Hollywood loses its nerve...

I didn't think last year's hit movie Inception was an exceptional film, as this article from GQ Magazine online says, but it was at least a rare attempt by a Hollywood studio movie to explore a story with intelligent ideas and some range of psychological depth. I felt the creativity of ideas in the film's first act got taken over as the film went on by the usual over-reliance on special effects. But it was an attempt to get away from - (to quote from the article)...

 ...the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon...

Article author Mark Harris posits that Hollywood's terror of producing any movie not aimed directly at the youth market can be traced back to the 1980's hit Top Gun, an awful piece of schlock if ever there was one. Films, encompassing that grand old word - stories - have been superseded by brand management.

Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they're now trying to sell.

To keep us sane there are still decent Indie movies coming from places other than Hollywood. Check out Mike Leigh's superb character study film Another Year.