Not a good movie.
Not Batman Begins cause it was cool and Liam Neeson was great in it.
Not Million Dollar Baby because it won all those Oscars.
Not Ray because everybody talked about it.
I mean the last time you went to a theater and got blown away without somebody telling you, "This movie is going to blow you away."
Sadly, you won't be getting a chance anytime soon.
Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is the author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, argues in an LA Times editorial that movies just don't matter anymore. His argument claims, in a nutshell that we as Americans have become so enamored with stars and how they live, that we don't even care why they're stars anymore (aka the movies).
Gabler writes:
Movies, television and DVDs are attracting fewer patrons because people, especially young people, value being entertained less than they value knowing about entertainment and entertainers. Movies have become what director Alfred Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" — a red herring that triggers a plot but has no other inherent value. Like MacGuffins, movies have little inherent purpose except to be talked about, written about, learned about — shared as information.This culture of Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and "The Fabolous Life of..." on VH1 is now making us dream, whereas crazy ideas like putting a movie in space simply doesn't do the job anymore.
And part of this stems from Hollywood paying too much attention to questions like "Will this make money?" and "Will this play in the Midwest?" Right before cable exploded, the credo about television was that "The best shows never air because they never get past the pilot phase." Film, an artform that should allow visual and other sensual expression, should not be held back because Kansas won't like it or a focus group didn't laugh accordingly.
We're too busy trying to know everything, to guess how movies will end before we see them (Spoiler Alert, anyone?). We will concede the actual experience of seeing the movie if we can assume how it ends. But come on... somebody, somewhere has a script we've never heard with characters we've never met and a story we've never been told. That's the one I want to hear. That's the one that will leave me saying, "Wow."
As opposed to the Dukes of Hazzard, which will inevitably leave me saying, "Wow.... that was crap."
2 comments:
You have to drag me kicking and screaming to any movie theatre these days. I even hate most of the ones that are critically acclaimed. I was worried that it was because I'm becoming a grumpy old hag, but I find that a lot of people are on the same page. Movies really do just suck.
I get worried sometimes at the sentiment of "movies just aren't as good as they used to be." I point to the example of music, where it seems like everybody thinks the golden age of music falls around the time they were in high school and college.
Movies don't fall into the same description, but can at times. Ask the average moviegoer now about their opinion of black and white movies, and they'll give you a sentiment about how they're all old and very primitive.
But movies at large lately don't challenge you. They're either sequels of movies that challenged you once upon a time, or they're the Dukes of Hazzard, a remake of some 70s-80s fairly popular TV show that may provide fond memories but no one would honestly miss it if it went away forever (see: Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, etc...).
Post a Comment