When did we stop going to the movies for fun? It seems like all we do is go to the movies and pour over ever line of dialogue, every scene and use of CGI and criticize it. Don't get me wrong if a movie is bad it should be and you should tell people its bad. However it seems as if our main objective when seeing movies is to find how many plot points and use of bad dialogue we can find.
The reason for this blog was quite simply Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones was/is the brainchild of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two of the biggest names in Hollywood. Raiders of the Lost Ark came out of no where and gave us the serial action of yesterday for modern day audiences. Temple of Doom followed and was responsible for creating PG-13. Back in those care-free days it was just G, PG and R. After which we have Last Crusade and we thought the series ended. In 2008 Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out and the world lost it's shit.
One of the most infamous scenes is the Nuking the fridge scene. The hero, Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator and the blast carries him to safety. For most people this was the moment the series became absurd. I guess people forget about the other absurd things in the film series. Is the nuking the fridge scene any more absurd than jumping out of a plane with a life raft, inflating it and gently floating down to the ground as we saw in Temple of Doom. To be fair Spielberg didn't think the scene was possible so the two turned to scientist. The scientists stated that if the fridge was lead lined and Indy didn't break his neck he had a 50/50 chance of surviving. A 50/50 chance that works out for the hero...that sounds like every other Indiana Jones movie.
In 1978, Jaws came on the scene and quickly became the highest grossing movie of all time (until Star Wars came out) and is often cited as one of the greatest movies of all time. This movie created the summer movie season. Studios nowadays release their big budget movies during the summer months. You can thank Jaws for that. Mind you that at the very center of this movie was a completely fake looking rubber shark. People were able to overlook the shark and still have a good time at the movies. If Jaws was released to day it wouldn't have made a dime. People would criticize the fake looking shark, poor character choices "why would the mayor keep the beaches open if a man eating shark was out there?" and the fact that the story line was vastly different from the book's. Jaws was a book written by Peter Benchley....some of the plot lines written out of the movie were the mafia's involvement in keeping Amity's beaches open, the affair between Hooper and Ellen Brody and more importantly the shark dies not by explosion but by Quint stabbing it repeatedly much in the same way Ahab dies in Moby Dick.
The fact remains that many people my age feel that movies nowadays will never be as great as the movies of the 80's. Perhaps the main reason we think they are so great is because we didn't nitpick them to death.
