The major component in great movies is great direction. I guess because audiences never see the director they assume that the actors are most responsible for success of the movie. However, that is rarely the case. Actors are skilled artists that are trained to give the director the performance he or she is looking for. The director and his staff plan each scene deciding on how each performance is to be delivered in order to accomplish the purpose of the scene which becomes a link in a chain that leads to final scene.
I believe movies are not as good as they once were because we just don't have enough good directors. In the mid 20th century about 1900 films were released in the US. By 2006, the number had increased to 11,600. By 2020, the impact of streaming services plus the huge demand for series has created a huge demand for good directors.
You can go to school and get a degree in film direction and after years in the business you can acquire the skills you need to make good movies but you still have to have the creative talent and that is what we are missing in today's productions. Too many productions lack the creative talent to touch audiences and involve them in the movie leaving audiences, bored, confused, or wondering why they just wasted two hours.
Excellent analysis and observations. I think that creative intuition isn't lacking in just movies these days but in many other creative aspects too, i.e. books. theater, comedy, music, even video games.
I have a couple of Hoyle card games for computer from early in the 21st Century designed to play bridge, spades, hearts, pinochle etc. with a variety of characters in a very realistic setting. The characters are programmed with various mannerisms and comments to you as their partner or opponent and to each other and the programming is brilliant. I bought an updated Hoyle program created in the last five years and there was no comparison. Dialogue was flat and boring and no individuality in the characters at all.
Same with an online game site I have subscribed to for years. it used to be such a user friendly social site and even the robots that sometimes replaced live players were entertaining in their expressions and mannerisms. The site was completely restructured recently when Google stopped supporting flash player and the new programming is cold, not conducive to social interaction and the programmers don't seem to know how to make things fun for people.
As our society has evolved and become more political, more judgmental, more ideological it seems to have lost something. And that might be that intuitive creativity that used to be so great.
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