A few of my views put me in a direct line of fire from some of the more outspoken members of society who don't see things through my hippy tinged eyes. The Israel-Palestine thing usually draws the sharpest comments but not far behind it is my notion that people are influenced by what they see in films and on television.
Many people, including this blog, made links between the Virginia tech shooting and the film 'Oldboy' which the shooter watched obsessively and my view seems to have the agreement of the US military who set up recruiting booths in major cinemas where Top Gun was showing and had the highest applications rate for years as a result.
While we are always going to get films that are a throwback to the boy’s films of the 80s, there does seem to have been a shift away from the mindless gun toting action films emerging from Hollywood. Back in their heyday you couldn't swing a M-16 without hitting a buffed up Arnie, Stallone or Van Damme but as this generation of actors aged and either had sense to give up or stuff themselves full of steroids to make ill-advised comebacks, the following bunch of performers didn't seem so keen to play muscle bound gun-toters.
Maybe we are seeing the grinding down of the film makers by people who carp on about Hollywood taking more responsibility for what they present to an audience or maybe it is just the action films of yesterday are just not the money spinners that they once were. Whatever the reason behind it, the revisited Rambo’s and Die Hard's which performed badly at the UK box office are a dying breed.
10 comments:
Um, did you happen to miss "No Country for Old Men" and the massive amounts of gratuitous violence?
I'm not interested in watching any disgustingly gory movies; I'll just keep on viewing my Sopranos DVDs, thx.
Haven't seen it Cody, is it in the same league as a Rambo?
I have just rediscovered Quantum Leap on some obscure tv channel miz uv.
Lucy,
What? The best movies in past 10 years were the Borne series!!!
Q
at least the acting is superb in no country for old men. rambo, not so much.
The scary thing is, there are places in Texas that you can get your ass shot off. Drug smuggling and psychotic American narcotics laws make the only combination of factors in the world that could ever make a situation where a rural Texan could be out gunned.
The rural Texans (I know many) can bear some hefty steel. AR-15s ("Civilian version" of the M-16) are the "kill'em all" weapon of choice.
And it can get pretty scary. One rancher I know mentioned that a pipeline across his ranch is a big junction in the trafficking of immigrants and drugs and the traffickers are pretty well armed and like to prowl around at night.
So "No Country for Old Men" is a movie that I can rather relate to. Rambo though, why doesn't Stallone just quit. Someone even made a chart on "kill inflation in Rambo movies".
I'm not a fan of official 'intervention' when it comes to the arts. When you go down the road of banning stuff for having violence in it, where will it all end? - we'll end up banning Roadrunner cartoons because poor old Wile E Coyote always gets his head flattened by a half-tonne Acme anvil... I've exaggerated for effect, but you see my point. Someone somewhere have to draw 'a line' somewhere, and I bet I wouldn't (and most of us wouldn't) agree with where he drew it.
Besides, implementing prohibitive laws that affect the whole of society, just because the occasional sick mind can't handle being exposed to something, doesn't make sense to me. I believe that the sick mind will always find something else (something else that hasn't been banned yet) to set him off. Sick minds are like that.
But anyway... wasn't 'No Country' cool eh?? :)
PS: Wouldn't your true hippy be an advocate of artistic freedom, rather than of censorship?...
The problem isn't the movies. The problem is the marketing and advertising of the movies. Movie trailers are getting more and more graphic, and they're running during TV shows that kids watch. That's irresponsible on the part of the studios, the media buyers and the networks. Hell, ads for TV shows, particularly crime TV (no more Law and Order spinoffs, please!), are incredibly graphic.
Incidentally, my buddies and I went and watched Rambo kill 1,000 men. But they were all bad guys, so it was okay.
I never mentioned banning anything, i just said i am glad to see the back of actors like Stallone and Arnie and the sort of films they made because there does not seem to be any replacements for them in this generation of actors.
I wouldn't ban them but i do advocate a new certification that ran along the lines of pornographic films, only for violence. That would either see the films toned down or risk being shown to a very limited audience.
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