How Western Civilization Lost It at the Movies
“Movies really have become awful, haven’t they?” Ace writes. And who can argue with him?
I don’t mean politically; sure, there are a lot of liberal zingers put into movies for no very good reason, except to make the filmmakers think they’ve done something positive with the piece of shit project they’re foisting on people.
Hollywood has always made most movies for a juvenile crowd. A producer, I think his name was Zanuck, worked out the logic like this: Girls will see anything boys will see, but boys will not see most things girls will see. Younger kids will see anything that older kids will see, but older kids will not see things made for younger kids. Adults will see most things that older teenagers will see, but older teenagers will not necessarily see things that adults would see. Therefore, the correct money-making demographic to make a movie for is a 17 year old boy.
Read the whole thing, and follow Ace’s link to screenwriter Eric Heisserer, at the appropriately named industry blog The Bitter Script Reader.
So is the real problem the declining intelligence and taste of the average 17-year-old male, or is it the declining intelligence and taste of Hollywood, or do the two — along with the declining intelligence and taste of the American education system — combine to form the complete Red Queen’s Race to the bottom? I’d blame the latter scenario, especially after contemplating what the average 17-year-old male likely dug when he went to the movies over the years:
- 1950s: Alfred Hitchcock’s best decade, and loads of war movies, both pro and con (Strategic Air Command, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Paths of Glory, et al).
- 1960s: The birth of the James Bond movie franchise, plus big-budget middlebrow epics like Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago, plus the rise of the counter-culture, with Dr. Strangelove, Blowup, Bonnie & Clyde, 2001, and the Beatles’ movies.
- 1970s: More Bond, rock movies (Woodstock, Gimme Shelter), B-movies/exploitation/violence galore (Easy Rider, Clockwork Orange, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Taxi Driver, Death Wish, Dirty Harry), the Godfather movies, and then the rise of Spielberg and Lucas, which led to…
- 1980s: The Empire Strikes Back, ET, Jedi, Blade Runner, the Star Trek movies, Platoon, Wall Street, Full Metal Jacket, and the SNL movies (Stripes, Trading Places, Ghost Busters, et al). Plus plenty of horny teenager movies (Fast Times, Risky Business, etc.)
- 1990s: T2, the Batman movies, and the omnipresent summer action movie with Arnold, Bruce, Tom, Harrison, et al. Plus the 1998 digital mind-f*** movies: The Matrix and Dark City. And Titanic, which brilliantly combined the chick-flick with an ending filled with plenty of digital FX and carnage for the boys.
- 2000s: Brit-lit such as the Lord of the Rings and Narnia, the horrible but exceedingly profitable Star Wars prequels, and wall-to-wall superheroes.
- 2010s: Avatar and even more superheroes. Did I mention the superheroes?
Sense a trend here? And don’t forget — a tiny percentage of the most aggressive of those moviegoers in the ’70s and ’80s are the ones who headed to Hollywood to write today’s drek. Their idea of deep and complex middlebrow culture aren’t the books that inspired Hollywood’s golden age, but the actual movies themselves. Or as John Podhoretz wrote at NRO on the eve of 9/11, “A century dominated by movies has left the movies starved for inspiration.”
Even beyond that mammoth dumbing down of the average hit movie’s writing when middlebrow culture was nuked and paved by the new left, after 9/11, the combination of PC and fear of failure completely numbed Hollywood, resulting in the Big Screen’s current malaise. And oddly, television’s renaissance, a topic that Mark Tapson discusses at Acculturated.com, in his review of television critic Alan Sepinwall’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever:
In “an interesting role reversal” with the movie biz, the TV revolution gained momentum as “the 21st century slowly saw the extinction of the middle-class movie. If a film couldn’t either be made on the cheap or guarantee an opening weekend of $50 million or more, it was out.” That meant that studios began to depend heavily on big-spectacle blockbusters (something I touched on in the previous article in this series). “Movies went from something really interesting,” as The Sopranos creator David Chase put it, “to what we have now.”
That left a growing void of more artistically and dramatically compelling fare–a void that television filled with Sepinwall’s list of the dozen American TV shows “that changed TV forever,” as his subtitle puts it: The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, and, of course, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
As an example of this revolutionary fare, Sepinwall points to the balls-out opening of Breaking Bad, in which former sitcom father Bryan Cranston’s character–a middle-aged, cancer-ridden chemistry teacher wearing saggy tighty-whities and a gas mask–careens down a desert highway in a mobile meth lab, a dying pair of drug dealers on the vehicle floor behind him. At the end of that jaw-dropping sequence, your inevitable two responses are “What the hell was that?” followed by “More, please. Now.”
The revolution didn’t materialize ex nihilo: “The millennial wave of revolutionary dramas,” Sepinwall writes, “was built on the work put in by a group of other series” that paved the way: cop dramas like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, the hospital dramas St. Elsewhere and ER, the sitcom Cheers, the “MTV cops” of Miami Vice, the hallucinatory Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and others.
But hey, cheer up movie fans, because help is on the way. Who’s up for Ridley Scott’s production of Monopoly: The Motion Picture?!
Or this: “What Hell Hath Disney-Lucasfilm Wrought? ‘Star Wars’ Meets ‘Extreme Makeover.’”
Update: In addition to the dumbing down of American culture via PC, I should have mentioned how the need for a film to compete in a worldwide marketplace can also dumb down the writing. Tapson addressed this in his previous essay:
As an example, [David Denby] notes that 2010’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which he calls “a thundering farrago of verbal and visual gibberish,” grossed $1 billion worldwide in a month: “Nothing is going to stop such success from laying waste to the movies as an art form.”
It doesn’t help that international audiences now account for two-thirds of box office receipts. Denby feels that this makes studios gun-shy about making their movies about anything. “Aimed at Bangkok and Bangalore as much as at Bangor,” Denby writes, “our big movies have been defoliated of character, wit, psychology, local color.” He cites director Christopher Nolan’s Inception as an example of “a recent trend in which big movies have been progressively drained of meaning.”
That essay/extended blog post by Tapson is also well worth your time.
>>At the end of that jaw-dropping sequence, your inevitable two responses are “What the hell was that?” followed by “More, please. Now.”<<
Actually, the response of my wife and me was to hit "stop" on the DVD player, eject the disc and dump the crap into the nearest trash can.
The creatures inhabiting Hollywood (including the ones making TV shows, not just movies) have gotten less talented and more leftist, but it's the American culture that's changed for the worse over the years, degenerated and devolved. It's the culture of the nation that matters; it's always the culture. See also, politics and presidential elections.
