My Issues with Modern Films

Growing up a movie fan was arguably the the highlight of my childhood. Almost all of my best memories revolve around going to the video store or the movie theater, settling down with friends and family, or sometimes by myself, and escaping into another world. This enjoyment led me to my first job at Blockbuster Video while I simultaneously tried to began telling cinematic stories myself. My filmmaking dreams never quite worked out, but I spent almost a decade managing a movie theater where as my boss used to put it, "We're on the back end of the filmmaking process."

I think one of the biggest downfalls that come with having an obsessive hobby is the desire to stay up-to-date. With movies, that can be a difficult, because every week dozens of new movies debut. Still, if you call yourself a movie freak/film aficionado you are almost expected to have seen the latest big releases, award darlings, foreign sensations, and even the under the radar cult hits. It's a lot of responsibility that for folks, like myself, it takes something that should be fun and turns it into a chore.

In 2017, I launched a horror review website. I had an absolute blast creating the site and writing my first dozen or so reviews. I decided to focus specifically on the 1990s, a decade that many horror fans consider to be one of the worst in recent memory. Having grown up in the 90s, I had a lot of love for the post 80s boom flicks, and I wanted to revisit my favorites and explore the ones I'd missed.

But something happened a few months in. I decided that I should keep up with current releases too. I mean, the audience for Amityville Dollhouse isn't nearly as large as the one for the latest Scream flick. So, I retitled the blog and decided to start reviewing every horror movie I watched, both good and bad. The fun experimented I started one random evening, changed dramatically overnight, and suddenly I felt a pressure to keep up, to see those big releases and also the small ones. I found myself sitting through movies I wouldn't normally watch, because of some ridiculous notion that I "should" watch this. I believe these few years did more harm to both my horror and movie fandom than anything else. It just stopped being fun.

Of course, things had also changed. The films that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s, were no longer being made. Hollywood adopted the 'four quadrant' approach for most major releases and the DVD market dried up, eliminating a backup source of revenue for films that didn't make their money in theaters. Hollywood stopped taking a chance on mid-budget movies, and as the world became more conservative and sensitive, Hollywood adjusted for better and worse.

I recently shared with Paolo, one of the biggest movie fans I know, a portion of Letterboxd review I ran across after watching Dead End Drive, a little known Australian b-film that I described as if "John Carpenter made a prequel to Mad Max." In truth, I don't really care of Letterboxd reviews, because for the most part, they are as performative as the rest of the internet. Instead of offering well thought out opinions, they are flashy and showy in this desperate attention to be followed or laughed at. You know... like the majority of the internet. But this reviewers thought resonated with me, because it really is how I feel about current films and their desire to push messaging.

... felt older films presenting smart ideas in a stupid way were preferable to more recent films that present stupid ideas in an apparently smart way. I happen to agree with this; my recent reviews of The Invisible Man, Midsommar and Hereditary do underline my repeated frustration with the watered-down progressiveness that seems to be hailed as Forward-Thinking these days. Give me loud, dumb, borderline-offensive films that actually manage to touch a nerve on serious issues any day. Like Dead End Drive-In!

There is a place for messaging in films. I'm a huge fan of moral lessons in storytelling, because that's been the basis of storytelling since the beginning. We all know we need some more morals in our current society, but when I watch a trailer and I can see how a film is nothing but a vehicle to work through someone's trauma or identity, I just turn it off now. Get a journal and write that out, don't make a boring movie to appeal to a niche audience to feel seen. Stop making shitty movies because you didn't feel seen as a child, no one did. And for the love of God... if you can't tell a decent story in under two hours, re-write your script. Most movies shouldn't be more than ninety minutes, let alone two hours.

As Frank Capra said, “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” Sadly, most movies are dull today, in my opinion.

Of course, there are big budget films that attempt to circumvent the dullness by creating massive digital set pieces and display epic battles all rendered inside of a computer. There is nothing wrong with this when done right, (Lord of the Rings comes to mind), but sadly the lack of money and attention to detail are usually lacking in the visual effects department. So, instead of using CGI to enhance a film, like David Fincher does, the studios decide that they will use the actors to enhance the CGI of the film. This doesn't work, and as we've seen over the past fifteen years, CGI has been going in the wrong direction. There is no reason why a film made in 2009 has better CGI than a modern film. Then again, director Gore Verbinski recently stated he believes the transition to the Unreal Engine in Hollywood is what has made all of the CGI look like a video game cut scene.

Growing up, a lot of the older men I knew watched old Westerns, the stuff they grew up with and enjoyed. I'm guessing that this is my transition into the old man who watches the things he grew up with and enjoys. I don't hate everything new. Heck, last night I just finished Cobra Kai which I loved. Last year, Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck was a truly moving film watching experience and I really loved the latest Jackie Chan movie The Shadow Edge more than I ever expected to. There are still good movies out there being made, and there are still filmmakers putting a lot of effort into creating something that feels unique or tells a good, fun story, but these films aren't in the majority. And that's okay. Because the best thing about living in 2026 is I have access to millions of films and it takes very little effort to find most of them.

Those memories I have about the video store... I used to spend hours just walking around and looking at all of the cover boxes. Each picture was a glimpse into a world different from my own that for ninety minutes I could escape into. I wasn't able to rent all of them and so there are titles that remain on my "to-watch" list for the past thirty years. Now, instead of forcing myself to sit through the latest Marvel film or Award winner, I'm going to finally check out Flash Gordon from 1980. Odds are I'll enjoy it more and even if I don't, at least I can finally cross off that VHS box in unseen movies video store in my mind.