Syriana I actually think quite highly of, I know something of the subject matter and by and large it’s a pretty accurate film – that which I personally know he got right which gave me confidence in the rest. I rather liked Good Night and Good Luck also.

Jonathan, efficient market theory has many holes in it, and I agree that’s one of them. That said, Let the Right One In from what I understand of it is disturbing, unsettling and thought provoking. Twilight is comforting, safe, reassuring.

Whatever the marketing push, I think one of those two recipes will always outsell the other. There are doubtless many people who would have loved LTROI but won’t hear about it, which is a great shame, but Twilight would always outsell it.

Society and culture form economic niches; places where money can be made and people can support themselves by providing services. In some cases this is fairly straightforward as if you need your bathroom fixing, you call a plumber. But once you are dealing with cultural artifacts it becomes a lot less clear because people a) do not necessarily know what is out there and b) do not know what will hit the mark until they experience it.

For example, there’s evidently a HUGE market for stories involving young kids and angsty vampires. Twilight cashes in on that market. But how many of the people buying Twilight would have preferred Let The Right One In but didn’t know about it?

The assumption is that the market responds instantly to any new demands but that’s assuming that capitalism is an equal opportunities system and it simply isn’t. LTROI is a better book than Twilight and I’m sure more people would enjoy it but they simply do not hear about it. They hear about the hugely successful publishing phenomenon with the 7 figure marketing budget.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. As Jonanthan decoded, I meant Alan J Pakula’s ‘Paranoia’ trilogy. This began with Klute (1971), the Parallax View (1974) and worked up to All The President’s Men (1976). Pakula of course made further thrillers after this but few capatured the times like these three films, and rarely did he achieve such high standards in art direction as in the early days. His later films (Rollover, Presumed Innocent, The Pelican Brief, Consenting Adults) all have the odd scene or moment, but none really locate a wider context within which to work any magic. Indeed, the best scene in The Pelican Brief is the car park scene, and that’s pretty much a lift from ‘All the President’s Men’. And I was so disappointed when the Pelican Brief literally referred to pelicans. Anyway, I implore you to see all three, as they’re all an astonishing high standard of thriller. Klute is currently showing now and then on TCM. It’s a really dark psychosexual thriller with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, all set against a nasty atmosphere of corporate America. Hard work, but compelling.

Anyway, I see these films informing the likes of Syriana and Michael Clayton, even though the latter fail to be anywhere near as estranged as Pakula’s work. I have time for Clooney (Goodnight & Good Luck is a great film I think) but it is limited and I never need to see him doing comedy ever again.

Agreed on the rest. One of the more interesting bits of the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I read recently was the author’s argument that with the end of the 1970s there was a switch in Hollywood back from director power to producer power, and with it a move from the primacy of the auteur to the primacy of the market – except that unfortunately it turns out nobody knows what the market actually wants.

Alan Pakula produced a series of films about paranoia. There’s The Parallax View, All the President’s Men and, I think, Klute (though I haven’t seen that last one).

I suspect that there are a number of ways in which focus groups don’t work. Most notably conformity. Sit in a room with a load of people who moan about how ‘depressing’ the ending is and it takes a certain kind of personality to fight the film’s corner. Alternately you might use a dial test (in the way that they do with Presidential speeches) but that really only does measure immediate almost unconscious reaction and tragedies and depressing films are all about making you feel (at least in the short term) rotten.

Focus Groups are all about manufacturing groupthink and groupthink is really not the best basis for making any kind of decision.

I actually meant just weird endings that do not make much sense but which nonetheless pack an emotional punch.

You might be right about The Tenant not proving that influential. I only saw it for the first time recently myself.

Soderbergh’s an auteur and a serious one at that but Clooney is, in my opinion, the poster-boy for liberal films that are long on posturing and shrugging and short on analysis. Both as an actor and a director.

Regarding focus groups, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, why it is they don’t work.

They should in theory, you get a representative group of people, show them the movie, note their reactions. It’s not that hard to ensure they are genuinely representative. But the process seems to have produced weaker movies, and to be dismal at predicting hits.

My suspicion is they’re measuring the wrong thing, that it’s accurate, but what it’s accurate for isn’t what’s actually relevant. It’s accurate to instant response, but not to long term impact and so not to word of mouth effect which is driven more by recollection after the event than immediate appeal.

Or it could be something else, but the focus group really starts to kick in during the 1980s in cinema and that’s when we start seeing a backlash against serious film too, that’s not a causative link I’m drawing but I think there are related factors.

Surely the origins of this ‘moebius strip-style’ ending (is thsi what you mean?) can be traced elsewhere? I’m only thinking this because I’m not convinced that many people have seen The Tenant. It was only reissued five (?) years back after a long time in the wilderness.

As an aside, I think maybe the Pakula Trilogy and The Conversation have been the 70′s movies that, more than any others, have hooked the Clooney/ Gilroy /Soderbergh generation of Hollywood filmmakers who are looking to make ‘serious political thrillers’ in the current era. Though they’ve made a handful of great films, none really come close to those earlier 70′s films.

I suppose part of my reticence has to do with the fact that the proper falls happen off-screen. You don’t see Plainview shutting himself away as a drunk. You see the seeds of that but not the full retrenchment. Similarly, you don’t see Eli as a pastor lured into making bad decisions. One minute he’s a revivalist in a tiny oil community and the next he’s begging for help.

Another one that occurred to me is Chinatown but the fall of that film’s characters occur in response to stuff that goes on off stage. The seeds of their destruction are not included within them at the inception.

In a way, I suspect that Chinatown may well have muddied the waters for Tragedies. That final ending is so dramatic and over the top it looks like something from a Tragedy but the structure of the film simply isn’t there.

Speaking of which, between Chinatown and The Tenant, I think that Polanski has had more influence than any other film maker when it comes to endings. How many films try to recapture The Tenant’s ending?