There Are Things Worth Saving

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” is how Ecclesiastes puts it, “and there is no new thing under the sun.” What was true for the Bible will surely be true for the movie business, new millennium or no new millennium.

Still, as an exercise in fantasy, it’s amusing to pretend we can start afresh, to speculate on what would be worth saving from the world of film as 2000 begins and what it would be a pleasure to discard. But even here, reality interferes, because anything you could do without is inextricably bound to something you love. Saving and discarding is less a matter of extremes than a Solomon-like attempt to divide what may in fact prove to be indivisible. Still, here goes.

Computer-generated imagery.

Save: Who would want to miss out on, even if we could, the wonders the computer can call forth, from the living dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” to the sinking of a certain very famous ship. And it’s not just big-budget epics that make excellent use of the computer--quieter, more artistic films do so as well. When Canadian director Atom Egoyan had to send a school bus through the ice in a small but crucial scene from “The Sweet Hereafter,” he found the only way it would sink at a speed slow enough to suit him was to have it done on computers.

Lose: What it would be good to do without, however, is the feeling that just because the effects cost a fortune and considerable time and effort went in to getting them right, that’s all that really matters. As recent effects-heavy but dramatically inert efforts like “The Haunting” demonstrate, assuming that the script will take care of itself is definitely not the way to go.

The blockbuster syndrome.

Save: In theory, critics love blockbusters as much as anyone. There’s a definite excitement inherent in having everybody in the country seeing and talking about the same film at the same time (especially when, as was the case with “The Sixth Sense,” the film is actually a good one). This is the Holy Grail of the industry, often sought but rarely achieved, but there is nothing wrong with the aspiration.

Lose: What is a problem is the notion that for a film to be a blockbuster it has to worship at the shrine of the lowest common denominator. Wouldn’t it be nice if studios could be made to trust the mass audience and its taste--and could see that just because hordes of people sometimes go to dumb movies, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t go to more intelligent popular fare if given the chance?

Worship of the box office.

Save: That plague of modern times, the Monday morning grosses report, actually comes from something good about the movies, its existence as a popular art, accessible to everyone and eager to connect to an audience. When films are made without that need to make contact--as is the case with too much of state-supported cinema in Europe--what can result are distant, hermetic films that no one wants to see even in their native lands, let alone anywhere else.

Lose: But looking at being the weekend’s top grosser as an end in itself, worth any amount of pandering to undiscriminating segments of the audience, leads to films that are so feeble and off-putting they’re plainly embarrassing. No names please; you know who you are.

Violence on screen.

Save: Given that there’s violence in the Bible as well as in great theater and literature, an interest in it, if not a taste for it, is apparently embedded deeply in our consciousness. Certainly film would be poorer if the work of John Woo or “The Matrix,” to name just two examples, were completely absent from our screens.

Lose: That said, no wish list for the future would be complete without a plea, sure to go unheeded, to tone things down. With advances in physical special effects, plus the aforementioned computer technology, it’s now possible to vividly re-create the most brutally grotesque situations. Does that mean we have to, or even should? I hope not, but I’m not holding my breath.

Independent film.

Save: The indie explosion is the best thing to happen to American film in the past 20 years; the existence of two separate and increasingly co-equal universes for film, each with its own sensibility, its own audience and even its own stars, is an embarrassment of riches no other filmmaking country can boast.

Lose: But welcome as all this is, the fact that independent filmmakers are typically just starting out in adult life means that the works they produce can too often be dead-end explorations of how sensitive and unappreciated they were as teenagers and how cruel and unjust life can be to people in their early 20s. This may well be true, but as a subject for film it’s not one of endless fascination.

Testing films.

Save: Some directors, mainly those who work in comedy, actually seem to thrive on the audience testing process, learning where the jokes are and where they’re not, and those people would have reason to be sad to see the process go.

Lose: What definitely should go is the over-reliance on this highly suspect procedure by executives who lack the innate sense of what a mass audience wants to see--a sense that characterized the moguls of Hollywood’s golden age. Testing can lead to cinematic disembowelment and is hardly the completely reliable predictor of audience reaction that its partisans would so like it to be.

Excessive focus on the director.

Lose: Yes, the director can be the most important person on a film, but as opposed to everything else on this list, it’s hard to think of much good that’s come out of the current overemphasis on this figure as the sole creator of everything on the screen.

Really smart directors know how to assemble a superb supporting staff of writer, cinematographer, editor, production designer and so on without which their own efforts would come to naught. Despite what the credits say, most movies are not “A Joe Schmo Film,” they are truly collaborative efforts, and if any one thing would make the new millennium more cinematically satisfying than the old, it would be a renewed, better-late-than-never recognition of that fact.