The impossible goal of current movies
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Grant ends up in jail, but proposes to Hepburn when he gets out.
Movies are really the gateway to modern society. However bad they may be, they still gauge for us something of the society's positions. They tell us how a society thinks, behaves and what it holds important.
There is such a strange earnestness about contemporary movies. It’s all about getting everything "just right". I don’t think anyone does a belly laugh over contemporary comedies the way that people would have done in those original screwballs comedies. To laugh like that, you would have to admit the incongruity and absurdity of a situation. No director wants to be incongruent or absurd these days, and least of all an actor. Just give them the politically correct, please. Of course, this goes for other emotions like anger, sorrow and deep indignation. No movie makes people deeply indignant anymore.
I think people feel an irrational anger more than indignation these days. This makes people a little crazy. When defending illegal immigrants, for example, who are for all practical purposes criminals, how do people support them other than to lie to themselves? What do they tell themselves about this or that illegal person? They can defend his humanity, but how can they defend his actions without being insincere (i.e. lying) to themselves? Such ambiguous feelings do not make for indignation. So people just get irrationally mad instead, and no longer go for the Good vs. Bad, anymore, because their story is already coated in lies. Such was the mood of the immigration movie "Crossing Over", although the director tried to be as honest as possible.
So, part of art's pleasure, to see truth reveal itself, becomes near to impossible in current movies, since so much is camouflaged with untruth. Even comedies, where we should be doing belly laughs, fall short. In the screwball comedies of yonder years, for example, slightly nutty women ran circles around unsuspecting men to finally return to "a man-above-woman world order", as one film critic put it. This is no longer possible. The comedy of the sexes is now no longer is a comedy of the sexes because we have equal opportunity, and career women, and politically correct men who dare not ruffle the feathers of their women colleagues (and wives). How do you return to "a man-above-woman world order" when everything has to be equal?
Still, art, whether the artists like it or not, does reveal some of the truth some of the time, especially if it is in the hands of a good artist.
Here is a review I did of a recent film "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and the trajectory screwball comedy took from the 1930s to this 2009 version. Despite all the meddlesome feminism, this 2009 version does give credit to the original masterpieces. People cannot completely change human nature, after all, although they may try to in their imaginations.
