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With Oscar fever in full swing, it's hard to choose favorites from what are supposed to be the past year's best films. Looking over the nominees, in fact, it's clear the Mankatoan will have a particularly difficult time choosing.
Of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture, only six of them came to Mankato theaters. The front-runners for two of the four acting awards didn't enjoy any face-time in our city, nor did some of the other highly talked about films of 2009 grace our movie houses.
To movie fans, how we get the movies we do and how we are kept ignorant of the ones we don't is a widely unanswered frustration. At the root of the issue is a battle between taste and money, where some argue Mankato is subject to the films its citizenry want to see, and others say it is a matter of what the industry wants us to see.
"The real issue is how the films get marketed," said Donald Larrson, an English professor at Minnesota State who specializes in film. He suggests smaller markets are many times pigeonholed, and film distributors sometimes lose the pulse of cities such as Mankato and go unaware to their willingness to try new things.
"I've always believed that the movie and theater industry underestimate the ability of such little-known films to build an audience, if given a chance," Larsson said. "Mankato's two first-run theater chains have their decisions made by corporate marketers far removed from our location. They may know data, but they don't know Mankato."
However, making and distributing movies is a business like any other, and making money equals good business. And in order for that business to be as successful as possible, it must decide which areas will be most prosperous for each film.
"If we pull in a feature that doesn't generally do well in this area, we could lose a lot of money," said Rodelle Mehlhoff, a manager at Carmike Stadium Cinema 6.
In deciding to pull "Fantastic Mr. Fox," a film that received a national release the day before Thanksgiving Day and lasted around seven days in town, Mehlhoff said the distributer saw more potential for gross at a different theater than in Mankato.
Taste, then, becomes the major factor deciding which films come here and which don't, not necessarily how well marketed or mainstream they are.
"It depends on the feature," Mehlhoff said. "If it's a religious-type film, it seems to do fairly well in this area."
Laura Golding, a manager at Cinemark Movies 8, said Mankatoans enjoy a variety of films, and do not judge them by their wide or limited status. Where "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" did poorly, "Paranormal Activity" was a hit, she said.
However, Golding suggests a correlation between how well-known a picture is and how successful it is at the local box office. That is, limited-release films have just as much potential as their wide-release counterparts, as long as people know that they're here.
"I think if we got more limited releases - especially if we were able to advertise to let people know we were getting them - they [would] have the potential to do pretty well," she said.
Therefore, taste is a relative term, because, as Larsson explains, taste can change with a film's corresponding exposure to the people.
"What appeals to me may not appeal to you, but just as we can learn how to taste and enjoy unfamiliar foods, we can do that with movies too," he said.
Manohla Dargis shares a similar opinion. In a Dec. 20 New York Times article, Dargis blamed the film industry for offering nationwide access to the "flashier, noisier, dumber" pictures while limiting critically-acclaimed art house films and foreign features to metropolises only.
"'Angels and Demons'...opened on some 3,500 screens domestically and ate up more than 10,000 internationally," Dargis said. "The French film 'Summer Hours,' meanwhile, the best-reviewed release in The Times that weekend, opened on two screens."
With this in mind, it seems the industry cares little to open up the market for foreign and widely unknown films, even to growing cities like Mankato, which is frequented by nearly 15,000 college students at MSU alone, and serves as a weigh station for the entirety of southern Minnesota.
With a median age of 26.8, Mankato citizens are almost nine years younger than the rest of the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. At 88.1 percent, our percentage of high school graduates is nearly 8 percentage points higher than the nation's as well. A young, well-educated population seems custom-built for artistically flamboyant, limited-release films.
Is it really possible such a large business as the film industry would simply not care to pick a market as ripe as ours?
The short answer: yes.
Larsson explains that the industry would rather continue to offer the films we see trailers for on television than put in the effort to support little-known and foreign films.
"Downbeat themes such as poverty and child abuse in 'Precious' and war in Iraq in 'The Hurt Locker' need time to convince theater owners that they won't actually keep audiences away," he said.
And keeping audiences away is exactly what Carlos Posas says they do.
According to Posas, the Stomper's Cinema Chair for Impact, movies that didn't see wide release or are aimed at a niche audience tend to do poorly at the campus screenings in Ostrander Auditorium.
"As all-inclusive as we can be: that's what we try to do," Posas said, acknowledging the organization's attempts to not alienate prospective student and community attendees. "We're trying to get as many people to come to the movies [as possible]."
For Posas, risking attendance numbers for the sake of what some would call the integrity of the medium is not something Impact is prepared to do. He maintains, however, that their exists an untapped market for challenging and critically favored, but popularly unexperienced, films in the area, and that with a larger budget he would certainly champion all films.
"Our main problem is the budget," said Posas. "If I could get an exorbitant amount of money to show [independent and foreign] movies, I would gladly do it."
Jacob Bohrod is a Reporter staff writer
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