Recently, I have been watching movies from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly famous “film noir” movies, and I would like to summarize by quoting “The Critic” (TV show), by summarizing with, “It stinks!”
Holy shit, man. I get that there really wasn’t a lot in the way of special effects and post-production — don’t care. I can look past that. I get that there was no digital — or even video — editing. Again, don’t care. But holy cow they really made some stinkers back then.
Like, the movies I’ve watched lately had some truly awful writing. No, let’s get more descriptive: bad writing, bad acting, bad editing, bad cinematography, and much more. I can forgive bad acting and editing, etc. Those, after all, entailed integrating new technologies (and I’m giving em a pass for not knowing how to act for cameras). But, I simply cannot overlook bad writing.
I keep thinking of “movies” I made as a ten year old. I see now they were excellent. I had no idea. I am willing to overlook a lot of things as like elements of the time — like in this one “Film Noir” movie I watched recently, this woman shakes a child [that she doesn’t even know] by the shoulders. Ok… But in the movie, the police officer gets to unilaterally assess criminal culpability, despite clearly looking explicitly looking for witnesses who confirm his existing prejudices. Like, I fully believe police circa 1960 were routinely corrupt bigots — that part is totally plausible. However, the writing of these movies reveals various fundamental misunderstandings of the basic mechanics of the justice system. Additionally — let’s leave that aside — these movies commonly feature plot elements that simply do not seem plausible. Like, I am starting to think film writers in the 1950s and 1960s were actually space aliens who had never interacted with humans but came to earth to write movies.
That said, I really like the lighting. I think movies nowadays try too hard to look “real.” Indeed, the lighting and everything looks so “real” (real green!) that the movies are stripped of — well, a few things. Firstly, the movies are stripped of unique aesthetics. Secondly, because appearing “[hyper]real” is such a priority, the overall appearance bleeds into the plot. Ultimately, the entire American cinema industry is a paragon of sameness. Whereas different genres have had different aesthetic properties throughout the history of cinema, all movies — especially Hollywood movies — have coalesced around a very narrow band of lighting styles and colors.
Once again, I could rave about how excellent movies were in the 1970s. Even if I don’t talk about plots at all, I can list 10 movies from the 1970s with 10 different visual styles: set colors, wardrobe aesthetics, lighting styles, and etc. Nowadays, the spectrum is very narrow, despite the craft being far more mature and the budgets being far greater. It’s sincerely shameful. Like, honestly, every film school just needs to pack it up and go home, ideally under a cloud of shame.
And man, don’t even get me started on indie shorts. I watched a bunch of those online recently. Omg they were bad — one after another. Really terrible writing and like depravity for its own sake. The people writing those should probably just go to therapy. I watched so many and maybe 5% was decent. 0% was impressive/good/memorable. Probably 70% started out with some writer asking, “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if..?” A proliferation of terrible shorts is clearly the dark side of camera tech getting cheaper. Shit — this was supposed to be about film noir. I said don’t get me started!
Bottom line, this planet has a talent and/or selection crisis.