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In Reply to: What the hell has happened to Hollywood? posted by mvwine on September 24, 2002 at 07:01:53:
It's your fault folks, maybe not the specific people at this forum, but the audiences pay for action, not story. The perception is that you guys won't come without plenty of CGI, violence and or sex. So far the perception appears accurate. When the audience stops flocking to the crap it will stop getting made. Not a very complex issue.Steve
Follow Ups:
You know those who spend several thousand dollar on home theater and all they watch, special effects movies: Star War, Jurassic Park, Gladiator...
if newspapers are written on a 5th grade level, movies are now made on a 3rd grade level.
It is the same audience that used to flock at the thoughful Hollywood films, so something HAD gone wrong all of a sudden.I think the public and the movie industry had entered the degenerative oscillation, self-sustained, that trully took two to tango. The same trend is noticeable in the European cinema too, but to a far lesser extent.
I think we get what we deserve, goes for films, fashion, cars, government. I am not by the remotest stretch a film expert or historian, but as I recall it the Hollywood machine went arwy somewhere around Star Wars and Raiders of Lost Ark and MTV. Both great films for their uniqueness, size, and fun. Somewhere around there, big, loud, fast, flashy took priority over clever thoughtful writing. We are still sinking into the abyss.Audiences made it quite clear what they wanted, and Hollywood kept making it. Hollywood is not about art, Hollywood is about money. Goal #1 MAKE MONEY. If they are forced to make trash to make big bucks they will make big trash, if forced to make art to make big bucks they will do that. Do not attend the next big trashy film, don't watch Cops, Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol. Write letters and name names of types of films you want to see. Force them to find a new Hitchcock, or Walt Disney, or Billy Wilder. Tell them writers over 22 are not washed up.
Steve
i always noticed the following. i don't know when it began. but i noticed in american film that action was the way it operated. now it's full of killings, which are action death/mortality issues. it's a cheap hook in terms of holding an audience's attention.i do marvel at how good hollywood has taken the action genre. it's quite remarkable really and these films are of interest in their own right. the action never ends in 'collateral damage'. explosions, fires, i just love the scene where arnold plunges into the water, going down a large waterfall. as as he goes under water, my subwoofer kicks in with a great underwater sound effect.
so i'm there with the action. i got the surround sound and the hdtv. it's alot of fun.
i also notice how pumped up i feel after a movie like this. watching my superheroes, i am almost ready for battle.
my complaints here are poor movies like changing lanes in which the social dramas are pathetic. everything is cardboard.
where is this going to go? i envision movies like mtv music videos, where brief sexual images are played for a whole movie and the mind can't fully grasp what it wants to attend to before the image is changed.
i think we are already at the point where it doesn't matter who the director is. they will basically follow the same formula and come out with the same movie. seeing the recent woody allen movie reminded me that he is an individualistic director, that his movie would not be the same as another director.
i saw a movie recently that i thought was okay but the next day i had absolutely no recollection of what the movie was about!!!!!! i completely forgot the whole content of the movie, that's how insignificant it was. and since it was a dvd rental, i could not use the cover to help me remember the movie.
actually if you want to go back to the seventies, remember how unreliable american cars were getting then? how bad it was getting until the japanese cars surged onto the market.
at the time, Star Wars appeared to be a watershed event. I still remember the LINES as I have never seen them before around the theatres. Hell, I liked it myself, and I still do. But it marked the beginning of the end.In fact, I attribute the decline and fall of the entire world on Star Wars. Hollywood got a taste of BIG MONEY, and their rush to create eye candy style movies totally overwhelmed any efforts towards art or deeper entertainment.
This mindset spills over into world-wide distributed media, and pretty soon there are Osama Bin Laden's hating the USA and wanting to kill it.
So, were I to invent a time machine, I would go back in time and prevent Star Wars from ever happening. I would place good money that the World Trade Center would still be standing.
Randy
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
By the time it came out the water has already been tested by 2001.In terms of demonstrating the public's willingness to swallow big white elephant, it was already clear by the time the SW was rolled out.
What the Star Wars did was to show that once you adapt that simplistic mentality, no high art is required anymore. There is no need for Kubrick and his search for new forms - a simple cookie cutter will work. While the 2001 was - OK, arguably! - a thought provoking film, the SW was nothing but visual kaka, a chemical, with the viewer's brain now simply sending the data (notice - DATA, not even information) from the eyes into the arms and legs, the stomach and bladder - time to get more popcorn, time to pee....
From that point it all accelerated, and today we see the prolifiration of dreck in that format produced every month - all those idiotic shooting creatures abound. Today it probably takes just a few month to "assemble" another Star Trooper, or Lost in Space, or whatever the name of that crap is.
Victor,I respectfully, but totally, disagree with your assesment of Star Wars. Not high art, but hardly empty. A film as empty as the one you portray - a filmic video game - would not have brought me back to the theater over 25 times to see it (when I was young and it first came out). The legions of Star Wars fans the series inspired are hardly mindless (they think a little TOO much, methinks).
Despite cynical wisdom, Special Effects in of themselves are rarely enough to give a film legs. There are countless films that have been special effects heavy, but which have been abandoned by audiences for lack of compelling characters or plot. For many viewers, Star Wars had heart...characters they wanted to see again and again, and a coherent, cogent fantasy world in which to escape.
A lot of people blame Jaws for the same reasons they pile on Star Wars. But I saw Jaws more times than I can count because, long after the scares and gore had lost their impact, the characters, locations and story remained vital and compelling.
Many people have theories about the decline of hollywood, and usually these theories start with a completely subjective reaction to a film.
"I hated this popular film....therefore it's responsible for everything bad that has come since..."I don't buy it.
Rich H.
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