First, it’s too bad you threw the disc out so quickly. Breaking Bad is one of the best written shows I’ve ever seen, and the character work as Walt slowly loses sight of his original goals is fantastic.
And secondly… exactly what the hell did you think the show was about when you bought it? Did that opening scene so shock and disturb you because you’d heard it was a show about Walt living placidly in Mayberry?
After hearing so much about the show and not having HBO (or whatever premium channel it’s on) I started to watch the whole series on Netflix starting with the very first episode. I absolutely agree that the opening sequence was riveting and the acting, writing, photography, character development was unbelievably first class in all the shows I subsequently watched.
I stopped watching by the fourth episode because as much as I’ve heard how wonderful the show is, how it’s the best thing since sliced bread, I began to really hate the glorification of the drug culture, especially as Walt devolved/evolved. I spent four years in Art School (3D sculpture) so I’m not unfamiliar with “film” but I simply do not want to watch a drug dealer enrich himself as his family falls to the wayside.
I guess I’m much more middlebrow today than I was 35 years ago. I appreciate the “quality” but don’t like the content. If that’s the best we can do, I’m sorely disappointed. Surely there has to be stories as compelling without the subtexts.
Dreck, but extremely high quality Dreck. Like a gold-plated buffalo chip.
Oh, so it’s like House – something about a guy who’s a louse, except with some character development from episode to episode. He becomes lousier.
We’d like something about someone who’s a hero we can aspire to emulate in our own lives. That leaves out comic book characters. Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, and Clark Gable portrayed the necessary roles. It can be done again. All that is required is for Hollywood to stop thinking people who write dreck like Hello Kitty The True Story have talent and go get someone with the right stuff.
I expected exactly what we got for him. My wife, however, is still susceptible to the “critically acclaimed” label and sometimes puts in to try a show just because “everyone” says we ought to be watching it. About 10 minutes into this mess, she turns to me and says, “geez, this is disgusting.” To which I said, well, yeah, of course it is. (shrug) She’s the one who took it out and tossed it (not sure if it ended up in a trash can or in a used book sale at the local library, but it surely was out of our house). I don’t do shows that try to tell me some scumbag piece of crap is a “hero”, no matter how good the writing or acting may or may not be. And I have my doubts about the quality of that, given some of the other clips I’ve seen from this show in various places (like linked from pointless news stories such as this one). Projectile vomiting is not “acting” much less “great acting”. No thanks, no sale.
The above should read “I expected exactly what we got from it.” Too damn early for typing.
I felt the same about the “Sopranos.” No matter how well written, well acted, great production quality – if the subject matter is delving into low-life criminals, why spend any time watching it, unless maybe you are a psychology student gathering material on abnormal psychology?
James:
Movies, in addition to being an exciting medium of entertainment, are our connection to the arts and history. Without reference to these, especially to our common history, our experience in the movie theater is nothing but dumb show. Swearing is not clever repartee, a punch in the gut does not enlighten us, and an explosion in space is but special effects. Our humanity, so alive in American films of the 40s and 50s, has just about evaporated in modern film.
Chronicling the lives of cretins and thugs, to the exclusion of achievers and contributors leaves us empty and frustrated, but then again those with empty souls and psyches live in the best of times.
Read #60, CoastRanger: To gain Historical perspective one doesn’t need to go into the details as deeply, and for hours on end, as “Breaking Bad” for instance. “The Big Bang Theory,” on the other hand, is deeper than just teen-age humor; the weaving of accurate theoretical physicist jokes into the plots has a certain attraction for those such as me, who have an interest in science. At the very least it is not end-to-end crime, death, blood and gore.
I fail to see anything revelatory in the linked articles. They seem to be recognitions that my complaints about the industry AREN’T the imaginations of a frustrated screenwriter, but rather that they are actually true.
Just because Eric Heisserer is proud of being a sellout doesn’t make him any less a sellout. My goal is to make good films, not to “be a screenwriter” no matter the cost. He’s not saying I have a legitimate shot at getting my scripts made, he’s confirming that I do, in fact, have my nose pressed against the glass and won’t get a chance.
At least I get his contempt!
There has always been a lot of trash at the box office. Last weekend I saw Lincoln and Skyfall, which were both worth my time and money. As always, theater goers need to exercise their intelligence to avoid the worst schlock.
Dunno about the other flick, but “Lincoln” is the usual covert lefty propaganda disguised as history.
It conveniently came out just now, in an attempt to discredit any further discussion of THIS.
I agree that today’s movies in the movie theaters are a waste of time, at least for any adult (especially a middle-aged adult). If there isn’t a gore-fest murder movie, there is either a superhero or the supernatural, either way it’s a super bore. And when you have to deal with junk like the 51st Harry Potter movie, yet another Pixar animated morality play with either an animal, human, or Shrek-like character, or a violent drama that has at a bare minimum 25 shootings or violent deaths (not to mention car chases) in them, you tend NOT to go to the movies that often, unless you’re 17.
But I have to admit, there is more and more good programming on TV, mostly on cable TV. From “Boardwalk Empire” to “Homeland” to “Breaking Bad” to “Mad Men” to “Hell on Wheels” and several other shows, things are really looking up on television. As for television movies, well, not so good. I guess the focus is on the TV series rather than a one-time television movie so as to get the biggest bang for the buck. But at least it’s SOMETHING, which is way better than what the movies theaters are offering, which is nothing.
You want to know how you can tell there is nothing to watch in the movie theaters? It seems that every year it becomes harder and harder just to even nominate a movie for the Academy Awards. It’s getting to the point where even Hollywood is finding it hard to swallow most of the junk it produces on an annual basis. And when a movie comes out that could even be considered half-way decent (like the new movie “Flight”), then it automatically gets nominated for an award. With so little to choose from, they’ll take whatever they can get.
Why try to swim upstream when you can tread water in the idiot pool.
Your list of sixties movies was pretty good but left out a few classics. Such as Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Kremlin Letter, Funeral in Berlin. Surely these have to be included?
But you’re right. The small screen has edged out the big one. I’ve often felt that the ability to create computer special effects cheapened productions and required less of writers. Much less.
It was a Synopsis, not a Bibliography.
There were many more that I would have included, but movie choices are subjective.
Ed,
you left out the biggest reason why Hollywood movie-making has declined: We don’t need to go to movie theaters anymore. And later in this century, we won’t need Hollywood producers anymore either.
