"Classic" vs. "Modern"

I’ve recently just given up attempting to catch up with the past and just started living from the present. This may sound dramatic, but it does, once again, refer directly to movies. Over the past few years, my obsession with movies has grown and grown to the point where I watch, on average, at least one a day. Which gives me plenty of time to watch all the so called ‘legendary’ movies of the past 50 years such as ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘The Godfather Part II’ and of course ‘The Taxi Driver’ among others. I picked these 3 movies out of the bunch that are so called ‘immortal’ purely for one reason. They are all over-hyped rubbish. Well, to be fair, they are good movies but with all the attention they get, and all the lists they top, you would assume they would be better. Another reason why I picked these 3 is because they were all made within the 1970’s. Is it something about that decade or were most films that came out then really quite bad? I mean, sure there was ‘Alien’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ at the end of the decade, and movies like ‘Dirty Harry’ towards the start which are all phenomenal, but there’s a handful of much-loved tripe which has been incorrectly labelled ‘classic’. And by saying this I am in no way attempting to be edgy or refreshing or whatever, I’m just trying to get my point across. 

Being only 15 years of age, I am forced into a maturity group which also involves nit-wits, nit-pickers and all round creeps. This group is full of other movie-lovers like myself, but with one fatal flaw. They all suppose that if everybody says “Hey, this movie is brilliant!” it must automatically be brilliant. I am not saying that all of these 'over-hyped' movies are rubbish, I'm saying most of them are, and they are nothing by today’s standards. And when I say ‘today’s standards’, I don’t mean Hollywood blockbusters like ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘Salt’, I mean proper brilliant modern cinema that, believe it or not, is around, you just have to *cough* look closer. Forgive the ‘American Beauty’ reference (but if you picked up on it, well done you, have a digestive) and the small rant about modern cinema, I’ll leave that for now. Back to the point at hand. 

The classic movies most people grew up with are hanging by a thread. I’ve never been more bored in my life than I was when I watched ‘The Deer Hunter’. It was 2 hours 40 minutes of nothingness (well, a bunch of Americans drinking, swearing and whinging) with about 20 minutes or so of tantalizing action and random russian-roulette scenes. Yes, in 1979 when it was first released it was a masterpiece, but not anymore. We need to get our head out of the past and live in the present. There’s so many great films that have been made over the last 10 years which not only have completely changed the genre they are a part of, but changed movies in general. The only problem being that nobody is watching them. I’m talking about ‘Hard Candy’ changing the face of horror/thrillers, changing the dynamic of chilling, meaning you don’t need to throw buckets of blood at the screen to scare people. I’m also talking about ‘(500) Days of Summer’ a movie which twisted the romantic-comedy, so it not only didn’t feel like a romance movie, but didn’t feel like a comedy either. It was like the greatest feel-good film in recent years (if you forget about ‘Juno’ of course, which is impossible) and it also mixed in some fantastically fresh ideas, with the flashbacks, and expectations and such, it really felt like someone had thrown their heart and soul into making this movie, which really isn’t present in any Hollywood blockbuster. I’d like to see Michael Bay get people emotionally attached to a robot as it blows chunks out of a smaller robot whilst transforming into a 1968 Volkswagen Beatle. Jeez that movie was bad. But less about the diabolical ‘Transformers 2’, and more about the movies that matter. 

It’s just a shame when these great, triumphant pieces of modern cinema do finally grace our screens, and people just simply call them ‘alright’ or ‘a bit weird’ just because they don’t follow the usual trend of explosion, sex, explosion, blood, sex. The one exception I can see to this entire rule came out on 16th July 2010. It was neither a blockbuster, nor an indie movie, but a delicious mix of the two. It was of course, Christopher Nolan’s freak-out masterpiece ‘Inception’. And what was so refreshing about this movie is, it attracted everybody. And I mean, everybody. Movie geeks like me were desperate to see it. Retards lapped up the odd explosions, and the general movie going public liked the look of Leo DiCaprio’s face and Marion Cotillard’s boobs (although they completely missed the REAL stars [Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page, duh!]) This movie is so unique in the sense that it’s a blockbuster (I guess, based on the budget) with a brain. It would be like watching Frankenstein develop Einstein’s theory of relativity.

But of course, when I whinge about Hollywood blockbusters, there are some exceptions. These include comic-book adaptations like ‘Batman Begins’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘The Dark Knight’, ‘Spiderman’ and so on. Also, movies such as ‘The Matrix’ which have an underlying message. And finally movies like ‘Kick-Ass’ or ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ which I guess are again comic book adaptations, but with a twist. This final tiny little sub-genre is full of movies like these that are made by fan-boys, for fan-boys who want to see the comic come to life, not a re-imagining a la Batman style (despite them being brilliant). 

Notice how the one movie I left out was AVATAR, purely because I hate what that movie stands for. The movie itself was watchable, and don’t get me wrong, the technology was good, great even, just the message that film seemed to transmit. It’s like James Cameron had just recorded himself saying “It’s expensive, it’s glossy, it’s basically the biggest advancement in movie technology for a while, LIKE IT or you’ll die.” And so the media lapped it up, meaning the public lapped it up, meaning it earned over $2 billion globally, which makes me feel sick to think about, when fantastic original flicks like ‘Moon’ and ‘Kick-Ass’ struggle to make back their budget. Although the public lapped it up for it’s luscious use of colour, ground-breaking special effects and unnecessary but trend-setting use of 3D, there is a small, but fantastically awesome part of everyone (except the cast and crew) that wants to hate it. Some of us, like the dudes that give out the Academy Awards, have embraced it, and some haven’t, and some are even stuck mid-way. When I say I hate what that movie stands for, I mean that everybody assumes they have to like it because it cost lots of money to make, and therefore, everything that cost under 30 or $40 million is utter shit. Sometimes I just want to grab these people by the throat and continuously shake them until they realize what they are doing/saying. Wow, and... breathe.