Cinema Infantile - A. Burbridge
Baby-boomer Hollywood has substituted earnestness for corn, lowering the quality of its product. Just as the Coca-Cola Company debased the quality - and altered the taste and texture - of Coca-Cola when it substituted corn syrup for cane sugar, so Hollywood did its customers no favor when it substituted smarmy earnestness for corn (that is, sincere emotion, sincerely articulated).
Corn always makes kids squirm - they are embarrassed by emotions which they may not yet have completely grasped or learnt to cope with. In pre-Boomer Hollywood, nearly all movies had been made to satisfy adults, and the rather more complex emotional lives they inhabit. But in Baby-Boomer-controlled Hollywood, movies are made to satisfy adolescents and children.
So, the range of emotions - and the range of emotional responses which a movie aims to provoke - have been compressed. That makes a considerable difference in the quality of ambition: Boomer Hollywood is characterized by the strict limits on the emotional and philosophic ambit of its narratives. They can show more skin, and deploy sex and violence more casually than previously, but the ranges of human experiences and of human emotion which they will explore, are very small, not only compared with the cinema of other nations but compared with the American cinema of even twenty years ago. Strangely, American cinema has - in the twenty-first century - become more infantile than the cinema of the twentieth century.
It is in this distinction that one may discern the difference between the interest in genre of the French Nouvelle Vague, and that of the so-called "Independent" films (which were independent only in the methods by which they had been financed, not in their subjects or styles). The critic-filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague employed genre as an expressive medium to explore ambitious materials; the American "Independents" simply engaged in retro restylings, no different, nor more ambitious, than the BMW refurbishment of the Mini automobile or Volkswagen's retro-style new Beetle.
The joy of Quentin Tarantino's oeuvre is in its antiquarianism - to watch his films is to observe museum quality pastiche. But they are not - and cannot be mistaken for - examples of a vital, relevant cinema. [Cinema Minima: Per Diem]
8:54:41 PM 
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