Lost Artistry: Exploring the Evolving Landscape of Modern Cinema

I’m a big fan of movies that tell a story and make you think while opening up a conversation with your peers. Watching some films out today and forgetting about them the next day made me think of this concept. I started listing what I feel is missing in today’s entertainment while showing some appreciation for what is out there. It’s all over the place, but I let my stream of consciousness come out and tried to put everything together the best way I could. Stay with me.

The Vanishing Intrigue of Opening Sequences

Back there was art. You look at a movie like Pineapple Express, the opening shot where ‘Electric Avenue’ is playing, and you have Seth Rogan smoking weed driving in his car, running job to job, not having any luck. You don’t see movies like that anymore where they open up, and you say to yourself, ‘, Okay, I’m pumped up.’ An opening sequence where the music in the film makes you feel something, a certain vibe, a feeling where you don’t know what you are getting into and are unsure whether the movie will be fun or sad.

Diminishing Setups and Character Introductions

There’s no setup in movies anymore. Movies now are very cut and dry. Very choppy. There are no films where you are eased into the character you will meet, the plot.

The Yearning for Complex Characters

The audience wants Kaos. They want to be drawn to a character. The audience wants to hate or love somebody. They want to not know about a character in the movie. We are so used to seeing the same actors in movies all the time that you cannot separate the character from their persona off-screen. Social media plays a part in this problem because now everyone’s lives are in the open, and the audience may see the celebrity on social media acting a different way rather than them being unknown and only looked at and thought to be the character in the movie.

Character-Driven Films vs. the Attention Span Challenge

There are no don’t see a lot of character-driven movies anymore. Audiences don’t have the attention span to follow a troubled soul, a murderer, a man, or a woman who has issues. There have been films where you know the struggle and are either rooting for or against the character.

Now, you can debate that television does that now. There are shows like The Bear or Succession where there are multiple characters we are following on their journey. You look at the main character in The Bear, Carmen, played by the talented Jeremy Allen White. What are his motivations? Why did he leave that Michelin-star restaurant? What’s really holding him back from being a successful chef. Why is he drawn to turning this dump of a restaurant into his success story and into a five-star restaurant with a staff who doesn’t have talent on paper but sees something in them? Maybe someone never gave him a shot or saw potential in him to take his career to the next level.

Let’s talk about Kendall Roy in Succession, played by Jeremy Strong. Obviously, his motivation to be successful and run his father’s company could be because of his relationship with his father and some trauma at some point in his life.

It’s said in the show, and you can see it in the character, but we don’t really know; you don’t know what the character is thinking. This is something that is lost today in film. Will it come back? Who knows. That is up to the audience to decide.

If a movie were made where the audience is introduced to a character where you don’t know what they are going to do and you are on the edge of who they are, there’s a mystery. That is lost in the movies that come out today.

This is why you see a lot of biopics and action films today: you can get swept away by the special effects and the action and pay less attention to the actor. If you tune in to these movies, you wonder — who are these people?

Comedy’s Transformation: From Subtlety to Slapstic

Look at comedies. A few clever lines will get a laugh, but for someone to fall off a roof and make a funny face, that’s not comedy; that’s slapstick.

Eddie Murphy used to do humor when he appeared in movies like Boomerang and Coming to America, where the improvisation, the way he changes his voice. Thats comedy.

The Changing Landscape of Leading Actors

Do you wonder where people like Seth Rogan and Adam Sandler are? Why aren’t they releasing anything? I watched the movie Funny People, written and directed by Judd Apatow, and starred Sandler and Rogan, two megastars. It flew under the radar, and I was pleased to discover it late, but to have a movie like that with a cast of that caliber is impossible today because of the writing.

The Power of Established Names

There’s so much content and not enough excitement for movies to come out as much anymore. Leonardo DiCaprio is coming out with a new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. That is an exciting project coming out; he’s Leonardo DiCaprio. He and Brad Pitt have been called our generation’s Robert Redford and Paul Newman. So you get excited when you see their names coming out in a movie. It is an experience.

The Auteur Effect: Nolan, Tarantino, and Cinematic Experience

The same feeling applies to directors. You would only get that feeling right now when you hear Nolan and Tarintino. And when you hear those names, you know that movie will have character actors where you will be drawn to the story, the setting, the dialogue, and the main character. You are going to want to know who they are.

Rediscovering “Jackie Brown”

Watch a movie like Jackie Brown. The slickness, the coolness, the music. And who were you following the most? At least I did; you followed the bail bondsman Max Cherry played by Robert Forster. There’s a list of actors wherever it is that Hollywood has to cast in every film. Well-known names. Why not get someone you have never seen before.

While I could write something different every day about my thoughts on today’s version of storytelling, the examples written represent what I feel is missing in movies today and what I think should be made more of today. Most consumers find themselves watching film or television that is not out in 2023 but movies from the late 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, which is what I consider a golden age of film. Or it’s just me and my fascination with Old Hollywood and a time I’d like to see come back.