I warned some that I would post this quote in my LJ, so here it comes. Thinking along the lines of suing copyright violators, releasing DVDs sooner, taking away rights from legitimate customers, etc. will not solve the movie industry’s woahs. To quote Vim, in reply to my diatribe on what’s wrong with the movie industry:
“…is there a forseeable solution for the movie industry? I feel nothing short of a complete staff and personel (sic) overhaul in all the major studios will change anything.”
The people who should be running the movie studios need to be thinking very much like this.
You know what the problem with Hollywood is? They make shit. Unbelievable, unremarkable shit. Now I’m not some grungy wannabe filmmaker that’s searching for existentialism through a haze of bong smoke or something. No, it’s easy to pick apart bad acting, short-sighted directing, and a purely moronic stringing together of words that many of the studios term as “prose”. No, I’m talking about the lack of realism. Realism; not a pervasive element in today’s modern American cinematic vision. Take Dog Day Afternoon, for example. Arguably Pacino’s best work, short of Scarface and Godfather Part 1, of course. Masterpiece of directing, easily Lumet’s best. The cinematography, the acting, the screenplay, all top-notch. But… they didn’t push the envelope. Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it? What if - now here’s the tricky part - what if he started killing hostages right away? No mercy, no quarter. “Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it the back of the head.” Bam, splat! What, still no bus? Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations? And this is 1976; there’s no CNN, there’s no CNBC, there’s no internet! Now fast forward to today, present time, same situation. How quickly would the modern media make a frenzy over this? In a matter of hours, it’d be biggest story from Boston to Budapest! Ten hostages die, twenty, thirty; bam bam, right after another, all caught in high-def, computer-enhanced, color corrected. You can practically taste the brain matter. All for what? A bus, a plane? A couple of million dollars that’s federally insured? I don’t think so. Just a thought. I mean, it’s not within the realm of conventional cinema… but what if?
Of course, this lovely piece of irony comes from John Travolta’s mouth in Swordfish (an underrated movie, imho). I could dissect this quote clause-by-clause, but I don’t feel like writing that much, and I doubt my small audience wants to read that much. To the highlight reel!
– The first three sentences are, in my opinion, dead-on accurate. Are good movies still made? Yes. Are they but a small constituent of moviespace? Yes.
– I’d like to reemphasize that screenwriting truely is a purely moronic stringing together of words.
– Realism in movies…that’s a LJ post in and of itself.
– Not enough movies push the envelope. They’re all formulaic, predictable, safe. The few that deviate from this become cult classics (i.e. Napoleon Dynamite, Donnie Darko).
– In short, the realm of conventional cinema needs to thrown in the trash, spit on, and then burned for good measure. Conventional cinema is a lot of what’s wrong with movies, and hardly anything of what’s right.