At one point in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the titular Ultron, a
sort of artificial intelligence bad guy, says “In order to survive, we
must evolve.” He could be talking about movies.
Back in
the late 50’s, during the Golden Age of Television, people were staying
away from the movies in droves because they could sit at home and be
entertained. Of course, it didn’t help matters that, at that point,
movies had settled into a groove, gotten stale and boring. To combat TV,
movies became bigger, epic, offering cinemascope spectacles that could
not be contained on the little boxes in the living room.
Today, it’s happening all over again, with countless networks and streaming services series offering high quality shows, movies are, once again responding by being big, loud, long and, much of the time, less about showing human beings on screen and more about technical artists creating worlds, creatures and events with software.
Of course, I have been watching drawings on screen since I was
little, fascinated by Bugs Bunny and Speed Racer as well as the matte paintings that made up so much of King Kong and the like but this stuff is
different, new and represents something I have mixed feelings about.
Filmmaking is no longer about film, it’s about mouse-clicks and it has been for quite awhile now. I am not an anti-technology Luddite. The digital revolution made movie-making democratic. Almost everybody has access to enough technology to make something we, for some reason, still call a film. I think that’s great but I also think that, just because you have everything you need to make a film doesn’t necessarily mean that you know everything you need to know in order to make a film. Making cool stuff appear onscreen is not the same thing as telling a story.
The art of cinema is about getting an audience to believe in what they are watching whether it is a car commercial, a documentary or a sci-fi extravaganza. Special Effects have been around since the beginning of film. Georges Melies was in the audience that night in Paris when the Lumière brothers screened their films for the first time and, since then, the question has been there “What are movies for, spectacle or reality?” Melies, a magician, crafted wild images on film and used them as part of his act.
It’s been said that nearly 80% of the shots in Citizen Kane involved a special visual effect of some kind. Welles was actively involved with the process, pushing the team at RKO past the limits of what the optical printer could do, taking it into new territory. Nobody comes out of Kane talking about the special effects. What was special was that they had the effect of serving the story, making the audience believe they were seeing something that they were not actually seeing and drawing them into the film.
If you come out of a movie and say “The special effects were amazing,” then they weren’t, they took you out of the movie, disengaged you from the story to the point where you were captivated by pixels moving around on a screen. That’s not why we go to the movies.
Every movie trailer ahead of the Avengers was another CGI-fest and, by the time the film started, I had already had enough, Don’t get me wrong, I love super-hero movies — at least I did but I couldn’t escape this question of “Is this what movies have become?” I sat there, unable to figure out what Age of Ultron was even about much less even care. I was watching computerized drawings.
Yes, movies have to survive the battle for our attention when there are always so many other options pulling at us. I don’t blame movies. I just found Age of Ultron so empty, soulless and, if I can presume, it was like they didn’t even care about writing a story; plot is just downtime between big action sequences. Any dialogue is there to set up a snarky line - who knew superheroes could be so sarcastic or bawdy?
The question about what a film is or should be is also near the surface of While We’re Young, Noah Baumbach’s new film about a middle-aged couple going through an identity crisis after befriending a younger couple and becoming seduced by their lifestyle.
Filmmaking is no longer about film, it’s about mouse-clicks and it has been for quite awhile now. I am not an anti-technology Luddite. The digital revolution made movie-making democratic. Almost everybody has access to enough technology to make something we, for some reason, still call a film. I think that’s great but I also think that, just because you have everything you need to make a film doesn’t necessarily mean that you know everything you need to know in order to make a film. Making cool stuff appear onscreen is not the same thing as telling a story.
The art of cinema is about getting an audience to believe in what they are watching whether it is a car commercial, a documentary or a sci-fi extravaganza. Special Effects have been around since the beginning of film. Georges Melies was in the audience that night in Paris when the Lumière brothers screened their films for the first time and, since then, the question has been there “What are movies for, spectacle or reality?” Melies, a magician, crafted wild images on film and used them as part of his act.
It’s been said that nearly 80% of the shots in Citizen Kane involved a special visual effect of some kind. Welles was actively involved with the process, pushing the team at RKO past the limits of what the optical printer could do, taking it into new territory. Nobody comes out of Kane talking about the special effects. What was special was that they had the effect of serving the story, making the audience believe they were seeing something that they were not actually seeing and drawing them into the film.
If you come out of a movie and say “The special effects were amazing,” then they weren’t, they took you out of the movie, disengaged you from the story to the point where you were captivated by pixels moving around on a screen. That’s not why we go to the movies.
Every movie trailer ahead of the Avengers was another CGI-fest and, by the time the film started, I had already had enough, Don’t get me wrong, I love super-hero movies — at least I did but I couldn’t escape this question of “Is this what movies have become?” I sat there, unable to figure out what Age of Ultron was even about much less even care. I was watching computerized drawings.
Yes, movies have to survive the battle for our attention when there are always so many other options pulling at us. I don’t blame movies. I just found Age of Ultron so empty, soulless and, if I can presume, it was like they didn’t even care about writing a story; plot is just downtime between big action sequences. Any dialogue is there to set up a snarky line - who knew superheroes could be so sarcastic or bawdy?
The question about what a film is or should be is also near the surface of While We’re Young, Noah Baumbach’s new film about a middle-aged couple going through an identity crisis after befriending a younger couple and becoming seduced by their lifestyle.
Ben Stiller plays a once promising documentary filmmaker married to the daughter of a much revered veteran documentary filmmaker. When it emerges that the his new friend, Jesse (Adam Driver) is an aspiring documentary filmmaker with borderline ethics, morals and scruples, it raises the question of whether the truth is as important as the story.
Who cares if a documentary is literally true as long as it represents a compelling point of view? Who cares if an Avengers movie has a good story as long as it has wall-to-wall special effects?
Survival is the goal, success is the brass ring and how we get there seems to matter less and less.
Survival is the goal, success is the brass ring and how we get there seems to matter less and less.
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