Director Peter Bogdanovich: What If Movies Are Part of the Problem?

[Javaman]

43. I'll tell you what happened to society...

video rentals.

That and crap writers.

video rentals cut a huge swath through movie theater profits. Hence the higher prices. Also, rather than showing films with good story lines (which only seem to reside now in "art house" theaters), the big movie chains needed to resort to sensationalism to draw in their big money demographic: teens.

Lots of explosions, lots of overly dramatic mellow drama, lot's of over the top killings and a huge dose of completely unrealistic situations that are passed off, by the very thinnest of script plots, as plausible.

The big chain theaters now offer an "experience" not a pleasurable movie experience.

Every movie that I have seen in the last 2 years in an actual chain theater has always had one half wit movie goer yell at the screen. Which takes me out of the moment.

I avoid them like the plague now.

Most of the movie going audience don't want a story. They get plenty of well written stuff on cable now. People go to the big box theaters to be "wow'd".

the bottom line (as I said in another thread) is: mental illness, in this nation, is either not diagnosed properly or not diagnosed at all.

Combine any sort of psychopathy with anything and you can have problems; whether it's movies, video games, milkshakes, or too many tacos. If the person was predisposed to violent outbursts, (whether or not any incidences occurred before), it won't take much for them to be set off.

We've had countless mass shootings here in the U.S. and nothing has been done to deal with the screening the mentally ill from the gun purchasing process.

(FYI: full disclosure: I play "violent" video games and really enjoy a good "shoot'em up" action movie, yet I don't own any guns and abhor violence of any kind against real people or animals)