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= film your own masterpiece!
Posted on 07/23/2005 4:31:17 PM PDT by MadIvan
‘You can take Hollywood for granted like I did,” says a character in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. “Or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
If that was true decades ago, it is truer today. I have yet to find any American grown-up who disagrees with the notion that Hollywood movies today are unprecedentedly bad. But nobody quite understands why.
It has always been true that Hollywood put commerce before art. It has always been true that celebrity often drove casting, and that sex drove celebrity. But none of that glorious sordid American reality produced movies as bad as the ones we now have to endure.
Take the two films that a wonderful actress, Nicole Kidman, has starred in over the past two summers. Last year she appeared in a remake of The Stepford Wives. The original was a campy, creepy 1970s feminist screed. The Kidman version was an artless, humour-free, dumb-as-a-post sitcom with a logic-free plot.
This summer she starred as Samantha in another painful, universally-panned remake, of the cheerful early 1960s sitcom Bewitched. What exactly was an actress of Kidman’s calibre doing anywhere near it? Perhaps the most concise answer is money. The old studio system was geared toward raking in the dollars, but it also kept costs down. Stars were contracted to studios and were unable to leverage up to $20m a movie or a cut of the profits. Expensive visual effects were yet to be invented. The massive Lucas-Spielberg formula for the summer blockbuster — with advertising and marketing budgets to match — was in the future. And so, as the film critic David Thomson points out in his new book The Whole Equation (yes, he cites the Fitzgerald quote in his title), more movies were made.
In its prime Hollywood used to churn out up to 700 a year; now it’s 200 tops. With fewer and far more expensive movies you tend to take fewer risks with any individual one. And so you tend toward bankable celebrities and concepts that will guarantee sales.
A couple of years ago Thomson related the problem in an interview with the journalist Robert Birnbaum: “Someone comes along and says, ‘Look, Tom Cruise is a secret agent. Goes all over the world. Beautiful exotic locations. Lot of very high-tech machinery. Four or five beautiful women. Two or three major supporting actors as villains. Do you like it?’” The script, the storyline, the characters, the photography are almost afterthoughts.
And so you get something like this summer’s War of the Worlds. It’s another remake; its script is risible, the effects are amazing (but no better any more than most state-of-the-art video games), the characters are cartoons, and the acting rarely gets beyond movie-of-the-week quality. The ending was so corny and contrived the audience I saw it with burst out laughing.
And this was Spielberg! We know he’s capable of at least competent film-making. The producers must have known it was dreadful, because they organised an absurd series of advance publicity explosions to create interest. But watching Cruise bounce up and down on Oprah’s sofa declaring his new love for a Hollywood starlet was about as interesting as watching him disappear in the movie into what looked like a giant alien posterior. (The latter, at least, got a cheer when I saw it.) There is a reason why this year Hollywood has seen almost every week’s take decline compared with last year. The audiences are catching on. They know that imaginatively exhausted dreck is now the rule.
Other factors count. As Joseph Epstein observes in the current issue of Commentary, most movies are aimed at niche markets, mainly teenagers and young adults. Intelligent, challenging adult films are no longer the mainstream. The global market also favours easily translatable special effects, crass plots and minimal dialogue.
The best comedy is now on television, and usually in cheap cartoon form — South Park, The Simpsons, (yes, still) and The Family Guy spring to mind. The kind of intelligent middlebrow of Hollywood’s past is now more likely to be found on HBO: Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Oz, Deadwood, or even the innovative comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Every now and again something in this genre makes it to the big screen, and when it does critics are so relieved and overjoyed they tend to overhype it. Sideways struck me as a classic example of this. The ecstatic reviews were more about the deluge of dreariness the critics usually have to sit through than the flawed, slow movie itself.
So why don’t the big newspapers and critics simply ignore the big movies and refuse to review them? Aren’t critics in some way supposed to check commercial mediocrity? A few of the old school still do. The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffman simply refuses to review much that Hollywood produces. But The New York Times cannot. Its advertising income is heavily dependent on Hollywood blockbuster hype. And so, day after day you read critics who grew up on Fellini and Scorsese finding new and inventively ironic ways to describe The Fantastic Four.
Money also traps. Stars paid a fortune find it hard to accept modest sums for more interesting work. Recently I found myself watching Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in a film called Meet the Fockers. It was the sequel to the intermittently funny family comedy Meet the Parents. Hotel Rwanda was funnier. But watching Hoffman and De Niro tart themselves out for millions they do not need in a script whose awfulness defied belief was, well, a bummer.
