a theater last weekend, I would have seen this movie.  It concerns a pregnant teenager's trip to New York City with her cousin to arrange an abortion that would have required parental consent in the small Pennsylvania town where the girls live. 

Effectively, it observes the two almost-adults coping as their daylong journey expands to three days in a city they do not know.   Critics love this movie, but some want to see its story as a rebuke to "toxic masculinity" or a call to activism for preserving abortion rights in "Trump-era America."

That all may be true, but I'm pretty sure it misreads the more personal aspect that Eliza Hittman, the filmmaker, wants to explore.  Her films to date have been observations of adolescents adrift and coming to grips with their sexuality -- lonely journeys that parents perceive only dimly if at all.

Instead of going to the theater, I streamed Hittman's two earlier releases at home.  So let's talk about those. 


It Felt Like Love, 2013





This deliberately mis-titled story concerns 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti) who wants to be more like her sexually active friend, 16-year-old Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni,) and less like her pleasant 12-year-old neighbor, Nate (Case Prime,) whom she regards as a little boy.

Lila stands at the beach shore while Chiara's current boyfriend plays with her in the water.  Lila is there when the two use their hands to pleasure each other and when the boyfriend tells Chiara she is too far ahead -- too sexually experienced -- for him.  Lila is not around when the boyfriend breaks up with Chiara.  Lila had seen their relationship as enduring and true, while Lila's father, a widower, was confident that it was not going to be a long-term one. 

Wistful Lila sets her sights on Sammy (Ronen Rosenstein,) a randy college boy who is not interested in her.  But Lila persists.  She makes up stories about encounters with Sammy and shares them with her friends.  Her yearning and awkwardness are evident.

Things happen -- not romantic things -- and eventually Lila begins to catch up with Chiara.

This movie is not a series of plot events but rather the study of an uncertain girl who is making up her life as she goes along.  The acting, almost entirely by a bunch of new actors and especially Piersanti, is so believable that it feels absolutely true -- and more than a little sad.


Beach Rats, 2017




Like the first film, this one is set in outer Brooklyn.  It revisits the same theme but with a male character, Frankie (Harris Dickinson,) who is a few years older than Lila but also is coming to terms, again awkwardly, with his sexuality.

In this case, Frankie's sexual preference is for men.  He takes pictures of his buff physique, posts the photos on gay websites, and then he meets and has sex with older men who find him attractive.  He craves their attention.

Meanwhile, he hangs out with bloke friends who know nothing about this part of his life, which he also hides from his mother and sister.  (His very sick father dies during the course of the movie.)

Frankie meets an attractive young woman, whom he likes and who is appropriate for him by his friends' estimation.  When asked by her and and by the men he meets for sex,  he says, "I don't know what I like." It's denial, but understandable in his situation.

Like Lila in the earlier movie, Frankie tries to avoid facing his desires by getting drunk and/or high.  When sober, again like Lila, he remains conflicted but decides to act.

The resolution, if in fact it is one, has Frankie returning to Coney Island, the place he visited with his friends early in the film.

As in the 2013 movie, the lead character, first-timer Dickinson, turns in a performance that is utterly convincing if not easy to watch.


Eliza Hittman

This filmmaker, a Brooklyn native, wrote and directed the current Never Sometimes Often Always film that had the misfortune to be released as Americans decided to stay home and avoid Covid 19 exposure.  The movie opened Friday on thousands of screens, but, not surprisingly, sales were weak.

It's interesting that the film received a PG-13 rating when it deals unflinchingly with disturbing and mature matters of adolescent sex while cartoon-like shoot-em-ups are rated R and deemed appropriate only for viewers who are 18 or older.

Hittman's work is original and regarded highly within its industry, as is that of her cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, who did the camera work on the two later films.

But movies like Hittman's are challenging in the same way that serious literature is more challenging than the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy, which is easier to digest and much more profitable.

If Ms. Hittman's new film finds an audience, it may consist more of people interested in pro-choice political themes than in the situation the filmmaker most wanted to explore -- the coping of two young women in a desperate situation.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Memories of times when people weren't afraid to gather in groups.  

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This year for the Super Bowl we were at my sister-in-law Dalia’s house in Glendale. Me? About football I know bubkes. Who’s playing? Don’t ask. (Ed. note:  The 49ers lost to the Chiefs.) As usual, the men were in the den with the bir and the cigars, while in the dining room, we “girls” were playing mahjong and the kids were going at it with penny poker and pisha paysha.

Later, when the men were running back and forth from the waschzimers, Benjy, (Lola’s son-in-law), yelled, “You gotta see this halftime show!” So, we did. And what did we see? We saw 50-year-old Jennifer Lopez half naked on a pole twirling her toches like a baboon in heat. As the kids say: “That’s something I can never unsee.”

