I haven't watched much cinema lately. I'm tuned out of reviewing 2018 releases after the stream of trash in 2017 and I've burnt out on watching older films. I'm not even entertained by revisiting films, although I had a great time watching Batman, The Running Man, Commando and a few others.
I'm a bit jaded with film period after delving pretty deep into the cult of Jess Franco films. My opinion of him is more confusing than ever. Clearly, many of his films are glorified and over-analyzed. Many have little merit after a one or two time watch. But they all serve the impact of his great works, which are some of the most powerful films to come out of their genre, era or budget range.
Venus in Furs is a near masterpiece its so ahead of its time. A Virgin Among The Living Dead is better than 9/10 films you'll ever see. But many films (especially after the death of Soledad Miranda and the death of XXX theaters) are simply entertaining and well-crafted schlock and some are just tedious. No doubt they are smarter and more beautiful than other exploitation films and have more art than "serious" films, but there's an intense sadness in the fact that he made so many films but so few great ones. But again few directors make great films and this guy made a lot of good ones out of nada. Its almost its own genre of pure cinema. I understand his mournful disposition later in life and his own ambivalence to his own career, but I still cherish and honor his actual talent and resilience standing up to the degradation of auteurist filmmaking.
I'm at a weird crossroads where many films I once loved don't work for me now. Mainly because most films are either beholden to bland commercial or critic-serving scriptwriting or indulgent, distracting and stooge-fooling visual spectacle. They have no singular voices and certainly won't challenge the viewers out of fear of not reimbursing investors.
The Millennial reboot of Blade Runner is not a favorite film of 2017 for me but it unsurprisingly has a diehard cult of defenders who are calling it superior to the original and attributing meanings and accolades that aren't there. I'm not even too bothered because the cult is made up of 20 year old's who haven't seen anything outside of modern Western film or anime. I haven't seen any serious lovers or critics of film buying BR2.
We're in an era of Gen X filmmakers and Gen Y audiences who have inherited so much powerful technology, secondhand knowledge and inflated sense of Self, that EVERYTHING is deemed "art" so long as its of the moment and rejects the past and offers a predictably dark but hopeful view of the future. Its so... phony. This is a perfect reflection of the post-Obama, post-Trump mindset. "The majority is evil but WE select few will save the world by destroying it and remaking it in our image". This Us Vs Them shit. Everyone is so distracted, distrusting and maddened by the 1% that they don't see THAT is the game. Media wants us all to hate each other and pay to see simulated violence against each other and hand over control to politicians and corporations and keep being zombified consumers. Oh, technology will save us!
Its time for a real radical voice of social revolution and individual responsibility. Films for the people and by the people. A return of INDEPENDENCE! They've taken every platform we have for getting the message out: the press, TV, film, internet. Whats left? The real fucking world. Let them have Virtual Reality. We live in the here and now of physical space where they can never rule. Ok, they can monitor us, brainwash us, embarrass us, harass us and leave us disenfranchised. But there's still more of us than them. We can't all sell out.
BTW, John Carpenter's "They Live" is one of the real classics of the 1980s and should be a manual going forward not only for independent filmmakers and artists but all of humanity. We are waking up and our enemies are scared.
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