countries like france have a successful and respected film industry but england doesnt - what are we doing wrong (again and again)?

so how's that work?

and when is PERFORMANCE coming out on dvd while we're at it?

Trying to appeal to the world (i.e. USA) with domestic films.

Are there any good French comedy/parody films ala Shaun Of The Dead? SOTD is, perhaps, the new quintessential Britcom flick - the anti-Curtis for the post Curtis generation.

mind you i saw Four Weddings for the first time properly the other night and it wasn't as bad as i feared it would be (except Grant and Mcdowell lacking chemistry really and not enough use of Scott-Thomas)

this cold is really affecting my command of English today

recent comments by hugh grant about the pitiful nature and plentitude of twee rom-coms

Well, by continuing to star in ALL of them, surely he's not helping?

american films, unquestionably. paris is something of a unique case, with all the independent theaters showing world films and french art films and older films and so on. but otherwise french screens are dominated by american films and a few french films--some of which are good, a lot of which are out of the whole "cinema du samedi-soir" genre tradition and are merely middling or worse.

the history of french film after world war i is mostly an occasional victory of prestige over profits--films successfully sold to elite audiences overseas, milestones in film style and so on. but the french film industry hasn't been what you might call healthy for a long, long time.

i don't know what the situation with protective tarifs and other state support is right now. certainly many of the art and even many of the auteur films get made thanks to a nexus of firms that get a lot of money from the cnc (national public/private body that coordinates french cinema production/distribution/education/etc./etc.). but the level of support (or "propping up") doesn't extend, i don't think, to laws saying that such-and-such percentage of french screens need to be filled with french movies (as in korea)--i think the situation is less coercive and more complex than that.

anyway that's all to say that while the french film industry may get much respect, it isn't necessarily very successful on purely commercial terms. then again what national cinemas are truly very successful on purely commercial terms nowadays? the american cinema, the indian cinema, the japanese cinema (to a diminished extent), the korean cinema (largely thanks to government quotas).... not even sure about hong kong right now.

anyway even though britain's film industry has, commercially speaking, usually been stronger than the french system (or at least, less chaotic), it's true that britain has historically had a much harder time developing marketable national cinema movements/styles. my impression is that the story of public/private apparati now firmly established in france don't exist to the same extent (to say the least) in britain. even the bfi is starting to move toward something resembling a profit model. the result is a situation where terence davies can't get funding for his new film. surely an indictment of the state of english film. but on the level of its producing art, not profits.

anyway there's a reason i'm not an anglophile....

:(