Currently the first four Amazon Prime Trending Movies are
Constantine - a 2005 American occult detective film directed by Francis Lawrence (in his directorial debut) and starring Keanu Reeves as John Constantine. Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Djimon Hounsou co-star. With a screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, the film is based on DC Comics' Hellblazer comic book,
Practical Magic - Maria Owens, a young witch, is exiled to Maria's Island in Massachusetts with her unborn child for escaping her execution. When her lover does not come to rescue her, she desperately casts a spell upon herself to stop falling in love due to heartbreak, only to die soon after.
Annabelle - a 2014 American supernatural horror film directed by John R. Leonetti, written by Gary Dauberman and produced by Peter Safran and James Wan.
To summarise - we have a fantasy based on comics, an occult tale also based on a comic, a dose of witchcraft and a tale of the supernatural. Movies are merely entertainment of course. However popular they may be, does their popularity cast doubt on the rational nature of our culture?
Yes.
Yes.
6 comments:
If people are daft enough to spend a lot of money on this service, then they probably think that these films are documentaries.
Frankly yes. I saw Atomic Blonde last week... It revolved around unfeasible levels of violence, people walking around with knives sticking out of their backs and lots of unbelievable fighting, a script that might have been written by a hamster and delivered by hamsters... Yet the kids lapped it up. I would rate it minus 1000 but the millennials seem to lap up bullshit like mother's milk
Amazon et al are in the business of garnering a revenue stream, that's all. Who needs high culture anyway, all that poncified poetry, high art, professors of embroidery for heaven's sake. Anything with a whoosh, a bang, blood, gore and sex is good. Game of Thrones = politics 101. Almost enough to make one fork out on Baudrillard.
Unfortunately, a very large proportion of our population live in a world of "make believe". It seems to me that the only solution is to get rid of those industries that create that world, enriching themselves and destroying reality.
It is all very 17th Century, give me the age of Sheridan.
Sam - we have it mainly for the grandkids. Better value than the BBC in my view.
Graeme - yes, we used to lap up a certain amount of violence and improbability, but on nothing like the same scale as today.
Roger - yet presumably that revenue stream taps into something already there, a willingness to depart from the reality we have spent the last few centuries discovering.
Henry - destroying reality is what bothers me. We've always done it, but not with this level of intensity and excess. Reality is our greatest discovery and we are throwing it away on entertainment and politics.
Demetrius - that's exactly what it is.
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