I also agree. The reason the good old days seem better is because the good stuff endures and people forget the crap. In twenty years, 2011 will be remembered as the year The Artist was made not the year Jack and Jill was made.
Look back a couple of decades. If you asked people today what were the best movies released in 1990 you’d probably hear names like Goodfellas or Edward Scissorhands or Miller’s Crossing or The Krays or Truly, Madly, Deeply or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
But the top movies of 1990 were Ghost, Home Alone, Pretty Woman, Dances With Wolves, and Total Recall. 1990 also saw the release of Another 48 Hrs., Back to the Future Part III, Bride of Re-Animator, Child’s Play 2, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, Die Hard 2, The Exorcist III, The Godfather Part III, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Look Who’s Talking Too, Predator 2, Robocop 2, Rocky V, and Young Guns II, along with DuckTales the Movie, Jetsons: The Movie, and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.
In terms of what the big stars were doing, 1990 was the year Sean Connery made The Russia House, Tom Cruise made Days of Thunder, Robert De Niro made Awakenings, Clint Eastwood made The Rookie, Harrison Ford made Presumed Innocent, Mel Gibson made Bird on a Wire, Tom Hanks made Joe Versus the Volcano, Bill Murray made Quick Change, Jack Nicholson made The Two Jakes, Julia Roberts made Flatliners, Meryl Streep made Postcards from the Edge, and Denzel Washington made Heart Condition. Which of these have become classics?
Digging deeper into the barrel, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Ernest Goes to Jail, Graffiti Bridge, Kindergarten Cop, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all released in 1990. There were two Steven Seagal movies released in 1990. And four movies where Charlie Sheen had the lead.
They want to make money and don’t want to lose money. Most people are kind of like sheep when it comes to what they want to go to the theater to see, or the DVDs they want to rent/but, and a lot of people like things that are familiar.
And the movie industry is not that old really, but, most things have been done to one extent or another, so, what worked 20. . .30. . . 40 years ago also might work today.
How bad can Hollywood be if these people are making movies:
Coen Brothers
Alexander Payne
PT Anderson
Jason Reitman
David Lynch
Steven Soderbergh
Quentin Tarantino
Spike Jonze
Ang Lee
Wes Anderson
Richard Linklater
David O Russell
Christopher Nolan
Edgar Wright
Tim Burton
JJ Abrams
Tim Burton
Alfonso Cuarón
Peter Jackson
Pixar
I finally have a chance to get back to this thread.
Yes. Yes yes.
That list of bad movies from 1990 was nausea-inducing. That’s a pretty damning indictment of 1990. I’d say the worst movies of this last year are better and fewer than all those awful/mediocre movies of 1990. Other years too. I went to a fun movie marathon in the theater yesterday (the original Roger Corman Little Shop of Horrors, The Last Starfighter, Brazil, Night of the Comet (the only one I hadn’t previously seen), Twelve Monkeys, and Attack The Block, plus an awful horror anthology called The Theatre Bizarre). Before and between the movies they played shorts and trailers for bad movies of the 70’s & 80’s (like Jennifer, Dead Heat and others but I was usually out in the lobby so I thankfully missed most of them). Lot of people like those kinds of movies and cheered all the horrible trailers. I don’t. I have my guilty pleasures, but I don’t like bad movies for the sake of bad movies, and boy, there used to be a lot more bad movies released.
For me, Quick Change. I think it’s far and above all those other films. I think it’s extraordinarily underrated as a great black comedy. Plus it has the greatest quotes.
Bank Guard: What the Hell kind of clown are you?
Grimm: The crying on the inside kind, I guess.
Street Barker: Nude women! Nude women
[Grimm dressed as a clown walks by]
Street Barker: Clowns Welcome! Clowns welcome!
Loomis: Is that our plane?
Phyllis: No, if it were our plane, it would be crashing.
Loomis: It’s bad luck just SEEING a thing like that!
and on and on and on…
I haven’t seen Joe Versus the Volcano since it was released, but I remember it being pretty good too. I need to see it again.
Absolutely. That’s a stellar list and one that I would have come up with too. I bow to your excellent taste. Of course not all of them are “Hollywood” but people seem to be lumping everything they don’t like into one pile of slush called “Hollywood.” If they can do it, we can do it too.