The advent of HDTV and home entertainment centers has made it possible to enjoy wide-screen entertainment (even in 3-D!) right in the privacy of your own home. Without, I may add, all the distractions in a movie theater: Strangers near you talking, crumpling candy wrappers, sneezing, coughing, etc.
And the revolution in inexpensive computerized digital SFX has enabled TV shows in HDTV to provide the same kind of spectacle that hitherto only movies could provide. Back in the 1960s, TV shows just couldn’t afford optical SFX. “Star Trek” was one of the first to push the envelope on that–and it had trouble producing the SFX on time and on budget. Today that’s no problem. The spectacular plane crash scenes in the pilot episode of “Lost” is what first hooked the audience.
So today, it’s straightforward to produce a TV show that provides the same kind of wide-screen spectacle that was formerly only possible with movies. And producers and screenwriters have migrated to TV. Those TV shows you mentioned, Ed, had top-flight screenwriters.
In the future, we won’t need Hollywood at all. Personal computers are getting so powerful that digital optical SFX, nonlinear video editing, and all the other tools of sophisticated video and movie production are now available to Everyman. And some ordinary folks are already taking advantage of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtifyhPScCw
The result is going to be distributed TV and movie production, produced by everybody in the world, uploaded to YouTube and elsewhere, taking away business from Hollywood. Just as Craigslist and Monster.com and other Internet websites destroyed the newspapers, these personal video production facilities are going to destroy Hollywood. It’s only a matter of time.
And like everything else on the Internet, 90% of it will be junk–but there will be a few genuine gems out there.
I’m simply stunned that anyone, anywhere cares enough about this to spend so much time and effort thinking and then writing about it. That’s a statement in and of itself. Wow….
Though apparently you see no contradiction inherent in your taking the time to read it and comment on it.
Golly, you must be one of them there book readers I hear so much about. You really learned me good with that’n.
Glad I could help.
After all, where would we all be without your insight? You’re a humanitarian.
Some people like expressions of art – all kinds of it; some passionately. Some people don’t. Some people will spend quarter of a million on a King Kong 6-sheet poster. What… did you just blow in from Mars?
There is a gaping chasm between mindless pop culture and art. 98% of what’s come out of Hollywood in the last several decades falls into the former category. I just don’t know why this is news to anyone.
To “mindless pop cutlure” I really should have added “leftist drivel”…. I guess it’s because I wrote off Hollywood years ago myself. I’m stunned that anyone out there would hold out any hope of affecting it in a positive direction.
What do you do for a living and for fun Mark? Maybe I will be “simply stunned” by how you spend your time. Political affiliation aside, I think we can all get behind the notion that people like Mark – who think that their idea of what is important in life is the only legitimate one – are really annoying.
Now you’re catching on. You’re a sharp knife.
You left out the most popular genre from 50s-70s, and probably the most morally grounded, the western.
Easy Rider was 1969.
Otherwise, good article.
Also, I know you are referring to the hits but you might want to consider the B & C & D movies that best illustrate the downfall. Westerns & sci fi from the earlier era to things like Street Trash in the ’80s.
Well, we’ve gone from Citizen Cane to Jackass: The Movie (and probably worse to follow)…
There’s a movie about that trend. “Idiocracy”
I think I noticed the steep trend toward the cultural sewer while watching ‘Pirates Of The Carribean’. The interminable and tiresome sword fights went on forever, and the guys dancing with the swords looked like waiters in a gay bar. The fencing final in the 2004 Olympics between Italy and China was a thousand times more interesting.
Hollywood has become a town of millionaire marxists preaching and extolling the glory of Obama the baloney salesman. There is no one there I care about or want to see.
Secret: Quite a lot of people in the 17th and 18th century dressed like waiters in a gay bar, as you put it. Even our founding fathers, and the most powerful people in Europe.
Maybe we should ask Zombie or one of his/her colleagues to do some photojournalistic investigation and report back to us on what garments, if any, waiters in gay bars actually wear.
I wasn’t referring to costume.
I watched 10 minutes of ‘Suits’ the other night and the idea occurred to me that of all the men who I saw there it may be that not one of them is a heterosexual.
Mr. Driscoll,
Did you actually read the Deadline article?
Representatives from the 501st legion (a group of Star Wars fans who dress in costumes) helped a family rebuild their house which was destroyed in a wildfire. The family are diehard Star Wars fans, and lost all of their possessions. Members of the 501st donated some of their own Star Wars memorabilia to this family, and helped them rebuild their home. This was filmed for an episode of ABC’ Extreme Makeover show long before the Disney/Lucas merger.
Lucasfilm has nothing to do with the 501st. These people helped a family out of the goodness of their hearts.
But the author of the Deadline article didn’t see the episode in question. Instead he wrote another anti Lucas hitpiece.
I see people piling on conceptually to Ridley Scott’s proposed ‘Monopoly’ movie, understandably so.
But I am struck to remember the first time I heard they were making a ‘Brady Bunch’ movie, and thought that might have been the all time dumbest idea in the history of film. And, while it ain’t ‘Citizen Kane’, I have to give total props to the BBM producers, because the peg they hung it on was actually totally classic: Having the (superbly cast) Brady’s play it totally straight right down the line – it was the entire world around them that had entirely changed, so every “normal” person thought they were flat out nuts, with the Bradys utterly oblivious to them all. OK, THAT was funny.
I also was floored when I heard Peter Jackson’s choice to follow up LOTR was “King Kong???” already remade in 1977. It never occurred to me that he would actually set it in 1933, and essentially make the movie Marion Cooper would have truly made if he had the technology. I rather enjoyed that re-make, far more than the pathetic DiLaurentis version.
So ya never know. Ridley Scott is enormously talented (Gladiator, Alien, Thelma & Louise, Bade Runner), who occasionally misfires (Legend, Prometheus), but I wouldn’t rule him out on this. I’ll wait to see what comes out of it.
Consider who is writing these movies. Men who apparently believe they are still teenagers. Watch some of the TV shows (Big Bang Theory, 2.5 men, etc.). Do you think they are written by mature adults?? I quit watching most of what’s on TV – either written by teenagers or someone steeped in the mind blowingness of the 60s and 70s. I spend more TV time watching reruns of Adam-12 and Dragnet instead of that the crap that is on now.
Yes!
Movies used to be adaptations of works by Hemmingway, and Fitzgerald, with writers such a Faulkner putting words on a screenplay (whether original or adapted).
Now…..we’re lucky if the characters can complete a thought.
Lost it??
