While you can't blame these guys for grabbing the brass ring, you do have to ask if they are really worthy of the task. Never mind talents like Lucas, DePalma, Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese, but even the guys who came up in the 80's and early 90's such as James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, John McTiernan, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee and countless other talented filmmakers - they all cut their teeth on smaller movies, honing their craft before getting the shot at the big leagues. The stuff looks polished, makes money. But too often the end result resembles an emotionless two-hour commercial. Most of these flicks play like feature-length trailers.
Feature film requires a whole different mindset.
A feature director is a storyteller as well as an imagemaker. He must find the narrative's emotional highs and lows, shifts in tone and rhythm - all the while nurturing the subtext. A lot of these new video directors know their lenses and aspect ratios, but haven't learned to use their images to tell a story. They throw us machine-gun glitzy pictures that look nice, but have little or nothing to do with story, character, subtext or emotion. The result is a movie like THE CELL, flat and unwavering in tone from start to finish.