The reason Hollywood is making cheap copies of classic films like The Pink Panther and The Omen is because the writers are spending too much time staring at a computer monitor...instead of filling up their creative reservoir with real life experience.
hollywood goes through phases because the public respond. remember the natural disaster phase? twister, volcano, hard rain (that's a movie right?). i know there's more lol. there's a comic book phase...xmen (and so far both kicked some mighty ass), daredevil, superman is coming out, and others that escape me. and of course there is apparently a remake phase...which they will never grow out of. it does seem a bit more overt lately. but mainstream movies do not make up the entire film industry. if you love movies, branch out bud. most mainstream flicks disappoint me. alot of indy flicks can be really boring. it's all subjective. there's something for everyone if you dig a little. and yes, hollywood does still churn out a few intellectually stimulating gems. just rented capote. i love hoffman. can't wait to curl up with that one later. i noticed movies are hitting video much quicker. i never make it to the theater, but to me it seemed as though capote was on dvd in a flash. i know they tend to release the ost now before the film is even released. my only assumption is that it has to do with p2p programs. i can see the link but have no idea really lol. just found that interesting.
The death of the film industry? Don't know. Films (much like the plays of Greece) are a facet of humanity now...I don't think they are leaving anytime soon....and just like most 'facets of humanity', there will always be an industry to make money off of it.
New actors will almost always suck, though, because they're inexperienced and, well, new. Guys like Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, etc. just simply pwn.
Go see Twin Town. The movie industry will adapt abroad. Most movies outside hollywood are more gritty and have more edge to them.
Hollywood has gone through slumps before. The sixties were just as bad or worse than the uh-oh's, or whatever this decade will be known as. Films like "The Graduate" and "The Producers" were few and far between. We were so starved that a mere four-star movie like "Easy Rider" was hailed as a work of timeless art and we all saw "Barbarella" three times. (Duran Duran named themselves after the villain in that movie and all of us of that generation caught it first time around.) There were a lot of good musicals like "Camelot" and "My Fair Lady" and we hung onto them gladly. Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood started cranking out their spaghetti-westerns and they've become cult classics. But really, is that a little embarrassing or what? I suppose they're no worse than all those cookie-cutter John Wayne movies, there's another whole thread going about overrated actors. I checked the list of Best Picture Oscars from the 1960s onward, and I have to say that it looks like things actually got worse. There was an upswing in the 1970s, which figures because that was the apex of popular culture, but the 1980s look just awful and it's been all downhill from there. (The prophetic title "Ordinary People" ushered in the decade.) It's been said that the downfall of Rome could be foretold by the inability of its culture to come up with new motifs. That doesn't speak well for our future. However, I think that music is overshadowing film in prominence so it could be argued that all of our creativity is going in that direction. We've got a long way to go before pop music regains what it had in the 1960s and 70s or before symphonic and chamber music regain what they had in the 1940s and 50s, but for me today's music isn't nearly as hopeless as today's movies. I can't believe I'm looking forward to "Over the Hedge" and "X-Men III." (I always pronounce that, "ill".) As for the actual demise of the medium... I suppose the same thing will happen to it that's happening to all culture because of the Paradigm Shift to post-industrial civilization and the internet. More visual creations will be watched on small screens by individuals or families than on large screens in theaters. That means there will be more to choose from with greater variety in theme, voice, and quality, but production costs will drop to the point that a whole lot more people will be producing them. Movie blogs like the journal blogs we have today. I'm sure you young people will live to see the day when some of you will be putting your own lovingly thought out but rather easily produced cinema/video creations on the web and there will be at least a niche audience for them... and you'll be paid proportionally.
Movies? Hell, they'll never end. Maybe they'll be some new holographic shit or movies where you can feel, smell, taste whats happening, but the industry itself won't end.
What, where? To me, typical American/British pop and rock is just a parody of what has gone before. The only things that have changed are the myriad genres we have nowadays and the slick productions provided by digital equipment. My musical tastes differ from yours somewhat as I was always more into the jazz fusion type thing that peaked in the 70's and early 80's. I mean, where is the new Weather Report, or Herbie Hancock or Crusaders of the present day? Probably non-existent. But of course, there are lots of bands that try to emulate those ideas except that they're just not original enough and the musicians, while they may be good or even technically excellent, they seem to lack the dynamism and urgency of the old hats. The deejays and remixers seem to have taken over. Nowadays, I find myself listening to chill out 'Lounge' music and, though it's certainly chilled, there's no real musicianship going on, just clever use of computer programs and billions of samples.