Its still going strong. Soft power at its best!! (fortunately)
We used to have a shared Judaeo-Christian value system in the US, and the movies had to reflect that, at least to some extent, in order to reach an appreciative audience.
No shared value system means no means of appealing to an audience other than sex, violence, and splashy special effects.
Moreover, the heroic imagery in the movies lets the teenage and young adult male audience live vicariously in a nation that has already lost its liberties. Watching all of these superheroes has drained away any perceived need within the individual to live a life of responsibility and courage. While we are being mindlessly entertained, we failed to notice that most of our liberties have already been taken away, and the remainder are soon to follow.
Here’s a very quick example of that.
a recent trend in which big movies have been progressively drained of meaning
That’s how I felt about the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. A juvenile show, whose demographic was definitely the 17 year old boy, devoid of meaning or substance passing itself off (unsuccessfully) as something high-minded. What was worse was listening to BSG apologists and Johnny come lately Science Fiction fans who thought it was completely original.
It isn’t just the movies; there’s been an overall stagnation in the art and entertainment world over the past 15 years. Does anyone else find it weird that you can turn on the tv, pick a random movie or show, and not be able to tell whether it was made last week or 10 years ago? Music is the same way. It’s like the first decade of the 21st century had nothing new or distinct to offer. Had I gone to sleep in 1999 and woken up yesterday, you would have a hard time convincing me I’d been out of it for over a decade. Oh, and most of the clothes in my closet from ’99 would still be in fashion. Weird.
it’s a paralysis of the brain. films and creativity is coming from other countries and they are doing a very good job. we don’t know who we are anymore or what we are. our president may as well be a hologram. our society, our culture is degraded. as for going to the movies, if there was ever anything of ours i want to see, i never do that. we once shared in silence what we could discuss later on. it was a sense of community. movie audiences are inhabited by the very dumb, raucous and the eerily moronic who are eager to start fights with anyone sane.
and here I thought the target demographic was 13-year old boys.
Seriously, the real problem is the poor storytelling. I stopped reading fiction when the plots disappeared into post-modernism.
Plus, the Academy Awards have succumbed to affirmative action. I have yet to understand why Forrest Whitaker won Best Actor for “The Last King of Scotland” over Leo DiCaprio’s tour de force performance in Zwick’s “Blood Diamond”.
Or why Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” was totally ignored by the Academy.
Gran Torino told of a man who had a code-of-honor, and could bring down the bastards in his life without grievously breaking the law himself.
Unacceptable, on both counts, in today’s entertainment elite.
Plus, they didn’t want to “get off my lawn”.
I’m not sure I agree. In the 60s and 70s, before the Blockbuster appeared, the average 17-year-old was watching crappy giant bug movies, alien invader movies, Jerry Lewis movies, Japanese atomic monster movies, war movies, cowboy movies, zombie movies, Hammer-style horror movies, beach/surfing movies, and maybe some trashy biker movies. By the mid-70s, his menu was more limited but arguably of higher quality – Jaws, Close Encounters, Carrie, The Exorcist, Halloween, and of course Star Wars.
I think Hollywood is still aiming at 17-year-olds. But the industry has changed. You no longer have dozens of studios making dozens of crappy movies that teenagers can watch at the local drive-in. You have a few studios making a few crappy movies for teenagers to watch at the multiplex. Movie making is no longer a volume industry. Fewer movies are depended upon to capture a larger share of the 17-year-old market. That’s why Transformers looks like (and is marketed like) a Big Important Motion Picture. If it had been made in the 60s, Transformers would have been a cheesy monster movie from Toho Studios; nobody would have mistaken it for a Big Important Motion Picture. It didn’t have to be.
If Islamic terrorists judge America by our mass entertainment, I can sympathize with their views. I take pride in knowing I never watched one episode of the several puerile trash that polluted TV in long running series. Hollywood is filled with filthy rich types who lack good looks, acting ability, or a brain.
It is insightful that the LA movie industry produced two opposite smash hits, the Passion of the Christ, and pornography. The former was cursed by the moguls but made the producer, Mel Gibson, a billionaire. The latter comprises most of the digital traffic on the internet. This demonstrates the futility of exclusively targeting teen males as an audience. After the ten thousandth way of having sex and killing a human body are displayed, there is nothing left but mental numbness, and chewed gum under the seat.
There are some excellent foreign films, for those with triple digit IQ. And books.
We have given up on American films and most of the TV shows. If you would have told me fifty years ago I would be watching foreign films with sub titles I would have laughed at you. Every once in a while (maybe once a year) we try to watch an American movie and we are always sorry. Poorly done and paying the leftist degenerate actors. Much of what is in the foreign films we watch should be required viewing for the younger set that hasn’t been taught the evils that abound in the world or those that have lost their moral compass or have forgotten there really is evil in the world.
Judging something as worthless when by your own admission you haven’t seen it is nothing to be proud of.
I disagree.
My time is valuable to me and there is an infinity of trash in the Hollywood offerings. If I watched every piece of filth, I could arrive at an accurate determination that the entire set was worthless. But life is short. This is the reason man developed statistical sampling. As JC notes, I too occasionally view one, recalibrate my junk dial, judge that the level of trash continues, and make other choices, with pride.
I don’t buy your line.
You want me to believe I must examine every email and fax from a Nigerian asking for a little help with a bank transfer before I can judge them all a waste of my time.
And I don’t buy your reductio ad absurdum. A closer parallell to what he describes would be refusing to use email because of Nigerian scammers. And that would be absurd.
So, what youre saying is:
Hollywood sucks, because it produces crap.
And TV is about the same, ‘cept maybe the screen is smaller.
Yeah, I figured that out like 30 years ago.
Thats why I have some actual, real physical projects I involve myself in to occupy my “free time” when I’m not earning a living.
Sitting in a chair, and looking at (someone elses) blinking lights on a screen, is something I AVOID LIKE PLAGUE.
Because its sucks
I concur with your analysis and approach. Very little to see out there and with a DVR there is no reason to see anything that is not worthwhile.
You sound remarkably similar to this guy:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/
The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this and every country but his own
Yes, if you ignore all the crappy programmers and B-pictures and miscellaneous dreck that was burned for its silver when our parents were in high-school, the cream of old movies are better than the average movie made today.
Is “Satan Met A Lady” (1936) a better movie than “Cloud Atlas” (2012)? Of course not. Is “Cain And Mabel” (1936) funnier than “The Hangover” (2009)? Not by a long shot. But “Satan Met A Lady” and “Cain And Mabel” are utterly forgotten now, except by hardcore cineastes. Instead people remember the remake of “Satan”, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), and reasonably good comedies like “The Awful Truth” (1937) are the only ones ever shown on TV.
