They don’t. Not by any demonstrable objective metric.
The people who espouse this rhetoric are looking at films of yore with rose-coloured glasses, and when you do that, all the red flags just look like flags.
When one looks back, they tend to remember the positives.
1994 played host to Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption. What an exceptional year, right?
Yes, it was. But it was also the year of The House of the Spirits, Car 54 Where Are You? and Milk Money.
Haven’t heard of those films? Yeah, they aren’t particularly lauded or remembered. We remember the highlights and discard the lowlights.
Movies don’t ‘suck’ now. And if they do, then movies have always sucked.
Colin’s answer has already succinctly described a part of what I’m trying to convey.
Further, not to be curt or impolite, but the people who think ‘movies suck now’ are not watching enough movies; it is as simple as that.
Movies are a reflection of the audience, and we are quite the hypocritical bunch.
“Originality is dead,” we say, and then flock to a below-average superhero film while original, inventive films play to near-empty theatres.
X-Men: Apocalypse and The Nice Guys both came out in 2016. The former, a straight-up mess, made $500 million. The latter, one of the finest comedies of the decade and a critical darling, made $62 million.
Of course, there are other factors at play such as the latter's R-rating, nonetheless, the divide exists.
We live in a world where the likes of Children of Men, The Assassination of Jesse James, Steve Jobs and Blade Runner 2049 failed at the box-office, whereas the fourth Transformers sequel made a billion dollars.
And that’s the reality.
I’m not protesting. People should watch what they want to watch. But then don’t turn around and say that there are no good movies being made.
Perhaps I’m slightly agitated by this question given the timing – 2019 was one of the finest film years of the past decade.
The blockbuster delights of Avengers: Endgame. The wistful, elegiac embrace of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The anxiety-inducing, two-hour panic attack that was Uncut Gems. The Joaquin Phoenix powered Joker.
The Irishman and its collection of titans. The hilarious Booksmart. The wickedly fun and twisty Knives Out. The piercing and precise Parasite.
And those are the ‘popular’ ones. Here are 10 other slightly lesser known, but stunning films from just last year: Waves, High-Life, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Little Women, Pain and Glory, The Lighthouse, The Farewell, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Luce, Her Smell and Dark Waters.
I could name at least 5 more.
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. For every hackneyed reboot or sequel, companies like A24 put out a gem.
For every Dark Phoenix, there’s a Midsommar. It’s just that right now, we focus on both.
But in 10 years when someone else asks “Do movies suck now?” they will look back at 2019 with rose-coloured glasses; they’ll remember the Parasites and Irishmans, but forget about The Kitchen, Serenity and The Goldfinch.
I’m sure many already have.
More movies are being made now than ever before. Many of them are bad, some are good, and a few are great.
I would argue that the last sentence holds for practically any era.
Thanks for Reading
Image source Google
0 Comments