How Many Tamil Movies Are There

[Algernon Alcala]

WhyNotably many of the characters are decades old in comics. Did something prevent making so many films before the Millennium? Or did the general popularity of superhero-themed media (including comic books and animated series) grow? Do the movies target teenagers like animated series of 1980-1990s or those who were teenagers then?

The simplest answer is this - in the 20th century, superheroes were a thing for kids and "nerdy people living in the basement", so a blockbuster movie with such a topic would not appeal to the wider audience when the world was run by jocks and the mainstream "cool thing" was sports, military, and so on.

Now the "nerdy kids" took over the world in the 21st century with the internet revolution and the mainstream thing is to be into superheroes, tech, and other "nerdy/geeky" stuff. So now these movies appeal to the wide audience - the kids, and the adults which were into comics while being young in the 20th century.

Superheroes are just very popular right now, so studios make more movies about them to get more money. In earlier times these movies didn't sell that many tickets, so it was not a financially good idea to make them.

TV networks have embraced more programs related to comics. The CW currently has Arrow, Batwoman, Black Lightning, Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl. With more DC shows to come. Multiple streaming services have their own superhero shows. The quality of shows like these gives people good stories that happen to focus around unusual characters. The Umbrella Academy, on Netflix, is a brilliant example.

The advent of R-rated comic book flicks opened up a whole new world. From Logan to Deadpool, it has been made clear that this isn't kid stuff. This has broadened audience appeal while also making people more open to other, PG-13 and PG superhero films with a reasonable expectation of quality.

For many years I remembered the name of the first film I ever reviewed, but now I find it has left my mind. It was a French film, I remember that much. I watched it from a center seat in the old World Playhouse, bursting with the awareness that I was reviewing it, and then I went back to the office and wrote that it was one more last gasp of the French New Wave, rolling ashore.

I was more jaded then than I am now. At the time I thought that five years would be enough time to spend on the movie beat. My master plan was to become an op-ed columnist and then eventually, of course, a great and respected novelist. My reveries ended with a deep old wingback chair pulled up close to the fire in a cottage in the middle of the woods, where the big dog snored while I sank into a volume of Dickens.

I now find that I have been a film critic for 25 years. I am not on the op-ed page, have not written the novel, do not own the dog, but do have the cottage and a complete set of Dickens. And I am still going to the movies for a living. My mother never knew how to handle that, when her friends asked her, "And what about Roger? Is he still just...going to the movies?" It didn't seem like a real job.

There is something not natural about just...going to the movies. Man has rehearsed for hundreds of thousands of years to learn a certain sense of time. He gets up in the morning and the hours wheel in their ancient order across the sky until it grows dark again and he goes to sleep. A movie critic gets up in the morning and in two hours it is dark again, and the passage of time is fractured by editing and dissolves and flashbacks and jump cuts. Sometimes I see two or three movies a day, mostly in the screening room upstairs over the White Hen Pantry. I slip downstairs at noon for a sandwich, blinded by the sunlight, my mind still filled with chases and gun duels, yuks and big boobs, cute dogs and brainy kids, songs and dances, amazing coincidences and chance meetings and deep insights into the nature of man. Whatever was in the movies.

"Get a life," they say. Sometimes I feel as if I have gotten everybody else's. I have a colleague who describes his job as "covering the national dream beat," because if you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear in their deepest secrets. At least, the good ones will. That's why we go, hoping to be touched in those secret places. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may seem. The real subjects of "Wayne's World" are innocence and friendship. That's what you get for your seven dollars.

In the past 25 years I have probably seen 10,000 movies and reviewed 6,000 of them. I have forgotten most of those films, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind. There is no such thing as an old film. "La Dolce Vita" is as new for me as "Basic Instinct." There is a sense in which old movies are cut free from Time. Paul Henreid and Curt Bois have died recently, and that means all of the major characters onscreen in "Casablanca" are dead, and the movie floats free of individual lifetimes. It no longer has any reference to real people we might meet at a gas station or the Academy Awards. It is finally all fiction. "Basic Instinct," on the other hand, involves careers that are still developing, people who are standing behind the screen, so to speak, peeking at the audience from the wings.

I look at silent movies sometimes, and do not feel I am looking at old films, I feel I am looking at a Now that has been captured. Time in a bottle. When I first looked at silent films, the performers seemed quaint and dated. Now they seem more contemporary than the people in 1980s films. The main thing wrong with a movie that is ten years old is that it isn't 30 years old. After the hair styles and the costumes stop being dated and start being history, we can tell if the movie itself is timeless.

What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn't matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn't matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we're supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we're supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren't about what happens to the characters. They're about the example that they set.

"Casablanca" is about people who do the right thing. "The Third Man" is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to one another as a result. The secret of "Silence of the Lambs" is buried so deeply that you may have to give this a lot of thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.

Not all good movies are about Good People. I also like movies about bad people who have a sense of humor. Orson Welles, who does not play either of the good people in "The Third Man," has such a winning way, such witty dialog, that for a scene or two we almost forgive him his crimes. Henry Hill, the hero of "GoodFellas," is not a good fella, but he has the ability to be honest with us about why he enjoyed being bad. He is not a hypocrite. The heroine of "The Marriage of Maria Braun" does some terrible things, but because we know some of the forces that shaped her, we understand them, and can at least admire her resourcefulness.

Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement. When Gene Kelly splashes through "Singin' in the Rain," when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road, when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, when John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and gallops across the mountain meadow, there is a purity and joy that cannot be resisted. In "Equinox Flower," a Japanese film by the old master Yasujiro Ozu, there is this sequence of shots: A room with a red teapot in the foreground. Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with a mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back. A reverse shot in a hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter. A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame. This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem.

I also enjoy being frightened in the movies, but I am bored by the most common way the movies frighten us, which is by having someone jump unexpectedly into the frame. The trick is so old a director has to be shameless to use it. Alfred Hitchcock said that if a bunch of guys were playing cards and there was a bomb under the table and it exploded, that was terror, but he'd rather do a scene where there was a bomb under the table and we kept waiting for it to explode but it didn't. That was suspense. It's the kind of suspense I enjoy.

Love? Romance? I'm not so sure. I don't much care for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too seriously, and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very, very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in "Young at Heart," or when Lili Taylor thinks River Phoenix really likes her in "Dogfight."

Most of the greatest directors in the history of the movies were already well known when I started as a critic in 1967. There was once a time when young people made it their business to catch up on the best works by the best directors, but the death of film societies and repertory theaters has put an end to that, and for today's younger filmgoers, these are not well-known names: Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman, Ford, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir, Lean, Bresson, Wilder, Welles. Most people still know who Hitchcock was, I guess.

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