For the past three months I have been reviewing films for the Times and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job, I subscribed to the general view that cinema is not what it used to be. With the exception of a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, the art form has been in a state of decline since its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. But I had no idea just how bad things had become.
Take The Spell, for instance. This low-budget British horror film, released a couple of weeks ago, was so bad that the critics started pouring out of the preview theatre within the first five minutes. By the end, there were only three people left. It was so amateurishly made, it was as if a group of delinquent teenagers had been given a camcorder and told to remake The Exorcist within the next 24 hours. Actually, that makes it sound more interesting than it was. I emerged from the screening room with smoke billowing from my ears and spent the rest of the day organising a petition to send to the Society of Film Distributors demanding that they change the rules regarding which movies are eligible for review.
The Spell was far from exceptional. The national film critics are forced to endure this form of torture all the time. If you’ve ever come out of a movie wondering why it got so many good reviews, the answer is because we’re comparing it to the other films we’ve seen that week. Next to The Spell, the latest Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy seems like a work of staggering genius.
I used to do the same job for the Guardian in 1992 and that now seems like a golden age. I remember being shocked by how poor My Cousin Vinny was — something that seems scarcely credible today. If I had to review it again next week, I’d give it four stars.
The problem is that the number of movies released each week has increased exponentially — and an increase in quantity has not meant an increase in quality. In the month of September, 40 films came out, at least half of which were along similar lines to The Spell. The reason for this glut is because the cost of making movies has fallen dramatically in the past 15 years. Advances in digital video technology — and the reduced cost of converting films shot on video to 35mm as well as the emergence of cinemas able to show movies shot on digital video — means that films made for under £10,000 can now be screened.
They don’t even need distributors. There are several cinemas in central London, such as the Apollo in Piccadilly, that will show your film for a relatively modest sum. Provided it’s in a cinema for one week, even if it’s being released on DVD directly afterwards, the critics are obliged to treat it as a ‘national release’. It’s the equivalent of self-publishing a novel and then seeing it reviewed in the book pages of every national newspaper.
About 15 years ago, people in the arts welcomed the array of technological advances that made it easier for amateurs to participate in fields like filmmaking. The politically correct line was that it would expose a whole new layer of creative talent. We were witnessing the dawn of a new era in the arts that would rival the Renaissance.
Today, such optimism seems wildly misplaced. How many filmmakers have taken advantage of this new technology to pose a challenge to the likes of Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Steven Spielberg? The answer is zero. The only effect it has had is to encourage people who have had no formal training — who’ve never been to film school — to imagine that they’re proper movie directors. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of the sentimental message at the heart of Ratatouille: anyone can cook. As someone who’s spent the past seven years working as a restaurant critic, I can confirm that that is a big fat lie. Not everyone can cook and not everyone can direct a film — particularly those who haven’t even bothered to study the craft.
Reducing the cost of making movies and hoping a new generation of young filmmakers will emerge from the ether is the equivalent of lowering the cost of violins and expecting an army of Yehudi Menuhins to spring up out of nowhere. The sooner the barriers go up again, the better.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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