Chesney Digital Studio

Why I Reject Mainstream Movies of Today and Only Watch Films Of The Past.

I seem to have the privilege of belonging to yet another generation of those who bear witness to a shifting control cycle of mainstream Hollywood resulting in the transformation of movies from masterful works of cinema by passionate collaborative professionals, to an utterly deplorable parade of hour and a half long targeted marketing advertisements posed as cinema thanks to totalitarian control of the studio system by non film-connoisseur executives who's reputations & careers are made by coming in under budget for immediate presale to TV or netflix profits rather than producing a good movie that endures long term success.

Jurassic Park was a kids movie, or so I thought while waiting to see it in a theater with my Dad and younger sister. All the media hype about technical breakthroughs in  "digital animation" couldn't mean less to a person like myself, who went to shows only to escape reality and become one of the characters in order to participate in a great adventure never to be had in real life.  Little did I know that was exactly what I was in for as terrifyingly realistic dinosaurs roamed a lush rainforest hunting for their human prey.  Seeing panicked characters frantically trying to escape in a jeep while a huge realistic-looking dinosaur ran after them was a movie moment I never forgot and it gave me great hope for the future of digital animation.

But tragically, digital effects of the next decade somehow declined to the level of kids cartoons as software became cheaper and studios under budget obsession saw marketing research suggest that movies didn't have to be good, just abundant and cheap as suggested by Pauline Kael in her famous New York Times article "Why Movies Are So Bad or The Numbers".  So after becoming increasingly disenfranchised with cheap digital characters & effects created with obvious minimal effort, I looked to settle with just interesting stories. But more disappointment followed as movie after movie seemed to offer the same exact watered down formula of characters and situations. It began giving me the impression that some computer algorithm was calculating the story based on parameters set by a studio executive marketing strategy team and that the cartoon-like digitally animated characters were the resulting labor of some low paid outsourced software programmer over a remote network that streamed the pieced together final product right into the theater from overseas. 

A 'Perfect' Role Model For The Global Consumer

A good film is believable and presents believable characters like those we encounter in real life; ones with quirky ways and slightly flawed back stories. But something major has changed in the course of the last several years which, from my perspective, has brought a complete shift away from the unique oddball individualist character, to an collectivist army of conformists serving as a generic one-size-fits all role model for the ideal global consumer.  

We are all flawed, in a variety of ways.  But it is impossible for today's politically correct mainstream studio system to to allow anyone to be portrayed as such as it would stifle the level of political correctness needed for the broadest international marketing possible.  So instead studio execs bait target-audiences like wild game using the most basic desires of the human race, sex and material gain to cattle-drive the minds of the public into moral bankruptcy in order to sell millions of products.  Like a cosmetics commercial promising euphoric beauty with each purchase, the mainstream movie preaches with religious fervor the never ending quest for prioritizing beauty above all, no matter what or who you are thereby accentuating the need for constant consumerism.  Common themes transitioning into this frenzy include the young girl who must forget about the simple pleasures of childhood to focus on learning about sexuality as soon as possible, in order to be accepted by the world around her and obtain goods & services from men.  The older woman's story is of overcoming the obstacle of age as well as her boring idiotic husband, working hard to retain her youthful sexuality for advancements in career or positions of power even at the expense of family relationships.  The results of this philosophy are clearly visible as each and every movie character, even ones that may be presented as 'too fat' or 'nerdy' always posses an underlying cosmetic beauty that transparently reveals the true moral of the story, like all mainstream movies, that the two most important things in life besides committing one self to any socialist cause are beauty and sex via a never ending ego massage of self love through the pursuit of wealth in order to achieve the god-like stature of the character in the movie.

Fortunately, the disgust I experienced with all current movies  and thier messages became a blessing as I began to search out and find a universe of great films made in the 1940's, 50's and 60's that I never would've discovered otherwise. This treasure trove of fascinating stories, characters and actors were directed & produced by passionate imaginative filmmakers like Roger Corman, Edward D Wood Jr, the Milner brothers, Orson Welles, George King and Alfred Hitchcock. Their films offer a delightful escape into the past away from today's pushy, preachy and corporate wholesale movie mindlessness.