I think it’s pretty common to get the “(fill in the blank) ain’t what it used to be”s every now and then. I get this a lot. In my mind, French films will never be as good as they were in the 60s, American films will never be as good as they were in the 70s, music will never be as good as it was in the 90s (highly debatable, I know, but I’m a child of said 90s), etc… I think it’s all a matter of personal perspective. I think 2007 was a better year for movies than 1999. Maybe you have a point from an innovation stand point, but there were no movies like, say, Persepolis or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 1999. I think Zodiac is a vast improvement over Fight Club for Fincher, There Will Be Blood and improvement over Magnolia for Anderson. It’s all subjective, though.
Agreed. It’s a matter of perspective, as movie culture is cyclical. Innovation to me is just as important as the story, because it’s what pushes the medium in unexpected territories. There are infinite possibilities on how to tell a story, yet only certain directors have visionary status. Films are expensive, but that’s another subject. Now about Zodiac and TWBB…I’ll get back to you on that one.
the corporatization of hollywood is a factor. studios are run by business execs and lawyers, not people with artistic sensibilities like the days of the classic studio system.
I watch a lot of … extreme, B, foreign film (Japanese, Hong Kong, Chinese, Russian, Indian) and film has not gone to pot. Its just Hollywood atm has become too constrictive. It will probably go into a down turn like it did in the 60’s and 70’s until they pull their heads out and fix their model. Nothing beats watching a movie in the movie theatre. You have the people next to you, the atmosphere, etc
And never let it be forgotten: Hollywood made garbage by the truckload back in the 1930s and 1940s. The movies were like TV then; there always had to be lots of new product to fill the weekly movie habits of three-fourths of the country. A lot of these movies have been lost to history. A lot are impossible to sit through now.
I think 2007 is a great year for film history, specially with “no country for old men” and “there will be blood”. I’d dare to say that No country for old men tells us something that may be new, that we have reached a turning point that started in the 60’ but is probably reaching boiling point about now (I mean not in cinema but in world culture), should we not take it as a signal that no country… and batman talk about preatty much the same thing, is it posible that a character as nihilistic as the joker came around other than now (don’t get me wrong the new batman strikes me as childish as always but pay close atention to the villan) sudenly the villan doesn’t want money, or power or anything really other than destroying. And how about no country, preatty much the same thing, it talks about a new way of thinking (granted, the film is set like in the 80’s) I really don’t think this movie could have been done other than about now because we are reaching a point of no return, ancient values are gone and those who are child will habit a whole new world. Film is there to do its part and I feel like I can see a new gold american cinema being born, take for instance paul thoman anderson, wes anderson, the coen brothers, jason reitman, even FF Coppola. I think those are filmmakers that are showing us something new, that are talking about something new that is happening in our culture. That “something new” is quite scarry but I’ll say wellcome because if its happening, and it is, is because the old same order is just not working, boring us to death.
Sigh.
How about an Internet hug, Allison? Internet hug I bet that made everything better! It’s a magical place, ye olde Internetz!
Oh, I forgot that asterisks made stuff bold. More magic!
The Fall by Tarsem is the best newer movie I have seen in a long time. Really, really good. I think there are always gems, it just takes some digging to find them.
Pablo Hutardo has a good point. Gems do exist, but our values are changing. Film culture is at a crossroads. It’s a cyclical process, something new comes out between the cracks.
I really don’t know what was so innovative about Fight Club other than the CGI title sequence thing.
Gee Matt I hated The Fall-visually stunning but otherwise a pretty lousy film.
as long as people pay to see the majority of the crap hollywood puts out, sadly, hollywood will keep making the same movies over and over. the handful of true autuers these days have to work the system to get anything relevant made. hollywood hates taking risks and are always going to put their money where it is safe. the breakthroughs just happen by accident sometimes. someone backed a good idea and it worked. something slipped through the system and struck gold i don’t know anymore. lynch has to distribute his own films city by city these days. hollywood will not touch him.
Gee Steve, why would I care what you thought of the fall?
Yeah that and kids used to respect their elders…wait no they didn’t.
The truth is that regardless of the era there has always been crap films and lots of them. When you accumulate every film ever made, great films a few and far between.
The reason it seems like all the great films are in the past, is simply because: Those are the only ones that have stood the test of time. In thirty years no one will remember the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but a great film like “Waltz with Bashir” will still remain. The question is what will withstand the test of time? The answer is: Only a few films that were either very popular or were incredibly good.
A little snippy there, aren’t we, Matt? I would like the record to show that I don’t care what either of you think of The Fall.
i think film is in a great position at the moment, in fact comparisons between this year and 1999 have been drawn widely. there will be blood, zodiac, the diving bell and the butterfly, gamorrah, no country for old men, changeling and presumably benjamin button, slumdog millionaire, the wrestler and revolution road represent an incredible time for mainstream cinema, and thats not even taking into account the blockbuster fare (wall-e, hellboy 2 and the dark knight represent possibly the strongest summer schedule for 20 years) and the arthouse work.
About fight club, everything about that film signaled a progression of film language. It used technology to tell the story imaginatively, the only way the material could be told. Fincher experimented with editing to fragment the narrative, while nothing new, delivered the information in ways that seemed fresh at the time, and sadly aren’t explored with such virtuosity today. Innovation breeds followers, and that film was way ahead of it’s time. Critics didn’t get it, now they do.
Watch it again, you might learn something.
It could seem that way because, the benchmarks created by directors in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s are so ahead of time and awe-inspiring that the current set of directors get highly inspired and follow suit. Finding it difficult to break the mould, all they can do in such a case is come up with a mishmash of styles already seen.
