Why Movies Suck

The pinnacle decade for movies was the 1970's. My absolute top favorite films came out during that decade. Prior to that decade, movies were good. They got better and better each year. Hollywood turned out some great stuff like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Even B-movie material like Dirty Harry and Shaft were damn good. So, what happened? How did movies go from consistently good to being consistently bad?

The answer to that question is two words--Star Wars. Star Wars is a great movie with a great story, but Hollywood got the wrong message. They turned to special effects instead of story, and it has spiralled into the shit we endure today like Transformers, a movie that is pure eye candy.

There have been some good movies since that time, but they appear less and less now as producers opt for the sure thing. Story has taken a back seat to spectacle. Movies today employ scriptwriters to write stories around the scenes that producers have already decided to film. In this new world, story is subordinate to the scenery and not the other way around. The alternative are the indie films that are so damn quirky as to be unwatchable.

We look at paintings to find something beautiful. Instead, we get art that makes us want to puke. We listen to music to feel something. Instead, we get saccharine pop songs that fill the blank spaces. We watch movies to lose ourselves in a great story. Instead, we have the equivalent of animated wallpaper.

To make matters worse is that Hollywood milks it all to death with sequels, franchises, reboots, and the like. I can tell you that these milk jobs never live up to the original. You can only be original with something once. That is what makes it original.

The reason things have gotten like this is because they spend so much money on movies. Eye candy looks good in trailers and piques interest. Sequels and the like guarantee return on invested capital. Hollywood plays it safe, and the result is massive suckitude.

The best thing that could happen in Hollywood would be a decline in available funds for movies. Hollywood needs to go back to a time before the big budget movie when the story mattered. The internet may be the thing that does the trick. But I doubt it. 30 years of decline is hard to reverse. Today's moviegoers have been reared on shit and can't tell the difference.

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