Being a movie fan places the viewer into an odd relationship with Hollywood: on the one hand, Hollywood is the place where your favorite art is produced and released from – cinema would not exist without it – but on the other hand, there’s an undercurrent of contempt that lingers beneath every studio and executive. To us on the outside, this manifests itself as a prevailing sense that the people responsible for movies existing could not care less about the movies themselves. It seems that almost every filmmaker who has spent time in Tinsel Town has emerged with stories about insane notes, impossible studio executives, and the labyrinthine development process, or in other words everything that gets in the way of them making the movies they want to.
But you don’t need us to dig up interviews to learn that Hollywood thinks that you, the viewer, are stupid – you just need to look at the movies.
Important Note: Just because a film is mentioned in this article doesn’t mean that the film is at all bad. You’ll see a bunch of Marvel movies pop up, and I am a raving Marvel fanboy who has enjoyed every movie they’ve produced as a studio. It’s just that, when placed in the larger context of ALL Hollywood product, patterns emerge that are troubling, even in movies that work from start to finish. So please don’t rush to the comments to yell at me because you see The Avengers or one of Nolan’s Batman’s embedded in an example – it’s all about context.
1. The Obsession With Youth
Everyone wants to feel like a kid again. We all have some happy memory of a time in their life before the pressures of the world clamped down and the dark shadow of maturity swept down. Desiring to re-experience those youthful highs is natural, if sort of unhealthy if left unattended, so naturally, a large portion of the market will be devoted to that age group and to the people who wish to be reminded of their own time in that age group.
But we’ve crossed a line in pop culture where instead of having a sub-set of movies aimed at that audience to having ALL blockbuster films designed specifically for the pre-teen and teen demographic. Right now, there is huge currency devoted to covering Young Adult fiction, toy adaptations, comic books, etc.
While we can argue about the quality of each individual film and franchise, the prevailing attitude is still troubling: Hollywood has become more and more divided, with films that seek to deal with adult themes and narratives being relegated to micro-budgets and awards runs. It seems that the only way to secure a large budget for your film these days is to cater to the toy people.
This speaks to the homogenization of the look and feel of so many movies, and why so many films, of wildly different subjects matter, seem bent on chasing the same visual style, regardless of larger considerations. How many times have you seen the grime-‘n-gritty shaky-cam look applied to action scenes? Even when the action is giant robots punching each other, the camera is shaking like a Youtube video of an alley fight. It’s all this juvenile obsession with being “dark” and “edgy” and “kewl,” which means that all films need an ironic detachment and glossy coat of malice, no matter how ludicrous or campy the initial concept. There is no reason why a film about talking cars that turn into robots that then punch other robots should have scenes of characters getting spines and faces ripped out, or have characters calling each other names you’d expect to hear over a Call of Duty live game.
But it happened. Because that’s what the kids want.
Even a raunchy comedy like this past summer’s Ted, while very funny, had nothing in it that could not be easily dubbed over for future syndication runs. More and more, movies are not designed to be good movies, they are designed to appeal to one specific market group, let all other qualities be damned. While quite a bit of it is well-made and entertaining, there’s still a sense that a new ceiling has been built in terms of thematic content and narrative types, a ceiling which cannot be burst through without sacrificing production values.
Speaking of stories…
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7 Comments
I agree with you entirely. I’ve done a few movie critic article reviews here and there, but most of my focus is video games. Video games like the movies now days share a lot of producers and production methods of the movies. Script process is even more heavily tied to the money-making-machine where you can make a FPS shooter back story using random generator or out-of-a-hat method on the mater of time period, location, hero back story, nemesis back story, process of reaching climax, climax (optional) and how its resolved. EX: time period, WWII; location, Madagascar (easy because very few people know what it should look like); Hero is special ops Army specialist one man wreck crew with some drama secret (too lazy to ever explain and reveal it); Nemesis is a Nazi witchcraft practicing fruit loop, hell bent on gaining knowledge on a voodoo ritual that will allow him to control the dead; Process of story evolution is hero is chasing after bad guy while bad guy is constantly just one step ahead of him but stumbles into the after math of what he left behind; Climax, nemesis is a retarded and opens a portal to hell and gets obliterated by a demon; Resolution hero must battle demon to get a gem (a easy accepted token)to close the portal and save all humanity.
