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| I think TV just is better recently than film. by blackwater 05/31/2014, 3:48pm PDT | ||||
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| There's been a lot of good TV series lately: The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire. Meanwhile, the only good mainstream movie I can think of recently is Gravity.
Why is it like this? Why are movies so terrible these days? I think there are a few reasons. One is just that people have shorter attention spans these days. Computers and cell phones have contributed to this, by fostering a culture of instant gratification. If a movie like Tarkovsky's original Solaris aired today, people would just walk out of the theater during one of the many long takes. I think part of it is drugs, too. In the 1970s they had pot, which tends to foster just sitting around and contemplating things. Now, we have cocaine, and speed, and even completely legal ritalin for large segments of the population. Some new movies seem almost unwatchable to me because the camerawork has so many rapid cuts. One good example is the original Hunger Games movie. Even when nothing was happening, the director was cutting back and forth between shots incredibly rapidly. One of those movie critic websites (sorry, can't remember which one) pointed out that you just can't find a take that lasts more than a few seconds in the whole movie. The camerawork is just a symptom, though. If you look at the actual plots of recent movies, you see the full disease. There's way too much plot! It's as if the directors are scared that if there isn't a dramatic plot point every 5 minutes, audiences will lose interest. The scary thing is, they might be right. In contrast, if you look at a classic movie like Deliverance, nothing even HAPPENS until at least the 30 minute mark. It's all just atmosphere. So you have these hack directors making dumbed-down movies for ADD man-children. They feel like they can't afford to diverge from the formula, because the studio has invested huge amounts in CGI. You have things like Peter Jackson making a bloated 3-part monster out of Tolkien's only short book, in a cynical grab for cash. TV shows can avoid a lot of these problems. They don't need to have such big budgets, because they're not playing the winner-take-all movie box office game. So they can experiment and actually be creative sometimes. People still have short attention spans, but it's easier to get them to focus for 30 minutes than for 2 hours. |
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