The Best Summer Movie You Still Haven't Seen

Both Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells and LA Times critic Ken Turan took a moment this weekend to circle back around on Fox Searchlight's art-house hit Once, which just passed $5 million at the box office. And they essentially come to the same sad (albeit somewhat obvious) conclusion about this small, beautiful, unconventional love story's big-picture meaning to American cinema: movie quality matters less than marketability. Once won the world cinema audience award at this past Sundance, but distributors were hardly fighting over the film. Why? As Turan points out, while the film had "playability," most knew it would be tough to market and sell to audiences:

The film had no stars, no big names behind the camera, no dazzling visual splendors or CGI toys. Worse than that, "Once" was not reducible to a glib high concept. On the contrary, the more you tried to describe it with words, the more it fell apart in your hands. How on Earth, distributors wondered, were people going to be induced to go in the first place?

But its hard to blame the other speciality distributors for their initial lack of interest in the movie. And that's because they're thinking about you and me (the average movie-goer):

If they are timid, if they lack trust in the willingness of an audience to find and support something that lacks marketable elements, it's because experience has shown them that they have reason to be afraid.

Even now, in the face of the success and visibility of "Once," I am constantly running into supporters of independent cinema who have not gone to see the film partly because, despite a terrific Fox Searchlight campaign, it lacks the kind of easy-to-remember hook having Keri Russell in a cute uniform has given "Waitress."

If you want distributors to acquire films as sophisticated and unusual as "Once," you must make the extra effort to seek them out and patronize them. If you don't, don't count on them to be around when you need them the most.

Fox Searchlight reportedly picked Once up for $600,000 after Sundance concluded. And it has since made 15 times what it cost to produce, and will make even more on DVD. Turan says that there's even Oscar talk for the film in the best original song category (I recently picked up the soundtrack and have been playing it non-stop on my iPod). If you haven't seen this movie, go see it. Now.