After he’s dead and gone — I’d prefer burning at the stake to a beheading, but I’d take either of Henry the VIII’s favorite methods of killing his rivals and the other 80,000 people he murdered — Trump’s era will be called an era of death. Optimists who believe in the myth of the phoenix will look at the scorched earth and think on this new fertile soil, full of ash from a once great civilization, and think that a new, brighter, shinier thing will emerge. Pessimists will look to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as an example: a once thriving but small Island civilization that destroyed its habitat and starved to death, leaving only large heads of stone.
But the movie, I’m afraid, is gone. Spielberg began it. Lucas amplified it. And then came directors like Michael Bay. Jaws, Star Wars, Transformers. Jaws did something new and extraordinary which, unfortunately, rewrote the way movies had to draw us in. The opening scene. The ominous music, the naked girl in the water, swimming, shot from below. Our knowledge — truly Hitchcockian in the best of senses — that the shark was about to eat her. I remember seeing the movie when I was so young I couldn’t drive. My brother and I rode our bikes “all the way” to the mall to see the movie. The opening scene left me shaking and horrified. And then on the way back my brother had to spoil everything by re-narrating or “mansplaining” the entire thing to me. That opening was the first time in movie history (that I’m aware — and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it was done before) that a movie opened with one of the most dramatic scenes — possibly more dramatic than at any other point in the movie — at the beginning of the movie rather than at the climax. After that, it was just a matter of building it into the formula for movie writing.
Star Wars didn’t open quite so dramatically, but it was drama of a different sort. No villain had ever been created that was as scary as ruthless and as heartless as Darth Vader. The scene that gave me nightmares was the scene where he casually chokes (telepathically) someone who has “failed” him while having a normal conversation with the man next to him, who is going to take the soon to be dead man’s place. Continuing the Henry the VIII comparison — in the first adaptation of the first two books, Thomas Cromwell watches the beheading of Anne Boleyn and then walks to the palace where Henry is dressed in his finest, ready to marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Henry stretches his arms wide as if to say, “What a wonderful day to get married.”
So with these two lead-ins, came comic book movies. Superman, with Christopher Reeve, was first. Batman second. But I think the X Men series really catapulted it above and beyond — mainly because it was such a good stand in for how isolated many people feel — not to mention they are all gays in a straight world. They’re just called “freaks” instead of “fags or dykes.” For me it was proof that a gay theme can be interesting to straight people, including guys.
But then the comic book got stale and so they turned to games — board games and then video games. Tron was the first movie that invented a video game. I remember playing in Times Square video game playlands — this was back in the day when you had to leave your apartment to do just about anything — and there was no “Tron” video game until the movie came out. Then a disappointing version of Tron hit those arcades and I think the game vanished. It just wasn’t fun.
But now all we have left are Minecraft movies, Disney animation, re-animation, live action films of animation and probably, to come, animation of live action, and then who knows what with the scourge of AI being foisted upon us by Zuckerberg, Musk, Microsoft and web browsers everywhere.
We aren’t going to have “Godfather”s or “Place In The Heart,” or “Brokeback Mountain,” anymore. There a few still working who can pull it off: namely Chrisopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, to name two. But while I used to find at least two to three movies a week worth seeing, now I’m lucky if there’s even one. This is taste of course. I could have gone to see The Minecraft movie last weekend, like millions of others did, but the plot of that movie is this: Tron meets The Karate Kid. Four people get “sucked” into a video game and must find their way back with the help of a master. I know how it ends. They do. But at least with The Wizard of Oz, one couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever get back, because there was a real sense, played right through to almost the end, that she would not make it. And the witch was scary and mean and heartless.
Now we get wicked, which is, in fact, not wicked at all.