+1 – exactly what I was thinking. The article simply cherry picks the examples listed to support his concept – it falls short on proof of concept. The argument as presented is as bad as the movies it disparages.
Exactly. And what Driscoll fails to take into account is that many of the movies HE lists as classic (Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Clockwork Orange, Terminator) were condemned by contemporary critics as being inexcusably violent, vulgar, stupid etc.
So presumably if we wait around for 20 years we’ll find Driscoll’s kid here writing a post about Hollywood’s bygone glory days, when people could see great films like “The Avengers”.
Right. I was looking at IMDB’s list of movies made in 1941 – same year as The Maltese Falcon. I was up to No. 147 when I got tired of scrolling. Can you imagine today’s Hollywood producing 147+ movies in one year? And for every Maltese Falcon on that list, there are a dozen Crash Corrigan serials.
So while the 17-year-old in 1941 could certainly watch The Maltese Falcon, he could also treat himself to cinema classics like Escort Girl, Blondie Goes Latin, Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc., Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, The Man Made Monster, Jungle Girl, All-American Co-Ed, and Spooks Run Wild starring Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall.
The dumming down of the human race.
It’s all about the money, to hell with the consequences.
The Transformers franchise is an excellent example for another reason. Movie makers have become far too reliant on special effects to draw those 17 year old males and that means that they have to sacrifice other things……..like dialogue. The further we travel into the age of electronics, the more we will need to accept the “dumbing down” of Hollywood. There will never be another Gone With the Wind. Even the Bourne franchise had to go techier, as brainwashing and training to kill without remorse became passe. Genetics………that’s the future of movies.
Gee, someone forgot another movie product of the 2000′s & 2010′s… “Sparkly Vampires.”
I liked the breakdown by decades, but would add that the theme uniting the history of the movies is populism/progressivism. The liberal Protestants who initiated the Progressive movement was indifferent to anything so tawdry as movies, so left it to Jewish immigrants, who quickly adapted to the regnant populism. Rich people and power elites have been the constant target of movies from their inception to today. See http://clarespark.com/2012/09/10/index-to-blogs-on-populist-demagoguery/.
SO may movies these days (and TV sitcoms) are just stupid. Plots unlikely, human mis-behavior normalized…
And many actors do stupid things and make Leftist statements; I just can’t watch ‘em after they do.
Unfortunately, seeing is believing, and too many people, especially kids, think these inane flicks are reality…and behave accordingly.
My grown children rent movies that are so improbably and foolish I fall asleep, walk the dog, take out the garbage or open a book.
There are good shows if you can find them: Modern Marvels, Larry the Cable Guy’s AMERICA, nature programs and Cops…
Hey! Cops is a nature program.
I don’t think you can ignore the role that the MPAA rating system (yes, regulation) has had on movies in the last 40-some years. Violence has become cartoon and sexuality has become locker room humor to get that all important PG rating. Most of the “great” movies you mentioned were rated R and the themes were equally adult. Once Hollywood realized that the money was in teenagers, it became apparent that they couldn’t make a PG-rated Godfather, Graduate, or Exorcist either.
The history of film in America, and America itself, plays out as a trend of teenagers with increasing economic freedom. No surprise we’ve come a long way from Mickey Rooney and Our Gang saying “Let’s put on a show.”
There have always been a staggering amount of films aimed at kids, right from the inception of talkies. Those films today are so obscure no one knows they even exist but they’re there. The well-remembered Andy Hardy focused the teenage market in the ’40s and when the ’50s came it was the monster movies. That market never really stopped and is stronger than ever.
10 years ago less than half the top 10 grossing films were aimed at youth. This year 8 or 9 out of 10 are, and those lone exceptions are “Men In Black 3″ and James Bond.
The blowback has taken out fantasy and science fiction literature as well. What used to be called the “juvenile” novel is now called YA and it sometimes seems every fantasy novel is some lame fare with a 13 year old hero. Similarly, every other SF novel seems to be variation on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with “Neuromancer” endlessly regurgitated. Maybe they’re hoping to cash in on the Harry Potter success; it’s hard to believe anyone finds much happiness writing such junk.
The irony is that fantastic literature used to be ghettoized while it was turning out brilliant novels. Today it’s the accepted mainstream, as it is in film, and churning out junk that merits an artistic ghetto. People adore Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and neither could write for the also-ran called Cracked Magazine in the ’60s. Our literary heros are so amateur they encourage hobos and security guards to say, “I can do that.” That’s because they can.
My biggest gripe about the two highest grossers this year, the Avengers and “The Dark Knight Rises,” together with “The Hunger Games” is not the content but that they’re frankly bad and boring screenplays. Even Roger Corman had a certain excitement about the pot-boilers he made. But the films this year are Corman with the money and without the excitement.
To me the simple art of writing a film is becoming a lost art. For some reason someone made a remake of “Total Recall” that involved one long chase scene. Why that’s convincing SF was lost on me. “The Dark Knight Rises” was even worse than the Star Wars prequels; at least those were fun to look at. One can only wonder what would’ve happened if Anne Hathaway had been turned loose to play the wacky psychopath the Catwoman actually is, maybe like an evil version of her character in “Alice In Wonderland.”
Instead Catwoman doesn’t seem to like her costume all that much and is a more sensible adult than Batman. My mother is more eccentric than Hathaway’s Catwoman and she loved Hee-Haw and B.J. and the Bear.
Bad news, all the Men In Black flicks were aimed at youth. Hint: Any movie in which a character ends up covered in snot is aimed at youth.
Your comment that mentioned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was peceptive. That the turtles began as a parody only adds to the damning evidence against Hollywood’s teen flicks production machine.
Good points all about the YA watering down of SF – IMO it’s mostly written by girls for other girls anyway these days – and the Catwoman. Played by the Princess Diaries girl, that’s too out there for me to grasp. Blech!
I promote piracy of Hollywood productions, if you cant boycott them. Find ways to deny them a revenue stream out of your pocket.
Don’t get me started on this, but due to palm greasing and Washington schmoozing, the American entertainment industry has the most protective and restrictive film and music copyright laws in the free world. I don’t feel too bad about the piracy either. Just try posting a movie or song clip, like you post a book quote or news article, and the extremity should become apparent.
Well they should reap what they sow. Moral relativitsm, glorification of depravity, glorification of criminals, demonization of greedy Big Business, promotion of Cultural Marxism, from each according to their ability to each according to their wants.
