This is in from Walkoff-HBP. Basically it's Paul Byrnes having a whinge about the state of the film industry in general; or perhaps it's just a whinge about the world.
Apart from Dennis Quaid, who was 50 last year and Hugh Laurie, who's 46, most of the actors in the remake weren't yet born in 1965. So what? Well, nothing really, except that I think we may have lost something since the youth market became the dominant force in Hollywood. This began well before Star Wars. Indeed, it probably began with the rise of the affluent American teenager in the 1950s, but it means that now, a great many movies are skewed toward younger actors. I suspect that means we see less of the great character actors who made movies like The Flight of the Phoenix so memorable. By definition, character actors bring a certain depth of life experience, but if you're not allowed to cast many people over 40, you must surely affect a film's dramatic possibilities. The writing has to stay younger, to reflect the audience's range of experience.
The difference can be seen in the approach of these two movies. The first was a taut, entertaining survival story in which an experienced director made the most of a seasoned cast and a solid script. The drama was serious and played as such, with attention to character detail across a dozen or so roles.
I'm not much of a Paul Byrnes fan as far as Australian film critics go. He has a penchent to get all moralistic and really quite self-righteous in spite of his good insights. He was also a phenomenally boring curator for the Sydney Film Festival, so much so he put me off the SFF for life. Having said that, I have to admit that he's on the same page with me on the issue of the increasing 'adolescent quotient' in cinema, sort of dumbing down drama everywhere. So now cinema belongs to the young and the ever-recurring infantile desires. It's only fiction, but it bugs me.
Tangential Thought To The Above
Actually I was thinking about Wendy James and Transvision Vamp (and whatever happened to those inpet musicians?) in the shower this morning. No, I wasn't wanking. I was thinking about the ephemeralness of marketed commodities. You know, the unbearable lightnesss of my counted bean and all that. And how totally incoompetent as rockers those guys in transvision Vamp were. Frickin' woeful. Sort of the Tony Womack of rock bands.
Music used to be hard to organise. Composers wrote stuff down on pieces of paper and you had to find people who could read it and play it; you needed lots of these people depending on the score. If it were a symphony, you needed a whole orchestra. Then, along came Jazz, where the musicians decided to play what they liked and the combos got smaller and smaller: from Dixieland to Bebop, to Trios, the number of musicians kept shrinking. Then came rock'n'roll, where musicians decided you didn't even have to play too much complicated stuff. That you could organise music in blocks of chords andd rhythm and still have a rockin' good time. And while some people still tried to achieve virtuosity, the predominant trend was towards requiring less and less competence to be called a musician. It was only a matter of time before punk and grunge surfaced and laid claims that any kind of competence was a pretension and one was ar more legitimate a musician in one's own incompetence. Until eventually some people invented Rap *music* whereby people just did away with melody. And lots of people thought this was a great breakthrough.
It's all part of a long term trend.
Meanwhile technology has been advancing leaps and bound and it has now gotten to the point that people who sheepishly call themmselves 'non-musicians' can arrange entire chunks of recorded music and poste them up on the internet at iCompositions ("PLEASE CHECK MY RECENT STUFF BY CLICKING ON THE BADGES TO THE RIGHT!!"). A munchkin vocalist like Britney Spears can be turned into a most marketable commodity through the marvels of technology, but also thanks to a generally deteriorated sensibility in an ever increasing, anti-musical audience that for reasons totally unknown to themselves want to participate in 'music', heck, she can be (and IS) a star.
Well, that's like a modern blockbuster film, isn't it? Too much special effects, not enough writing/directing/acting/editing?
So the post-'Star Wars' munchkinification trend we were discussing recently is not isolated to cinema. It's taking place even in music; in fact it has been for a good 255 years since the days of JS Bach's passing. And from this we know, that subsequent generations will be more inept, but with better technology invested, they will look almost half as worthy as generations past. It's a con, really. - The other way to look at it is this: at $120 for a night at the Opera; or at $7 a pop for an LP for rock music;or $20 for a CD of your favourite DJ; it's all about what one expects to get for what one pays.
So for a 'free' download of an MP3, what should one expect? It kind of tells you what kind of times we live in, no?
- Art Neuro
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