We are knee deep in awards season, so many cinema fans have been catching up on the various nominees. Every year there is a backlash about how the nominees are rarely popular titles. Academy elitism is often to blame, and I’m not going to disagree there. In the cinephile spectrum, I’ll admit I do skew more towards the arthouse than the blockbuster, but I understand the argument. If there are ten nominees for Best Picture, maybe one is a popular film. I speculate that many times those who nominate and vote will place titles into this unnecessary binary of a “movie” vs. a “film.” These terms ought to be synonymous, and I think for many they are, but there does seem to be a distinction.
Some years ago, I checked out the Film Snob's Dictionary, and I remember it giving some cheeky definitions on the difference between the two terms. “If Tom Hanks is in it, it’s a movie. If Tom Waits is in it, it’s a film.” I feel like that discounts a film like Philadelphia (with Hanks), as well as a movie like Mystery Men (with Waits), but I see the point and I’ve been guilty of this myself. When I talked about the Conjuring movies on our podcast, my guests and I even made the same kind of observation. “A flick like the Exorcist is a film, the Conjuring is a movie.” The former is trying to elevate something while the latter is a popcorn flick. An artistic merit sort of argument. Art over entertainment. Many will acknowledge that overlap exists, but I don’t think it’s acknowledged enough. With the right eye though, I think it isn’t difficult to find the craft in just about any film.
Last year, I did a compare and contrast of the two versions of Rocky IV. Despite the first film in the series winning Best Picture (perhaps somewhat controversially), few would be making the argument about the artistic merits of the fourth entry. It’s cold war patriotism verges on nationalism, about a third of it is montage, and for some reason there is a robot. Stallone rightfully deleted the robot in his new cut at least. The runtimes are very similar and there is minimal change to the story and structure. Mostly Stallone replaces shots with different takes.
Watching the two cuts together, one learns something about the process of editing. Why select this take now? Why move this scene slightly forward? Etc. I had been comparing alternate cuts of various titles for years, but I probably learned more about the editing process from one of the worst Rocky movies than I did from the cuts of Amadeus or Blade Runner. It made me appreciate the art of it, especially in the montage sequences. It was easy to see the “film” in the “movie.”
I am not the first person to say all this and I am sure the binary will still persist, but ultimately there really isn’t a difference. One person’s film is another’s movie. I think Quentin Tarantino has been making a career of blurring that line for decades. Steven Spielberg makes films for movie heads, Wes Anderson makes movies for film buffs. There are not one but TWO Michael Bay titles in the Criterion Collection. There is an art to the popcorn flick, too. Movies, films, flicks, whatever, it’s all cinema.
~Andrew