And then there’s the Oscars. Who are these people? The only real movie star I recognized was Kirk Douglas, and he’s dead. Brad Pitt I know from the tabloids. Martin Scorsese I saw in the audience looking so tiny he should’ve had a booster seat.  I slept through all of the red-carpet chitchat, but I did see that schtunk Joaquin Phoenix give his speech thanking G-d and pegging the rest of us as mamzerim for “injecting cows with hormones, stealing their babies, and selling the milk to put it in our coffee.” This we need? Likewise, Rene Zellweger, who portrayed Judy Garland, droned on so long that I was able to use the kloset, load up the dishwasher, reorganize my purse, take a nap, and when I woke up, she was still kvelling away. Oy!

And then there’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. All over the news they are. She’s the actress nobody heard of who married the prince and invited only her mother to the wedding. Okay, so her father’s a schmuck, but no invitations she sent to her siblings? Yes, they’re half-siblings, but half-schmalf, family is family until they borrow money and don’t pay it back. Adele Luskin said maybe there weren’t enough seats in the cathedral for other relatives, (but between you and me, Adele’s been taking a medication that makes her drowsy and a bit schwindeldik).

Enough I’ve said already.



Vocabulary

Waschzimers: A variation on the German words wasch (wash) and zimmer (room.)

Pisha paysha:  Yiddish for the card game War, which remains popular among children to this day.

Mamazerim: In Jewish, a mamzer is a person born out of wedlock (aka, a bastard.) Grandma's use suggests a more general definition, one that defines mamzerim (the plural) as bad human beings.

Schwindeldik: Schwindel is a German word for dizziness.  With the addition of the dik suffix, Grandma seems to be suggesting a person who can't think straight.

MovieMonday: Greed

This film wants to be a hilarious takedown of a selfish billionaire.  In the right hands, it could have made some good points.  Sadly, that does not happen here.

The hero/villain of the piece is the one-dimensional Sir Richard McCreadie (aka McGreedy, haha) who is played with glee by the talented Steve Coogan.

McCreadie has been an insufferable jerk since before he dropped out of school and became a fashion entrepreneur.  His negotiating style, when quoted any price -- even for a completed cab ride in impoverished Sri Lanka -- is to offer 75 or 80 percent less, take it or leave it.  Surprisingly, many people take the money.

Sir Richard buys and opens fast-fashion stores and strips them of assets before they go bankrupt.  His biggest deal, the one that makes him a billionaire, is the purchase and subsequent sale-leaseback of a large chain of retail stores; he of course stashes the cash in tax-free Monaco.  This has made him the target of an inquiry about various of his business practices by the British parliament.

His mother and ex-wife are just as bad.  His resentful son is said to be studying up on Oedipus in Wikipedia.

To stroke his already oversized ego, McCreadie hires a pliant journalist (a completely underused David Mitchell) to produce an authorized hagiography.

McCreadie also orders up a Gladiator-themed birthday party for himself on the Greek Island of Mykonos -- complete with togas, paid celebrity guests and a real live lion.  When he visits the island to check on the project's progress, he frets about the unsightly Syrian refugees blocking his view of the public beach and the low-paid (natch) Bulgarian contractors' slow speed as they construct his plywood coliseum.

That's enough of the setup.  The plot climax and resolution may have -- may have -- looked good on paper, but boy are they weak.

I cannot recommend this movie.   In the current moment of coronavirus anxiety, it probably will not attract many viewers. No big loss.



Notes

McCreadie's antics and excesses -- the $100 million yacht, the multi-day birthday parties for the beautiful people, the reality-show daughter -- are a pretty straight recitation of complaints about Topshop founder Sir Philip Green, who seems to be widely loathed in the U.K.  It's only when Greed's plot strays from this narrative that it wanders into total idiocy.

-----

Greed opens and closes with the phrase, "Only connect," a famous epigraph that the film traces accurately to Howard's End, a novel by E.M. Forster.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought this hearkening to a famous novel from the last century would inspire moviegoers to consider the poor garment workers paid very low wages by people like McCreadie: If so, they were wrong.

I've read that novel; it's about personal relationships, not social justice. Either the filmmakers should have come up with a different motto or left the Forster reference out of it.

-----

Just after the "Only connect" message and before the final credits roll, placards tell us about the inequality of the world:
   
That 90 percent of billionaires are men, that the wealth of 26 billionaires equals the net worth of 3.8 billion humans.  That garment workers in desperately poor countries make four quid (British pounds) per day.

We get it.  Apparently the wish is for this ostensible comedy to make its audience angry enough to march in the streets with signs deploring billionaires.

I'm not a billionaire and prefer not to be.

