Inessentials

The first round of the 2010 NFL draft is going on as I write. I have three different windows open in Google Chrome as I watch the NFL Network playing live on NFL.com, the ESPN NFL DraftCast, and (for my home team) the Packers.com camera that is an audio-less feed of the Packers’ war room. (Yes, they really do call the draft room the war room.) I just now switched off ESPN on TV because the Tivo is going to be full of NBC comedies and a really great season of Survivor.

And I’m only a moderately rabid fan. I don’t watch college games just to see who the best prospects are. I don’t do my own mock draft. But I do get awfully excited.

I’m presenting at a conference in a few months where I will discuss the concept of team loyalty, so stay tuned for my thoughts on that. But I thought I would take a couple moments tonight to explain to people who don’t follow sports (or follow other sports) why NFL fans care so much about the NFL draft, one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

1. The Wait It’s been nearly four months since most teams have played a game, and for many teams the last meaningful game was a month or two before that. Football has a shorter season (17 weeks) than other leagues (baseball: ~24, hockey: ~24, basketball: ~32). (None include playoffs.) So there is already less football, and considerably fewer games (16 per team, plus chance at playoffs). That makes the off-season for the biggest sport in the country the longest wait of big four sports.
2. Drama You don’t have to spend time around WWE wrestling fans to see guys who love melodrama. Watching a highly touted player drop through the first round as they squirm on national television or staring at shock at whatever stupid thing the Oakland Raiders do this year makes for really great reality television.
3. Shared Experience Sports fans are used to watching live sporting events. They talk about it immediately. We may live in a Tivo nation, but sports fans love their live shows.
4. Hope With the possible except of opening day, there is no day when a sports fan is filled with more hope than on draft day. No matter how bad your team is, your team will get better on draft day. In fact, the worse your team is, the better your draft picks, so (you hope) the more your team can improve on draft day. Sports fans love to see the interests of their team advanced, and they don’t get more advanced (usually) than on draft day.

Discussion of Jennifer’s Body (no spoilers beyond the trailer), Whip It (extremely mild spoiler), and The Hurt Locker (no spoilers)

The early numbers show that Whip It, the roller derby film directed by Drew Barrymore, bombed with $4.9 million in its opening weekend. Jennifer’s Body opened three weeks ago to a disappointing $6.9 million, and has earned less than $15 million in three weeks. That’s a very low number for a horror film that had received a lot of attention. (Compare to Zombieland, which grossed $25 million in its opening this weekend.) I’m a little surprised by how low both of those receipts were, but I think the Whip It numbers were especially surprising. (The people who have seen it have given it very high marks, so at least one person is hopeful that it will have staying power.)

One thing that stands out about these two films is that they are both written by, directed by, and starring women. Jennifer’s Body was penned by Oscar-winner Diablo Cody (Juno); Whip It is Drew Barrymore’s first film as a director; both feature some of the most-talked about young actresses in Hollywood (Ellen Page, Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried). So what happened? Why did so few people go to see this films?

I’m not completely sure why these two films didn’t fare so well, but they both clearly have one thing in common. Not only are women prominently featured on camera and behind the camera, both of these films represent gender reversals of traditionally male genres. Whip It is in large part a traditional sports film in which the hero(ine) must overcome familial obstacles to do what (s)he really loves and take the team to a championship. But this isn’t an all-male basketball or football film in which the female parts are the always-saying-no mother and the always-has-your-back girlfriend, it’s about the bruises-as-power feminism of Drew Barrymore, who has also produced the girl-power Charlie’s Angels films and Never Been Kissed. Jennifer’s Body (which I haven’t seen yet) is supposed to invert the horror genre by positioning the pretty, seemingly defenseless high school girl as the killer, which has a couple predecessors but is still atypical.

It is tempting to say that women will go see “guy films” (sports and horror films), but that guys won’t go see films about women. And perhaps that is the case here. But these two cases don’t seem enough to judge that. (It would be interesting to see the gender breakdown of the audiences for these two films, which might help show who was coming.) What’s sad is that at a time when over 90% of Hollywood films are directed by men, the failure to bring out crowds to these films directed by women can only make it more difficult to see that imbalance corrected. Two of this year’s best reviewed films are directed by women (Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Jane Campion’s Bright Star), but neither of them will shatter any box office records.

But more than just being about larger trends, it’s a shame that people aren’t going to see these films. The Hurt Locker is easily one of the best films of 2009, and it is absolutely thrilling. It’s wonderfully acted, and has more tension and excitement than any film I can remember seeing recently. Whip It isn’t a great film, but it is a good one. It is incredibly likable (an underrated quality) and very well acted. Ellen Page’s performance simply blew me away. I enjoyed her in Juno and Smart People, but I had never before appreciated the subtlety, range, and power she brings to a role that most young screen actors would play for charm and melodrama. You expect the great performances that Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern give, but Barrymore brought something wonderful out of Page, Alia Shawkat, and Kristen Wiig. The film respects its actors, and subsumes all other aspects of filmmaking to draw us into these performances, which are worth it. It’s an incredibly good film, and one worth seeing.