The death of cinema

Lately I never know what to watch. 

Every time I turn on the TV or my streaming service of choice everything looks the same to me. There are like 3 genres at most, and if I actually want to watch something in which I have to pay attention I have to choose a movie made before the pandemic.

I remember movies used to be an event. 

Before they were being mass produced into senseless cinematic universes that bite their own tale and ,through the years, have lost the plot of what they really represented. 

Do you remember the last movie you watched at home without checking your phone? And I am not really talking about a declining attention span, which is another problem in itself. 

But movies used to be beautiful, art, made like paintings.

I remember the first time I watched the grand hotel Budapest: the detail, the care and love put into every frame, the story was slow, careful, you love the characters, you ARE the characters, you are there with them feeling their pains and excitement and you so badly want them to succeed. My eyes were glued to the screen.

I don’t remember seeing a beautiful movie so purely original made by Netflix. 

Movies have become background noise, you put them on and then work, clean or do chores, they are no longer an event. And I believe that is incredibly sad.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some good ones being made out there but you have to look for them amongst all the trash that pops up first think when you open a streaming service.

Not only are movies being produced like donuts, with little to no consideration for their quality, but the argument is being sold for shock value. Who cares about the story if you can show someone’s insides in a shot, some blood, guts spilled everywhere, maybe even some assault or cannibalism to give it the excitement and attention it deserves. Horrible. And we are being desensitised from the violence.

The movie seven does an amazing job at showing you just enough so that your imagination does the rest, so much more thought has to go into the symbolism, and what studios now fail to understand is that the feeling it evokes is so much more memorable than the one in which you are showing everything. To be honest I don’t want to see all that, it’s lazy and plain unpleasant (and I say this as someone who sees open chest surgeries every day). 

Copy pasting the plot of movies hoping no one will notice because they were accompanied with different scenes of the same gore and because no one really bothered to listen to what the plot was actually about, they were too busy looking at their phones. 

The characters are usually badly written too: when they try to make someone intelligent they just make them know a bunch of information, just because the writers themselves are not intelligent enough (or don’t care enough) to think of a plot that has an interesting or unexpected plot twist, heist movies are monotonous and predictable, detective stories are boring and center too much on the alcoholism and family problems of the depressed protagonist and police stories just accuse some random person they got out of nowhere instead of making us love a double agent to just betray our confidence in them.

My favourite genre of movies are romcoms, even those have gotten corrupted. When they make them, the chemistry seems to never be there. Actors used to be rumored to have fallen in love during the filming of every love movie. I would be the first to fall in love with the sweetness and gentleness in which Ben treated Andie in how to lose a guy in 10 days or the way, the way Jim waited for Pam in the office, the way Emmett looked at Elle in legally blonde when she solved the case,or even the way Troy ran after Gabriela in high school musical. 

Now it’s just, sex? No longer this pure idea of souls intertwined, but an attraction that becomes too strong. Maybe sex sells but I don’t think it’s worth assassinating a whole genre for it. I miss the tension, I miss the longing, I miss the loyalty and the way characters tried to convince themselves they could live without the other. 

I truly don’t know who is to blame here, but people now need everything explained to them, what do you mean you can’t stand an open ending, what do you mean you didn’t understand the movie inception, not everything needs to be spelled out and the point of the ending of the Truman show is that he was now free from the cameras.

To end my rant I will leave you the video that first made me think of writting all this