The Decline of Hollywood Movies

[TheBrew]

I have been a little critical of how these blockbusters have gone. People are watching Transformers, Avatar...great SFx movies but terribly written movies.

Come now, like spectacle wasn't popular in the days of yore. When George Lucas included the Ben-Hur chariot race in The Phantom Menace, he was onto something as far as that continutiy went - the extravagant period pieces of yesteryear are the predecessors of the epic blockbusters today. Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Avatar, Titanic, they're all a piece. Bloated extravagance in film goes all the way, way back to, uh, Italian pictures like Cabiria, which was then copied by D.W. Griffith's monumentally indulgent Intolerance. We love our epics!

How can you possibly compare an over-special effects'd piece of crap like The Phantom Menace to a classic like Ben-Hur?

Because The Phantom Menace is better than Big Hur.

 

[Kegg]

How can you possibly compare an over-special effects'd piece of crap like The Phantom Menace to a classic like Ben-Hur?

Easy. Both films are all about the spectacle. Ergo, they are both spectacle films. Ben-Hur is about the scope of the screen, the size of the chariot race, it is quite simply epic.

Phantom Menace, same deal, no?

Whether or not Ben-Hur is the better film (which, yes, it is) is beside the point there. If I was going to cite a great spectacle film from today I'd probably point to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, if you wanted that. Sadly, the Lord of the Rings doesn't have a handy-dandy visual cue from the William Wyler film I can reference, though it did pay its due respects to Jason and the Argonauts (Harryhausen: Another predecessor of SFX spectacle, and his films were a lot lighter on plot than most of his successors).

Could modern Hollywood go back to making movies that didn't depend so much on the technical tricks?

What, like Ben-Hur? That film is very, very dependent on technical tricks. So too was the black and white Ben Hur. And Birth of a Nation if we want to push it back far enough. Let's not pretend that before eeeevil SFX was unleashed in the 1970s Hollywood was an endless parade of Ingmar Bergman chamber dramas. Citizen Kane is, as Roger Ebert liked pointing out, loaded with special effects shots. It's what Hollywood does and always will do, most likely.

This is the importance of my comparison: Continuity. From one to the next, that.

But the writing and acting have declined significantly.

Check on The Ten Commandments and get back to me. And that was one of the better written and acted Bible epics. How about Samson & Delilah? Or hell, Quo Vadis, now that is just all around terrible film enlivened but a tad by Peter Ustinov hamming it up wonderfully but it made a monster smash at the box office. There were dozens of these things in their heyday, and believe me, they ain't all good. Some I'm fond of more than I'd defend, like The Egyptian, which I like altogether too much.

We forget the big hits that weren't criticial darlings. The Greatest Show on Earth disappears as we linger on Casablanca and Citizen Kane. We've even spent a lot of (justified) time idolising the noir B-pictures - the equivalent to today's supremely excellent indie films, if anything.

 

[Greg Cox]

Although it seems like Hollywood has gone to the Cats and Dogs (heh), there is absolutely nothing new about what's going on. Look back at the 1930s, 40s and 50s when the overwhelming majority of films made were b-pictures, serials, and the umpteenth Frankenstein sequel.

Alex

Not to mention umpteen movies about Ma and Pa Kettle, Blondie, Topper, Francis the Talking Mule, etc.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Although it seems like Hollywood has gone to the Cats and Dogs (heh), there is absolutely nothing new about what's going on. Look back at the 1930s, 40s and 50s when the overwhelming majority of films made were b-pictures, serials, and the umpteenth Frankenstein sequel.

Alex

Not to mention umpteen movies about Ma and Pa Kettle, Blondie, Topper, Francis the Talking Mule, etc.

And Abbot and Costello met them all.