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1. They have a huge ego and believe his so called "fans" will swallow up what he says

2. Trying to draw publicity for himself and saving his floundering career

3. Is just plain jelous of the success the films he criticizes

4. He's just throwing a hissy fit

Personally, I just wish more film makers would look upon making films as an artform rather than a job where they can make lots and lots and lots of money.

[The other two with big walkouts were The Comic, a rubbishy low-budget drama ill-advisedly shown at a gore-horror festival, where it got the slow-hand clap treatment; and Dust, an incoherent home-movie that was billed as "Straw Dogs on acid" but with indecipherable dialogue, hideously overmixed sound, rubbish music, amateur performances and no interesting characters; at least a third of the audience left before it was over.]

NP: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (Patrick Doyle)

He just wishes he could make a film like Fellowship...or even Hairy Pooter (that was too funny!)...

And no cinema is not dead...films are business...and as a business they flourish. Say what you will about quality...some people merely like a 2-hour diversion.

Look, they still keep making movies and every once in a while they'll get one right (or atleast make one funny), but overall films seem to be grinding their wheels.

Sure, you can point to a specific film and say, film can't be dead yet because I liked Harry Potter. I'm talking about something much bigger than that.

It's hard to articulate, but here goes. When film arrived, the grand spirit of all that older Opera and epic novel had found a new form. The feeling of cinema was almost like religion. Huge expensive movie palaces were built to house the the new creation and ordinary people became giants: Valentino, Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, Chaplin, D. W. Griffith. Not only could movies move people religiously, they could create social change bad and good. A Birth of A Nation invigorated a new Klan (bad, but that's the power cinema had). I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang could actually change conditions for prisoners.

By 1967, Godard could end his film Weekend with the titles, Fin Du Film, Fin Du Cinema. Even while he was innovating, the cinema was dead, wiped out, a product, a pablum instead of a guide, a sleeping aid, a center for complacency.

Today, cinema is a dwarf. "Stars" become ordinary in front of the camera. The world shrinks there. Everything's been done. The cinema chews it's own cud. The cinema is now media, television, filler, noise, babysitter, advertising. There's nothing special about it and it doesn't open to a world of possibilities. Every new film is just another episode in the same long-running series: "Death of Cinema, Death of Culture, Death of Humanity." Film music is no better. Each new score is the absence of spirit, music, taste, and ability, the same sound regurgitated one more time in a new outfit.

The human race isn't finished yet, so people will come along to keep putting their toil into movies and I'm sure something new will come along from that that I praise very highly. But that's just smoke and mirrors hiding the corpse behind the curtain. The cinema is really one long Weekend at Bernie's.

Or, if we haven't noticed, maybe Bernie is us.

Lou,

Perhaps you are not too much of the cynic that you address yourself as, for apparently you still catch movies on a frequent basis. Is there a possibility that you still have faith in cinema, waiting for that day when movies once again have meaning?

I think it's one thing to say cinema has died, it's quite another to say that society is dead. The reception those movies that Lou mentioned could never have taken place today thanks the political, economic, and the social developments of today's world.

To quote Walter Benjamin,

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Call us cynics, but that's just how the world has progressed and we do whatever we can to mitigate this change, but naturally we fall short. The ideal life's essentially about getting back to where we once were: happy. Call it cynical, but we can never get back to where we came from.

And because the times have changed, we as individuals have changed, and obviously our perceptions changed along with our tastes. And yet amazingly in my eyes movies continue to do the same thing that they have been doing ever since the popular medium's inception: to entertain. Nothing more, nothing less.

That may not be the "progress" of Benjamin's angel, looking to the past, and hey, maybe mine's a regression, but if movies are now, then, and always about entertainment, then even at that level, modern movies just fail me.

I don't know what this means but I just thought the following tidbits might be relevant or interesting--

My folks saw Titanic, like everyone else in the world. But for my father, it was (and still is) the only movie he's ever seen in a theater ever since my parents got married (and that's a long time).

I remember the first time I saw Forrest Gump, I was inspired for four years to run home from school everyday trying to be like Forrest.

Although I know everyone here will truly eviscerate my credibility as a poster if not a human being for revealing this, but my view of the world was molded by Tetsuo Hara's manga series "Fist of the North." I think the influences that rubbed off on my from those books are more apparent than I would like, but nevertheless the ideas of love, hope, and friendship in an post-apocalyptic setting have stuck with me ever since. Most of you would deem Tetsuo Hara's execution of these ideals as childish and violent, but remember, as a child, we are all extremely prone to what we read, see, and hear. There were definitely others historically (Dante, Chaucer, and countless others) who conceived the same literary elements, but it just happened that "Fist of the North" was my first gateway to this chivalrous world of nobility and honor.

But it was truly film music that changed my life. I won't say for anyone else, but I sincerely believe that the impact that film music has had in my life is more profound than anything else I have ever experienced, on par with the suicide of my brother and subsequently the closer bond that I share with my family and friend. I can't honestly say cinema has died, but film music inspired me to dream of things I had never thought possible, and to see things in a whole new light, an enlightenment of sorts. Sure, I may be exaggerating the significance of the film music medium to biblical proportions but that's truly how I feel. So even if cinema is dead for society, film music sure made me want to live in it.

