Part of it has to do with passing the 200 mark for movie reviews at the end of last year, but it's also due to the fact that Ma and I have been finding it harder and harder to find movies to watch, so much so that out of the first six months of this year we didn't see any movies for February, March or May and only one (last night's viewing of Monsters University) in June.
And that's definitely a change.
For the almost eight years of my blog's lifespan Ma and I have had a fortnightly movie night locked into our calendars. In fact the movie-going actually pre-dates the blog and started when I moved into my current apartment (and that was the continuation of Ma coming over with dinner on a Tuesday night when I shared an apartment with Ludo).
Sure we didn't always go every fortnight, and there have been gaps if something else came up (my time at the Camera Club, Fringe shows, Cabaret Festival shows, trips interstate, etc) or there wasn't anything of interest on at the movies, but we've been doing the same thing essentially since the late 1990's.
But in recent times there's been a decline. From 2006 to 2009 we averaged around 30 movies a year whereas from 2010 to 2012 we've only been averaging 22 movies a year. On the flip side of that though, when I crunched the numbers, it does look like the average scores I've given movies over those periods has increased, which is interesting.
So whether it's the fact that there are less movies around that meet the criteria for something Ma and I both want to see (or that I want to see alone because there are some of those in there) or whether it's just the fact that we're seeing less of the movies that either turn out to be kinda crappy or we know are going to be a little crappy going in, I'm not sure.
I know that I've definitely gotten pickier about what movies I want to bother to go and see. And it's stuff that in the past I probably would have gone along to even though I may have heard it wasn't as good as it could have been, or starred someone annoying... things in the last couple of years like The Hobbit, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Oz: The Great and Powerful, Prometheus, Chronicle, Men in Black 3, The Lorax, Snow White and the Huntsman, John Carter, This Means War to name but a few.
And I've seen a few of those since they left theatres... some were good, some were bad, some were average.
So, let me ask the rest of the movie-going public... is it me or is the general quality of movies decreasing? Or am I just getting fussy in my old age?
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2 comments:
For me and my daughter, I think the opposite is true. If anything, we seem to be going to the movies even more than in the past. As to the quality, you could be right, it may be well decreasing somewhat. But as most of the time we only go for 'mindless entertainment', and don't expect too much, we are not really bothered.
I love going to the movies and sometimes see three in a week. I believe movies are technically better than ever before because of the amazing developments in computer generated techniques but the quality and originality is lacking.
There are few if any genuinely witty films now of the sort that used to feature stars like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Too many films nowadays are rip offs of whatever made money last year which explains the torrent of gross out 'comedies' like The Hangover.
Only occasionally now do I see a really riveting film; something like 'The Lives of Others' or 'Mystic River'.
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