Tada!!! I just wrote you guys a FPS game script. I do expect royalties for this wonderful creative process here. :) Continuity errors means nothing in the game world. Just means you need to add better blood splatter effects. Gears of War is proof of concept of this.
Where I disagree with you… The critic process is as equally flawed. Us critics are WAY heavily swayed by our advertisers which happens to be the material we are criticizing. AND mainstream populace thinking. If everyone loves a game… IE Gears of War. And I go against the grain of mainstream populace, people stop reading my reviews saying “what does this guy know?! He is just a jerk that doesn’t get it.” So we end up writing mandy pandy mush mouth reviews that are absolutely pointless, uses a lot of verbiage but says nothing. Not until we get a better feel of what everyone else thinks… than we get brave and whip out the wording to confirm the mainstream concept.
Last flaw of the critic process. It’s easy to use negativity and just shoot an idea down rather than putting your own buttocks on the line and support it. After all it’s easy to find fault with anything and attack it in some comedic entertaining fashion. This for a lot of critics is a part of the mush mouth say a lot of nothing process. Just bash the crap out of it and than later bury the review like it never happened and write a flowery one if the game is embraced by the mainstream. This critic spectacle of slam reviews is entertaining to people like watching a roman gladiator battle. We wage war on the writers and all the people in the creative process while they are pretty much unarmed and vulnerable for the amusement of our audience.
But I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a new release game absolutely tank in the first week 80% after the critics find out that the mainstream populace likes it.
In fact for many critics the only way not to get a early bash review is to heavily advertise on their website or other publication just at the time of the release. As Kane and Lynch 2 proved… if a producer spends enough advertising money even the worst of games will get a positive review at the release period. Until the ad money dries up and than the critics come out of the wood works to attack the product after being forced into humiliating submission during the release phase.
Point is: Not only is the creative process is flawed, but the critic process is as equally flawed.
In the game and movie industry, it’s a kind of a rare thing now days to actually see a critic that is actually thoughtful and intelligent. That dissects the artistic material rather than graffiti on it with a spray can. With this kind of weird mindset (of course being metaphoric) that it’s ok to graffiti on someones property if you use rarely used big words in your vandalism and there is cynical humor to it. Like it turns vandalism into a vigil ante public service announcement.
Hey Shawn, thanks for the comment and I’m glad you liked the article. The thing about the critical community is that, even if you disagree with what is written, reading the criticism is still important. Even when I read a review that thrashes something I love, I am glad to have read t because it is in disagreeing with that person, and developing my reasons and beliefs to counter-argue, that I really come to understand my own reaction to the film/book/comic/any particular thing you can think of. So, yes, the critical community is flawed, but that’s only because it is a community built on opinions which are of course going to be flawed and inconsistent. I still think it’s worth it, flaws and all.
Wasn’t Rise of the Planet of the Apes a reboot? It’s canonicity doesn’t matter. It had zero to do with the Roddy McDowell films. And that was the point. And Star Trek takes place in an alternate timeline. The original one exists concurrently to it so, again, isn’t impacting on already established canon. X-Men, however, did. Charles is shot and paralysed at the end of First Class but is seen(as Patrick Stewart) walking at the end of Wolverine, set 10 years later or something. This might be rectified in the Days Of Futures Past as I can’t see them having the character sitting down for the whole film so maybe he’ll be using a stick and his walking gets progressively worse.
RISE may have been a reboot, but there are numerous call-backs to the original films, and there are a bunch of references to a “shuttle mission being lost” setting up the initial Chuck Heston crew. Not to mention all the time devoted to setting up the virus plot thread that has no bearing on the rest of the film besides setting up the original films.
Or maybe the references to the virus and the missing ship is a set up for the inevitable sequels. Rise is a reboot. Simple as that. The reason the apes could talk in the originals was the paradox of a talking ape from the future being switched for a normal ape in the present. It had nothing to do with apes being made smart in an effort to cure Alzheimer’s. You seriously need to watch the originals again cause it seems you have no idea what is a reboot and what isn’t.
Another prequel/reboot that I do think is great is “Casino Royale”- while it wasn’t a prequel in the literal sense, in that it didn’t take place before the original Sean Connery Bond films, it was a spiritual backstory for that character who was fully formed right from the first film. It did a great job of showing how Bond learn to be Bond-it definitely brought new life in to the franchise, and was actually made by the same people involved in some of the previous films.
Those three prequels you name as good movies aren’t prequels; they’re reboots.