Sometime around ’82 or ’83 legendary film critic Andrew Sarris shared a classic line of despair — “the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies.” And within that particular pocket of time with the wrong people starting to exert more and more influence in Hollywood, that was a fair (if profoundly depressing) thing to say.
Pauline Kael had shared a similar complaint in a 6.15.80 New Yorker article called “Why Are Movies So Bad, or The Numbers.”
In a 4.3.07 review of an Ice Cube comedy called Are We Done Yet?, I mentioned the ’80s Sarris quote and said that “now the roof is gone also and the walls have collapsed, and makers of mainstream family comedies have thrown in the towel and said ‘if it makes money, we don’t care!…the family audience loved Are We There Yet? so what do you want us to do, not make more money?’
“And so the movies they’re making radiate a terrible odiousness,” I wrote. “Or a kind of soul-rupturing stupidity…not just unfunny but suffocating in ways you wouldn’t think possible. You sit there staring at the screen and you feel dead inside, and then you feel poisoned and you realize you’ve been reborn except you’re losing your mind. Ice Cube got paid a lot of money for doing this thing, you’re telling yourself, but you’re just sitting there.”
Now it’s 14 years later (39 years after the Sarris quote) and earlier today I wrote the following to a friend:
“You know something? A certain percentage of movies…not a high percentage but maybe 5% or 7% or somewhere in there, used to deliver certain emotional nutrients. Those nutrients today are in shorter and shorter supply. I feel as if my personal spiritual garden is wilting from the lack of these nutrients, and the shitty movie virus is spreading like Covid and that movies have turned rotten in more ways than I could have possibly imagined back in the day.
“The cinematic preferences of Millennials and Zoomers are horrific, not to mention the GenX gamers and their longstanding comic-book appetites…don’t get me started. This is a ruined, jaundiced industry…a racket that has poisoned itself.”
I wish I could think of something more to say at this point. Maybe it’ll come to me later tonight.
Two Sarris anecdotes that have nothing to do with the depression: In the fall of ’77 Sarris agreed to talk about movies in front of a crowd at the Westport Country Playhouse Cinema, where I was working at the time. I was told to pick him up at his Upper East Side apartment and drive him up to Westport, and then drive him back a couple of hours later. We obviously enjoyed some chat time, but what I primarily remember was his energy and spirit — a genuine inspiration for me. He seemed indefatigable.
A year or two later I was a struggling New York freelancer, doubtful of my talent and unsure of my footing. I was at a black-tie New York Film Festival party, and I remember suddenly putting on a pair of jet-black Ray-Bans as I joined a group of five or six that included Sarris. He made me feel very much part-of-the-gang when he remarked a few seconds later that I looked “like a Roman pimp in a Fellini film.”