An Appeal to Film

For the film industry, shareholders, billionaire producers, copyright lawyers and the MPAA: You guys are just shit. That goes without saying, but lets get that out of the way right now. You and I and everybody else, including those who abscent-mindedly pay to see your movies just to have something to do on a Saturday night, know it.

You make movies because they make money, not because you intend to leave a mark on the decade in our present time or pay homage to the legends of the art of the motion picture. And even when you try to do this, it ends up being rushed and insulting to their and our intelligence. You exploit a medium because its attainable by the public who got swept into the trap coated in promises of an exciting, edge-of-your-seat adventure. You perpetuate artificial scarcity by demonizing copying to justify making people pay for the latest flaming garbage of Happy Madison Productions and M. Night Shyamalan. You try to keep a corpse breathing by beating it to death. You try to keep an audience by pissing in their eyes. Its an abusive relationship where everyone tries so hard to be happy, when they all know they’re killing themselves slowly. Its an insulting continuation of events and I intend to propose a truce.

Lets take a step back for a moment and look at the ugly truth. Movies once had a sensible balance of being profitable and being well-made in terms of story structure and conveying meaning through subtlety. Their profitability was the result of the product being good. People think RottenTomatoes gives older movies higher ratings because they’re old films and they’re just snooty in that way — but they neglect to see the downward spiral of filmmaking quality after the threshold of the Chinatown or Streetcar Named Desire era. The scales tipped dramatically when profitability and determination in cheap production became the primary investment for the largest congestion of filmmaking. As with all things that accumulate profit, it swelled into itself and regurgitated paniced, flat productions hardly worth a sigh’s effort, simply to keep the company afloat. At its core, its laziness and petite greed. You would think that with the potential of technology rising, film quality would consequently rise too, but only in an ethical world where the ends of income aren’t put first.

But I guess I’m telling you what you already know. But I think what a lot of people don’t know or don’t care to know is that this isn’t the result of just one line of events, but the splintering of those events creating a new line of events circling back onto itself and sustaining its vicious circle. That is, the overall quality of films degrading and the standards of audiences degrading with it, justifying the present substance of major motion pictures. People don’t care, producers and directors don’t care. So who cares? If stupid audiences like stupid movies, there isn’t anything to correct.

This is where the indie film demographic comes in for the outlanders who do care. But no group of people should have to seek the outcast underground experimental demographic of movies to rejuvinate their outlook on the craft. They should damn well be able to look to a well-off production company and expect a film that bends and heats and cools something inside them right before the credits role. Across the board, films should just be good. Not perfect, but just good. Just like books and TV shows, things that are garbage and shams and gimmicks shouldn’t be syndicated and distributed and make millions of dollars each quarter. There should be a federation of people who jail investors in media that robs people of their right to fair-priced good content and self-respect.

Ah but here we reach the part where I’m told that my subjective opinion on the sustance of major films doesn’t hold up outside my own taste. That each movie can’t be a masterpiece, that each theatergoer’s life can’t be changed each time. Of course it can’t, but no industry should exist around and thrive off of garbage. Not garbage simply in concensus of quality, but in the honesty and intentions of the producers. Worthless nothingness that is a means to an end is garbage. Films now are simply trash, tools in the exploitation of people who could have taste but instead want nothing.

My proposal is less than a practical overview of how to allocate money and resources into a project and more of an idealistic suggestion to breathing life into a medium. To save the world, more or less, so I don’t exactly care about how it will be done. You invest a quarter of your efforts in remastering, remarketing and re-releasing films from the 1950s — 90s, give their presentation to a new audience and witness a recycling of ideas, stories and art that fertilizes the future frontier of cinema beyond the current gray area, which would, as an extension to my idealistic vision, collide with the social realization against intellectual property and exploitation in other realms.

The general idea boils down to casting a mirror onto all the components that make up film and remind it of its former greatness, encouraging a return to solid, basic story architecture and genuine ambition. Incorporate solid, tried and true values of filmmaking with contemporary techniques. A combination that gives us yearly releases that individually compete in a race to the top, each worth a thousandfold what was put into them. Not just productions made to be forgotten next year to occupy an audience for a week.

This shouldn’t just be an appeal to the industry, but also to the people who keep it propped up. You people are the most abhorrent entertainment-seekers who ever graced the earth. You sustain the idea of honing 100 percent of your intelligence and good sense into your obligations and tasks of the week, and shut that shit off the second its time to wind down, instead of caring about yourself and reserving some of that critical and curious mental energy for a quality story. Instead you prefer to witness the dancing-singing corpse of Ben Hur or the next generic jumpscare dependant horror flick of the coming month.

I’m not telling everyone to go on a spree of Scorsese or become the encyclopedia of Sidney Lumet or Michael Cimino, but to compare average and high-ranking films from then and now, and see what I’m getting at. Demand that films be less like trash, or at least demand that trash films don’t make mountains of cash.