September 4, 2006
“I was struck by how stunningly banal and formulaic it all was.”
Michael Caine thinks these movies today are no damned good, not like in the old days. Is that the distorted perspective of an old man thinking about the past? Or is he right?
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I think there are lots of great movies being made today. They're just not showcased at your mall theatre. Maybe its tougher to track the good movies down, and maybe its not given tools like the Internet.
There was lots of banal and formulaic crap made around the same time as Casablanca. Its not really fair to hold up one of the best movies of all time as representative of all movies of the period.
Russmunki: I noticed that and looked up the title "The Worm-Eaters" to see if there might be another movie or if that was the title for "Fried Worms" in Britain and they got the horror movie part wrong. There actually was a bad movie in the 70s called "The Worm-Eaters." And it was a horror film.
My theory is that Caine meant "Fried Worms" but called it "The Worm-Eaters" and the interviewer looked up what "The Worm-Eaters" was and saw it was a horror movie (but not that it was from the 70s).
If such a thing could be quantified, I'd wager the ratio of crap to quality has always been about the same. In the '30s and '40s (and maybe through the 1950s?) they often cranked out pictures in a week -- and it shows. The main difference perhaps is that the crap is celebrated and hyped, and lives forever in DVD, etc. I'm all for film preservation, but surely a lot of awful films have turned to dust in a vault somewhere.
Michael Caine... Jaws 4, The Hand....'nuff said. He's even said he makes some pics for the rent. He missed his Oscar while making Jaws 4 of all things.
"Is that the distorted perspective of an old man thinking about the past?"
Sounds like it to me. I've watched more pre-1950 movies than most here I bet and there was a _lot_ of crap. The diamond to dross ratio has never been very high. The great majority of movies are two stars, competent and of minimal interest to most people (though specialized audiences may enjoy a given movie a lot).
"Or is he right?"
On the other hand it's hard to argue with him about so many, many movies now that suck ass. Movies are a weird hybrid artform with a unique technological/economical/artistic balance that emphasizes the first two at the expense of the third. As Pauline Kael once put it (paraphrasing) it's as if grand pianos were invinted before anyone knew how to play them.
"The Man Who Would be King" is the greatest adventure movie ever made.
"The Eagle Has Landed" is the second greatest adventure movie ever made.
"Get Carter" has the best ending of any "admirable gangster" movie ever.
"Blame it on Rio" has the greatest assortment of unclad womens' breasts in the history of cinema.
"Casablanca" sucks.
Hey, I saw "Hurry Sundown" in the theater when it came out. Oooh! Is it bad! The scene with Jane Fonda acting sexual toward a saxophone should be in YouTube. Can't remember if Caine was in that scene, but it's burned in my memory. I saw it when I was 16. You have whatever beef you have with Jane Fonda. That's mine. That and the "hoedown" section of her first aerobics video.
Caine may be simply theorizing why the box office numbers are so poor in the past few years. Ann's discussed it before, and explanations abound, from competing entertainment outlets to poor film-making.
His comment does have a grampaw's 'everything's going to hell' quality, but I rarely go to movies anymore, nor do I rent them much, because the stories are just not there.
But last night I saw "Little Miss Sunshine". It reminded me a bit of Elizabethtown or Napolean Dynamite, but what a fun little picture. And Superman Returns was pretty good overall. But faced with dreck like MI3, Crossover, Saw 3, and the like, why bother going to the movies? When I was in high school, Star Wars came out, and I still like it for the grade B movie it is. Star Wars Episodes 1- 3 came out in much later and were forgettable, if not regrettable.
He's both spot on and an old crank, in my opinion. Sure, there are decades of dreck in the can. I think what he's bemoaning, though, is that more and more of that dreck makes it into the top selling lists, and fewer good movies, with good dialogue and plots, make it to the theaters. There's no development, no faith in smaller stories. That hasn't always been true. But whether it's our godawful sense of taste that makes it so, or that there are now more markets for films--stadium theaters, alternative theaters, and DVD--is undetermined.
Just one more example of Sturgeon's Law: "90% of *everything* is crap."
He's just focused on the 90% instead of the 10%.
Dave's Corollary to Sturgeon's Law: The bigger the pile of crap, the bigger the remaining 10%.
It helps that most of the banal, formulaic junk from the old days has long since rotted away in their canisters unused and unloved, with only the best films surviving.
Even full of cliches, you have to like Caine in one of the best war movies ever made: Zulu
Zulu was marvellous, and Stanley Baker's closing line was wonderful.
dearieme said...
Zulu was marvellous, and Stanley Baker's closing line was wonderful.
