Two nights ago I settled in to my extremely massive library of films and TV shows and wanted to pick something to see and I found myself getting legitimately frustrated trying to find something to watch. When I was digging through all the new releases I found that basically nothing was piquing my interest and a lot of it looked like the usual Matchbox-style crap that Hollywood churns out dozens of times a year. I skipped all of those but The Weight starring Ethan Hawke caught my interest. I did in fact watch that all the way through but by the end of it I was so non-plussed that I didn't bother to write anything about it.
I'll get to that later. Afterwards I was looking across what else was in there and I just wasn't in the mood to explore with the modern notion of cinema because I know that more often than not, I am going to end up angry at the screen. Instead I went back to go and see a film that I have seen several times already called A Beautiful Mind - which I'm sure most of you have already seen - and then proceeded to watch every minute of it and enjoyed the hell out of it.
This absolutely brilliant movie is fantastic from start-to-finish and has a little bit of everything. It even has the exceptionally good fortune of being a true story. Even though I already knew every little thing that was going to happen in this one, I preferred to watch this over the scores of new films I had available to me already.
Then, in a twist that is very rare for me and everyone else, I decided to watch yet another film and watched Scorsese's The Departed, which is another movie that I have seen several times before.
One thing that I frequently say mostly in jest is that "every Dicaprio movie would be better if it was a Matt Damon movie." In this one though, DiCaprio really does well as does everyone else that is in it, even Mark Wahlberg.
Now I don't think this movie is as epic as others will line up to say. It has several major flaws that really annoys me such as the ignoring of forensic evidence and how a lot of these police coverups would get discovered based just on basic things such as blood splatters and proximity to noise that would have attracted attention to it and the other is not about plot but just that the music in the film is too loud to the point where you scramble for the remote because the scene prior was a "whisper scene" and how you have "Comfortably Numb" playing at a volume that the members of Pink Floyd would be ok with at a live venue.
This is the only film these two have been in together and that is likely to remain the case if for no other reason that the fact that both of their required paychecks would exceed most films' overall budgets. Even though they do not interact with one another outside of a few scenes, it's pretty amazing when we get to that point.
Even though The Departed is a very long film, I never fast forwarded and stayed glued to the screen even though I already, once again, know everything that is going to happen in the story.
By the time this one was over I found myself rather frustrated at modern film making. I just watched 2 films I have already seen back-to-back and was entertained yet these days I have a really tough time finding so much as a 30 minute episode of a TV show that can hold my interest. I put on an episode of Chad Powers earlier in the day and turned it off in disgust. That show fucking SUCKS!
What has happened to film-making? Has it really gotten that bad or am I just getting older and fussier? It seems as though more often than not I find today's films exceptionally stupid and boring and in the rare event that I find one that I actually like such as Licorice Pizza it normally was some sort of box-office bomb.
Are people today seriously entertained by the drivel that is Matchbox? To me, these films that end up making hundreds of millions globally are more often than not, a pile of complete trash and studios seem to climb over one another to make the next one to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars in budgeting.
Maybe I am just old. I am sure there has always been generation after generation that thought "new" movies were crap and that the films released in their own prime were the best movies ever made. That's a possibility I am willing to entertain. The other thing could be that we are now so accustomed to entertainment coming in short bursts thanks to the internet and our own pocket devices that all people struggle to say focused for more than 10 minutes at a time. I tried to not become this way but I suppose this is also something that very well could be true.
All I know is that when I take a look at upcoming releases I normally won't have even a small amount of interest and would rather go back and watch good films from a bygone era.