Confused? I certainly am ... Still from Mission: Impossible III
You hear a lot about "dumbing down" in the cinema. References to formulaic plots and easy-access characterisations abound, so that you could be forgiven for thinking Mr Lowestcommondenominator is not only calling the shots, but framing, cutting and writing them as well.
In fact, it seems to me, a great many of today's mass-market movies are not so much dumbed down as dumbed up.
Take last year's top 10 highest-grossing movies, for example. Of the six I managed to see, three - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Mission: Impossible III - fell into the dumbed up category of being both easy to watch and near impossible to follow. You sit back and relax, ready to let the fluid entertainment wash over you, only to find yourself struggling wildly to stay afloat.
Characters, motives, actions, dramatic momentum ... all seemed to float half-randomly in a kind of cinematic zero gravity, while, at the same time, providing compulsive viewing. By the end of MI: III, I had the sense of weightless flight, a feeling of heady, semi-conscious triumph of a kind presumably rather like that of Tom Cruise waking up from his walk through the valley of hi-tech death at the end. Kind of clever, really. And that was in a film which, unlike its MI predecessor, gave you characters who were kind enough to refrain from swapping faces every two minutes.
Although my taste in films is fairly catholic, my real love is for movies that live up to cinema's claim to be an artform of high significance. Thus the films I love most tend to be of the intellectually challenging variety that sends Michael White off to his keyboard in a flurry of indignation.
Clearly, to pursue complexity for its own sake is the height of self-indulgence and pretension. But the opaque surface of many "art films" does often serve the positive purpose of preventing the sensuous matter that greets the viewer's eyes and ears from dissolving too quickly into a cinematic formula. The best of these encourage us to tarry with the fabric of the film, to push and prod it for a glimpse of coherence.
Of course only some films reward the trouble, and some don't. Wrestle with Godard and you'll find yourself pushing against the truths that bind the world to itself. Wrestle with Bertolucci and you'll find yourself pushing against nothing much except the cinema's side-exit.
Entertainment cinema, though, is supposed to let its viewers simply sit back and enjoy the ride.
Which is why the current new wave of high-octane obfuscation seems really puzzling. With their murky plotlines and strings of disjointed explosions of cinematographic virtuosity, held together with sparse, elusive dialogue of the kind that make Tarkovsky's notoriously opaque Mirror seem as clear as glass, these films defy all expectation. You do enjoy the ride - but you don't know what kind of rollercoaster you're on.
My main worry, though, is whether they're worth the mental effort. Is the mystery of Pirates' Davy Jones of as deep and timeless significance as Wagner's version of the same character in his opera The Flying Dutchman? Is the mutants' delicate truce with the ordinary folk in X-Men III an expression of a mystery eternally true or endlessly trite? With Bertolucci I can tell. With these, it's anybody's guess.