The one about:
First action? Do you think I'd be involved in this butchers business more than once?
Baker put up his own money to get the film made. It thought it was a great story and part for him.
My favorite lines were:
Lieutenant John Chard: The army doesn't like more than one disaster in a day.
Bromhead: Looks bad in the newspapers and upsets civilians at their breakfast.
Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead: Damn the levies man... Cowardly blacks!
Adendorff: What the hell do you mean "cowardly blacks?" They died on your side, didn't they? And who the hell do you think is coming to wipe out your little command? The Grenadier Guards?
Colour Sergeant Bourne: It's a miracle.
Lieutenant John Chard: If it's a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it's a short chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.
Colour Sergeant Bourne: And a bayonet, sir, with some guts behind.
When I was in my Army officer basic course we studied the battle. It is a classic in leadership and small unit defense.
I still get a tear in my eye when I hear "Men of Harlech"
Dearieme
Here are sound clips
http://www.moviesoundclips.net/sound.php?id=20
He's right about modern films being generally banal and formulaic. He's wrong in thinking that was ever NOT the case.
I hardly ever go out to the movies these days. But last month my wife and I found ourselves at the theater just looking to see what was playing right now. We ended up seeing Miami Vice. You couldn't come up with a more apt description than "banal and formulaic".
We rented "The Battle of Britain" this weekend. Great airplanes, generally bad acting, terrible continuity, wildly inappropriate 60's hairdoos, clichéd music, mediocre history. Talk about formulaic. Michael Caine stuck his mug in this one, but the Spitfires were the real stars.
For every "Alfie," there were many really unmemorable performances from this actor. One nice thing about Spitfires as stars is that they don't say silly things in their old age.
Go to the movies, and the answer becomes obvious. The average moviegoer nowadays is like 17 years old. That's the target audience. 17 year olds LIKE stupid movies.
Personally, I think it is a mistake for movies to try to be thought-provoking, because it almost never works. Movies are limited to the equivalent of a written short story's worth of plot and characterization, with the added limitations of being visually appealing and making very limited use of introspection.
That's why, if you look at any list of "best films", almost nothing on the list requires much intelligence to understand or provokes many thoughts deeper than "that was a really entertaining film!".
I tend to agree that not much has changed. There's always been more than a fair share of banal and formulaic movies. There's plenty of formulaic movies in arthouse cinemas, it's just a different kind of formula.
What has changed is the target audience. The multiplex was pretty much created for the teenager. That typically means lots of action and little thought. And an aversion to risk taking. It's not surprising that Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man get lots of praise for their fidelity to the source material.
It's also not a surprise that when a movie costs $200 million, that the studio will interfere and take out anything that challenges the audience or is seen as polarizing. The mid-priced picture has pretty much disappeared leaving big blockbusters and very cheap movies with nothing in between.
Michael Caine has one of the greatest quotes ever with regard to Jaws 4. I'm going by memory, but it went something along the lines of, "Dreadful, dreadful movie... but the house it bought was quite lovely."
Anyway, I think that Chris Anderson's 'Long Tail' theory is behind the perception that movies are getting worse. As audiences decline due to competition from other media, film studios become even more dependant on the handful of profitable hits in their catalogue. This, then, forces the studios to 'dumb down' films in order to create the least objectionable product possible, to cater the the largest audience possible. And because of this increasing dependance on hits, they spend more money marketing the bland, mainstream fluff which they need to survive. As a result, even if movies as a whole are not getting worse, the most heavily promoted movies are. I'd rank 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' favorably with any movie made in the last 50 years; but in my mind, 'Pirates of the Caribbean' can't even begin to compare to, say, 'Indiana Jones'.
This, in turn, is also why television seems to be getting so much better. Because TV scales down much more readily (particularly cable TV), it is easier to target niches and still remain profitable. Hence, I'll take 'The Wire' over 'Dragnet', or 'Iron Chef' over Julia Child. Heck, even if we stick only to broadcast television, compare 'House' with 'St. Elsewhere', the , or 'Lost' with... well, heck, I don't even know what the analogue to 'Lost' might have been (The Prisoner, maybe?).
in my mind, 'Pirates of the Caribbean' can't even begin to compare to, say, 'Indiana Jones'.
While I've loved "Raiders of the Lost Ark" since I was a kid, there's really no getting around the fact that it IS a dumbed-down movie, aimed at mass audiences, and riddled with plot holes, contrivances, and just plain silliness -- hitching a ride on the German sub, the guy's melted hand, the snake-filled tomb, sliding under the truck, etc.
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