I’ve been a big movie buff for as long as I can remember, dating back even to the 1950’s as I watched grainy, black-and-white classics from the postwar era. At 7 or 8 years old, my appreciation and understanding was limited perhaps, but there was something about the story telling and the magic of cinema that grabbed me from the start.
For a stretch while I was in radio school in the Navy in the late 1960’s, I once had a string of 44 days in a row watching a 25-cent movie on the Norfolk, Va., base, a record that still stands but I would like to have been able to challenge had the demands of making a living, marriage, etc., not intruded.
Fast forward (pun renounced) to 2011, and my love affair with all things cinematic is strained to a horrible degree, but even having said that I can’t imagine there will ever be a genuine breakup. I love movies – simple as that. But I gotta tell you, it’s harder clinging to that relationship these days than it ever has been in the ensuing, say, 50-plus years.
I know it’s customary for the elderly to grumble that modern times can’t hold a candle to the earlier generations, but I truly believe that the criticism of the movie business in this regard is more than nostalgic myopia. I’m not suggesting that all the films made today are crap, but merely noting that it has become increasingly difficult to find the gems every year. The principal culprit in all this is not that difficult to pinpoint: money.
As feature films become ever more expensive to produce and distribute, the pressure to stick with tried-and-true formulas (read sequels and comic book characters) has been impossible for the moronic movie moguls to resist. I shudder to think how many great stories and screenplays have been shelved because they didn’t conform to some arcane bean-counter truism that is substituted for actual judgment and daring from the executives paid to provide just that.
My passion for film may have started in the late 1950’s, but it really took flower in the 1970’s after I was discharged from the service and started college. Coincidentally, this was a magical time in the movie-making word, with groundbreaking news directors stepping forth with stunning masterpieces that redefined the whole art form and wound up making the decade perhaps the golden era for feature films. With two Godfathers, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Days of Heaven, etc., it certainly seemed like a wonderful time to be going to the cinema.
I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly when it all started to go wrong, but I can say that by the time we arrived in this glitzy, technology-laden millennium, the first-rate Hollywood screenplay had started to take a back seat to all the goofy bells and whistles that the new age had to offer. I understand that computer-generated imagery has had a revolutionary impact on film making, but anyone that suggests it’s all good is not paying attention to the things that always made feature films so special.
I used to say to friends that for so many movies, I wished I could have seen the film being made even more than I desired to see the finished product. “How’d they do that?” used to be so important; now, with all the incessant and ubiquitous CGI stuff (computer-generated imagery), you know how they did it and you increasingly don’t care.
Now we can have blood-thirsty Ninjas somersaulting 20 feet off the ground and stopping in mid-air, but I don’t ask how they managed that, I merely ask why they bothered. I remember being astounded by Gene Hackman’s frantic car chase beneath New York’s elevated trains in “The Fench Connection,” wondering how such fast-paced mayhem could have been orchestrated by anyone not blessed with supernatural powers. Admittedly, the pressure on Hollywood screenwriters and directors to come up with ever-more jaw-dropping effects is responsible for much of the computer-generated gibberish that passes for modern film. While I understand how we got here, I can’t quite bring myself to applaud the fact that we’re here.
And speaking of applauding (or more precisely in this instance, not applauding), does anyone else remember a time when you could go to the multiplex no matter how multi it may have been and hardly been able to find anything for anyone under the age of 15? I suppose that wasn’t quite fair at the time, the fact that the movie business seemed to be a decidedly adult form of entertainment, but my goodness, the pendulum effect that we’re experiencing now seems like a cruel and malicious overreaction to the slights of another generation.
Between the scads of animated films and the legion of blockbusters created by the various comic-book behemoths, it’s hard to understand why the concession stand doesn’t consist primarily of Animal Crackers, chocolate milk and leased blankets and pacifiers rather than the criminally overpriced popcorn that winds up being the real profit center at American theatres nowadays.
I cringe every time I watch a trailer and the first thing that comes up is the DC Comics or Marvel signatures. Geez, it used to be campy fun when we shuffled off to an occasional bit of Superman or Batman silliness, but they’ve moved so far down the superhero hierarchy these days – while the mayhem has stepped up because of our fetid preoccupation with computers – that I find myself consistently rooting for the ostensible evil villains.
You wanna scare me big time with a truly frightening antagonist? Make a movie about a chain-smoking executive at Paramount or Universal who is a serial killer that specializes in disemboweling novelists and screenwriters. If it somehow were successful either with the critics or at the box office, the only thing you’d have left to worry about is what category to enter it in for Oscar consideration. I’d vote for Documentary.
- T.S. O’Connell
