Growing up the cinema was never a huge part of my childhood, nevertheless I still spent a lot of time visiting the cinema to watch the latest Dreamwork or Disney animation. To me these visits were a treat, a once off, like a visit to McDonalds every month or so. To ten year old me visiting the cinema was a luxury, the experience was far more about the extravagant lolly buffet, the hot popcorn, the big screen and the comfortable seats then the film I was watching. The film itself was usually just whatever the hottest kids film was at the time. As I grew to my teenage years this dynamic shifted I began growing a liking to certain films, franchises and genres. The later mentioned extravagance was a nice addition to the movie I wished to watch. Unfortunately, the films which grabbed the attention of fifteen year old me were the large franchises which were to me more large corporations then filmmakers or artists. This notion is also mirrored in Martin Scorsese’s (2019) article in The New York Times where he expresses the idea that modern film franchises are just as much products for sale as they are works of art or “cinema”. The two big franchises which grabbed my attention as a teenager was the bebirth of the Star Wars and Jurassic Park franchises, both having their franchises reintroduced into the cinema in 2015. However, I found that both of their returning films were bland, uninspired and left me feeling disinterested for any future films planned for the franchises. These two lack lustre instalments into my two favourite cinema universes singlehandedly killed my experience with cinema from that point onwards. Since their release almost 8 years ago I could count the number of films I have watched in cinema on two hands. I have now resorted to watching independent or films of past on streaming services. Scorsese (2019) mirrored my experience similarly when comparing the cinema today to that of decades past, ‘Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marvelling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going back to? I don’t think so’. It was for this reason why I stopped going to the cinema to watch films. Most new films were never terrible. They were visually stunning, beautifully shot and composed but they never grabbed me emotionally or left me wanting more. I always left feeling indifferent, neither impressed or blown away yet neither disappointed or offended. It was this indifference that left me wanting to experience the same awe and enthusiasm I used to enjoy when visiting the cinema as a child.
References:
Scorsese, M. (4 November 2019) I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain, The New York Times, accessed 7 August 2023. https://www.lib.rmit.edu.au/easy-cite/?styleguide=styleguide-1#stn-3#subtype-30