Well, even though I maintain my rock position, I hadn’t seen Contagion yet and am interested to, and Winters Bones, though I’ve not heard of it, sounds intruiging based upon your statement.
What I really lament in movies these days is the move away from plot driven movies to special effects driven movies, and the non replenishing of acting talent, for the most part, in Hollywood.
FX driven movies account for 2 maybe 3 dozen movies released a year. They’re the high profile tent pole movies so everybody knows about them. But really outside the summer blockbuster season FX are largely incidental.
The thing to keep in mind is that big time Hollywood releases 3 or 4 movies a week, and indy/ art house Hollywood runs a similar pace. That adds up to about 200 movies a year being released theatrically in some form or another, let’s not even get into cable channel produced and direct to DVD. What that basically means is you can’t make a blanket statement about movies. There’s good comedies, there’s bad comedies, there’s FX driven, there’s plot driven with lots of FX (Rise of the Planet of the Apes fits that, yeah there’s tons of FX but it’s a damn good movie), there’s Michael Bay FX festivals.
I think the ultimate statement on how impossible it is to make blanket statements about movies is being released this Thanksgiving, Hugo, a kids movie by Martin Scorsese... no seriously Scorsese is about to release a movie intended to be watched by kids, no f-bombs, nobody getting their heads blown off, good clean family fun. It kind of frightens me actually.