I’d like to add some other established and up-and-coming quality directors such as (in no particular order, sometimes listing the first movie that comes to mind for each, which might be the latest or the next or an old one, and forgetting many many many others)
Martin Scorsese
David Fincher
Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone)
Vera Farmiga (Higher Ground)
Danny Boyle (127 Hours)
Anton Corbijn (Control)
Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)
Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
Bennett Miller (Moneyball)
Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)
John Michael McDonagh (The Guard)
Joe Cornish (Attack The Block)
Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In)
George Clooney (Ides of March)
Lynne Ramsay (We Need To Talk About Kevin)
Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness)
Sofia Coppola (Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation)
Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart)
Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth)
Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)
Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code)
Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine)
Terrence Malick (Tree of Life)
Lars von Trier (Melancholia)
John Cameron Mitchell (Rabbit Hole)
Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run)
John Sayles (Limbo)
Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Biutiful)
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris)
Mike Leigh (Another Year)
Julie Taymor (Freida)
Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene)
Michael R. Roskam (Bullhead)
Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville)
Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage)
Neill Blomkamp (District 9)
Lee Tamahori (The Devil’s Double)
Sarah Polley (Away From Her)
Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech)
Michael Winterbottom (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Trip)
Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley)
Gary Oldman (ok, he’s only directed one, but what a great one, Nil by Mouth)
Fernando Meirelles (City Of God)
Paul Weitz (Being Flynn)
Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton)
Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)
Ben Affleck (The Town)
Whit Stillman
Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre)
Joe Wright (Hannah)
Dee Rees (Pariah)
Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry)
Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent, Win Win)
Drew Goddard (Cabin In The Woods)
Nadine Labaki (Where Do We Go Now?)
Jonathan Levine (50/50)
Gus Van Sant (Milk)
Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch)
Atom Egoyan (Chloe, The Sweet Hereafter)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)
Lucky McKee (The Woman)
Mike Cahill (Another Earth)
Susanne Bier (In A Better World)
Paul Greengrass (United 93)
Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Peter Weir (The Truman Show)
Andrew Niccol (Gattica)
Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In)
Neil Burger (Limitless)
Rian Johnson (Brick)
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Micmacs, Amélie)
Alejandro Amenabar (The Others)
Gavin O’Connor (Warrior)
Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker)
Jim Sheridan (In America)
Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams)
Kenneth Lonergan (Margaret)
Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff)
Denis Villeneuve (Incendies)
Daniel Barber (Harry Brown)
Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence)
Steve McQueen (Shame)
Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham)
David Cronenberg (A Dangerous Method)
Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)
Rodrigo Cortés (Buried)
Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus)
Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen)
Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass)
Banksy (Exit Through The Gift Shop)
Jane Campion (Bright Star)
Todd Solondz (Life After Wartime)
Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko)
Lone Scherfig (An Education)
Tom Ford (A Single Man)
Mira Nair (The Namesake)
Fatih Akın (Soul Kitchen)
Bobcat Goldthwait (no heckling, World’s Greatest Dad is great!)
Ricky Gervais (ditto for The Invention of Lying)
Jodie Foster (The Beaver, which WAS a good movie, dammit)
Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise)
Spencer Susser (Hesher)
and of course,
Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and
Roman Polanski
That’s very incomplete. That’s mostly off the top of my head and with the barest of research (to look up spellings and exact titles). The rest I noticed or remembered when I’d look something else up. I didn’t specifically look up non-English language directors, or female directors. Not all of the directors have had only successful movies, some are hit and miss, but they’ve all had interesting movies, and thus have the potential have more. I also didn’t list all the documentary filmmakers, such as Errol Morris, Morgan Spurlock, Michael Moore, D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, Lucy Walker and, well, so many more.
And seriously, we live in the age of producer Scott Rudin. Do we take him for granted, when future generations of moviegoers will look back on this, his era, with awestruck awe? Yes, yes we do. Well, some do. I don’t. How lucky are we?
It’d be wise to keep an eye on up and coming producer Megan Ellison too.
For the same reason that The Brady Bunch Movie was not a new property. Thor has appeared on television many times as far back as 1966, besides being in a handful of direct to video movies. If Thor had been based on a single book published about two years prior that had never been adapted to visual media before, then it would have been a new property.
