NOVEMBER 1, 1999: Let me being by saying I’ve always, always tried to think of the movies in purely artistic terms, to appreciate great films and encourage others to see them, and let that be that. But we have reached a point in this country where the weekend box office has become a weekly horse race, with everyone anxious to see if their horse won, and I’ve found myself more than passingly occupied by the b.o. figures. Why? Honestly, because I want the great films that are out to do well; I know that their directors, writers, and stars will have an easier time doing more work if returns are good. Because I want to see the bad films fail. And because I like to study the trends; it helps me see what we’re going to be in for in the future.

Now that I’ve made my excuses, I have to say that I’m more shocked than usual by the way the tickets are turning this fall; fine films are being ignored, and bad ones are raking them in. While this is certainly nothing new, it is a pattern that is distressing. Are any of the great movies that I’m expecting this fall going to do well?

It all started in September, when a fine psychological thriller called "Stir of Echoes" had the misfortune of being released the same weekend as a dumb thriller called "Stigmata". Both were jockeying for the same audience; that Stigmata grossed three times as much as Stir was upsetting, since "Stir" is approximately three times the better film.

Then, at the end of the month, came the unfortunate phenomenon known as "Double Jeopardy". This slick thriller stars Ashley Judd as a wife and mother whose husband fakes his own death and leaves her to take the fall; she does several years in the clink, where she finds out what he’s done and plots her revenge. You see, a fellow inmate tells her that “double jeopardy” laws state that she can’t be convicted twice for the same crime; so she can kill him when she gets out, and she sets out to do just that, much to the concern of lovably cranky parole office Tommy Lee Jones.

Never mind that the legality on which the whole film rests is completely misinterpreted by the filmmakers—as many have reported, it only restricts prosecution for the exact same crime, at the same place, at the same time, under the same circumstances. She cannot be tried again for killing him on that boat, that night—anything else is fair game, so the entire construct of the second half is ludicrous. Never mind that the evidence she gathers from the pen is, in spite of the weak arguments of the film, certainly enough to get someone to look into her discovery. Never mind that poor Tommy Lee Jones is stuck playing the upteenth retread of his "Fugitive" character. Never mind that overrated but smart director Bruce Beresford has made a dumb, dumb film.

Most of all, never mind that every reviewer in sight has given scathing notices to Double Jeopardy. The film is an absolute smash—consistently resting in the top Three for its six weeks (so far) of release, and just passing the $100 million mark. And why is it doing such gangbuster business? On one hand, I don’t have the slightest fucking clue. It’s really not a very good film. But there is an argument to be made, and probably an accurate one, that the reason it’s doing so well is that it managed to pull in both sexes equally: women want to see the film for it’s female revenge and empowerment angles, while men want to see the film for its action elements, for everyman Tommy Lee Jones, and because Ashley Judd is so very, very hot (I’ll admit, she’s what got me in the theater). I realize that these are sweeping oversimplifications of both men and women and what they want to see at the movies, but these are the angles I’m hearing, and they make as much since as anything.

Then, a week ago, the box office chart was topped not by the excellent new Martin Scorsese picture Bringing Out The Dead, but the painfully clumsy "The Best Man", a woefully overwritten feel-good comedy/drama from Spike Lee’s cousin, Malcolm, starring the excellent Taye Diggs and Nia Long. While "The Best Man" is certainly better than Double Jeopardy (and its grosses aren’t nearly as scarily high), it’s also not a good film, a fault that lies squarely on the shoulders of its corny, melodramatic screenplay.

There’s a skill to writing exposition, to relating information to an audience, and frankly it’s a skill that writer/director Lee was not blessed with. A great deal of information must be related to the audience in "The Best Man"; who each of its eight or so characters are, what their relationships were in college, how they’ve changed since, and where they stand now, several years later, as two of them prepare to marry. The sheer volume of shit we have to find out leads to countless, countless scenes of characters awkwardly telling each other things they both absolutely already know (lines like “I’m so glad you stopped here in Chicago on your way to New York”), and since we’re getting nonstop exposition until at least the 45-minute mark, this is a film that seems to take forever to get going. Once it does, Lee’s script gets no better; he is apparently a graduate of the High Conflict School of Screenwriting, where you have to “create conflict” by having two characters argue in every damn scene. To keep the conflict coming, Lee overcomplicates his story with melodramatic, soap opera storylines that he throws in by the handful, making his movie entirely too busy and unfocused. When it just settles down and lets the characters talk, the film can work (an early card-playing scene between the four men is easy-going and well-done). He gets the best performances he can out of his cast, who struggle as best they can with his clunky dialogue, but the one who fares the best is an actor I’ve not heard of before named Terrence Howard, who plays the most misogynistic of the group and is absolutely incapable of muttering a syllable that sounds inauthentic. And Lee is a competant director, capable of an occasional nice touch (I liked the way one character flashes to another’s infidelity during the wedding vows). He just needs to work with a far more skilled screenwriter than himself.

Yet "The Best Man" is cleaning up; some box office analysts are attributing its success to the lack of films for Black audiences, an explanation that makes sense until one reflects that the same theory didn’t get anyone into the theatres that were showing "The Wood" this summer, a similar film that is years better. Both "The Best Man" and "Double Jeopardy" are topping the charts; last weekend "The House On Haunted Hill", a film that I haven’t seen (and hold no high hopes for) sat in the number one slot. Meanwhile, the brilliant "Bringing Out The Dead" languished in the bottom half of Top Ten; so did the flawed but excellent "Fight Club" and "Three Kings". The only ray of hope is the continuing strong (but by no means record-breaking) performance of the incredible "American Beauty". But I’m worried anyway—there are some films coming out this fall that look really great, and I hope that there’s an audience for them.