"Movies"

My plan was to fill this section of the site with movie reviews, but I decided to write a review of movies in general first, so that the others that may follow will make a bit more sense.
Last night I watched a very interesting old movie called Metropolis. A film by Fritz Lang, it was made in the twenties, before they figured out how to have spoken dialogue integrated in with the visuals. Ok, so it was a "silent" film, a term I don't understand, because this film was anything but silent.

I was interested in Metropolis because in virtually every design class I have taken, the professor has at least once mentioned this film for its amazing visuals, as well as for being a quintessential example of the Art Deco style.

As I watched the film, I began to think about all the ways in which movies have changed in the past eighty years, and how amazingly they have stayed the same. As each scene unfolded in Metropolis, I would catch myself saying something about how this movie was an amalgamation of one tired old cliché after another. But a second later I would realize that these were the very first time these tired old clichés had ever been used. It was a thrilling thought, that I was witnessing firsthand the birth of cinema as we know it, for indeed this film is considered to be the first GOOD movie ever made.

It got me to wishing somewhat blasphemously that I would love to see a modern remake of Metropolis, in an age where special effects could make the film look more realistic, and the invention of "sound" could bring the characters to life in a more emotional way. Lang did such a wonderful job of creating his fictitious world that there would be much to draw from in recreating it.

But then we must face the facts, that modern "Hollywood" movies have just as many limitations as black and white, silent films of the early filmmaking era. Audiences have become so jaded to anything spectacular, that filmmakers nowadays have to create something that is much more than spectacular. Unfortunately, this often leads to overdramatic fluff that relies entirely on what I like to call the "gimmick" of the movie: the special-effects-created "climactic scene" or some kind of artificial nostalgic feeling to generate any kind of box office revenue at all. If that explanation was as incomprehensible as I think it was, just think Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Wild Wild West, The Mummy, Returns, Driven, The Sixth Day, Jurassic Park III, etc.

In any case, I mulled over the prospect of a Metropolis remake, and decided that much of the movie's charm was in the viewer's realization that these scenes that are so recognizable from other, more modern films were, in this film, the first of their kind. A remake would not re-create the atmosphere of the original, because no one would be impressed with the scale of the movie. It would simply be another $100 million, forgotten among the endless clutter of 80mm tape strewn about Hollywood.

-c