Screw your realism, bring back happy endings.
The past 10+ years in cinema have been miserable because of an infection of pessimism, cruelty, and depression in the movie industry.
I have stopped watching new films almost entirely because they're not enjoyable anymore. They're visually so dark I can't watch them in the daytime. The sound balance is so terrible I require subtitles to understand what people are saying. And I can't trust writers to deliver on the promises they make.
They will tell their audience everything they know people want to hear. They will hold up every genre convention in the messy middle where they know people are still hopeful and curious. They will shake their narrative asses at you to keep you coming back to watch more. But in the end, they will take everything wonderful they have built and burn it down and grind the ashes into dirt and call it a bittersweet and poetic end.
It's not bittersweet poetry. It's just misery. There is nothing beautiful about pain. It's just pain. Destroying something beautiful is just destruction.
I know how this all got started. The soft focus glow and romance of the 80s. The rom-com craze of the 90s. There were so many upbeat, optimistic, happy endings. Then gen X aged into the industry and they wanted to do something different. They wanted to shock their audiences with gritty reboots, with edgy realism, with twisting genres that were once gentle into the reality of what people would actually do if they were in that situation.
It was interesting at first, but then it took over. The point is no longer to tell a good story. The point is now to shock the audience. To make us feel something disturbing and call it beautiful. The word catharsis is thrown around carelessly.
The film industry has turned into emotional abuse.
Bring back movies that teach us how to treat each other. Bring back movies with a hero people can admire. Bring back HOPE.
It is utterly selfish and irresponsible to be pushing a narrative of hopelessness in these awful times. We don't need edgy realism, we need an escape from reality so we can take a breath and regulate our damn nerves.
I don't need catharsis. I live in reality. Actually real, solid, fucking reality. I know what pain is. I know what people are like. I know all about violence and twisted people and cruelty.
I do not need this shit bleeding into my magical fantasy stories. I do not watch a comedy to be SAD. I do not watch a fantasy to get reminded that when bad guys fall they take everything down with them. I don't watch a romance to feel the experience of an abusive relationship.
I never thought I'd be that person in my 40s only watching movies from my childhood and teen years -- except I'm not doing it for the nostalgia or preferences, I'm doing it because I am AVOIDING the abject misery the movie industry has been marinating in. I used to love new movies. Everything is just fucking awful now because the writers and movie execs are pushing this narrative that it's not a good ending if people have a happily ever after.
I am begging story writers to find a way back to optimism and hope. We don't need these horrible stories right now. Fuck.
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
prguitarman