I agree with Fraggle Rocker, there is much great music around lately, especially in the neofolk and dark ambient scene. Of course that's a fairly underground scene, nothing you ever hear on the radio. Here are a few labels: http://www.cynfeirdd.com/ http://www.coldspring.co.uk/ http://www.equilibriummusic.com/ http://www.fossildungeon.com/fossildungeon/ http://dangus.net/ http://www.going-underground.de/ http://www.palaceofworms.com/ http://www.coldmeat.se/home.html
I started out by admitting that it can't hold a candle to Gentle Giant, Renaissance, Heart, Roxy Music, King Crimson, Genesis, or a score of other seventies bands. But still, Joan Osborne, Sara McLachlan, Natasha Bedingfield, Gorillaz, Maroon Five, Rob Thomas, Evanescence, The Mars Volta, and a score of other 21st Century bands have made some music that requires no apologies. You don't sound like you're interested enough in rock and roll to put enough effort into uncovering the top notch bands. I suggest you check out Gorillaz and The Mars Volta (a Puerto Rican band that you're somewhat more likely to stumble over on MTV en Español if at all) and maybe Radiohead. Or Shakira's early stuff in Spanish before Hollywood did the Céline Dion transformation on her. Or Céline's French stuff for that matter, she still makes songs for her loyal fans in Paris and Montréal. If those bands don't earn your respect then you should probably stick to jazz. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Songs can be so simple that a good garage band can cover them in one take, yet still have something to say that touches us. They don't have to be dependent on the performance skills of Rush, Joni Mitchell, or Jimi Hendrix to qualify as culture. That's probably the qualitative difference between theater and music. Theater is at its heart verbal, and has to be at least a little profound to be great. Music is... well something else. A simple melody with a simple lyric and a simple beat can touch you in the very deepest part of your heart. I remember Jean-Luc Ponty and Al DiMeola. I must have seen them each 20 times in the 1970s because the top progressive rock acts (including the totally out-there groups like Tangerine Dream) found that their audiences had a taste for sweet fusion. So many of the good fusion performers have gone into soft jazz or New Age because they can make a living that way. As for the parody thing, there's a fine line between parody and simply combining old motifs in new ways. And it's a really fine line in a genre like rock and roll that by definition doesn't respect anything or take anything seriously, including itself. To cite Gorillaz again--I guess that means I think they're one of the best three or four groups out there--you can't pull twelve bars out of their music and say, "That's brand new, how creative," yet the way they put all the various themes and dynamics together, it really is creative. Green Day is the perfect example. They're not very accomplished musicians, they're stuck in a style that was old ten years ago, and their lyrics are truly ham-fisted pop poetry. Yet even though my favorite bar band can play the songs off of "American Idiot" as well as the originals, every time I hear them (either version Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) I stop dead and find myself contemplating life.
im a big fan of dream theatre i urge everyone to listen to six degrees of inner turbulance, its a song for which the entire second disc is devoted to, the song is a 42 minute epic and petrucci never sounded better
Ideas for movies progress with how a society progresses. Even remakes are incited by the culture at hand I believe. I mean there's a reason why a certain remake will come up, why it seems a good time to remake it. Culture is constantly evolving. There's no such thing as static repetition. Everything has to progress. So movies will too. The film industry could conceivably die, once people decide there is always something better to do than watch some appealing fictionalized life. Do we even know why movies exist? There's all the standard declarations of what there is to love about them, and maybe that's all true, or some of it, but what if movies and such are just a substitute for something else and movies are one way we deal with the compromises we humans make for the civilization we've made and maintain? You know, what if - in our humanity - we just get sick of it? Maybe the time will come when movies just can't offer the satisfaction they once did, no matter how much people try to make movies that can. That could be good or bad, I guess. But what if there is always something that can be better than seeing movies? I don't know. I'm just saying. It seems like everything is old hat. Then again, I probably watch too much of them. Has anyone seen "V for Vendetta"?
I don't think that the film industry could ever die as long as our culture doesn't have a huge change in its priorities. It seems that Americans care about entertainment more than anything else. I know people who would run over their own grandmother to get to the premier of the new martin lawrence movie or whatever other crap is on. I really think that this is becoming a problem in our culture, if we are only concerned with entertaining ourselves, what progress can be made? It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it were a little better quality entertainment, but the action film, graphics driven movies of today just aren't very good in my opinion. Everything in moderation The same stories have been told with different names since the Greeks, and probably even before that, we just don't have records of it. I think as long there are good stories to be told, people will want to hear them. The stories that have survived this long are obviously the ones that are good enough to be loved and embraced by the human spirit.
Movies are just theater. Nothing more, nothing less. Theater adapted to contemporary technology. TV is a slightly different version of the same thing. Movies brought professional theater into the smallest towns. TV brought it right into people's homes. Of course it changed subtly along the way. Since one production of a movie can be seen over and over again in multiple copies, the production values can be much higher than live theater, including paying the salaries of whichever performers are considered the best and splicing together the best performances of their lives. But the audience chemistry is lost. TV provides a sense of faux intimacy, so that people watch stuff they would not be comfortable with in the company of strangers, wearing clothes they wouldn't wear among strangers, and only paying half attention. As a result TV has to have a lot of shock value to get their attention. But still, it's all theater and theater is at least as old as civilization, since economies of scale created surplus wealth to allocate to entertainment and division of labor allowed people to train as actors instead of food providers.
That could explain why agricultural workers have it so bad, typically, while movie actors are the cream of the crop (so to speak). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
There's more to it than that. Dancing is just as demanding as theater and just as dependent on the trappings of civilization to be practical as a profession. And just as much a cultural pursuit. Yet dancing is a labor of love and is not generally highly paid or respected. Much the same can be said of poetry, although it was probably elevated to an art form in the small permanent settlements of the Neolithic era and did not need civilization to fluorish. Poets are arguably on a lower rung of the ladder than grape pickers. There is something about theater that reaches deeper into people and evokes more of their passion than poems and dance performances--or production of the food we need for physical survival. Music is right up there too. There are those who sneer at pop music and cite the dismal straits of symphony orchestras as a counterexample. But symphonies are a lot like poetry in their limited appeal whereas rock and roll is more like movies. We treat our rock stars exactly like movie stars--to the extent of our very use of the word "star."