Only if you hadn’t read, or even had any knowledge of, written SF from about 50 years before. Seriously, SW was a mixture of old tropes which were presented as brand new. Lucas had read Campbell’sThe Hero With a Thousand Faces, and used it to pull his story together. Now, Lucas made a very EFFECTIVE film, but the story was no more original than most stories that begin with “Once upon a time…”.
Nothing is original if you get abstract enough, there really is nothing new under the sun and this same claim is made against every single work of fiction ever. If I had time I’d write a long post proving say Inception is nothing but a rip off of the story of Orpheus etc. When you get right down to it Blade Runner is about a slave hunter that falls in love with a slave, it is the visual execution that elevates it.
Films have to be judged as their own medium not dismissed because the setting is old hat in literature, that is what makes SW so imaginative that someone tried and succeeded in creating that setting on the screen.
EDIT:If anyone really believes Star Wars is a LOW point or heralded the downfall of Hollywood…I don’t know what to say, what do you consider the high points of Hollywood?
Thirded or fourthed – I was recently rereading the collection of “Harlan Ellison’s Watching”, his old movie/TV review columns from the late 60s to the 80s, and of course already 40+ years ago he was spitting foam at the stupidification of the audience and the establishment critics, and at how many then-current productions were mere rehashes, and at flicks that would be annointed as classics in their own time that didn’t deserve it and going all Fools!! Time will prove me right!! (did often enough, but didn’t always)… but all the while recognizing that even in the past there was a lot of dreck and in his present there was just as much, only more potentially profitable.
I would suppose a case could be made that Star Wars was the tipover point for the modern-era vision of the hit blockbuster* as generalized global pop-culture marketing phenomenon*. Sure, though The Godfather had already established direct sequelism (as in I, II, etc, different from discreet episodic installments) as viable, and James Bond had merchandising tie-ins, and then came SW and raised the bar way high.
But the thing is, that by itself does not “ruin” the artform. It just makes it hard to try and "be the next Star Wars", makes it more patently obvious when you fall flat on your face stupidly trying to, and you can save yourself a lot of aggravation, money and critical prestige by **not **trying to.
My point is, this isn’t all that abstract. Lucas took the old space opera memes and put them on screen. I don’t think that was terribly original. I’ll give him points for risking it, because the conventional wisdom in Hollywood at the time was to make SF movies as cheaply as possible, and Lucas tried to get some quality graphics and FX on the screen, and he succeeded in that. But his story was nothing more than a checklist, there was nothing really imaginative about it at all. Hell, I’ve thought of writing a fantasy novel (or series of them) based on Diana Wynne Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Which is hilarious, by the way. Now, I’d probably have a best seller on my hands if I could write at all, but it wouldn’t be imaginative, it would just be picking a few things here and there and dropping them into a standardized setting.
Read consecutively, they paint a brutal and well informed picture of how Hollywood and the creative process and business process shifted between about 1972 and 1990.
We are still dealing with the template created by the Sony’s and Coca-Colas of the world stepping into Hollywood and fucking things up.
Upon Preview, Lynn with all due respect I disagree. Lucas didn’t know enough to insist upon merchandising rights for Star Wars. He did for all subsequent films in the series. I grew up in Philly. ( "Yo, Adrienne ! " ). Star Wars ran nonstop in one theater on Chestnut Street in Center City for over 1 year.
While clever merchandising played a part as the film gathered steam, it is fair to say that if Jaws was the first blockbuster ( sprung from a hugely successful original novel ), Star Wars was the first blockbuster on its own. Yes, I do agree that it’s nothing more than Pippin with blasters. The Everyman tale is…uh…about Every Man. But Star Wars made its bones, as they say in the gangster pictures, without an initial huge marketing push. Was there marketing? Sure. Was it on par with larger films at the time that anticipated greater grosses? Not really.
A lot of Hollywood was gobsmacked when Star Wars hit as big as it did.
I think this hits the nail on the head. The rise of the cable drama around the beginning of the millennium has seemed to take a big toll on Hollywood. If you are a David Simon or a Matthew Wiener or a Vincent Gilligan wouldn’t you prefer the storytelling options presented by the multi-episode tv format? These series have become what movies used to be.
It’s very very telling that the people who complain about “Hollywood” are very loudly ignoring Yookeroo’s post (and yes, mine too) about all the amazing directors working today and the quality movies they have made, are making, and will make. They don’t want to hear it. They just want to complain. They don’t want to DO anything about what they’re complaining about by, god forbid, actually supporting these filmmakers who are making a difference and making the kinds of movies the complainers say aren’t being made. Even those who live in god-forsaken Multiplex Burbland have options that they don’t utilize or support.