Still, I understand the tension: Giving low-paid jobs to to impoverished people in Bangladesh and Myanmar is a tradeoff that makes it much much easier for the working poor in first-world economies to be fashionable.  Or, if they have consciences, perhaps to be concerned about global inequality and their contribution to such by buying cheap duds.

On the other hand, current American billionaires' fortunes accrue mostly to the creation of products that don't require the employment of low-skilled workers.  Would the founders of Google, Apple, Oracle, Facebook and others have become as wealthy as they are if they had to provide the numbers of jobs that industrial companies require?  Of course not -- those rich peoples' firms employ a relatively small number of well-paid techies, but what good do they do for the urban poor whose financial burdens now include high monthly cellphone and wifi bills?  Are we supposed to believe that the non-fashion billionaires are better people than the guy in this film?

-----

If the current Cov 19 dread continues, future Movie Monday posts will be about classic movies available online, which will accommodate cinema fans stranded at home.

Covid 19 -- We Have Seen Worse

Reprising "Stories from the Flu Pandemic," an Idiosyncratist post from 2014

from flu.gov

In the fall of 1918, a flu pandemic swept the world.  In the United States, an estimated 25 percent of the population fell sick and 675,000 people died.

Curiously, the youngest were among the most vulnerable, particularly young adults.  Older Americans seemed to have acquired a certain immunity during an earlier flu season before the turn of the century.

In 1918, doctors believed the flu was a bacterial infection.  In fact, it was a virus, but viruses were little understood at the time.  The distinction made no difference: There were no medicines in 1918 to treat infections of either kind.  Treatment consisted of rest, aspirin and patent medicines.

People retreated to their homes.  Public gatherings were cancelled, many schools were closed and church attendance stopped for several months.  Cities including San Francisco required everyone to wear gauze masks in public and jailed those who did not wear such masks.  In retrospect it was revealed that gauze masks offered little if any protection.

A New York mailman, from archives.gov

Family Stories

There are a few oral history sources of people's memories of the 1918 flu.  I culled the quotes below from flu.gov and historymatters.gmu.edu.  They are lightly edited but intact in substance.

From Pennsylvania:

     -- "My grandmother had a separate room curtained off when seven of their children got sick with the pandemic flu.  When she entered the room, she wore gauze over her nose and mouth.  Of the seven children that got sick, four of them died . . . . My aunt said that she knew when one of them was not going to live because her mother would sit with the child in the family's rocking chair and sing to him/her.  The rocking chair would creak and when it stopped, she knew they were gone."

From Missouri:

     -- A younger daughter stayed home in December 1918 when her parents and older siblings went for a sleigh ride.  Afterward, "all four children caught the flu; all four died within one week.  It was so cold they put the bodies outside.  Before he died, one of the boys said to 'just put me outside, I will join the others in a few days.'"


From South Carolina

     -- "My grandfather William, a merchant, met his wife Lily at a church gathering.  They had five children, three boys and two girls.  William registered for the draft but was not called to serve.  His business was very prosperous and became more so when the flu epidemic began -- due to increased demands for his livery (taxi) service.  As soldiers returned home with the flu, William picked them up from the train station.  As the numbers of flu stricken soldiers grew, he stopped charging for this service.
         "Sadly William contracted the flu and died in January 1919 at the age of 38.  Lily never remarried and life was very hard for the widowed mother and their children."

From Kentucky, a 95-year-old coal miner's memories:

     "And every, nearly every porch that I'd look at had -- would have a casket box sittin' on it.  Men were a diggin' graves just as hard as they could and the mines had to shut down there wasn't nary a man, there wasn't a mine arunnin' a lump of coal or runnin' no work.  Stayed that way for about six weeks."

From Colorado:

      -- Above is the burial site of an entire family lost:  two parents and their children aged 19, 16, 10, 8 and 4 years old.  (The family name was misspelled on the tombstone.)


A Nurse's Story

Nurse Carla R. Morrisey wrote an article, "The Influenza Epidemic of 1918," that is part of the Navy Department Library.  In it, she recalls what she was told by her great aunt, also a nurse, of caring for sick sailors at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois.  Here are some excerpts:

"With a room of 42 beds and twice that many sick sailors, Josie often worked 18 hours a day. 'As the boys were brought in we would put winding sheets on them even if they weren't dead.  You would always leave the left big toe exposed and tag it with the boy's name, rank and next of kin.' As one boy lay dying in bed, one waited on a stretcher on the floor for the bed to empty.  Each morning as the ambulance drivers would bring in more sick boys they would carry the dead bodies out.   Josie often said she felt sorry for the poor boy on the bottom. . . . As the weeks dragged on the truck loads of caskets left daily for the train station to destinations listed on the 'tag' as next of kin.

