Many people mourn the loss of the diverse and interesting modern cinema. Today’s movies are often bland, boring and seem to been a rehash of what has been. I had thought that maybe the problem is Hollywood, but I am beginning to think the problem is the audience..
This week, I had a meeting with a fairly famous You-tuber I made the statement to this talented young fellow that if he played his cards right he could be the Howard Cossell of the internet. His eyes glazed over and it was soon obvious that he did not have a clue who was talking about. The Twenty something sitting next to him also had no clue who Cossell was as well…..I was more than shocked.
Cossell was an American sports journalist who was widely known for his blustery, cocksure personality. In its obituary for Cosell, The New York Times described Cosell’s effect on American sports coverage: “He entered sports broadcasting in the mid-1950s, when the predominant style was unabashed adulation, and offered a brassy counterpoint that was first ridiculed, then copied until it became the dominant note of sports broadcasting.” In 1993, TV Guide named Howard Cosell The All-Time Best Sportscaster in its issue celebrating 40 years of television.
I then had to explain who Jimmy Stewart was. Again I was dumb-founded. I realized that unless this generation had a lap top in front them they had no knowledge of any popular culture prior to 1997. I suspect if the event did not happen prior to 1997 did they even care.
Millennials are defined as those who were born after 1980, for the most part they as a group are detached from institutions, intensely networked with friends. Millennials are the generation of technology junkies, nifty Facebook comments , you tube watching folks and who seem to be more than a tad self involved. Millennials in my humble estimation are kind of dull because they really don’t really seem to to have much depth, and frankly if you don’t know who Howard Cossell , I don’t know if I want to know you.
The movies that they watch are different as well .Millennial-era films, action and sci-fi films in , constantly reference older cinema but since this generation has no idea who Jimmy Stewart is, everything is new. For us older types it seems to be an newer rehash which should have been well left enough alone. We are now in an age of reboots, remade movies that are never as good as the original.
Since the turn of the century there have been seemingly endless and many times pointless movies based off Marvel superhero and X-Men comics,a huge amount of Star Trek movies , Spider Man movies (remaking the remake is more than silly), Planet of the Apes movies, (frankly I kind of like these) and Superman reboots and and a constant parade of what was old is new again. Add to all this the upcoming new Star Wars films, eight Harry Potter films, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Twilight saga, The James Bond series (hey don’t knock Bond, looking forward to Spectre), The Batman reboots, and the Hunger Games.
I think they keep rehashing movies because its extremely rare to have a Millennials attention. They have the attention span of a tse tse fly in heat. A Millennial cannot sit through a movie without playing with their iphone. For Pete’s sake they have to use cell phone during Christmas dinner. The loneliest I have ever felt is sitting in a room with a bunch of twenty somethings twiddling with their phones. They are constantly creating online,. Pith and sarcasm just ooze out of this generation.
I will take the socially engaged rebels of the 1960’s anyway of the week. The young were politically charged, experimental and loud. The old were reserved and conservative. Kids were kids; parents were parents. And they loved movies
The sixties saw the rise the rise of the art cinema movement, youth culture and changing views of censors. The drive-in screens were filed with B movie fare and not the family films of today. Out of this, the monopoly system of the film industry was challenged and studios were forced to adapt the industry to suit their key constituencies: youth and “cine-literate” college students . Three of the most influential films that arose from this new paradigm were;
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976),
What we see now are technology driven spectacles that mimic the short attention span of their intended audience. In my view both the movies and the audiences are boring.
