What Is Missing In Films Today

What's Missing

"What's missing in movies today that movies in the past possessed in spades is charm, which is one of the qualities that endears an audience to a film and gives it longevity. Special effects have mowed down all other qualities in film, and it's time to get back to what made films in the past great. Only an empty-headed, technology-crazed society would think that special effects are enough. Charm is a quality that both characters and story need if a film is to become a classic and survive from generation to generation. It is a quality that a society needs if it is to survive. Charm is the quality that marks all Pixar pictures. What better endorsement do you need than that?

Another quality that is missing from most films today is grace. Fortunately, it does appear occasionally, as it did this year in The Blind Side. When a film has grace, audiences love it and realize there is something different about that film. It's a quality that you can't get enough of, and it makes you want what the characters in the film have. It's God's fingerprint on a film.

Another missing quality is discretion, which is the better part of valor. Directors today want to show everything. They don't leave anything to the imagination. That is not good artistry, nor is it good humanity...By showing everything, directors today are raising an ante that future directors cannot possibly meet. There will eventually be a point at which a director will not be able to show any more nudity, any more violence, any more realism. At that point, movies will degenerate into something more perverse, or disintegrate entirely. It's time to get back to discretion in film, and life.

Do you realize that while the Motion Picture Production Code was in effect, which was from 1934 to 1968, the greatest films that have ever been made - the films we today call "classics" - were produced? 1939, the year when the Code was at its height, has been called the greatest year of cinema. More classic films were produced that year than in any year since. Today, there is no Code. Producers can make anything they like, and they are churning out the trash as fast as they can... and people are buying it.

There's something to be said for discipline. Having restraint makes one more creative. If you can do anything, you will, and it will be the same old anything that everyone else is doing. I'd like to see us get back to a Production Code in this country. I think it would give us better films. But it will take the American public demanding it of our government. It was the threat of government intervention that got the Motion Picture Association of America to come up with the Code the first time. It can happen again if we make it happen." ~Waitsel Smith

Excerpted from "Waitsel's Best Movies of 2009." Text © 2010 Waitsel Smith.