For you and me
Somethin’ good comin’
There has to be
I don't really care how much the latest superhero film took at the box office, although I'd probably know if you asked me. When I watch a film the main thing I am looking for is a good story. I like it when I look up at the big screen and can see a part of me staring back at me. More than anything, I am still looking for Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder in every film I see.
1. As The Guardian and New York Times have been writing about recently; most book reviews on Amazon are duffs. Paid for by the authors to drum up interest. You can't trust the reviews.
2. Film Trailers are meaningless. They're not cut by the people who create the movies. They're thrown together by marketing people who'll do anything to get you into a cinema.
3. We've been sold the paradigm that release dates are important, that a new movie is an event. But a movie is just a movie, and a new release is not indicative of quality, despite what the press would have you believe. It's like with music; is the new Rihanna track likely to be better than a Beatles classic? No, it's just newer. But newer means nothing in art.
4. Hollywood movies have giant marketing budgets. The awards buzz, the break-up stories, the praise; it's all fabricated. Forced upon us. They spend as much marketing the movies as they do making them. The movie might suck, but they can send the star to sit on the couch at Letterman or Jonathan Ross to charm you. You think because Denzel Washington is a good TV guest that the movie must be good, but of course this is ridiculous.
5. They want us to believe that a movie is good simply because we hear everyone talking about it. But again, that's just the marketing team doing their work. That's the $50million marketing budget. A great indie flick doesn't have the resources. The best movie you could ever see may have been made in Ohio in 2004 but you'll never hear about it because it can't gain a foothold. And word of mouth from zero is hard.
6. The modern myth is that great quality always goes viral, but it's not the case, at least not with movies. Sure, a 30 second comedy clip goes viral based on quality, but not a two hour movie. It needs recognition from higher up the food chain -- but getting to these people is hard.
7. 'Once' only went crazy-insane after Spielberg endorsed it.
8. The cinema is the only place where you choose to repeat bad experiences. They've got it into our heads that the NEXT movie will be the great one we've been longing for, but how often is that the case?
9. It's about finding voices you trust, people that are in for for the right reasons. For me that's: The Duplass Brothers, Aaron Sorkin, Ricky Gervais, Lena Dunham, Spike Lee, Martin Scorcese, Greta Gerwig. Who is it for you?
10. This stuff is relevant to people new to the industry and it's relevant to the ones who have been in it for years: let's not lose sight of why we love movies, there is always the possibility of achieving greatness, if only we have the audacity to TRY!
I only want to see greatness! Movies that say something! Rare, I know, but that's what I'm after.
Feel free to recommend stuff. There's so much I miss, probably because I'm in a cinema watching 'Ted'.
A Hollywood director said to me recently,"it's impossible to make good movies here", that's how dire it is. He's part of a system that sucks the life out of creativity. Whenever Hollywood makes a good movie, it's a fluke. Most movies are shockingly bad.
I'm not one of those guys who reviews every movie that comes out. Credit to those bloggers who watch everything and write lengthy reviews of them, and often for tiny readerships. I'm in awe of your patience and hard work, but I can't do it!
Life is short. I know a guy who died a few weeks back suddenly, he was 26. Same thing happened a week before to a guy who was 29. That's how it goes; life is fast and it ends. I choose movies, they're my love, but not the bad ones. We don't have enough time to be watching the studio dross.
I want to see magic. I want to see genuine connections between characters, and endings that are earned, that honour the rest of the story; I've had enough of hacked together bullshit. It's like those recent Sandler and Stiller films, even the kids think they're a bag of shit. These guys were once comedic geniuses, now their job is just to turn up.
It's like all of Hollywood thinks the job is just turning up. They turn great screenwriters into studio hacks. Their ideas quickly quashed by executives who think they know better. And they do know better -- they know how to make money.
The films are awful. The ticket prices high. The popcorn extortionate. The screens in disrepair.
The problem isn't technology, it's that the product they're peddling sucks. And sure, people eat up the superhero movies, and lucky they do, because the studios have squeezed out the in-betweens. Their indie-divisions shut down, their $80million dollar movies lacking in imagination and relying on names to get them ticket sales.
It really is an assembly line. We sit there and get duped by the trailers, we think we'll see something original.
Great films still happen, I know they're out there, but there are precious few coming out of Hollywood. We've become so content that we claim films are great when really we've been swayed by the hype. It's unlikely anything you saw in the last few years really stuck.
The King's Speech anyone? The Artist wasn't even that great, it just reminded us of what a story is. And they told us Cabin in the Woods was the greatest horror in years, but that's because there's hardly any competition!
Films are not always an art form. Often, they're just a turd on a screen.
I'm after greatness. The stuff that makes you so excited you have to tell EVERYONE. It happens to me maybe once a year. If you've had that feeling recently, please tell me about it, tell me why you loved the film -- we need those stories.