Hollywood, it appears, has lost its mind. I’m not talking about Leonardo DiCaprio jetting around the world in a private aircraft, owning a 450-foot yacht and living in a mansion with the carbon footprint of Uganda while lecturing the plebs about global warming.
I’m not concerned about Meryl Streep — net worth $65 million — complaining at the Oscars ceremony about how disadvantaged she feels.
My concerns are more prosaic. I think the principal studios are totally out of ideas.
Here are the top three earning movies so far this year: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume Two, Justice League and Spider-man: Homecoming.
Here are the top three from last year: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Finding Dory and Captain America: Civil War.
Every one of these is a sequel to one or more previous movies featuring the same non-plot and plastic characters. Every one of them relies on fantasy rather than reality. Every one of them places physics-defying tomfoolery ahead of traditional movie values, such as dialogue and acting.
I realize this sounds like an old-fogey gripe, but shouldn’t movies tell stories that have some meaning in our lives? Shouldn’t they impress us with insightful character development, clever scripts, beautiful photography, haunting musical scores?
Computer-generated imagery should have been a boon to filmmakers. It gave them the ability to depict scenes that would either cost a fortune to create in real life, or that would be too dangerous or impractical for the actors involved.
Gary Sinise didn’t have to lose his legs to play Lieut. Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. And I’m pretty sure Russell Crowe didn’t stand atop the 137-foot mast of a 19th-century man-of-war in Master and Commander.
But instead of being a boon, CGI has become a crutch for propping up limp and spiritless efforts, such as the second Star Wars triad. Just how bad was this pile of poop?
Here’s the opening scroll that leads off the first of these three disasters: “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.”
Honestly? This is a virtual reality exercise in interplanetary accounting techniques? Not even CGI can rescue that kind of drivel.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of Hollywood’s decline, however, lies in the baffling onslaught of movie remakes that can’t hold a candle to the original. Last year’s Magnificent Seven, with Denzel Washington reprising Yul Brynner’s role and a hapless Chris Pratt replacing Steve McQueen, should have been called The Pathetic Seven.
Gary Oldman made a respectable George Smiley in the 2011 reprise of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But the rest of the cast looked like a bunch of schoolboys in short pants, instead of hard men and spooks.
And a simpering Colin Firth as the bad guy?
All of which suffers in comparison with the brilliant BBC version, made in 1979, with Alec Guiness as Smiley and one of those eccentric casts the Brits are so good at assembling.
Isn’t it written somewhere that if you’re going to remake a movie that had stars like Brynner or Guiness, you had better be ready to rumble?
Now, I suppose it could be argued that movie makers are merely holding up a mirror to the society around them. In our post-truth, fake-news world, who knows what’s real any more?
But I don’t buy it. The purpose of drama is to inform, not to obscure; to inspire, not to confound.
By taking refuge in prequels, sequels, pallid remakes and the rest, Hollywood is demonstrating not just contempt for its audience, but contempt for its mission. La La Land didn’t win an Oscar for best picture, but the title is a perfect epithet for an art form that has lost its way.
