Covid Has Killed the Movies Dead

     My older brother and I love to watch movies on a big screen. The experience kind of takes us back to those childhood Saturdays where we could watch two and a cartoon. Back in the day, we kind of had the feeling that all of the movies we watched deserved the big screen treatment, and it was easy to see that the people who made them were proud of what they turned out whether it was one of those crazy B movie Sci-Fi things where the monster was wearing a latex suit, or something more elaborate like Gone With the Wind or Justice at Nuremberg. Nowadays though, anyone can stream a movie on their cell phone and watch it in the back of an Uber or in church. Hell, any piss ant with a cell phone can make a movie.

    We're both retired and sometimes we have to wait a month before there is something we actually want to see, and we do get disappointed an awful lot, a whole lot more than we are used to. We saw a movie recently where one of the opening scenes featured an elephant's ass blowing wet feces all across the screen. It was a big budget movie too. I don't care how you cut it, it'd be hard to be proud of a movie where you coat the audience's vision with wet elephant shit before you even get started. And you're not really a movie maker when you do shit like that, but more of a performance artist. You know, like that Gaga woman who obscures her real singing talent by doing stupid shit like wearing prime sirloin cuts of meat as a dress for a Gala event. I'm kind of old school that way and was raised thinking that you don't wear cuts of meat to big events, you eat them, I don't care how important the event was either. I suppose it might have been a way to get discovered without the obligatory attendance at a P. Diddy party, but it comes off looking more like you're still trying to snag an invite. Besides, I'm guessing that there are still a lot of us willing to forgo such a shot at fame, wealth, and celebrity if it meant exchanging our boxer briefs for a skirt steak.

       Three of our most anticipated choices this past year were huge disappointments. For example, Martin Scorsese's The Killer's of the Flower Moon had such a great premise, but Scorsese forgot to film the middle third of the story, and then there was that cringey opening where he explained how he felt compelled to make the movie. I read the book, and it was a shameless glorification of J Edgar Hoover creating the  fledgling FBI. I think maybe old Marty was just trying to get ahead of the story, so that his Hollywood buddies wouldn't really think that he working at the behest of law enforcement or something. Hell, in Hollywood nowadays, that would get you banished to making infomercials for air-friers or non-stick skillets.

       Next, there was Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga Chapter I, another movie with an interesting premise that was totally screwed up by the lack of an ending. It was one thing to have so many side stories that you needed a remote control on rewind in order to keep up with what who was doing what to who, but then he didn't wrap up a single one of the many storylines before launching into a thirty minute preview of upcoming events from Chapter II, II, IV, etc., and never give us in the audience any kind of an ending to the movie we were watching. That is not how shit is done in the real world, or at least the real world prior to Covid. You show previews after the movie has ended, everyone knows that, or used to anyway.

         Most recently, it was Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, another fascinating premise that F2 Coppola managed to screw-up by, in my opinion, trying to impersonate Quentin Tarantino. It was hard to tell what was going on half of the time, we were literally in the dark and all. It was like he was making a pastiche of subliminal messages in order to insert them into a movie and ran out of time and forgot to make the movie. This is the guy who made Godfather II, arguably the greatest movie of all time, a master manipulator of the narrative arc, so I know that he knows, or used at some point what a well developed and concise narrative does for a movie.

    I know there are going to be plenty of people who are going to say these movies are works of art and that these guys making them are geniuses. And I won't  argue that point, in regards, to the three I mentioned. But there are people who think Jack Black is a genius, and he wrote lyrics to a Grammy nominated CD about spilling his seed onto a woman's butt cleavage. I could have wrote shit like that when I was twelve, and I damn sure weren't no genius. He also endorsed Joe Biden for president and pretended Biden was doing wonderful when they had to stick a tracking device in his underwear to keep him from wondering off. Things is you have to be careful slinging that term around or you risk wearing it out describing something that is the textbook definition of mundane.

     There is definitely something wrong with Hollywood these days.

  Which brings me to my original premise that Covid has killed Hollywood. I think it died in a hospital bed on a breathing machine. It started to have respiratory problems about the same time all of its stars retreated up into their barricaded castles in the hills and started filming themselves singing "Imagine there's no heaven,"and urging the rest of us to sing along with them at a time that the rest of us were wondering how we were going to wipe our ass without toilet paper. I think some shady young dude snuck in the hospital room and pulled the plug on Hollywood. And that dude was probably the first one on the scene to offer his condolences to the grieving family as the doctors wrote Covid 19 in the blank as the cause of death. Everyone at the funeral was murmuring amongst themselves it nothing was ever the same after the pandemic.

      The death did clear the way forward for people who believed that covering a screen with elephant shit was an act of genius, the critics who tripped over themselves to give a 98% approval rating to the movie Road Trip which was the second worse movie I've ever seen, the people who green-lighted the movie Strays I which was the worst movie ever made, and for the suits so afraid of Quentin Tarantino that they couldn't bring themselves to tell him to leave that fucking flame thrower in the shed so as not ruin his best opportunity to create a masterpiece.

        In truth, Hollywood died in a lot more ways than that, it died in as damn near many ways to die as there are death scenes in the movies.

It was hit by a car on the way to meet a lover on the top of the Empire State Building so that they could attend a P. Diddy party together.

It was poisoned by a power mad bank president when he was caught trying to launder money from Epstein's offshore bank account.

It was shot and hung upside down after a bloody coup after telling the villagers that everything was hunky dory and those same villagers got tired of dining on the peanut shells the celebrities were tossing down from the parapets.

It hung itself in a closet after looking in a mirror and seeing what it had become (which ironically was, a performance artist totally lacking in new tricks as all of its former fans moved on to the wunderkind who introduced the movie going public to the wonders of whale shit and Octopi engaging in oral sex in a sci-fi romantic comedy, a wunderkind who showed up to receive his Oscar wearing a tux made out of the recycled clothing found at a homeless encampment in Malibu.

It died of a broken heart after realizing what it was in comparison to what it could have been.

Old Hollywood has died in a variety of Hollywood endings, but its ghost still lingers on like a wet fart in a nursing home on Chile Bean Wednesday. And its malevolent influence will continues to be felt indefinitely until either the audience somehow wakes up from this bad dream that we are currently in, or somebody remembers, ironically from the movies, what it takes to bring a vampire down.