Will it get better? No. Will some great movies still get made? Of course they will. At some point long after they have been distributed you’ll find out which movies they are. And that’s what DVD players were made for.
+ = film your own masterpiece!
works on both the MAC and Windows systems.
That's why I watch TCM more than any other station and rent mostly cds and tapes of older movies, movies with a plot and good acting. My grandson won't watch old movies because if something isn't blowing up in it or doesn't have really great special effects he thinks it isn't a good movie, however, my granddaughter loves the older movies and watches them with delight.:)
Absolutely one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Typical limosuine liberal dreck - two friends arguing about the quality of wine. Bleh!
Yes, we were soldiers, one of the few new ones that don't suck.
The DVD market is going to decline too soon. Most people already got their DVD collection set.
oops post 26 should read DVDs not cds.
The Pendragon film came out on DVD about a month ago. I was really looking forward to it because it was (according to a knowledgable friend of mine) very true to the original HG Wells story. It takes place in London, the dialogue and narration are often verbatim from the original book. The plot follows the book.
However, the production standards are bad. You really have to watch it as though you are seeing a stage play on the screen. The special effects are very unconvincing. It costs about $9 at Walmart. I wish I could recommend it because I was interested in seeing the original story on the screen. But it is too amateurish to recommend.
Hollywood is suffering from its own political bias. They shun non/anti-communist talent, and are thereby discriminating against anybody with half a brain. They've dumbed themselves down.
The timing is ironic. About 45 mins ago I was discussing movies with my two children ages 10 and 11 and they told me EXACTLY the same thing...that the movie people have no ideas and that they just keep remaking the same old movies. If preteens can get it one wonders why the ones paid huge ugly sums of money making movies and reviewing them don't.
Some of my friends who are also big movie fans like me had hangups about older movies and black and white films in particular. Slowly but surely I'm curing them of both problems. Pushing to have them watch The Godfather was probably my best move. Maybe not really old but still a step in the right direction.
Not true. A lot of people understand why. But nobody is listening to them. And that's why.
It has always been true that Hollywood put commerce before art.
I'm not sure about that any more. "Art" is the last thing on Hollywood's mind. And I'm beginning to suspect that even profit is taking second place to the socialist agenda. Hollywood sees itself as an engine of reform, just as so many left-dominated institutions do. It is willing to forsake even money if it can advance the socialist machine. So its apparatus is diverted from entertainment to didacticism, with the lessons being archetypal leftist catechism. Those sentiments don't resonate very well in this post-Soviet, post-9/11 world, so Hollywood becomes a very expensive whore walking a deserted street, flashing its tawdry, fly-blown wares at a handful of indiscriminate passers-by, elitist johns and perverts so obsessed by their needs that they don't care about quality.
It's the sick serving the sick, the dead feeding the dying.
Great indy film....Primer. on cd
very good
I wonder why movie critics aren't smart enough to figure that out on their own? So much for the state of criticism. But then that is why there is FreeRepublic--the critics like Sullivan can be reviewed. The professional critics no longer have the last word.
Worse yet, the "old ideas" they rehash are BAD old ideas! Half the movies produced today are cinematic renditions of freakin' comic books, for cripes' sake! Our kinetic literature -- that's what movies are for all practical purposes -- has devolved into pulp novellas.
A buddy of mine insists that it's because all the good writers have forsaken the screenwriting genre and turned to "graphic novels" because Hollywood is incapable of recognizing a good story any more.
Hollywood should die. The film community should disperse throughout the country and give the creative independents someplace to sell their wares.
B Movies , the "drive in" fare was better than most Hollywierd productions today.
What Hollywierd needs is competition, competition, competition.
No they are not "almost" afterthoughts they are not even thought of. Even when they have a decent story in the form of a book to begin with they manage to FUBAR the poor thing.
Very little is fresh, clever or witty. I will spend my $8.00 on a novel. At least there is a chance there that the story will have some internal consistency, some logic and some entertainment value.
These folks are so guilty about their unwarranted success that they tend to blabber about social issues. They listen to their scum advisors and side with the losers. Then they get huffy when those of us who used to buy tickets find other amusement to purchase.
Major league baseball would be in the same fix today if only (or 60-70-80%) folks who were related to folks already in MLB would be hired. The PR guys would still make big bucks but the game would suck.
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