Posted on 02/26/2013 4:47:51 AM PST by expat1000
Before 9/11 we used to have lots of Islamo Fascists terrorists type of movies such as Delta Force, Navy Seals, The Seige where the Islamo Fascists were the bad guys and we were the good guys and we ended up getting them in the end. Post 9/11 all of these type of movies, we have to try to understand the terrorist before we foil their plots. There has to be a reason why they do this (i.e. evil Americans have forced them into this life)
He doesn’t not watch it during that period. It’s just that the percentage of movies he considers good goes down because they include more recent movies.
Leni
What I meant by "ChiCom bad guys" was any depiction of Communist China as being an enemy of the United States. For example "Red Dawn" with Chinese invaders.
I began noticing a decline — or, at least, a change — in the quality & content of films after 1980. Increasingly sterile. Either that, or I just outgrew them.
Some people laud the indie films as an alternative to the vapid blockbuster mentality of the studios. The problem is, I don’t like indie films. Most of them are either dry or raving left-wing, usually involving charmless, dysfunctional characters. Makes me pine for the elegance of the old movies.
Once upon a time there was a middle ground: a film could have the production values & powerful emotional resonance of the studios with the intellectuality of an indie — and be generally conservative. Now there seems to be a glaring split, with nothing in between.
Once in a blue moon I’ll go to the movies. LINCOLN was good, although somewhat sanctimonious & liberal. But most of the time I find the experience very unengaging.
Your post made me imagine Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn rowing a galley oar like Heston did in Ben-Hur. I about fell over laughing.
Baldwin would have played the fat slob sitting on his fat butt eating grapes and sucking down wine! There simply are no real actors in hollyweird anymore. I do not go to movies. I pay to see the actors do the movie, and there is no one there now that I will give my money too to watch a movie they are in. Nobody in that town is a true actor anymore. They are a bunch of punk high school drop out homosexual drug users attempting to do the job.
I agree. Hollywood in not dead. It is just corrupt from the tip of its toes to the top of its head.
The Hollywood of today couldn’t produce an actor fit to carry Humphrey Bogart’s suit bag.
For your consideration:
Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Don Cheadle, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis
Pick your own: http://www.imdb.com/list/JVz-JF8ZW-M/
Bale and Gosling in the same class as Bogie? No thanks.
I liked Hoffman in Moneyball, but nobody will ever confuse his portrayal of Art Howe with Rick Blaine. Gosling, I will grant you, has come a long way since The Mickey Mouse Club but compared with Bogart? Don’t think so.
I’ll give you five others:
Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier. We don’t have anyone like any of them today, either.
Some of it is due to scriptwriting and plot, which are lost arts in most movies of today. Perhaps if movies told stories again, the quality of today’s acting might show up better.
JMO.
Just because a trip to the movies shows coming attractions for such gems as Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and The Wizard of Oz, you think that Hollywood is dead? < / do I really need it?>
-PJ
Timur Bekmambetov is an example of a Russian director (”Wanted” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”) though the budgets of his films aren’t anywhere near $200 million.
Jee-woon Kim is a Korean director who did the latest mummified corpse, er, I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger film “The Last Stand.” Estimated budget was $30 million.
There may be other examples, but not many. A foreign director has to REALLY stand out in order to get a big U.S. film. John Woo and Robert Rodriguez probably the most prominent examples I can think of.
Robert Rodriguez was born in San Antonio.
Ah, I thought he was straight-up Mexican. I stand corrected.
Are they on to Korean movies now? I know remaking Japanese horror movies was all the rage for a while.
I was being facetious asking that question. It was in response to the claim that no Chinese was a film star in Hollywood in the last 50 years.
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