The State of Modern Cinema

To talk about Hollywood cinema is to talk of world cinema. No country dominates an art form today more than the USA has a stranglehold on film. Authors worldwide have their novels translated into any and all languages. Art is and always has been global. Even popular music, though currently Western-centric, allows artists all over the world a chance to become successful. When, on the other hand, was the last time you saw a film that wasn't a product of the U.S. at your local cinema?

Though popular American cinema has become a byword for commercial, reconstituted rubbish, it wasn't always like this. In '70s Hollywood, we had material being made yearly by the likes of Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Malick, Lucas, Polanski, Scott, Allen, Bogdanovich, De Palma, Altman, Ashby, Friedkin and Cimino. A busload of brilliant, crackpot geniuses that came to prominence in just one decade, while Kubrick, Peckinpah and Lumet made arguably their best films during this period of freedom, too.

Cut to today and the most successful directors are the ones that can handle special effects and know how to make the most out of a multi-million dollar budget - glorified accountants and demolition experts. Where true originals of contemporary cinema Steven Soderbergh, Joe Wright, Sofia Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson find difficulty scraping money together for their projects, Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich are regularly thrown $200 million per movie. In perspective, that's 200 This Is Englands. Begs the question: couldn't that money be used to better effect elsewhere?

In this commercialised age, there isn't much surprise about the state of the movies. At least it hasn't reached the terrible, terrible lows of television - I give you the '...Got Talent' franchise - and there are still those real filmmakers around that somehow manage to find work. The Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky; those that want to make films, not just movies.

But the grip the U.S. film industry has on the market appears to be tightening. Promising directors are having to compromise, throwing in the towel and consigning themselves to Hollywood blockbuster movies - if you're Christopher Nolan then you've probably found your true calling, but what a rarity he is. The remainder of the pool of 'talent' in Hollywood seems determined to create work as broad and colourless as possible.

The actors all look like they've been chosen by a panel akin to the X-Factor judges, whereby the only requirement is they all have to look alike in their featurelessness - possession of acting talent is a bonus, but not a necessity. Why bemoan James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis popularising dead-eyed acting via mo-cap when we're practically already there?

On the production side of things, where once there were the LA and New York film schools, there is a new training ground called music television. Directors emerging from here have the unique talent of shooting so fast-paced they can induce aneurysms and come complete with an ADHD-stricken editor hooked up to an adrenaline drip. And perhaps the fastest growing part of the industry is the CGI department; those that work here are the heroes responsible for special effects that look dated after only a couple of years. Just take a look at Peter Jackson's King Kong remake or George Lucas' Star Wars prequels from only the last decade.

Put all those elements together et voila, modern filmmaking rears its disfigured head.

Where Jaws and The Godfather proved two of the top grossing films of their era, one of the biggest box office pulls of the last ten years has been Transformers 2. Does this make Michael Bay the next Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg? Of course it doesn't. It just offers further proof of the probably irreversible monopoly the American studios have on us and the effects of $100 million-worth of advertising.

As Hollywood cinema, and therefore world cinema, stands, there is nothing to be optimistic about. Where Hollywood was once a bright beacon of hope for film, it's now nothing more than a soulless empire built on sheets of money and ruled by businessmen that could be equally at home there, the Wall Street stock exchange or anywhere else that could build them a better home or give them a fatter paycheque. Hollywood cinema is not a cinema; it's a business. It ceased to warrant a term that had any echoes of culture when the '80s dawned.

Ever since a savvy exec had the Eureka moment "hang on...they'll watch anything if we tell them to!", Hollywood's output has worsened year on year. The realisation that blanket marketing, and not quality of a film, is what makes a profit has made Hollywood moviemaking into a production line, a factory mass-producing and recycling material. A once-admired cinema reduced to churning out movies the same way McDonalds makes its burgers. So now we have sequels, prequels, spin-offs, remakes, re-imaginings, movies based on popular comic books and basically anything else lacking originality that comes with an audience pre-packaged and the idea is, as long as the trailer looks good enough, audiences will be ensnared.

Whether the film the trailer advertises is any good isn't important. These aren't films, but equations, where the sum is one of hundreds of millions of dollars. Creativity be damned; creativity only takes time and money and is now a surplus to requirements. The repulsive and immoral nature of what was once the greatest cultural hub in the world - choking up a market of only its tepid movies and leaving no space for others - is hugely disturbing and I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more people washing their hands of the movies.