Cheapness
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007On the live album “Roxy and Elsewhere” Frank Zappa talks to the audience about “Cheapness” in horror movies. “…the cheaper they are, the better they are!”
It’s strange that the special effects seen in todays movies, now digitized and rendered in such glorious “realism” still have a tendency to cheapen the look of a movie unless they are used with care.
Hollywood moguls are, no doubt, cock-a-hoop at the relative cheapness of these effects and, like greedy kids at a fairground, want more and more and more!
The audience, watching yet another fire breathing dragon or kung fu kick (which takes out a skyscraper) reaches for the popcorn and looks at a fat bald man who is sitting in the next row and wondering if that girl, with curves that could cause a riot in a monastry, is his partner.
We are generally bored!
There is another problem…
I watched Spiderman 3 during a flight recently and I was actually very unimpressed with the special effects!
That generally didn’t look like Peter Parker swinging about the city, and looked more like a kid’s video game, albiet an expensive one!
I think that Hollywood is slapping itself on the back these days for inferior products -and it doesn’t give damn!
Bring back the scriptwriter with a pen like Hemingway or Steinbeck. Use special effects but don’t splash all over the screen with a ten pound brush!
A l;ittle taste gentlemen! (and ladies -though to be fair I think you are generally innocent of overuse of boys toys!)
Keep thinking!