“Hollywood” isn’t the problem at all. Apathy is the problem.
Is the actual plot and story original? No absolutely not, been done a million times.
What no one ever thought to do was create the universe or reality Lucas did, he painstakingly added details that add up to a film that has an amazing authenticity and verisimilitude and that is where the imagination and creativity of Star Wars is.
Details like mentioning events and things and people that don’t appear on screen and really have no bearing on the plot, having alien languages that are spoken just like there are multilingual discussions in real life, worn and dirty sets and props as if they are actually used and lived in, that is the genius of SW that we are dropped into a fully fleshed out and expansive reality.
If that was old hat in cinema, well hell give me your examples I’d like to see them
BTW before someone accuses me of childhood nostalgia I never saw SW in a theater, in fact I was born AFTER Return Of The Jedi came out. SW is still one of my favorite films of all time.
Yes, Lucas did it in film. But all of that was done in pulp fiction decades before Lucas even thought of it.
You want originality? Heinlein created a “Future History” where most of his stories were set in the same future, and many of the same characters reappeared. So did Niven, in his Known Space universe. Lucas’ main achievement was spending time and money on FX, and I really don’t think that this sort of thing was even technically possible much earlier.
Seriously, have you ever even read any older SF?
I should note that I got married in 1977, which was the year I turned 20, and I saw SW when it first came out in theaters. Yes, it’s very enjoyable as a movie. It’s not groundbreaking SF, though. It’s just space opera, on film rather than on paper. I have here in my hot little hands a copy of Triplanetary, which (so it says, and I have no reason to disbelieve it) is the first of the famous Lensman series, which I bought yesterday. The copyright of the novel is 1948, but it was originally serialized in 1934. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read any of the Lensman series, but I’m willing to bet that just about everything that you like about SW is in the Lensman series. Plus, of course, Lensman has hot redheads, IIRC. The big difference is that Smith had no way of getting his stories onto the big screen in a technically sophisticated way.
Space opera is fun. But for the most part, it’s not in any way original. There were a few pioneers in the field back when the field itself was new, but the genre was decades old before Lucas had the idea of SW.
Jesus. So what? Is knowledge of this thing that existed supposed to affect those of us who loved Star Wars? Damn, if I’d known about this thing that you’re telling me about 35 years later I never would have seen Star Wars over 100 times in the theater on first run. Nah, I still would have. I fell in love with it and took all my friends mulitiple times. I saw it before I took my son and then when I did HE fell in love with it and we saw it together over and over and over and bonded like hell over the movie. Granted, at the time I lived in worse than Multiplex Burbland. Try a farm in Kansas. But it played and played and played both at the indoor theater and at the Drive-In. My area was the same as Cartooniverse’s. It kept Star Wars around for months and months. But I didn’t go see it because it was the only thing to see. I kept going to see it because it was a damned good time. It was addictive, and much better (and cheaper!) than drugs or alcohol.
Btw, I’m a female, and “hot redheads” is not a draw for me. It’s a bit demeaning that you would even mention it, that you would think it would be such a draw for Star Wars fans in general, like only sex-starved nerdy men could be huge Star Wars fans.
The way Lucas put together so many different elements into one freaking fun package was sure original. It’s not just SF. It’s westerns and Kurasawa and film noir and action and adventure and buddy comedy and snarkiness and fun snappy dialogue and strong female protagonist and robots and monsters and (sorta) romance and male father figures and orphans and big machinery and all kinds of scenery and dozens of other things, all in one big freaking fun package. That’s what was original. Each individual part was not original at all. The entire package was.
you think Star Wars fans are idiots and don’t know that?
But that is what makes it groundbreaking, because it had never been done in film before. And it took a gigantic leap of creativity and imagination to do that.
Just as another example the plot of Watchmen the comic series isn’t all that original, in fact the last issue even references a Outer Limits episode with the same plot. What made it groundbreaking was the execution(the tone and characters and shifts between past and present and story within a story) and the fact no one had done it in comics before. You can say so what there are TONS of novels that came out before Watchmen that did all that stuff and more, but that is a different medium.
