The dawn of a new era of pseudo-intellectualism in mainstream cinema

Rating: 4/10 (14 January 2010)

After Spielberg's introduction of humor to serious thriller with Jaws in 1974, his derivatives quickly changed cinema forever. Distilling his easy and life-like approach towards storytelling to the technique now known as 'comic relief' violent, serious or simply unappealing movies could now be made digestible for a broader audience by inserting random bits of comedy after stressful scenes. One of the big advantages of this method was also that it seemed to work even without putting much thought into it. You don't need a genius to do it. A stupid oneliner here, some odd physical comedy there and you can get even the most sensitive viewer trough a movie that can still be marketed towards an action oriented audience. What this has resulted in of course was, that making high- budget movies without elements of comedy now became a bad business decision and it became more and more rare that you could sit trough a piece of high caliber cinema without having to endure idiotic jokes and tasteless characters, often ruining crucial parts of an otherwise promising flick. One can not go about writing about this without mentioning infamous entities like the Jar-Jar Bings character from Star Wars: Episode One, Rob Schneider in Judge Dredd or Michael Bay's over the top ideas, often crossbreeding vicious melodrama with borderline cases of slapstick.
Cinema is about what the audience wants and the audiences kept supporting this so comic relief kept ruining cinema for the last few decades. But you can only go so far (though this was somewhat more then far) and at some point stuff had to change. Sequels repeatedly promising a 'darker' more 'character centered' tone while dishing out the same topsy-turvy bullsh*t again and again kept loosing credibility and someone finally had to deliver. One year after Spider-man 3 and it's infamous emo-Peter-fever-dance-scene Nolan Presented the first 'serious' blockbuster for nearly a decade and brought about a revolution in mainstream cinema. Sounds cool? Just give me a few more minutes.
The concept of Nolan's Batman is to switch bat-nipples to army gadgets, pull back on stupid comedy, give the main character something that can be called a background story, motivation, introduce a 'philosophical' aspect and basically place Batman into the real world as compared to la-la-lala-land where Sam Raimy's Spider-man lives together with Michael Bay on the back of a purple dinosaur.
And all of this is really cool but wait a second, what about the box office? Wouldn't that mean that people need to THINK to grasp all this? How would this complex approach not frustrate the average moviegoer? How would Bruce Wayne's inability to express love, the Joker's hedonistic psychopathy not startle young mothers who go to the movies for fun and delight and like to enjoy movies together with the whole family? Nolan's got the key.
Movies can be serious. They just has to be dumb as sh*t.
It was a misunderstanding all along and Nolan (accidentally?)figured it out. It's not about the stress (in fact people love stress, isn't this the whole point of drama?). It's about the intellectual challenge. People want smart movies and they want serious movies, but not smart and serious like smart and serious. Smart and serious compared to their own abilities. That means on the average the intellectual abilities of what used to be a 13 year old way back when.
So present all the deepness, complicatedness, motivations and this on the lowest, dumbest, most childish level that is possible so every idiot can understand and then put trillions of dollars into making it look like something big and then start viscerally overstimulating the viewers by having a severe score blare all the f*cking time and the tons and tons of dumb, shallow bullsh*t will sound like Dostojewsky because there was the really heavy music and they said it with this deep voice and they were sitting in this incredibly expensive setting, it has to be profound. Hell, they might even feel a bit profound themselves now, after all there is profound written all over this movie and it's dark, serious looking posters and you have to be a profound guy to enjoy a profound movie. They won't care, that it's pretentious, that it's shallow and infantile, they don't even know what those words mean.
So this movie is on kindergarten level. It's not that there is nothing good about it, some of it is high quality stuff but it's a stupid, childish, shallow, phoney melodrama, it's overly long, extremely self- important and the production value is exactly the trick that makes it to be taken serious and therefore so harmful. It works because audiences are stupid and fall for everything flashy and loud and expensive looking, cause they are mainly teenagers and mainly Americans and because people love marketing and movies are only about marketing now.
But the problem is not that Nolan made a phoney movie, it's that he brought about a new revolution in mainstream cinema, as now it is the bad business decision not to have low-level, pseudo-philosophical bullsh*t in high-budget movies and flicks like X- Men: First Class, the god awful Spider-Man reboot, Prometheus and many others already adopted his mind bogglingly boring, anti-intellectual approach centered around infantile conversation and now make more money then ever. Nolan ruined mainstream sci-fi and superhero movies at least for the next decade and the thing in which his misdeed is truly severe as compared to Spielberg's case above mentioned is, that he has shown people how to do the tasteless version right away, rather then just having invented something cool which the capitalist world then abused for it's own merit. He did the sh*tty thing right away, god forbid those studios have to figure it out for themselves.
Thank you Mr. Nolan. 4/10