Why Are Older Movies SO Much Better?

Nostalgia.

Older movies are not better. It just seems that way because the old bad movies are forgotten.

Off the top of my head I'll say the people who were making films in the past were interested in creating art. Being monetarily successful is necessary, but the impulse was to create something interesting to ponder and beautiful to behold. I think nowadays a lot of people get into the business because it's a cool clique to be in, and the stress is on making $$. There are fewer visionaries and intellectuals working today in film.

I loved the "screwball" comedies like The Thin Man, My Man Godfrey, etc. Have you noticed that there are no comedy movies these days?

International market means watering down every theme that could possibly be offensive to anyone. Lowest common denominator. Everything has to be universalized.

This applies on a smaller scale too. Movies are so expensive now that they must serve a broad audience. No more great R rated action moves that cost $60 million to make. Now it's all $300 million dollar copyrighted CGI fests, or obnoxious Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity student films. The ironic thing is that neither side can afford a tripod.

I think it's a conspiracy. Movies have been made artificially more expensive, in order to give Hollywood more control. There's nothing in Avengers Meet Transformers that should cost more than say $20 million. They don't even use real special effects.

i. The sheer volume of movies being made today. I found a reference that said in the early 90s, around 450 to 500 Hollywood movies were made every year. Now it hovers around 700. Extrapolating, there were probably about 350 to 400 movies annually in the 80s. So good movies get lost in the sheer volume of mediocre stuff being made every year. (And new production/ distribution models such as Netflix are compounding the problem.)

ii. Fresh ideas are becoming rare. So you see a lot of re-makes / re-boots / re-imaginings while the original ones are still around.

iii. Formulaic film making. If a film becomes mega-successful, it quickly establishes a template that gets repeated over and over again. It's expensive to make mega-blockbusters so, if a movie clicks, there isn't much financial incentive to vary the formula. This is particularly true of 'franchise' movies.

iv. Related to iii. above is the reliance on CGI and special effects to gloss over mediocre scripts. The special effects drive the story rather than the other way around.

v. Over-saturation of PR, internet analysis, etc. When I was growing up in the 60s, you didn't even hear about a new movie until a few months before it hit the screens when you would see a single trailer for it. Now, with the Internet, teasers/trailers, announcements happen 2-3 YEARS before the movie arrives. There is endless discussion, analysis and speculation in that time. Broad plot details are leaked or extrapolated. When the movie finally appears, the fun of discovery is gone. There are no surprises.

I read somewhere that critics picked the 1970s as the best decade for film. It was a great decade because so many great directors were at their top, Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Kubrick. So it all comes down to talent. I think the current film industry isn't shying away from talent but afraid to take on new material due to financial concerns.

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