What I'm Watching

Right now, the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Quite enthralling; I don't want to say only Kubrick could do it, but it certainly takes a talented director to make scenes of monkeys dancing around and howling so interesting to watch. His eye for how to frame a scene is just about perfect.

It strikes me that this kind of movie could never be made today. No Hollywood flick would have 10 minutes with no dialogue, with no introduction or explanation of what the hell is going on beyond the line 'The Dawn Of Man' flashed at the beginning. If I recall correctly, the movie is quite short on explication of what exactly is going on; much is left up to the viewer to decipher.

Movies simply aren't made like that anymore. It can't be assumed that the viewer is intelligent enough to figure out anything on their own, and must have their hand held through the whole experience like a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls.

Whether through the Star Trek-ian 'Captain's Log' entries, the awful 'how we got here' stories in the Transformers embarrassment of last summer, or the ubiquitous voiceover by Morgan Freeman, any movie with an non-trivial background story has to have every detail spelled out, because the worst impossible thing would be to challenge the audience to actually think for themselves.

After all, we all know that thinking leads to reading, which leads to, you know, critical thinking, which leads to lower profits for the crap-machine known as Hollywood.

I'm not sure what my actual point is here - after all, I appear to lack the attention span to watch a very richly detailed movie without blogging about it at the same time. Maybe I'm just another child of my generation after all...