"You're gonna see some serious shit"

Imagine the excitement of a fully grown boy after learning that Back to the Future is coming to UK cinemas in October. I don’t want to lower the tone and use the term “jizzed in my pants” because the film doesn’t deserve that, I love it too much. Instead I jumped for joy, not literally, but you get the picture, I’m quite excited and not in a perverse way.
I am in a perpetual state of ambivalence when trying to choose my favourite film. Back to the Future or Die Hard. It’s too difficult, it’s like choosing a favourite nipple, if you could ever have a favourite nipple that is. Either way, I love Back to the Future as much as I love Die Hard. Who doesn’t? I don’t want to lie and say that something hip like Amélie is my favourite. It doesn’t make me any cooler, and I haven’t even seen it. No, I’m just like everyone else, and why not? A great film should have universal appeal.
Look back on the last decade and try to remember a handful of truly great films. Somewhere within the hundred franchises there must be something good, it’s just hard to remember any. I was born in 87, the 90’s should be the decade I think of most fondly, but the music was shit, and most films made then look really dated now, where 80’s movies have somehow aged really well. Maybe in 10 years time Jurassic Park will be as fun as Ghostbusters is now.
It’s costing more and more money to see a film at the cinema, add the extra cost of 3D and it’s more likely only seven people actually saw Avatar. You could probably make a film for the cost of taking a family to see Look Who’s Talking in 3D. The success of a film is dependant on its profit, not its quality, and it doesn’t matter that I liked Superman Returns, it didn’t make enough money for Warner Bros. and thus was labelled a failure (it still made $391m). All three Pirates of the Caribbean films were deemed successful however, despite not being very good. For all this extra money, films should be better now than they used to be, so why aren’t they?
Film has become a business over art, and it may take re-releasing a film like Back to the Future to make everyone remember the point of it all. There’s more heart and soul in Back to the Future than there has been in all of the highest grossing movies of the last decade. Who watches all three Bourne movies back to back and then feels good about life at the end? No one. I once watched the Matrix trilogy back to back and proceeded to take every colour pill I could find, I couldn’t take life after that horrible experience. I feel good about myself when I watch Back to the Future, and this is what’s missing in cinema today.
Slumdog Millionaire was pitched as a feel good movie because we’ve forgotten what one is. A young boy has his eyes gouged out in it, how is that feel good? “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”, that’s feel good! As intense and spectacular as Inception may have been, it didn’t exactly have me bursting with vigour at the end. I’m not saying every film should be all about ribbons and unicorns, but modern films lack an energy that films in the 80’s had.
The few films I’ve seen this year with that kind of energy haven’t taken the world by storm. Youth In Revolt, Kick-Ass, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (more to come on that) are all great films in my mind, but no one has seen them. It’s not as if they are complex concepts, people understood Inception anyway, so what’s the deal? Has the world dumbed down so much that we can’t even understand the plot of these films? Or perhaps we can’t suspend disbelief, but the highest grossing films of last year were Avatar, Harry Potter 6, and Ice Age 3. Tall blue aliens, wizards, and talking animals, we can suspend disbelief for these, but when it comes to a boy in a green wet suit, that’s just stupid, oh no, I’m not seeing that, it looks shit. Fuck off world, you’re an idiot.
It makes me wonder if they will change bits of Back to the Future when it’s re-released so people get it, and Spielberg produced it so anything could happen. I can just picture George Lucas whispering into his ear about how it shouldn’t be Libyan terrorists chasing Doc Brown, it should be the American government because, you know, that’s relevant. When Doc says “You’re gonna see some serious shit”, it will now be “You’re gonna see some serious bananas”, and Hayden Christensen’s face will be super imposed over every other character’s face. So Mr Spielberg, stop hanging out with this total prick, he’s giving you a bad name, just leave the fucking movie as it is!
I will love seeing Back to the Future at the cinema but I don’t want to see a trend of re-releasing old movies, but that just may well happen. As old songs are being re-released in the charts and selling more records, it will probably work for films, and as good as getting to experience the 80’s at the cinema would be, they won’t do that. Avatar Special Edition is out at the cinemas soon. It hasn’t even been a year and they are re-releasing it! We really are that stupid then I guess.