There is no dearth on the stories part, problem area might be the story-telling aspect. In any case I wouldn’t complain because every Friday is hopeful and exciting for me, very few remain as classics but we still get to the quota of 5-10 outstanding movies each year all over the world.
thats my theory.
also I agree with SHOTZI on Zodiac and There will be blood being improvements for Fincher and Anderson, Auteurs like Fincher definitely have flashes of genius in them.
Film Today = Old Gray Mare, AMIRITE?!?!
I agree that 2007 was a particularly rich and rewarding film year. 2008 by comparison was maybe a bit of a let-down, but I’ve still been pleasantly surprised by quality from unexpected quarters throughout the year. I certainly wasn’t expecting something like Rachel Getting Married from Demme. And who saw something like Let the Right One In coming? I’ve been blind-sided by quality this year. It’s a nice feeling.
Anyway, Alanedit, if you’re saying critics didn’t see the innovation of Fight Club when it came along, then who’s to say what is being missed right now? Give it some time. If the good work isn’t obvious, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Also, did someone thumbs-down a hug? Is this what it has come to now?
It looks that way. That’s some cold shit. If I knew who did that I would hug the crap out of them.
No I agree Joseph, Fight Club was there…there is a recurrent throughout film history of audiences not getting behind work that lasts a lifetime, who’s to say no one knows what films endure as classics? no one knows. The films that broke the mold and pushed the medium to strange places are not necessarily mainstream, but a product of a time and vision of the people who made them. Blade Runner was a notorious flop when it was released, yet it’s revered as one of the great Sci Fi movies, if not the great movies. Critics don’t matter, if they did every movie would be a hit, and every movie would be a flop. It’s how time serves a movie that serves it’s legacy, in my opinion. Ok I promise I’ll leave Fight Club talk alone, I’ve said it too many times.
My post on film criticism serves the topic.
2007 was a good film year.
There are more films being made now than ever before, and just as many great films as there were forty years ago. The only difference is the audience has grown dumb and fearful and flocked to the megaplexes, while the great films open for a week or two in the arthouses and disappear without making any money. People only have themselves to blame. If you really want to see better films, support them, go to your independent cinema and pay money to see them, urge your friends to see them, and wait for DVD to see drock like The Dark Knight and Babel.
And I can’t resist chiming in on HD. Filmmaking is about getting images captured, regardless of the format. HD is about getting those images captured easier. If you’ve ever seen 35 mm and HD side by side, shot by the same cinematographer (who knows what they’re doing) using the same lighting, you’ll see that there is no perceivable difference. Once on a 35 mm print, anyone who says they can tell the difference between images captured on 35 mm and those on HD is lying. The only difference is some romantic notion in the mind of someone who has never budgeted a film (and would therefore know that having enough money to get the best takes is more important that being able to tell people “I shot this on 35 mm” (because that’s the only way they’ll know)). I am not even joking when I say that I shot a short film on progressive DV and projected on DigiBeta and most people in the audience thought it was 16 mm. Also, it’s worth noting that most films now use a 2K digital intermediate and do not go back to the original negative, so effectively, what you’re seeing is HD. But regardless of all this, HD is making filmmaking accessible to a much larger range of people, and with what Red are doing, independent cinema is about to explode in a way we’ve never seen before.
I died a little when I heard that Mama Mia! is now the highest grossing film in British history. That’s part of the reason.
Mamma Mia! did that well in Britain? Holy moly.
Yep, it knocked off Titanic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/17/mamma-mia-uk-highest-grossing-film
Alanedit
Perhaps it sounds far fetched, but it has validity at it’s point. The films of the decade far for worse have declined in quality, but have picked up in other areas. The packaging of cinematic ideas has been diluted by commercial requirements and narrative and story conventions, only directors with an established pedigree can turn out good work, few legends are still around. Formula rules the marketplace, while indie is no longer synonymous with edgy. Freshness comes once in between, usually in the repackaging of the familiar by a person whose seen one too many films. Youtube be dammed.
It the above sounds prophetically bleak, consider the last and memorable year filmmaking was electric and (arguably relevant): 1999.
Being John Malcovich, Fight Club, Magnolia, The Matrix. Many films released that year broke the mold and carried cinematic ideas best anticipated by a new century, a decade in feels like it never came. Still early to tell, but film has indeed become watered down by conditions that are part of the trends the business follows. Formula and celebrity culture took a big chunk out of what is interesting about film culture, and that is the movies. Everyone became a filmmaker, film schools opened up their branches and DIY became exciting, and where does that leave film’s progression?
The only film I’ve seen since the year 2000 that feels like it couldn’t be done any other time was…Children of men. The fusion of technology and vision reaches a synthesis I’ve never seen before. Babel is another film that brings to mind our relevancy to modern events, a juxtaposition of the problems facing a global humanity. Those films couldn’t be done in the 90’s, our world has changed. Technology has accelerated, HD widely adopted, yet the very technique that a medium is chosen for often is used to emulate the medium IT’S NOT supposed be. Film is film, HD is another medium. Call me a purist, both have their strenghts.Film in the 21st century truly needs to get past the transitional stage, and start merging forward to the exploration of ideas that time ago were not possible. I speak not only of language, but how stories are told, and how far and interesting can they be. Perhaps I ask too much out of film, and sound like a spoiled idiot. I’m underwhelmed by the turn of events past 1999, and saw the gradual change films have taken for the worse. What has changed for the better, is the internet’s unity of film culture as something shared by us all, and that’s a beautiful thing. We can come to the auteurs and discuss our passions, and somewhere out there someone will respond.
The comfort of knowing a DVD is readily available for something you love is a benefit of the times, Criterion keeps the flame alive. Experiencing what you want any given time is glorious to behold.
It will be 2009 soon, and a decade will pass from the year that made films relevant again. Let us hope for surprises along the way. There is still hope film can surprise us, the kind we’ve never seen before ever again.