Helly­wood is the biggest, best financed self ref­er­enc­ing pro­poganda brain­wash­ing machine in the world out­done only by prime time tele­vi­sion, pos­si­bly. Are pro­duc­ers and writ­ers savvy and pur­pose­ful philoso­phers? No, they are merely unthink­ing, uncrit­i­cal non-philosophers who are immersed in the spirit of the age and when some­thing like “The Pas­sion” or “Lion, Witch…” go block­buster they are only capa­ble of react­ing and super­fi­cially imi­tat­ing them as “art”.
I have no strong opin­ions on this matter.….…

S-P,

“. Are pro­duc­ers and writ­ers savvy and pur­pose­ful philoso­phers? No, they are merely unthink­ing, uncrit­i­cal non-philosophers who are immersed in the spirit of the age and when some­thing like “The Pas­sion” or “Lion, Witch…” go block­buster they are only capa­ble of react­ing and super­fi­cially imi­tat­ing them as “art”.”

Not true. A very good friend of mine just got accepted into the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute –no small thing, as you know– and this was just after he earned his Mas­ters at St. John’s Col­lege in Annapo­lis MD. St. John’s is a ‘great books school’; lots of think­ing and phi­los­o­phiz­ing going on there, I assure you!

Remark­ably, before my wife and I became close with my pal and his wife, I felt much the same as you. But lis­ten­ing to him talk about movies (not the mass-marketed, sopho­moric pap) and screen writ­ing has actu­ally given me a renewed inter­est in film as a medium, and some­how my Net­Flix queue is now overflowing.

I’m just say­ing that there are peo­ple out there who are actual thinkers and have insight into the human con­di­tion and how we strug­gle through today’s world. It’s unfor­tu­nate that we have to look for them some­times, but they’re there. FWIW.

—–

Hi Grace!

Woo hoo! Who knew you had a flame-thrower on you? Well, I’d come run­ning to their aid, but unfor­tu­nately I agree with you.

I remem­ber a car­toon that came out after “Titanic” was such a mon­strous hit. One half was titled “In a dream world…” and fea­tured Hol­ly­wood types around a table say­ing “So it turns out that the pub­lic will still respond to good writ­ing, good char­ac­ters, a good plot, grip­ping action and his­tor­i­cal relevance!”

The other half was titled “In the Real World” and fea­tured the same group say­ing, “Let’s make more movies with water in them.”

I used to just think they were dense, but nobody is this dense. I think you’re right, they’re propagandists.

Oh, but I’m glad you finally got around to watch­ing “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” At the rate you’re going, you should make it to “Titanic” in just another 20 years or so.

LOL! Actu­ally I’ve been watch­ing “The Holy Grail” since it came out on the big screen orig­i­nally. I’ve had it in Beta, VHS, and now DVD. My kids can’t believe I can quote whole scenes. “Titanic”? Prob­a­bly never. Leonardo’s best per­for­mance was in “What’s Eat­ing Gilbert Grape”. I really thought he was “retarded” (I worked with kids like that…his per­for­mance was astound­ing, he should have won an Oscar for THAT.) The movie I MIGHT just see… Die Hard 4. For some goofy rea­son I love Bruce Willis when he plays the sar­cas­tic tongue in cheek parts. He was great in Moon­light­ing (at least the one episode I saw), his best flick was “The Last Boy Scout” (not “Sixth Sense”), and welll.… he’s just cool when he’s blow­ing things up.
I guess its a guy thing.… sigh.…..

s-p:
I thought of another one you and your wife might like, if you haven’t seen it: Princess Bride. Sort of reminds me of “Holy Grail”, but with­out the dan­ger­ous rabbit.

Can’t help you with the guy thing. I look at movies where a lot of stuff gets blown up and think “Who the heck is going to clean up that mess?”

Hi Jim!
I’d like to have a con­nec­tion into that world — it would give me a lit­tle hope. But I think I’d have a lot more if some­one who has all the good qual­i­ties you list would be one of the ones trusted to make the next block­busters. Unfor­tu­nately, I have a feel­ing the cur­rent flock of nihilists will rule the roost for some time. It’s really hard to change an entire cul­ture. Glad to know there are peo­ple try­ing, though.

Still, I would imag­ine that in film right now the sit­u­a­tion is the same as it is in most other avenues of cul­ture — the monop­o­lies of the “Big Inter­ests” has been shat­tered and there are oppor­tu­ni­ties for smaller alter­na­tive pock­ets to get their mes­sage out. So even if it’s only mak­ing YouTube videos or inde­pen­dent films with no stars, they might get a chance to bypass the big Hol­ly­wood types. That’d be nice — I’d like to hear from some­one else for a change.

