21st Century Film

These days people of my generation can often be heard complaining there are no decent films being made anymore but is that really the truth? Our parent’s remember with fondness classics from their childhood, be they Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid or Star Wars but ask them and I vet you they can hardly remember the turkeys that due to the passage of time have disappeared from our consciousness?

In today’s age we have the technology to see any film no matter how obscure the director or actor whose name is up there in front of us in lights. In our parents day a trip to the cinema was the highlight of the week but nowadays our access to films is almost unlimited and so with this proliferation of choice we are bound to see countless films with most being classed as anywhere between disappointing to down right awful. But does this really mean that films in general are getting worse?

Maybe then it is because we see so many bad films that when a film of a certain quality comes along it is either instantly branded a classic from it’s first day of release winning thirty six thousand Oscars or slowly spreads by word of mouth from one movie fan to another until you really aren’t a member of the human race unless you can recite three separate dialogues and have your own unique view on what the writer was trying to say. (Which was probably I’d like to get paid more for my next picture).

This in itself creates its own problems because whereas films from the distant past (the eighties and earlier) have only become recognisable because they have stood the test of time films of today can obtain that classic tag for simply being better than the thousands of mediocre straight to video movies that we can’t help watching when we return home late on Friday night from the pub.

When we see a film we believe to be a classic we shouldn’t compare it to a film starring the same leading man or lady but instead try to consider what audiences in twenty years time make of it. Using this criteria will Lost in Translation be released on DVD, Blue Ray or HYD or whatever the format of the day is twenty years from now as a classic or will it be shown on BBC2 as an alternative to the Norman Wisdom season? Will American Pie be as fondly remembered as Kind Hearts and Coronets? Or Twilight as The Lost Boys?

The only people who can truly determine whether the film we watch at the cinema tomorrow night is classic are our children because if they still want to watch it when they grow older then that film has stood the test of time.