hello dear listener
i have a confession and a cry for help, all rolled into one.
i have spoken with my colleague mr loe about this, and he has expressed his empathy. but i feel i must share this story with you, dear listener, in the hope that you might be able to assuage my fears.
yesterday i took advantage of a couple of hours away from my labours and bought a ticket at one of the local nashville multiplexes, for a film that looked to any reasonable viewer that it might pass the time, if not enjoyably, at least with a few moments of entertainment. failing that, some light dancing on a white screen has always served as a counter to the monotony of a tuesday afternoon.
after 45 minutes of the film had passed, i found myself gasping for a reason to stay. this film, which i do not wish to name, for it has already had enough publicity, was so derivative, so formulaic, so utterly without interest or merit that i had become bored enough, as mr loe once said to me, that i wanted to eat my own hair.
i attempted to steel myself for the possibility that something would eventually happen to pique – or resurrect – my interest. such as laurence fishburne turning in the kind of performance he used to. but then i realised something.
i was embarrassed.
even though i was alone in the cinema, and nobody else knew i was there, i was actually beginning to feel ashamed that i had spent six bucks fifty on this movie.
my inner monologue told me that i had enough self-respect left to choose life.
and so i left the cinema, and didn’t look back, lest i see the destruction facing the rest of the audience, and turn to a pillar of salt.
in the hope of purifying my spirit, i decided to step into the next screen and see what was playing there.
then i visited the next screen.
and the next.
‘tyler perry’s meet the browns’
‘drillbit taylor’
‘vantage point’
’10 000 bc’ (on which more in the next thefilmtalk episode)
and, sweet merciful lord
‘superhero movie’
after my embarrassment had dissipated, i was faced with a terrible question, one that my colleague mr loe has been asking himself for far longer than i:
do notable exceptions ultimately do nothing so much as prove the rule:
that cinema is dead?
Is cinema dead? hmm…cinema as a form of artistic outlet? yes. cinema as a commercial vehicle? nope, but getting close. I think, honestly, Hollywood no longer knows how to tell a story. Not cinamatically, not thematically, and not any other ‘atically’ i can think of to balance that statement out. I think if you’re looking for art or meaning, it can be more found in the ‘user uploaded’ community. Granted, you gotta wade thru a lotta crap, but then…you find something and it feels good and right, because it’s real. Even if it’s hideously fake, it’s real…if that makes sense…and so i think the ‘cinema’ survives, thriving and alive and well, thru the common people..for now
I’m not so sure that that’s the case. Its true that there does seem to be an awfully large number of terrible movies out there (especially in the last few weeks), but I feel that this is more a case of there being a greater output of rubbish than there being any dip in the output of quality pictures. Take recent pictures such as There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. Great pictures that stand like giants over the heads of recent movies, but then, nobody remembers the low-quality films that came out around the same time as 2001 for example. In a few years, nobody will remember Meet the Spartans, but No Country will be probably be remembered 50 years hence.
Old fashioned ‘Hollywood Cinema’ / movies that could tell a good story in an adult fashion seem to be dead – oddly enough though not in other countries – for example the German film ‘The Lives of Others’ is a very good ‘conventional’ pic of the kind that Hollywood just does not seem to be able to do anymore.