[GreenLantern2814]

I saw the Barbie half of Barbenheimer this weekend. In the first ten minutes, I was genuinely concerned I might be watching one of the worst films ever made. Thankfully, I was wrong. Barbie is not a subtle movie, but if you want to tell me it’s worlds worse than the John Goodman Flintstones… no. It’s not.

If you forgot John Goodman made a Flintstones movie in the 90s, that’s okay - nobody will remember the Barbie movie in 25 years either.

Nobody is going to remember much of anything the studios have churned out in the post Dark Knight era. I was looking at all the Best Picture nominees since 2007, and almost none of them are movies that anyone in their right mind would watch more than once.

To me, a movie you can’t watch over and over is not a great movie. And great movies really don’t get made anymore.

Maybe this is an oversimplification, but I wonder if this is because the up and coming directors literally aren’t filmmakers. They are movie makers, but if they’ve never made a movie on actual film stock, they’re not filmmakers.

This has nothing to do with film “looking better” - the simple truth is this. Film is expensive. Film has limitations. Film is harder to modify in post-production. Film is finite.

Film makes the whole production elevate their game.

The director asks the right questions: is this worth filming? Is this the right way to film this shot? Is this idea stupid?

The actors know they don’t have endless opportunities to get it right, and that urgency comes through their performances.

The writer(s) don’t want to turn in anything subpar that’s actually being committed to celluloid, and when someone asks “is that stupid?” They might actually wonder themselves, and care to figure out a way to make it not so.

The crew pay more attention because the people at the top are more invested in what they’re doing simply because they’re working with film - when the people at the top care, that filters down to everyone.

Bad films are inevitable. But I can’t help but notice, the best filmmakers in 2010 are still the best filmmakers today - Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan.

The most noteworthy new directing talent of the last decade is Jordan Peele. Other people have made quality films - they have. It’s that almost none are rewatchable. (La La Land and Death of Stalin are the only recent examples I’ve seen more than twice).

Disney has a hundred different Star Wars projects and nobody cares. Nobody should care. Because Star Wars isn’t Star Wars because people sycophantically consumed every piece of Star Wars media.

Star Wars is Star Wars because people watched the same three movies a thousand times.

If I ran a movie studio, I wouldn’t let any noteworthy project be shot digitally. The evidence is in - it sucks. Jurassic Park cost $30M and it still looks better than every other entry in the following 30 years. Use robots, puppets, and clever framing to achieve your effect. Spending $200M on some awful CG velociraptors isn’t not how you live forever.

There’s almost no CGI in Dark Knight, and nobody cares about CGI armies. Hire some extras.

With very rare exceptions, Modern movies are far too concerned with referencing the iconic and no time at all BEING iconic.

Shooting on film doesn’t eliminate bad movies, but I don’t know how many more great directors we’re going to get without someone deciding to re-emphasize it.

As I said, when the people at the top care, everyone else working on the project cares.

When the production cares, I mean really cares, about what they’re doing, the audience cares too.

You can tell people in a Tarantino movie know they’re part of something special, just like you can tell Chris Pratt cares about the $20M he was given to appear in another Jurassic movie.

Here endeth the (34-year) Old Man Yelling at Cloud.

Long live film.