the Why in the How

"All that despicable Hollywood trash with its boring body counts" is how one Reader / Commenter describes the present state of Film, at the end of a New Republic article by David Thomson.

The Reader goes on to Comment, {Quote}:
Not every movie can be great truth-telling literature.... I'd more than settle for decent escapism -- slick entertainment with a gleam in the eye, a heart in the right place, and maybe even a little food for thought. For that, I have to go to the DVDs, because I'm not seeing it at the theaters anymore....

Our mainstream movies today, it seems, have not only abandoned story, and character, and photography -- in short, both style and substance, the entire art. They're downright cruel, besides. They're vicious, vulgar, sadistic, inhuman. What used to be called thrillers, like North by Northwest, have given way to the mainstreaming of horror shlock -- the dubious pleasure I'll never understand in seeing young, pretty people butchered or tortured or, most benignly, "dragged to Hell." They made perfectly decent "Hitchcockian thrillers" with some regularity right up through the 90s. It was the default dramatic genre for the adult audience. Now, the whole genre is gone, and Brian De Palma gets laughed at whenever he tries to resurrect it....
So, we adults can no longer rely on a steady stream of stylish suspense movies or sweet romantic comedies,... the best of which transcended their genres but not too much, and gave us great memorable moments that were great because the audience was involved. Now, it's horror or [a current actress], the adventures of [awful people] as chronicled in films like The Hangover, or some action-movie atrocity that would be beneath contempt if it weren't so profitable.
{end Quote / Comment}
----------------------------  And he answers another Reader's Comment which discusses the greatness of The Godfather, saying that one 'never gets tired' of watching it -- OK, ya set up Comment Man now...! --

{Quote / Comment}---------I don't know.... I get tired watching The Godfather every time I try -- the gangster picture as oil painting with gilt frame. It's so serious, heavy-handed, long-winded, and I don't like a single damn character in the whole damn epic saga. And, when I say "like," I don't mean, "Oh, he's a nice fellow I'd like to know." I mean, appreciate, empathize with, become involved with -- like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, still the best gangster picture for my money, and a pretty honest one. When I watch the Godfather, though, I keep wanting someone to say, as Annabella Sciorra did in another honest gangster movie, The Funeral, "'They're criminals because they've never risen above their heartless, illiterate upbringing. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, romantic about it."
{end Quote / Comment}

If he could only learn to form an opinion.

I was actually thinking about some of this -- I saw a documentary about movies & it said that when Sound was introduced in 1929 it caused seismic change in how movies were made, content, who could star in them -- (some of the stars of the earlier silent films had funny voices or accents and couldn't "translate" into the new movies that included sound, nicknamed "Talkies") -- and it said the way the MGM studio responded was to start putting singing & dancing in, like, every movie.

It became a constant formula, for a while.  They showed a clip of Clark Gable singing and dancing to "Puttin' On The Ritz" -- atypical, to say the least, & the narrator said his fans didn't like it -- it was not what they paid to see, and to look up to.  But that was how it was -- for a while the studio pushed almost every performer to sing and dance.  Theory:  Now that we have the technology, we have to use it.  ALL
THE
TIME.

The studio, and the industry, outgrew this limited vision eventually.  I was thinking a few years ago that some movies have so much cutting -- from one scene to another, one image to another -- cut cut cut cut cut until I'm thinking -- OK, I can't see anything I don't know what's supposed to be happening.  The super-fast cuttingcuttingcutting is -- well -- fast, but -- it isn't helping me or the story....

And then I read something in a magazine that said something new ("digital technology" I think) had allowed them to fit more cuts and skips into film than had been possible before, so it was kind of like when Sound was invented -- they have the technology, so they have to use it. 
All The Time And A Lot.

Use the Available Technology FOR something, not for its own sake. ...

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