"Nursing was nine-tenths of the battle in recovering from influenza.  Since there were only palliatives for the flu and pneumonia it developed into, doctors were not the essential ingredient in fighting the disease . . . . Josie would work endless hours trying to relieve the high fevers and nosebleeds before the lungs filled with blood and face turned blue."


Conclusion

There have been many advances in medical treatment since 1918.  Vaccines and retroviral medicines have taken most of the sting out the flu.  Polio vaccinations, developed in the early 1950s, eradicated a childhood disease that killed thousands and paralyzed many thousands more in the United States, including an American president.  Worldwide, polio has been defeated almost everywhere.

On the whole, we are much healthier than people in 1918, but other challenges -- malaria, chikungunya, Ebola, Lyme disease -- are with us.  With time, new diseases are sure to arise.


Note  

A description of the spread of the 1918 flu, which is believed to have arisen in the U.S.  From 1914 on, World War I had occasioned movements and interactions of soldiers from many continents -- more than any previous event in human history.  An unexpected result was the international spread of a deadly flu virus.

MoviesMonday: Force Majeure v Downhill

Here is a trailer for Force Majeure, a 2014 Swedish film that was much admired by cineastes.



And here is a trailer for Downhill, whose American makers describe it as a "riff" on the Swedish movie.



The films have much in common, but their fates have been very different.

The Stories

Force Majeure and Downhill have the same basic plot:  A seemingly happy family goes on a skiing vacation in the Alps.  While eating lunch on an outdoor deck, they see an avalanche (a controlled avalanche*) heading their way, and the father leaves the scene, apparently to protect himself but not his wife and children, shocking his wife.   Later the wife tells the story of the avalanche scene in a gathering with friends.  The husband counters with his own view of the event.  The parents distance themselves from each other.

From there, the Swedish and American stories diverge.

The Swedish film was written and directed by Ruben Östlund, whose careful, sensitive observations of family dynamics owe much to the late Swedish director Ingmar Bergman.  The film also is described as dark comedy, but the humor comes off as pretty darned dry to an American viewer.

The American version is much more direct and amounts to a war between the sexes. The wife is not just disappointed but enraged by her husband's behavior, and loudly so.  When she talks, other women agree with her.  When he speaks, other men agree with him.  Mother gathers the children and unites with them against the father.

A scene that raises questions toward the end of the Swedish version is rendered explicitly in the American one, maybe because American audiences are presumed to be too literal-minded to deal with subtlety.  The final scene in Force Majeure suggests that the mother may not be perfect herself, but that scene is not part of the Downhill ending, which, per current American themes, ends in a straightforward win for the wife.

In further tailoring for American tastes, Downhill is much more vulgar, with dialog sprinkled with the now typical "fucks" and "shits," and with more explicit discussions of sex organs and sexual activities.  Two friends-of-the-family characters have been cast as shallow clods, presumably to provide some humorous foils to the more serious dueling parents.


Results

Downhill opened on 2,300 U.S. screens on February 14.  It was not expected to be a crowd favorite like Sonic the Hedgehog, which opened the same day, but it stars well-known comedy actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell as the parents, Billie and Pete Staunton.  Its writers and director are also well-regarded.

Downhill was expected to sell $4 million in tickets on its opening weekend, but revenues were a much lower $2.6 million after early reviews came in negative.  By last weekend, more than 70 percent of the theater screens had dropped the movie.  Yesterday, the 17th day after its release, each of those screens attracted an average $47 in sales, or about three viewers over the course of several showings.

In short, the film has bombed.


Theories on What Happened

1) Downhill may have been an unloved orphan in a new home.  Its production was well underway when Disney acquired it in its purchase of 21st Century Fox, which was completed in March 2019.
The very short length of the movie, 86 minutes, further suggests that several scenes may have been cut from the original script, perhaps not by the original writers and directors.  In addition, its release date, during the slow months of the movie year, seem to indicate there was little enthusiasm about its prospects.

2) Promoters may have pitched the film to the wrong market with advertisements suggesting it was a comedy or at least a straight story with lots of yuks around the edges.  These may not have been the kind of moviegoers who would enjoy a story about the disintegration of a married couple's trust in one another.  In fact, the people who saw Downhill in theaters gave it an average rating of "D."

3) Filmmakers could have concluded, wrongly, that Force Majeure was as popular with broad audiences as it was among their group.  In fact, that film's U.S. revenues were less than $1.5 million, and its worldwide sales totaled just over $4.1 million.


* Controlled Avalanche

The Force Majeure movie may have assumed that its largely Scandinavian audience would have understood that ski resorts reduce the likelihood of actual avalanches by breaking up dangerous concentrations of snow with controlled avalanches.

One clever scene in Downhill uses an actor from the earlier movie to play a resort official who explains to Billie and Pete that the controlled avalanche that scared them had been planned ahead and that many warnings had been posted in advance.