A slew of good movie articles in the NY Times

At the end of the years - and in this case decade - you can expect to find lots of good articles-in-review from various news outlets, but the NY Times is pure gold right now:

* A cover article on screenwriter-director Nancy Meyers whose writing credits include Private Benjamin (1980), Irreconcilable Differences (1984), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), The Parent Trap (1998), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and It's Complicated (2009), the last 4 of which she directed. The Times feature delves into Hwood and sexual politics - and apart from Nora Ephron, is there another female director with as much box office clout than Meyers? - but don't overlook observations in the article that spotlight her writing instincts. To wit [emphasis added]:

[re Meyers newest movie It's Complicated]: "“What we have here is a terrific populist comedy,” says a marketing executive at Universal. “It’s a movie that reduces well to a 30-second TV spot.”

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Meyers is also paid for generating “creative value for the studio,” says Jeff Berg, chairman of I.C.M. and her longtime agent. “Studios like to have success,” Berg says, “and then they like to have the halo effect, whereby the films reflect positively on the taste of the studio.”

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It typically takes Meyers two years from start to finish to do a movie — a year for the writing, then six months for the shooting and another six for the editing.

Meyers writes smart, character-driven, high-concept movies aimed squarely at a specific target demo: Women who are 40+ years old. Her talent as a writer and director pay off in numerous ways, including the talent she's able to draw to her projects (It's Complicated stars Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin, following on the heels of her films that starred Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black). But perhaps the highest compliment to Meyers is this simple fact: Who else could get a major studio to pony up $80M and a Christmas Day release date for a movie aimed at older women?

In another piece, my favorite movie critic A.O. Scott weighs in with one of his semi-regular analyses of current cinematic trends with "Cinematically, Homes Are Where You Find Them". Comparing Where the Wild Things Are, Up in the Air, Up, and District 9:

WHEN times are hard, people go to the movies to escape. Like most truisms, this sturdy kernel of Hollywood ideology turns out, on closer examination, not to be entirely true. The urge to escape is powerful, but it also has a way of subverting itself. We may flee to the multiplex or the Netflix queue hoping to escape troubles at home or out there in the world, but those troubles have a habit of following us on our adventures, popping up in our fantasies and haunting our bedtime stories.

That happens at the movies — where action extravaganzas and animated spectacles mutate into allegories of imperial war, social injustice or ecological catastrophe — and also, on notable occasions this year, in the movies, where escape hatches and psychic emergency exits are frequently blocked, and the repressed returns as if on cue. Our heroes and heroines strike out in search of a different reality, and filmmakers are increasingly able to oblige them, building far-flung new universes and worlds inside of worlds. But though our movie avatars can travel freely through time and space, skipping over metaphysical borders with digitally enabled ease, they are more often than not trapped in uncomfortable circumstances, perilous predicaments or their own heads.

This is a prelude to Scott's list of his 19 favorite movies of the year.

Manohla Dargis offers up her 12 favorite movies of the year, framed with her analysis of the indie film world: "Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience":

It was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very good year for Paramount Pictures. Two of the year’s biggest hits, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” have helped the studio climb out of its financial hole with a combined domestic take of more than $500 million. Both movies are deeply stupid, often incoherent and hinged on the principle that the spectacle of violence is its own pleasurable end. “Transformers” is also casually racist. But hey, that’s entertainment.

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Yet while the studios seem to be in retreat from challenging adult films, at least for now, and while nonstudio companies, particularly those in foreign-film distribution, continue to have a rough time (New Yorker Films shut down this year, a tremendous loss), there are some promising signs. Companies like the newly revitalized Cinema Guild (which this year distributed celebrated features from Agnès Varda, Claire Denis and Jia Zhang-ke) and larger ones like IFC Films continue to release tremendous work. Other companies have reconfigured to fit the lean times, as evident by the recent merger of Kino International and Lorber HT Digital, which joined forces to become Kino Lorber. Long may they brighten our screens.

Despite the shake-ups and bad economic times there are now more choices for dedicated movie lovers than at any time in history, though only if you live in a major film market like New York, have access to a cable outfit like the Independent Film Channel, which shows some of the best movies around, or own a region-free DVD player on which you can play international discs. (DVDs only play on machines manufactured for specific zones, a barrier you can bypass by buying or hacking a region-free machine. In March, President Obama gave the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, 25 American DVDs that Mr. Brown couldn’t watch at home apparently because he didn’t own a region-free machine. You should.)

And finally a nice overview of current Hwood movie trends from Brooks Barnes, "In a Distressed Year, Hollywood Smiles":

This was the year that Hollywood hit the jackpot by informing us that Mike Tyson keeps a pet tiger, Spock had a fling with Uhura, Hogwarts School needs a new head, the world will end in 2012, and even George Clooney is up in the air when it comes to women.

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Still, the uptick in moviegoing has studios for the first time in years focusing more on delivering must-see films than churning out poorly executed movies and letting DVD sales pick up the slack.

“If people come to the movies and leave feeling like they got more than they paid for, the experience was validated for them and they will come back,” said Tom Rothman, a chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment.

Of special note, the continued push into 3D movies:

Other factors mattered, like a less-cluttered marquee: the number of films released in theaters dropped 14 percent for the year compared with 2008. But by far the biggest contributor was the audience’s embrace of 3-D screenings, for which a ticket costs $3 to $5 more than standard.

Analysts estimate that box office revenue from 3-D has totaled $1.3 billion so far this year — not counting “Avatar,” from James Cameron, which opened on Friday. In 2008, 3-D sales stood at $307 million.

Expect the business to push the format even harder as a result: there are currently more than 50 films slated for 3-D release in coming years, according to RealD, a provider of 3-D technology for theaters.

Imax, the large-format movie company, also kicked into overdrive in 2009, helping to push film after film to blockbuster status. There are now 440 Imax theaters open around the world, a 24 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year, according to Richard L. Gelfond, Imax’s chief executive.

440 Imax theaters. That's a shocking figure. In 10 years time, I wonder what percentage of movie theaters in the U.S. will be Imax? 50%? 75% Virtually all of them%

All good articles. All informative. All worth the read.

By the way, GITS featured Nancy Meyers and her approach to screenwriting recently here:

My first draft was exactly 250 pages. I didn't have brads deep enough, long enough to get through the script. It took me about eight or nine drafts [to edit]. Just keep going, I think from the first draft to the second, I cut about seventy pages. It's just like making the movie. I'm now editing it, and I thought, 'How am I going to get two hours and forty-five minutes down to two hours?' It was the same king of thing again. How do you do it? You just start tearing away at it, and you can't do it all at once. It's impossible to see what it is at first. You just keep taking away and taking away, and it begins to shape up. Story, you know--you just keep following the story."

And here is the trailer for It's Complicated:

Looks fantastic!