Political and moralist messaging isn’t the issue. […]
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Political and moralist messaging isn’t the issue.
It’s poor writing that you notice.
Old long form movies (those made before 1970, excluding shorts) actually had much more political and unidirectional moralistic messaging in them woven into the plot. (There are long hair philosophical assessments of most every early to 1970 film that spell out the politics of each one)
Anyone who says Grapes of Wrath or even some of the Elvis fluff films lack it are just ignorant of “other” ways of messaging for or against a scene, a type of person or social issues.
Most old movies are preaching or making fun of social issues but you didn’t notice or care because the characters and events demonstrate the issue in practice as opposed to a literal direct restatement of their stance.
Some very popular old films had some extremely controversial , offensive subtext but casual viewers didn’t notice and those that did had thicker skin as it’s just fantasy.
As an aside many modern films you likely take issue with are likely ones I haven’t watched and won’t watch until years later if a dvd releases.
When I watch them I likely won’t care about their messaging but I will care about poorly integrated plot, poor acting (many times as a result of disrespecting the audiences intelligence by trying to just have the character make statements as opposed to being tactful plot and narrative driven),
characters that exist to gain focus, but have nothing to do and lack any relevance to the plot, feeling glued in, which is disrespectful to the actor and the character is my main gripe these days.
The it’s there and happening because I say so is overused ad nauseum.
But that’s just par for the course now, old movies had to actually have a cohesive plot, thick dense subtext, set pieces and competent character growth similar to a novel because they had nothing else to fall on, modern movies have stuff flying around and happening for the visuals then try to make a plot and character lines that fit into the nonsense they want to show.
In my mind this has a lot to do with heavy corporate influence on film bending to the strange things that appeal to Chinese audiences alongside the extreme capitalist corporate accelerated timelines that have to push out a steady stream of slop making up losses in foreign markets.
Believe it or not the downfall of daytime soaps and theater can be directly traced to a reduced pool of competent actors. The issue was so bad that new soaps and theater productions have recently been created as loss leaders to act as a training ground for new talent.
Your extras on set can no longer be counted on as being fully trained actors, which oddly years ago there was a surplus.
Without low budget fluff to throw concepts at a wall, the amount of truly interesting cinema is going to continue to decline with simplistic, poorly executed plots becoming the norm. While dense thought provoking somewhat hidden narratives will become rare.
Even if I don’t always agree with RLM , they are pretty spot on with a lot of their commentary.
The ancient mechanical story board technique of fill in the blank for each character one would use in highschool would go a long mile to improving “the random stuff happens” movies we get now.
That said, if you don’t like something don’t watch it, if other people like it, that’s fine.
Worth noting the Odyssey has been done as nauseum over the years, making it into a new thing is inevitable and it ain’t history either so it’s no sacred cow. In 5 years when I watch it I will express my true opinion.
I personally have enjoyed a few really blatant poorly scripted modern films but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
He-man comes to mind, even though it was very competently executed ,
even if some of the cast were visually disgusted by the source material and the ending was a screw you to the audience
unfortunate they will probably never release the silly “ if an alien watched the She-ra and made it into a movie” , movie because Gen Alpha isn’t interested in He-man.
The way they handled it was good enough and honestly that’s all we can expect most of the time.
