Writing for Sight and Sound Magazine, Oscar-winning writer and director Quentin Tarantino correctly describes modern movies as “plain stupid shit.”
“I loved going to the movies. These days, however, the concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity,” he writes. “Which is fair enough, because by comparison the movies of the last six years make the ‘80s seem like the ‘30s.”
He says the “1980s were pretty bad too,” but he could “forgive” 80s films because he “loved going to the movies.”
Tarantino is famously no fan of 1980s movies. He’s wrong about that, but there’s more…
“Since the pandemic… it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death,” he explains, adding: “Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers, or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavourless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood.”
He includes some titles post-pandemic he’s enjoyed…
“I’ve seen movies I liked since — West Side Story (2021); Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 and 2 (both 2024), a few others,” he admits, “but nothing that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly and was the reason I loved movies above all other artforms. These days I’d rather read a book.”
One movie he reserves most of his praise for is Joe Carnahan’s Netflix feature The Rip, which starred Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
“The film is an exciting cop thriller with a novel premise that manages to deliver the goods in really clever ways,” Tarantino continues. “The whole package worked for me: Carnahan’s direction, the splendid cast, the look of the film… but the real powerhouse component of this splendid collection is the sensational screenplay by Carnahan and Michael McGrale.”
Okay, I found The Rip forgettable and have no intention of ever watching Spielberg’s woke rewrite of West Side Story, but I loved Kevin Costner’s Horizon: Chapter 1. Tarantino mentions the second chapter, but it has not been released yet.
Movies have been steadily going downhill since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and most especially his reelection in 2004. That’s when the industry first lost its mind and began to hate and resent its customers by becoming even more ideologically blatant, hectoring, and conformist; it’s been a shit show ever since.
Since the pandemic, though? The worst.
Hollywood’s last decent year was 2019 with Spider-Man: Far From Home, Joker, Dragged Across Concrete, Avengers: Endgame, John Wick 3, Midsommar, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Angel Has Fallen, Rambo: Last Blood, Zombieland: Double Tap, The Irishman, Ford v. Ferrari, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Richard Jewell, and Uncut Gems.
Granted, there was a ton of garbage in 2019. Still, it was probably Hollywood’s best year for moviegoing in over a decade. Every year since has been torture. Exceptions like Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are appreciated, but are exceptions.
Tarantino’s full article is not yet available online, so we can only wonder if he had the courage to point his finger at the real problem, which we all know is woketardery. He does mention “pandering to the audience,” which is basically the same thing, so let’s give him that.
It’s just a fact that Hollywood’s anti-art obsession with identity politics and queerness has so degraded and undermined the basis of great art — truth — that moviegoing has become painful. You can set a movie in another dimension, use animals or aliens for characters… All of that is fine. But if you don’t tell the truth about the human condition, your movie will fail, and that’s where woketardery does the most damage. If we can’t suspend our disbelief, the movie doesn’t work, and woke is a lie, therefore most movies don’t work. The human experience is universal. We all know when someone’s lying.