As a deep and abiding lover of movies I hate to say this, but movies and the movie industry these days is trash. The signal to noise ratio of worthwhile watching just isn't there. The only reason theaters still exist is for big budget turn your brain off schlock, with some exceptions. Films like DUNE and Mad Max Fury road come to mind as worthwhile ventures of that ilk. There are only a few directors I trust to make something worth my time. Denis Villenueve, Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow and David Fincher to name a few. Heard a few good things about Everything, everywhere all at once, might check it out. In a way this a casualty of my age. Im sure to a 7 - 18 year old boy movies are great these days. All explosions and CGI and bullshit. Anything not blowing up is usually trying to sell me on the moral righteousness of some crusade that got shoehorned into the movie more clumsily than a cerebral palsy patient on ice skates. Once you start seeing it, its impossible to unsee it.
Take this movie I just watched on Netflix for example about Operation Mincemeat in WWII. A film about the secret deceptions Britain undertakes to misdirect the Nazis allowing the allied landings in Sicily to occur without impossible casualties. At one point in the story, for the operation to succeed, they need to get a photograph of woman, whose picture will create a necessary fiction of a hypothetical girlfriend in the ongoing top secret plot. Mind you that this is one of the most secret operations Britain is running at the time below I assuming only deciphering the daily enigma codes. One of the officers running the show in this top secret operation goes to a secretary working there to ask if she or one of the other secretaries has a photo he can use. The secretary he asks offers her photo, but ON THE CONDITION THAT SHE GETS TO SIT AT THE TABLE WITH ALL THE DECISION MAKERS IN THE ONGOING TOP SECRET PLOT. The British basically helped invent modern espionage practices and would take operations security and information security very seriously. You mean to tell me that the kind officers running one of the most important clandestine operations in the entirety of WWII would throw out the window that this woman has no security clearances and no practical ability to make the operation more likely to succeed? She gets allowed into this secret plot that literally 10s of thousands of allied soldiers lives are depending on because she offered her fucking photo to the cause? Are you fucking kidding me? Like I get it, you need to have your girlboss character to subtly controvert to the gender norms of Britain in the 1940's (which she does throughout the fim) so that wine aunt will hit play and get Netflix some more of that sweet sweet watch time. But JESUS, could you not do that by undermining the singular premise the entire plot is operating under, namely secrecy. Not too mention the fact that she now expects to be one of the people not just involved but running the fucking show. I still watched the whole thing because I knew nothing about operation mincemeat and found the bones of the plot, when not being ripped from my immersion every 8 seconds, rather interesting. If you want to tell a female empowerment story then go do that. Im sure there are enough scripts floating around hollywood to do just that.
In a way though for how awesome all those CGI movies are for a young guy growing up, I actually feel sad for him. For every avengers he gets in his childhood that I didn't get. I got a FACE OFF that he didn't get. Remember when movies where fun, and didn't give a shit. Could you imagine this scene hitting screens today?
And like, I'm not arguing that FACE OFF should win any awards, it most certainly shouldn't, but shit used to be fun. And thats what seems so drained from the industry today is that sense of fun. Like every writer is laboring under this assumption that their little contribution to American cinema needs to make the world a better place first, and entertain the audience last. You get this sense that every scene has been focus group tested to within an inch of its life until correct number of Joss Whedon jokes per second has been reached. And thats how the whole thing feels, like factory made fast food without the guilty pleasure of the grease.
Good stuff still gets made, but would a little kid today raised to love superheroes, even recognize it if he saw it.
