May be people could write their take here.The article expresses pretty much my sentiments about the development in the recent years in Hollywood.
There was a time I fancied "experimental" movies
in the long gone past...much of the European film scene was/is that way...but at the maximum it made you think...but hardly dreaming or touching
your soul.Hollywood is capable of great movies...but more and more the "great stories" seem to be missing.The xth thousand car chase gets to be boring and a turn off...
For some movie inspiration I turned since some years more & more to Bollywood...also for the time spent there:
BRIEF CASE: Loveless Hollywood
6 Dec 2007, 0005 hrs IST,SATISH K SHARMA
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Hollywood is passing through a particularly loveless phase. On screen, that is. The last big romantic film Titanic happened a good 10 years ago. In the 21st century, the only love-based movie to figure among the five top grossers in its year of release has been My Big Fat Greek Wedding, said Time magazine.
Contrast this with the fact that the highest all-time box office grosser is still Gone With The Wind — a love saga.
The chief reason, cited by Hollywood moviemakers, for their reluctance to make romantic films, is the shortage of credible and fresh love stories. But what can the writers do? Thanks to the breakdown of sexual barriers and now mushrooming social networking sites, love, in the West, is no more a matter of life and death. It is no more an inspiring theme for writers. What they don’t realise is that a love story need not be such a complicated affair.
Take the most original and enduring of them all — the one scripted by God himself. One can tell it in two neat sentences: there was a man called Adam and woman called Eve. And there was an apple. Phew! The story is over. The rest is all detail and treatment. The story has both irony and elements of tragedy that go to make a love saga.
But western audiences cannot digest love without its necessary accompaniments. A love flick, to catch their fancy, must have a powerful subtext. Thus, if in Gone With The Wind it was the American civil war, in Casablanca it was the World War. If in Dr Zhivago it was the Russian revolution, in Titanic, you had a, well, titanic disaster.
On the other hand, here in India, you don’t need these asides to make a powerful amorous statement. Three characters, some trigonometry and great music is all Bollywood moviemakers need to create magic. In fact, Saawariya has taken this art to new heights. The film depends on no crutches of a plot to stand tall. In fact, some people have found it so lithe that they have hailed it as poetry in motion. Perhaps Hollywood film-makers could learn a lesson from their counterparts in Bollywood. Making a romantic movie is no rocket science and lack of a story is certainly a lame excuse for not doing it.