So why not oblige them, and redistribute their productions.
I’m surprised that the Republicans haven’t figured this out yet, and declared war on their enemies in Hollywood. If they came out for an evisceration of copyright law, the callow youth of today would flck to them.
Just a couple of remarks because I have to give a presentation tomorrow.
First, the movies I judge the greatest range from the 1930s (Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera) or 1950s if you exclude comedy (High Noon, Seven Samurai), all the way to this decade (Warrior, 13 Assassins).
Second, very few movies in my greatest-movie list are in Ed Driscoll’s breakdown by decade, so I have to wonder about the criteria used to compile that breakdown.
My point is: there were great movies in pretty much every decade. (I might make a breakdown after my presentation.) If you want to argue that movies **with highest box office revenue** have declined intellectually, you might be right but you should make this claim explicit.
Since I’m the only comment, I can only guess that your readers are the people that liked “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”
UTB, not sure what your comment means, but T:DotM was as ok as any other movie of that ilk. I WAS surprised that they managed to find a replacement love interest that was even more annoying than Megan Fox.
Watch out for ilk! They bite!
I thought “Inception” was pretty cool. What’s wrong with me?
By not including the 1940s movies you left a huge body of example-making work: try to even imagine the selfless and altruistic virtue displayed by “Rick” (Bogart) in Casablanca as he bids Ilsa and Victor to take the airplane to freedom, foregoing his love for her being in a current movie….
A Tarantino character would rape and kill Ingrid Bergman, kill Major REnault and Victor Lazlo and hijack the plane.
Or the subtle, restrained love seen just in glances between Greg Peck and Jean Simmons as each simultaneously offers up their own life for the other without really saying so,,, in Blanco Canyon…only Burl Ives is sharp enough to pick it up…..
Now it’s the sleazy, dirty ambience of judd apatow movies that leave rings around the bathtubs of our souls….
C.S. Lewis saw the oncoming problem 60 years ago in “The Abolition of Man,” talking about textbooks for school children celebrating non-virtue and giving up on training minds and hearts to be good, to want to be good, and why such lack of education is critical:
” Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
. . .
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
By not including the 1940s movies you left out a huge body of example-making work: try to even imagine the selfless and altruistic virtue displayed by “Rick” (Bogart) in Casablanca – as he bids Ilsa and Victor to take the airplane to freedom, foregoing his love for her – being in, or comprehensible in, a current movie.
A Tarantino character would rape and kill Ingrid Bergman, kill Major Renault and Victor Lazlo and hijack the plane.
Or the subtle, restrained love seen just in glances between Greg Peck and Jean Simmons as each simultaneously offers up their own life for the other without really saying so,,, in Blanco Canyon…only Burl Ives is sharp enough to pick it up…..
Now it’s the sleazy, dirty ambiace of judd apatow movies that leave rings around the bathtubs of our souls….
C.S. Lewis saw the oncoming problem 60 years ago in “The Abolition of Man,” talking about textbooks for school children celebrating non-virtue and giving up on training minds and hearts to be good, to want to be good, and why such lack of education is critical:
” Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
. . .
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
PS2: sorry, meant Greg Peck and Jean Simmons in “The Big Country,” which was 1950s…..exquisite film…
Sorry, but I’ve seen tons of movies obviously made for an above 17 crowd over the decades have less intellectual meat than any of the Transformers movies they made.
Is it somehow dreck when a giant robot from another planet tells you “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings!” and then blasts the people trying to enslave you, and yet completely inspiring to hear another cliche, hedonist rant from whatever “sluts-in-the-city-styled” sex fling that they’ve dumped out for discerning adults?
You can cherry pick whatever movies you want to from the 70s and before, and try to match them up to today as some demonstration of movie decline, and I can find just as many pointless wastes of celluloid from that same period to show you that that same decline never happened. It just consolidated.
For every film remembered as good or great Hollywood churned out dozens, if not hundreds, of absolute stinkers. Yeah, the 1950′s were Hitchcock’s best decade. You know who else’s heyday it was? Ed Wood’s. “Lawrence of Arabia” came out in the 60s? So did “Curse of the Living Corpse”, “Castle of Blood” and “I Eat Your Skin”.
Listing the movies you do and presenting them as typical, or emblematic of what Hollywood used to make before it all went to hell is beyond silly. Anyone who does so is being either dishonest or foolish.
Back then “B-movie” meant something and Ed Wood couldn’t even reach that low bar.
These days, few summer blockbusters are much better in terms of the cinematic arts than the old B-movies – except in their big budget special effects. And Gone With The wind still surpasses all subsequent chick flicks.
“Girls will see anything boys will see, but boys will not see most things girls will see.”
and yet… and yet… the TOP EARNER IN THE PAST MONTH is the 5th part of… (noooo, it cannot be!!) Twilight. A movie loved and supported – internationally – by women. Who, it seems, can make a movie into a phenomenon without their boyfriends.
The producers of Twilight spend a lot of time tearing their hair out trying to attract ‘men’, especially with the 2d one, because they could not believe what was before their eyes, and on their balance sheets. And they think they have a winner with the Hunger Games. Well, it will not do as well as Twilight. Guess why?
You forgot to mention the advent of the spaghetti western (apologies to Clint Eastwood), which I consider the beginning of the end. Those Italian-made horrors are when Hollywood decided its heroes and villains no longer needed to shave, bathe, or wear clean clothes, and gratuitous cruelty was the whole point of the movie.
?
The dominant characters were villains — in the American Southwest — at a time when bathing and showers were for weddings and funerals.
In Fistful of Dollars — EVERY character, save a few, was criminal — to include the anti-hero.
In A Few Dollars More — the principals are either flaming criminals — or are pretending to be such — yet are bounty hunters — just more scum.
In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — WWII in Italy ( with homages to the Death Kamps ) is riven through the script:
The bloody bridge is an homage to the Rapido River — and all of the thousands of Allied soldiers that lost their lives there.
The chapel with the Confederate artillery-man is an homage to Monte Cassino — the German position that cost thousands of Allied lives.
( It looked down upon the Rapido River. )
The music and the torture comes straight from the Death Kamps….
In all of these real world arenas, no-one had any opportunity to bathe.
BTW, the final scene in the GBU features:
The Good — the American — arrogant — dead eye shot — astonishing with artillery
The Bad — the German — capricious killer — woman beater — baby killer — ruthless
The Ugly — the Italian — de-fanged — he’s without bullets — a nation without arms
( The Clint bit with the cigar to cannon shot = America’s astonishingly effective WWII artillery. Homages to cannon shots are in and out of the script. )
BTW, even the DVD reviewer/ embedded track entirely missed the WWII in Italy connection. Most do.
