Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
Avatar is like really good junk food. Somewhere someone's using their amazing skills to make truly marvellous and original food, but a lot of people will be more than happy if they get a very good yet totally unoriginal burger whose main flavours come from such clichès as fat, ketchup, sugary loaf and and some salt. It's familiar, uncomplicated, quick and it tastes good.
Sometimes, people want olds rather than news. Sometimes you want to watch movies like Die Hard or True Lies where the bad guys are one dimensional, the plot is not too hard to follow and the action is rather spectacular. That doesn't mean you'll be permanently turned off the more intelligent stuff and I don't think it'll harm the industry in any way.
Clichès are not going to go away. They'll be recycled over and over again .. If you think Avatar's plot today is "old", think about how old those clichès will be when they're used in movies 40 years from now.
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But to be fair, Avatar had a LOT more effort put into it than the usual McDonalds cheeseburger.
Escapism definietely has it's place in movies especially the american film industry because unlike other countries our first films wasn't arty stuff, we treasure a lot values and things that are familiar to us and so our movies reflect the world as we wanted to see it, that was the idea.
Then Cassavetes came along and decided that movies could only be taken seriously as art if it consists of nothing but mostly boring stuff happening for no reason and without a narrative. Yes Cassavetes' anti Hollywood attitude influenced greats like Scorsese and Altman, there's no denying, but they did it
right, even the filmmakers Cassavetes has influenced understand the value of subjectivity and symbolism, and that reality often needs to be exagerated a bit to get an entertaining film. I don't really dig films that try to present an "objective" view of reality so much as films that take a personal account of reality, a subjective and hyper-realistic point of view or just straight up fantasy.
In short, realism is great, but it takes more than that to make something worth watching, it needs to be expanded on in an interesting way, you can't just film a lot of boring stuff, show it to me and say "ta-da i just f*cking made art" because I will knee knick you in the face for being a pretentious dope.