There is another side to both me and the world's situation.

I know people who were transformed by Star Wars. They went in looking for action and adventure and came away with an ethic to guide them: sacrifice your life for an important cause, loyalty to friends, etc.

If I say that cinema is dead and society is right behind it, that ignores the fact that there are those who retain their high ideals in times of crisis and those who create cinema and art within or despite the confines of commerce and formula.

I haven't been very moved by the films around me, but that doesn't mean that others haven't. Perhaps, today's cinema speaks in a language I cannot relate to, but one in which all the worthwhile values and emotions are still communicated.

quote:

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
I haven't been very moved by the films around me, but that doesn't mean that others haven't. Perhaps, today's cinema speaks in a language I cannot relate to, but one in which all the worthwhile values and emotions are still communicated.

---

Well put, Lou. I agree with your assertion, and simply stated, it's not necessarily because of the films themselves, but rather the moviegoers that make the movies important.

I don't know if there has been any movie that has made that tremendous of an impact upon your life, but you never know,that movie may just be around the corner. That is, if you're actively looking for a movie to do so. If not, then just sit back and enjoy life as it is.

****************************************************************

To me, the cinema will always be a palace, even if I have to remake these gaudy stadium multiplexes into them in my mind.

However, what is shown in the cinemas is as subject to so many variables that one has no guarantee that one is about to see a worthwhile picture. In fact, it has gotten so bad that the formerly fun aspect of moviegoing... that of watching the trailers, has become a chucklefest.

Nevertheless, every once and a while I do see a film that makes me believe that cinema is not dead. And that makes it worth the effort. To see films on the big screen, where they belong (and nobody can deny that home video had a dire effect on the public's moviegoing habits) is still an experience I value... it is just a matter of self-discipline. That, and always making it out to see restorations of great films, such as Vertigo and The Third Man.

It is important to remind ourselves why we all appreciate cinema, but at the same time to be realistic about the state of a world where Spartacus is Gladiator. But then again, that would be true of many other aspects of life.

However, what really bothers me about this is that I like some of Peter Greenaway's films... but have not been interested in his newer work for a while. While Prospero's Books was an interesting fantasia on The Tempest, his works after that began to get increasingly incoherent (he stopped working with Michael Nyman about the same time). I wonder if it is from that point of view that he's writing.

My favorite Greenaway film is the sublime Drowning by Numbers, excellence in concept and execution (no pun intended)... and a great score by Michael Nyman based on Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K364 (to keep the thread on topic).

Like I said, I might be getting jaded like the rich couple in Blier's Menage, too bored to feel anything anymore except a pleasure in sadism. Then it's not the cinema's problem but my own: it's not dead, I am!

But, since I'm still breathing and feeling, I think the problem might be in Hollywood rather than in my solar plexus.

Something is missing, or perhaps, it's being ignored or is eluding current filmmakers. Maybe the Cinema Muse has returned, raped and bleeding, to Mount Olympus and no longer blesses what Bazin called "the 7th Art."

We don't always need a narrative. Great visuals are enough. But, today, style and tricks try to cover up a lack of substance. Or, worse, as Greenaway suggested, we steal substance but cannot generate it on our own. If we are only looking to film best-selling novels, retreads of other past stories, when does the cinema itself come into its own and take us to the next level?

Is it children bicycling in the air in ET, the White House exploding in Independence Day, is this what the cinema was brought to earth to do? Or is the realization of the human dream (and cinema's own dream) to be found in some other location and creation?

The cinema is not a democracy other than to say that producers make what they believe the public wants. But I can't vote on what films will get the green light like I can vote for a politician (and I don't want to--it wouldn't be too free a world if I was able to do this). So, I'm at the "mercy" of where other people want the cinema to go. I mean, I don't have to pay, I don't have to go, but I can't just call up and say, I'd really like to see such and such a film made in such and such a manner, please go spend a few hundred million to do this for me, chop, chop.

And, it's not like I don't want to participate. I love movies. I don't want to boycott the cinema and go elsewhere.

People have posted here saying, "Well, movies are just a mass entertainment, you expect too much, it's not perfect, people aren't perfect, don't get worked up, these are just movies, a way to kill time, relax, and not think about things, they're an escape." And so, they're fine with things as they are, they want a spiritless cinema in an increasingly spiritless world. But that allows the cinema to slack, to produce an easy-to-make assembly line product rather than quest and carve out the much harder-to-find soul of things.

And I'm not making a "French" criticism here, saying something like, all films made under capitalism and Hollywood are bad and all art films are good. The socio-economic-political system and the specific mode of production of how films are made doesn't need to change for the cinema to regain its force. What we need are artists, visionaries, maybe revolutionaries, though they are, like Kubrick or Welles, typically persona non grata in Hollywood. Maybe the solution lies elsewhere. I don't say I know what it is.