OOOPS! Forgot to mention how, after decades and BILLIONS spent making junk and wasting film, the Three Stooges remain ever-popular and some of the funniest movies EVER!
But only for 50% of the planet. I recall a suggestion following the 76 Olympics to test the East Germany’s women’s swimming team for gender. Make them watch a few episodes of The Three Stooges. If they laughed, they were men. Case closed.
One factor is the titanic amount of money Hollywood makes on the international market. Whenever Americans think of “the international market”, they think of a world of Fellini films or French art-house flicks, but what it really is are a bunch of 17 year old kids who have a very simple understanding of American culture and who want to see shoot-em-ups. Even shoot-em-ups with anything but a trivial – and already understood by the audience – references to American culture won’t work (or at least Hollywood thinks).
Movies made in earlier decades could at least be “American” – even if they were critical of American culture. They didn’t have to appeal to some sort of “common culture” lowest common denominator.
Once avatar actors populate movies, who will “celebrate” preening celebrities?
Following up on ‘False God’s props for Transformers…
…among the few movies (Battle: Los Angeles and Blackhawk Down being the others) I’ve seen since 2001 in which contemporary American soldiers are portrayed as resourceful, resilient, courageous and reasonably well-adjusted young men and women who swallow hard and run to the sound of combat.
Kinda like their real-life counterparts, not that one would know it from the flood of Hollywood’s anti-Iraq war duds.
Where are the 17 year old males?
They’re playing vid games which some have evolved into interactive movies allowing one not to be a passive viewer but an active participant in the process. They make the moral decisions, they choose good vs bad, they reap the outcome.
It’s interesting how few movies translate into successful games and how successful games are overwhelmingly unable to translate into good movies.
The game industry grossed $74 billion in 2011 without a lot of the costs or creative bookkeeping of the movie industry. They’re matching or beating the competition. Blockbuster movies, check out blockbuster game sales.
Since about 1900, the idea that ‘Nothing is Anything’ has been assaulting the idea that “Everything is Something’ (Rand). About 1963, ‘Nothing’ had spread wide enough to gain the upper hand.
Ed, you forgot all the 50′s & 60′s shlock that made up the second feature at the drive-in. These were bugs from outer space, bad crime movies, surf movies, or some shlocky WWII pic with actors older than our parents pretending to be young soldiers.They were called second feature flicks because the first feature was what one watched with one’s date; the second feature was so bad it couldn’t possibly distract from making out. Why do you think drive-ins existed?
This article, and many of the comments on it, are somewhat hysterical and rather miss the point. A thoughtful examination of Hollywood’s cultural output–one that isn’t predicated on a priori contempt for the present era or unwarranted nostalgia for decades gone by, doesn’t need to come to such wide-eyed conclusions.
Comments about the mass production of forgotten junk in every decade since film began are salient. One cannot compare a list of the 50 greatest classic films ever against the sum output of 2012 (or even 2000+) as if there were no films that were not classic before this millenium.
But here is something to consider: To the extent that Hollywood produces more bad material in 2012 than it did in some arbitrary prior year, one factor in this development is the rising cost of movie production in general, contingent with the development of ever-more-advanced technologies to bring a vision to life. Skyrocketing production costs lead to the dichotomy hinted at in the article: either films are low-budget productions produced on a pittance, or they must guarantee–to the investors who are backing the film’s production with hundreds of millions of real-life actual dollars–a return commensurate with the investment and risk. The problem is not “stupidity” or “ignorance” or “declining morals” or “superhero films” or whatever philosophical axe one wishes to grind; it is high production costs coupled with a paranoid risk aversion.
I guarantee that if someone came to you and asked for you to give them a hundred million dollars in cash to make a film, you’d want some very strict guarantees that you’re going to see some kind of return on that investment. Private investors aren’t the federal government; they typically can’t piss away a fortune like it was no big deal.
There is a real “dumbing down” in this sense, as filmmakers must then cater to the lowest common denominator in a way that maximizes opening-weekend revenue, but it has more to do with structural changes in filmmaking technology over the years than with the looming collapse of Western Civilization.
In parallel with declining artistic standards I see declining technical standards, especially in sound.
The actors are mumbling incompetents, the microphones are poorly placed and / or controlled and what little comprehensible dialog left is buried in a horrible, roaring and over-bearing allegedly musical score.
I watched Casablanca again recently. Every word rings out, clear, enunciated, professional.
“Listing the movies you do and presenting them as typical, or emblematic of what Hollywood used to make before it all went to hell is beyond silly. Anyone who does so is being either dishonest or foolish.”
What!? “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” taught us a useful lesson, especially for teen-age drivers: You are not going to beat that train.
The lesson was:”Support your local Sheriff… with more aviation fuel.”
Sheesh.
I thought everyone got that.
The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, and, of course, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
Of these, I have seen two or three episodes of the Sopranos, and not one minute of any of the others. Proud to be a TV hater.
Mankind has been declaiming the decline of culture and the next generation since the Neolithic dawned.
We have absolute proof of such by way of Cuneiform ‘scribbles’ only 6-7 millennia old.
In them the scribe wails over the noxious trend, particularly within his own family.
=======
What you’re witnessing is a universal trait first encountered in mining.
As product demand goes up, the ore (script) quality declines.
You’re deluding yourself to think that the same old critter, us, can come up with strikingly new and fresh story lines.
=======
And, of course, the best storytelling turns on conflict. And what conflict can beat winner-takes-all? (A movie title, IIRC)
So, it’s not too surprising that the best year for Hollywood scripts was 1939 — with European war so proximate.
Not to worry. Should atomic war break out, Hollywood survivors will have first class, intense stories to screen.
However, should peace really break out, then the whole world is doomed to an Eloi-at-the-theaters lassitude.
One of the few advantages of age is that I’ve gotten to hear this complaint before. It is largely true that people always think things are getting worse, while things are actually getting better. While there are some valid points to be made here (and I do suggest clicking through to the post written by the Hollywood writer) you hurt your case by calling “Lawrence of Arabia” a “middle-brow” film. If that’s not high brow just what, pray tell, is? “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”?
This also ignores the truism that 90% of everything is crap. If this column were being written in the 60′s (as many such columns were) it would rightly complain about the crappy new movies from Hollywood and extol those from a supposed “Golden Age”. And it would be just as right. But the really crappy movies are soon forgotten, and the good ones are long remembered.
