I Was Thinking...

There's a lot of cynicism that surrounds contemporary movies. I don't know why. Sure, they are big, dumb, filled to the brim with special effects but you know, at least they look good, are functional and well made. The advancement of CGI may have, for the most part, stripped film of it's authenticity, but even as recently as the 80s, just plain bad filmmaking was doing about the same thing.

This came into my mind last night as I was watching Teen Wolf Too for the first time. Needless to say, it was all kinds of awful. And yet it wasn't awful for the same reasons that today's movies are awful. It was awful because it was sloppy and lazy and made with little care or concern for anything other than getting it made.

At least today's movies try their best; their priorities are just in the wrong place. Today's market is concerned with hooking onto fads, plays up gimmicks, finding trends to beat into the ground. It's not that movies today are bad, they just lack the ambition required to make them anything special. Sure, there will always be stupid and lazy romantic comedies, but on a whole, today's films don't lack ambition, they just lack any desire to do anything but colour inside the lines. Even the worst of contemporary films like Transformers 2, doesn't lack the drive to be bigger and louder than every other movie. In fact, it's problem is that it has too much of that drive to the point where it is blinded to its own misgivings.

That's not the problem with films back in the day. Their problem was that they were made incompetently with an assembly line mentality. Here we have the sequel to a (very bad) popular film, let's put as little money into it as possible and get huge returns. I mean, look at this:



There is no way you would ever see something so blatantly stupid or lazy in today's Hollywood films. So thus I'm left asking the question: is it better to have empty, meaningless films that look good, are ambitious and are well made, or stupid, lazy ones like this? I don't know the answer although I tend towards the contemporary ones. Thoughts?