Contemporary American films can’t compare to the classics

October 22, 2009  
Filed under Archives, Opinion Archives

By Sean Raleigh
Round Table editor

Films have always been an important part of American culture, but in the last two decades there seems to be a severe lack of any real classic American films.

In order for a movie to become more than a movie, it must convey something else besides big laughs or truckloads of blood and gore.

To be a classic, a movie must provoke thought, or say something about people and the time they lived in.

Many directors and writers still try to make the audience connect to the characters and the world; whether that world is based off of real life or a fictional world, they tend to fail nowadays.

“The Godfather,” “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” “Casablanca,” and other classics create timeless environments, characters, and plots that modern movies consistently cannot live up to.

If filmmakers would concentrate more on building characters and plots rather than trying to have the most brilliant special effects or see how many more “Friday the 13^th” movies they can pump out before people realize they are terrible, they might have a chance to come close to the high-water marks of the classics.