‘What is going on with movies these days? Is there a kind of rule in Hollywood now that the movies have to be rubbish or they won’t be released?’ I was thinking to myself last night as I watched yet another stupid film. ‘What was it called?’ I thought, ‘O it doesn’t matter, they are all basically the same now days anyway.’
Then it suddenly dawned on me; it had happened; what I had always been scared of as a child had actually come true; we had finally run out of stories and now had to make the same ones over and over again. How horrific!
As we continued watching, on one of the scenes the DVD got stock and then skipped over a chunk of the film (as if the DVD player itself had got bored too) we decided to ignore the skip and continued to watch because as anyone who rents DVDs knows, these skips and jumps are the norm with rented movies.
Although when this happened for the third time, I got up swearing and took the disc out to see what was wrong. The skips were the result of a few scratches and a couple of greasy fingerprints. As Kamyar tried to wipe the greasy marks from the disc, I thought about how strange it was that we had the technology to put eight gigabytes of film on one tiny disc but most of us still did not have the fundamental understanding that it is not advisable to touch that disc with our greasy hands after eating a bag of chips (French-fries to most of you non-Brits and Freedom-fries to you Americans) with curry sauce and extra mayonnaise. Actually our problems with CDs and DVDs are often even more basic than that; most of us are yet to get the hang of opening the polythene around the case without looking like a cave-man trying to break the shell on a Brazil nut! Or getting the disc out without swearing and breaking the button in the middle.
Yes I believe we have a very serious problem here, while technology swiftly moved forward, at some point in time the average person’s brain started shrugging its shoulders and saying, ‘Yeah well I don’t get it but yeah. You must know how it works and I trust you.’
If I were to take a guess I would say that point was probably around the time when the audio and video systems went from analogue to digital. I think up until then our brain had always had time to catch up with every new thing in technology and try to understand it but round about then, it suddenly just went, ‘0101? I don’t know… yeah I guess it makes sense.’ (without actually understanding it) and from then on, we were like that kid at school who never learnt the multiplication table but managed to somehow hide his ignorance and go along with the rest and now is expected to solve complex mathematical problems without knowing the very basics.
So now we have the technology to make a film where a man can single-handedly fight with five thousand men (that don’t exist in real life but have been made on the computer and look totally realistic). He will fly in the air and go from one man to the other by running on their chests at a ninety degrees angle, kicking each one on the forehead and then take out a laser sward and before they can say ‘Ouch, my head’ cut the right hand of each one from their wrist and stack them all up in a pyramid shape.
But why is he doing that?
‘Ummmm…mmm…How about…no…how about because a very evil man has taken the love of his life hostage and is threatening to kill her?...or no no, how about an evil man is trying to take over the world and turn all human beings into slaves?’
‘Is that the best you can come up with?’
‘No wait we can put a twist in it.’
‘What?’
‘How about right at the end he realises that he and the evil man are actually the same person? …or or better yet the evil man turns out to be his father? Or…’
‘Please stop. I’m begging you.’
Yes at the end the technology plays its part perfectly well and the man fighting the five thousand computer generated villains does his job flawlessly but unfortunately the best the brains behind the story could come up with is, ‘Give him shades. Make him look cool and sexy.’ Which is ironic really when you think about how in real life it is usually the people who have no real substance or knowledge or enough confident who try to always look and act the way they consider to be cool to try and hide their shortcomings! Is that what we are unconsciously doing I wonder.