For those who're unfamiliar, you can check out TCM's offerings and listings here:
<http://www.tcm.com/index.jsp>
TCM is a remarkable resource. Used smartly, it's a fairly in-depth, if somewhat loosely organized, course in (mostly American) movie history.
In a single week it's possible to watch and hear interesting commentary about the movies of the silent era, darkly bright 1940s noir, the vast CinemaScope epics of the 1950s and the gritty capitalist realism of the 1970s.
To name a few examples.
One day, I was enjoying a stunningly beautiful print of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and the next I was grooving on Leone's masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time in the West".
Even the most obscure movies are carefully restored to their original state -- or as near as possible.
So yeah, good stuff and good times. A bottle of wine, some Rammstein as a lead-in and I'm good to go for a trip to the pure fantasies and quasi-realities of the past. (Cagney's brilliant performance as an ultra-psychotic in "White Heat" goes well with "Buck Dich" and a grape-induced buzz. Lusine works nicely with the silents.)
But here's the thing...TCM has a lot of time to fill: 24 hours and 7 days' worth of vintage entertainment. Not every movie can be Lang's "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse", not every day can boast Hitchcock, Ford and Dmytryk.
If you stay up long enough and watch enough 20th century fare -- TCM's catalog covers every decade of that fiery period -- you begin to notice something: a lot of movies weren't very special. Serviceable? Yes. A pleasant way to pass a few hours on a chilly night in 1945 or whatever pre-smart-phone existing year you care to imagine? Sure.
But memorable? Of lasting aesthetic value? Or even, just solid storytelling?
Not so much.
So when someone comes along and talks about the suckitude of contemporary movies and The Meaning of It All I listen politely and smile. Because sure, it's true: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (to cite the most madly-bad of the recent disbursement of big moving images) is terrible and earned enough to fund a Bond villain's wildest projects -- yes, even that one involving diamond dust, the planet's atmosphere and big balls blackmail.
But that's really nothing new. Well, the mega-profits are new but that's due as much to the various, and globally blanketing, distribution systems as to an alleged decline in tastes.
Two more points before I go back to staring at that brick wall over here, trying to dissolve it with my mind...
1.) Jordan's right: a lot of super-profits come from people who needed a place to take their kids on the weekend. Movies seem like a good option. Result - profit!
2.) Not all the blockbusters on that list are bad movies, worthy of teeth gnashing and weeping over The State of Things. A few are quite good and a fair number are what used to be called 'solid entertainment'.
What was it RKO execs advertised after kicking Orson out of the studio? "Showmanship, not genius"? Yeah, sometimes that's the ticket jabrone.
.d.