Are genre movies these days less "committed"?

[Gorn Captain]

What I mean is the following:
Let's compare Death Race from the 70s, to the recent Statham remake.

The original has a clear social message, apart from the good old rampant road violence. It was ironic, sarcastic, it clearly addressed social issues, and it had a nasty sense of humor.
Take the scenes where the retirement homes wheel out patients onto the streets where the Death Racers will pass by. The racers get extra points for hitting the elderly, kids, etc.
As it is, this is no laughing matter. It's a terrible thing. But the original Death Race used it to attack society values (or the lack of them), as a condemnation of how we view the elderly, for example. The same way that Rollerball used depiction of violence to actually condemn it.
The new Death Race has none of that. It dumped the social comment, the humor, the sarcasm, and just showed a fairly conventional street race.
Why is that?
Are we afraid to address these themes in modern films? Can we only handle popcorn entertainment?
Have we cut back our social evolution, so that we no longer deal with matters that also make us think?
I miss the guts that many 70s movies had, to tackle delicate subjects, wrap them in an action-packed story, and still get the message across...

[ctc]

>Are we afraid to address these themes in modern films?

Nah; it's money. Films are SO expensive to make they almost never go out on a limb with anything. Plots are stripped down to the lowest common denominator, surprises are limited, and everything is focus-grouped to death.

#4 too: 5 Hollywood Secrets That Explain Why So Many Movies Suck | Cracked.com

Don C.

[Obibob]

Interesting topic. Here is part of an article I used for a paper on this very subject (as part of my capstone management class for my MBA that I finished in May) that goes a long way towards answering this question...


How did hollywood get here? There's no overarching theory, no readily identifiable villain, no single moment to which the current combination of caution, despair, and underachievement that defines studio thinking can be traced. But let's pick one anyway: Top Gun.

It's now a movie-history commonplace that the late-'60s-to-mid-'70s creative resurgence of American moviemaking—the Coppola-Altman-Penn-Nichols-Bogdanovich-Ashby decade—was cut short by two movies, Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977, that lit the fuse for the summer-blockbuster era. But good summer blockbusters never hurt anyone, and in the decade that followed, the notion of "summer movie season" entered the pop-culture lexicon, but the definition of "summer movie" was far more diverse than it is today. The label could encompass a science fiction film as hushed and somber as Alien, a two-and-a-half-hour horror movie like The Shining, a directorial vision as singular as Blade Runner, an adult film noir like Body Heat, a small-scale (yes, it was) movie like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a frankly erotic romantic drama like An Officer and a Gentleman. Sex was okay—so was an R rating. Adults were treated as adults rather than as overgrown children hell-bent on enshrining their own arrested development.

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.

Top Gun landed directly in the cortexes of a generation of young moviegoers whose attention spans and narrative tastes were already being recalibrated by MTV and video games. That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was custom-built to excite them—is now in its forties, exactly the age of many mid- and upper-midrange studio executives. And increasingly, it is their taste, their appetite, and the aesthetic of their late-'80s postadolescence that is shaping moviemaking. Which may be a brutally unfair generalization, but also leads to a legitimate question: Who would you rather have in charge—someone whose definition of a classic is Jaws or someone whose definition of a classic is Top Gun?

The Top Gun era sent the ambitions of those who wanted to break into the biz spiraling in a new direction. Fifteen years earlier, scores of young people headed to film schools to become directors. With the advent of the Reagan years, a more bottom-line-oriented cadre of would-be studio players was born, with an MBA as the new Hollywood calling card. The Top Gun era shifted that paradigm again—this time toward marketing. Which was only natural: If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.

In some ways, the ascent of the marketer was inevitable: Now that would-be blockbusters often open on more than 4,000 screens, the cost of selling a movie has skyrocketed toward—and sometimes past—$40 million to $50 million per film, which is often more than the movie itself cost to make. According to the Los Angeles Times, the studios spent $1 billion just to market the movies that were released in the summer of 2009. "Opening a movie everywhere at once is a very, very expensive proposition," says Jinks, who points out that ten years ago American Beauty could open slowly and become "ridiculously profitable without ever being the number one movie. But today, if you're opening, you're inevitably going to overspend in order to try to buy that first-place finish."

This is only part of the story - I highly recommend reading the entire article.

Reference:
The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ

[ctc]

>If movies were now seen as packages, then the new kings of the business would be marketers, who could make the wrapping on that package look spectacular even if the contents were deficient.

It's interesting.... I think this is essentially correct; but the phenomenon was always present in film. I think the mix of depth and spectacle changes.... usually at the whim of the audience. What's weird about the "Top Gun" era is that the principles behind making and marketing the old B-Movies were now being applied to big budget stuff. In essence, the "summer blockbuster" is an expensive B. Except that the think which made the old B's interesting.... the sheer HUH?!?!?.... has been lost as the cost of films goes up and the tastes of the audeince solidify.

....but I do think you HAVE to factor in the audience. If they didn't buy into it, it wouldn't work.

Don C.