Every­one,
BTW, going back to my orig­i­nal dis­gust about the enter­tain­ment chat­ter­ers crow­ing about what a record-breaking sum­mer they were going to have, it looks like they’re hav­ing to admit that it was just wish­ful thinking.

From Reuters (HERE): “Hollywood’s hope for record sum­mer fades”.

It’s worth the whole arti­cle just for the men­tion of “widely hyped sequels like “Spider-Man 3″ that opened to huge ticket sales but failed to keep audi­ences return­ing the way their pre­de­ces­sors did.” Thank you, thank you, Amer­i­can pub­lic, for restor­ing my faith in human decency. “Spi­der­man III” had to be the DUMBEST sequel I’ve seen. And that’s say­ing plenty.

Hi Grace,
We actu­ally have Princess Bride… yeah, another one of my faves, actu­ally.
A clean movie can actu­ally be good.… why don’t they make more like it?
sigh.…

Grace, s-p, Jim and all else who read and lurk: I just fin­ished a class on film and truly enjoyed it. One sig­nif­i­cant rev­e­la­tion (it prob­a­bly isn’t rocket sci­ence here) I took from the class was that mak­ing movies is an expen­sive, tedious, resource heavy and risky enter­prise — there­fore, they sup­pos­edly churn out the for­mula dri­vel to keep sell­ing tickets.

On Jim’s point, though, there are many thought­ful arti­sans out there who are mak­ing films that require some thought, that have some depth and are not pro­pa­ganda machines. Cer­tainly every­one has a story to tell and a mes­sage they want to con­vey, but at least the artisan’s are doing it in a way that is clever and orig­i­nal and make good use of all of the ele­ments of the medium.

One of the films I was required to watch starred Bruce Willis, and it cer­tainly messed with your head — a film called “12 Mon­keys” — I had to watch it twice to truly appre­ci­ate the director’s con­cept of time.

Sadly, most of the arti­sans who are cre­at­ing these films do not prop­a­gate the Chris­t­ian world view, much less an Ortho­dox view — it would be great to see more Ortho­dox believ­ers become involved in film­mak­ing as I think we could offer some­thing unique in the marketplace.

Nicode­mus,
Hooray for arti­sans! You’d think that even­tu­ally there would be a “school” of them that wouldn’t be afraid to look at the Big Ques­tions of Life and at least TRY to dis­pense with the approved for­mu­lae that reduce them down to either:
* your own per­sonal prob­lem
* some­thing you can com­pletely for­get once you’ve sat­is­fied some pri­mal urges
* some­one else’s head­trip
* the gods being capricious

… or what­ever other weird thing is fash­ion­able that week. Peo­ple seem will­ing to enter­tain the most out­ra­geous pos­si­bil­i­ties for Why We’re Here, What Life is About etc., ANY hypoth­e­sis as long as it’s not what came from the Church and the Gospels.

But any­way, there’s oppor­tu­nity in the cur­rent envi­ron­ment where ama­teurs have at least a podium (if not much of a pay­check). Right now, it’s a big free-for-all, and you only have to ven­ture onto YouTube to dis­cover that it’s near jungle-rule as far as what mes­sage gets out there. The still, quiet voice of mere Chris­tian­ity can never hope to out-number the other mes­sages, and it cer­tainly can’t out-shout them (I wouldn’t think the Devil him­self could do that these days), but it can be the one that gets remem­bered, that gets peo­ple think­ing. In that way, I sup­pose noth­ing much has changed in the last cou­ple millennia.

What about trail­ers? Can we all agree that movie trail­ers are the high­est and most enter­tain­ing art form of our age?

The sum­mer has for many years been a noto­ri­ous waste­land for ‘thought­ful’ films while the indus­try shifts to high-energy-special-effects-blockbuster and silly com­edy releases. I think it’s some bas­tardized ver­sion of the ancient and ven­er­a­ble prac­tice of cam­paign­ing on the bat­tle­field in sum­mer and then sit­ting around the fire and qui­etly telling sto­ries in the winter.

But seri­ously, for an exam­ple of what Jim Nee is talk­ing about in thought­ful fil­mak­ing, I might rec­om­mend “The Name­sake” which prob­a­bly is just leav­ing the­atres and will be shortly (or per­haps is) on the DVD rack at the rental shops.

Greg,
You missed it. We gave trail­ers two thumbs up way back HERE and HERE

Eric,
Thanks for the rec­om­men­da­tion. I went and reserved it on Net­flix — it isn’t avail­able yet, but will be soon, I expect.

It’s an excel­lent book, too. I’d recommend.

Hello…I Googled for bride from rus­sia, but found your page about s wrong with movies these days?…and have to say thanks. nice read.