Friday, June 12, 2015

What Happens on Screen Can't Happen


I was watching some of Marky Mark’s “Italian Job” remake on Netflix yesterday, and while it was enjoyable, I realized that parts of it were just as implausible as any superhero movie.
Superhero movies are required to be unrealistic, of course, but crime capers are not. Maybe the problem is not that we have too many superhero movies (heaven forfend!), but that virtually ALL Hollywood movies now range from implausible to impossible. The something that’s missing in the cinema is the same something that’s often missing in our culture, I think. The realm of possibility has been entirely displaced by the dream world of wish fulfillment.
No more “Chinatowns,” for example (a film in which events remain plausible, if strange). People with a taste for realism now must turn to long-form, novel-like cable TV serials like “Mad Men.”

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