I will agree, though, that some of the best writing happening now is for television. I am so jonesing for the “Braking Bad” wrap up that I can’t stand it.
Actually, Lawrence is the very definition of middlebrow; Back in 2006, Terry Teachout classified Kirk Douglas’s Lust for Life as another middlebrow film in a memorable Wall Street Journal column. The fact that we’d consider both movies to be extremely sophisticated “high brow” cinema, to borrow from comment shows how far pop culture has fallen from its postwar heights.
Are we talking about the same “Lawrence of Arabia”? The one with arguably the best screenplay ever written? The one that towers above a century of cinema history? The one where any random frame from the film could be blown up and hung on a wall with pride? That one with the iconic imagery, unforgettable performances, and searing psychoanalysis of one of the century’s most complex and heroic figures?
I suppose one could call it “middle brow” if the subtext were completely ignored. I can say as a filmmaker that Lawrence is something to which I will forever aspire and likely never approach.
I like your writing, and agree with you far more often than not. But I’m bewildered at this. What, I ask again, would qualify as a high-brow film in your mind? Honestly trying to wrap my head around the criteria here.
And perhaps I’m a little dim. Teachout’s column seems to claim that “middle brow” means either just slightly dumbed-down for the masses, or choosing a less than towering figure as the subject, ie: Johnny Cash vs. Michelangelo.
If there was a Mozart of insurgency, T.E.L. was it.
So I remain, cordially confused.
Hollywood like Academia is fully infiltrated by Politically Correct Left Wing moonbats and all its output is full of blatant and subtle left wing Multi Culti nonsense and bias.
Lets face it too that HOLLYWOOD has been punting BLACK PRESIDENTS, black Bosses, Black Chief Detectives, Black brilliant Scientists, Black computer EXPERTS, Black most moral men, Black as the hero’s bestest truest most longest friend ever for decades now. In Hollywoodland what the Black NEVER is the CRIMINAL (or if he is he is ALWAYS misunderstood and INNOCENT of this particular crime or FORCED in to the crime by wicked whitey and his persecution) or the villain or the Terrorist. No those parts are reserved for Whitey and preferably South American or European whiteys. Now I am not saying some Blacks are not Chiefs of Police or Bosses or Scientists but in EVERY movie and TV show they ALWAYS are and that is NOT reality that is PROPAGANDA.
Life of Pi II? Nope.
I can’t tell from the discussion here whether people are more upset at the perceived poor quality of the movies (bad acting, overemphasis on SFX over writing or acting)–or if they’re mainly angry at the left-wing ideological tilt of most movies and TV. Those aren’t equivalent.
One of the greatest movies ever–”Doctor Strangelove”–was a strongly anti-military movie.
“12 Angry Men” made a hero out of the one juror who refused to vote for the death penalty for a defendant.
“All the President’s Men” glorified WPost reporters Woodward and Bernstein as they brought down President Nixon.
The producers of “High Noon” admitted that this Western was really an allegory attacking McCarthyism.
Going further back, Chaplin’s “Modern Times” blamed capitalist efficiency for the struggles of workers.
Those were all great left-wing movies. I liked those a lot. How about the other conservatives here?
On the other hand, we had the recently produced Atlas Shrugged movie, which stunk.
Great art isn’t supposed to tell you what you want to hear or reassure you. It’s supposed to make you think–and maybe rethink what you believe.
I blame the viewer. Hollywood is just like any other business; it produces what the consumers want. If Hollywood is producing mostly trash, well then, guess what? The viewers themselves are probably trashy. If you don’t like what is out there, then go read a book, go explore the great outdoors, or anything else.
I have yet to read any comment mentioning how the abnegation of meaning and purpose manifest in post modern thinking has wraught destrunction on late 20th c. and early 21st c. culture and the American popular intellect. Before the 1960′s, when the philosophies of post modern “iconoclasts” like Derrida and other intellectuals had yet to influence popular culture, themes like sacrifice, courage, beauty, redemption, and justice (and in counter, tragic flaws and the subsequent consequences)ingrained in traditional stories would reflect a shared national ideal. Not so beginning with the ’60s. Any hint in a story of a metaphysical standard was just another way for “the man to keep down the down trodden”. Language became ambiguous; to the point that we debated what the definition of “is” is in the 80′s. Now, with traditionally held exemplars of existence being viewed with contempt unless they are ghettoized in a fantasy setting, we are left with visceral stimuli to excite the brain– a series of bright lights, big bangs and emotionally charged eviscera. (the movies of Tarantino come to mind). It is what we as a culture have become (this may, perhaps, explain the fascination for zombies– a type of self identification for the audience). Putting that genie back in the bottle is one major task. But if it is not, for those whose comments suggest turning a conservative back to our cultural milieu, the American Experiment is doomed. A nation of the undead shambling to the polls.
I’m really surprised that there’s been little mention of the Dark Knight Rises. It’s a really great movie, in fact one of the few I’ve thought worth seeing in theatres. Plus you probably can’t find a big-budget spine-tingling epic with a more conservative message, not even Lord of the Rings.
I’ve been writing screenplays and TV pilots for fourteen years. I’d like to point out how hard it is to write a story with good values that is really well told. Even M. Night Shyamalan has only been able to pull it off once with THE SIXTH SENSE.
One more thing. Watch REDBELT, the David Mamet martial arts film, before you say Hollywood is morally bankrupt.
I am really surprised that Ed did not mention the spate of vampires, zombies, and cretins (MTV) cluttering the ether in the last few years. For me, Abe Lincoln as vampire hunter is the final indicator of the end of Western Civilization as I have known it.
I don’t go to theaters anymore. It is a waste of my time for the most part. If a movie gets a good review from friends with opinions I respect, I might rent it later.
I suppose this started years ago. Being an avid reader, used to go see a movie with the same title as a good book I had read. I always felt cheated, with one exception. In 1954, I saw the movie “Bridges of Toko-Ri”, after reading the novel by Michener. It followed the book to the letter.
For that reason, I have not seen “Atlas Shrugged”, a book I read right after it was published, that helped shape my life.
Many great movies have been mentioned here and most were from the time I was a kid. “Casablanca” being at the top of the list.
As for TV, I only watch one show. I am surprised it wasn’t mentioned. Perhaps I am wrong, but I find the show very entertaining. Good acting, good storyline, and no political statements. Does anyone else watch “NCIS”.
For pure entertainment, the old shows from the ’50′s like Ernie Kovac and Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” were hard to beat.