The time has come to declare Hollywood a cinematic deity.
Lo and behold! The time has come to declare Hollywood a cinematic deity. It is human nature to bash the present and deify the past. But Hollywood is an exception. There is no wistful sentiment for classics: the current era is unanimously viewed as the golden era of Hollywood. Every year Hollywood’s (over)-exuberant fans proudly beat the drum that the coming year would be another “good movie year”. It’s a blissful picture of fans totally submitted to the superiority of Hollywood’s present.
The crowd at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises is not just an ordinary throng of audience — it is a congregation of intellectuals gaping at the screen in awe. A film festival showing the likes of Man of Steel, Avengers, Iron Man, Transformers etc. is not just another film festival — it is an orgasm of connoisseurship. In the West, movies like Fast And Furious are sometimes dismissed as “just another blockbusters”, but in the East they are viewed with veneration. People in India wear Hollywood like a badge of honour. Nobody in India can criticise Hollywood without being ridiculed. Hollywood’s moral clout is so huge that even a guild like RSS never says a word against Hollywood. It’s another thing that underneath their tirades against the West, most of RSS activists enjoy watching Hollywood movies.
At times it seems Hollywood follows a regimented approach with a dedicated team of writers churning one screenplay after the other, meticulously planning for years ahead. If in the past, action films were met with reverence, now there are science-fiction, fantasy and kiddie-flick genres that generate oomph from the devout audience.
An Indian writer once wrote that modern Hollywood reminded him of the “grossly deprived childhood” he had to “endure” because his childhood was merely filled with friends, books and outdoor activities. As ridiculous as his self-deprecating confession may sound, it shows the veneration that Hollywood’s popular genres command from mature audience.
Things move fast in contemporary Hollywood. One critically acclaimed blockbuster comes and another follows quickly in the assembly line. A multitude of blockbusters have passed since the mighty Avengers conquered critics’ hearts merely three years ago. Hollywood keeps pumping one masterpiece after the other. At IMDB, contemporary Hollywood movies earn such hefty ratings from devout film buffs (or hired programmers) that anything below the rating of eight looks inadequate.
However, Hollywood’s biggest breakthrough is the implementation of reboots. Earlier there was a perception that reboots had to be a few decades apart but The Amazing Spiderman opened new horizons of connoisseurship when a few honchos decided to reboot the Spiderman series only five years after Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman 3. Who would have thought that? The concept of reboots is an unlimited mine of connoisseurship. When in 2006 Superman Begins failed, they rebooted it again as the much celebrated Man Of Steel in 2013. Hollywood can keep rebooting popular franchises infinite times till the last few human beings walk on the earth. There is no reason why they shouldn’t reboot the feted Harry Potter saga with a new cast, vastly superior visual effects and so forth. For that matter, even James Bond series can have another reboot in future — when Daniel Craig decides to move on — featuring a younger Bond in his teens or twenties who traces the murder of his parents and comes face to face with the nemesis. The James Bond scenario is a hyperbole, though not by much, but there is no doubt that when it comes to sci-fi fantasies and kiddie flicks, Hollywood is on the pedestal of eternal glory.
Lo and behold! The time has come to declare Hollywood a cinematic deity. It is human nature to bash the present and deify the past. But Hollywood is an exception. There is no wistful sentiment for classics: the current era is unanimously viewed as the golden era of Hollywood. Every year Hollywood’s (over)-exuberant fans proudly beat the drum that the coming year would be another “good movie year”. It’s a blissful picture of fans totally submitted to the superiority of Hollywood’s present.
The crowd at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises is not just an ordinary throng of audience — it is a congregation of intellectuals gaping at the screen in awe. A film festival showing the likes of Man of Steel, Avengers, Iron Man, Transformers etc. is not just another film festival — it is an orgasm of connoisseurship. In the West, movies like Fast And Furious are sometimes dismissed as “just another blockbusters”, but in the East they are viewed with veneration. People in India wear Hollywood like a badge of honour. Nobody in India can criticise Hollywood without being ridiculed. Hollywood’s moral clout is so huge that even a guild like RSS never says a word against Hollywood. It’s another thing that underneath their tirades against the West, most of RSS activists enjoy watching Hollywood movies.
At times it seems Hollywood follows a regimented approach with a dedicated team of writers churning one screenplay after the other, meticulously planning for years ahead. If in the past, action films were met with reverence, now there are science-fiction, fantasy and kiddie-flick genres that generate oomph from the devout audience.
An Indian writer once wrote that modern Hollywood reminded him of the “grossly deprived childhood” he had to “endure” because his childhood was merely filled with friends, books and outdoor activities. As ridiculous as his self-deprecating confession may sound, it shows the veneration that Hollywood’s popular genres command from mature audience.
Things move fast in contemporary Hollywood. One critically acclaimed blockbuster comes and another follows quickly in the assembly line. A multitude of blockbusters have passed since the mighty Avengers conquered critics’ hearts merely three years ago. Hollywood keeps pumping one masterpiece after the other. At IMDB, contemporary Hollywood movies earn such hefty ratings from devout film buffs (or hired programmers) that anything below the rating of eight looks inadequate.
However, Hollywood’s biggest breakthrough is the implementation of reboots. Earlier there was a perception that reboots had to be a few decades apart but The Amazing Spiderman opened new horizons of connoisseurship when a few honchos decided to reboot the Spiderman series only five years after Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman 3. Who would have thought that? The concept of reboots is an unlimited mine of connoisseurship. When in 2006 Superman Begins failed, they rebooted it again as the much celebrated Man Of Steel in 2013. Hollywood can keep rebooting popular franchises infinite times till the last few human beings walk on the earth. There is no reason why they shouldn’t reboot the feted Harry Potter saga with a new cast, vastly superior visual effects and so forth. For that matter, even James Bond series can have another reboot in future — when Daniel Craig decides to move on — featuring a younger Bond in his teens or twenties who traces the murder of his parents and comes face to face with the nemesis. The James Bond scenario is a hyperbole, though not by much, but there is no doubt that when it comes to sci-fi fantasies and kiddie flicks, Hollywood is on the pedestal of eternal glory.
No comments
Post a Comment