the twentieth century was the golden age of the silver screen. at least, it was, until the television took over its place in the hearts and minds of the babysitter-deprived generations of the second half of the century. now that we have entered the twenty-first century, though, the art of film is dead. that’s not to say that the painful experience that is theatergoing has lost money or attendance. it certainly has not. the mallrats and obsessives keep hollywood in small change and then some.

but what has happened to the experience?

dirty rooms with larger and larger walls and poorer quality projections fill with unwashed masses who speak on mobiles and talk throughout the production. and that’s only half the problem.

trailers take up the vast majority of the average attention span, before the film has even begun – and that’s with ever-increasing admission costs. advertising for products that i shan’t ever purchase followed by trailers for films completely devoid of interest sap the life from my viewing eyes. this is then followed by the introductory scene of the main production, at which point i am ready to go home. and that’s when the film begins.

but that is an incipit problem and cannot easily be solved. it is the tradition of an industry devoid of thought but flush with currency.

what i do not understand, however, is what happens once this vast harang has been relegated to the void of past experiences and the collection of photographs that will make up the memory of the film begin to flash before the eyes.

the forties and fifties saw film noir, the sixties and seventies, the drama, the eighties and nineties, the action film, and now, the comedy.

there was a time when comedies were funny. there were banana-peels. there were characters like donald and daffy. comedy was where it belonged. in the realm of the ridiculous and the animated. but it has become a mainstay of the modern film experience. and it lost something in the translation. the funny.

so where did the funny go? it was replaced by the disturbing. food humor, toilet humor, death humor – you name the depths of depravity that you’d like to sink to and then pick the currently-running film that uses them as a basic premise for existence.

and people watch it.

and i’m sad.

i want to see plot, writing, and an alternate reality that is believable, complex, and lifelike. i don’t need to see people behaving stupidly for the sake of non-existent humor. i don’t need to see illness in the guise of comedy.

pshah. i’m going back to the sixties. they knew how to write back then.