Picture this: the year is 1994, you’re an average moviegoer, and you need to decide if you’re going to spend your carefully-budgeted funds on a ticket to Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, or Pulp Fiction. Thirty years on, no greater three-way cinematic war has ever arisen.
There is a reason that these three films are still remembered beyond their shared theatrical timeframe. Who could forget Oscar darling Forrest Gump, which followed Tom Hanks on a humorous, yet emotionally resonant romp through American history, and celebrated not taking life too seriously, and instead feeling life as it occurs?
Or what of Pulp Fiction, the influential crime picture and Quentin Tarantino’s primary claim to fame? A film so entrenched in its references and homages, that it continues to be quoted and stolen from to this day?
And then there’s The Shawshank Redemption, the then-overlooked and now very much not-overlooked Stephen King adaptation, whose song of resilience and belief in our ability to rise to the occasion has been sung for generations.
All three are unforgettable films that shared the remarkable privilege of each other’s company. And how is social media choosing to mark their shared thirty-year anniversary? By complaining that movies suck now, apparently. Need evidence? Check out these grouchy exhibits from X.
“They forgot how to make movies since.” “Art was real.” (Etc.) …Is this not completely and utterly fascinating? All of these complaints are being hurled at the movie industry for its reliance on legacy sequels and nostalgia bait, and yet nostalgia for 1994, back when “art was real,” is precisely what’s prompting these very same complaints.
Folks, great art is no more an anomaly today than it was back in 1994. Whoever insists that there are no great movies these days is simply making no effort to seek them out. Did these doomsayers miss the memo on The Iron Claw, Sing Sing, Oppenheimer, Anatomy of a Fall, Whiplash, Licorice Pizza, Moonlight, and far too many other films to count?
Look, I get it; cynicism is easy to latch onto as we all try to navigate the world, and in the context of Hollywood, it’s far from unwarranted (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, for instance, was a blatantly predatory production). This is all the more reason, however, to be sincere in our efforts to seek out truly great movies. Indeed, if we’d rather complain about the easily-accessible films of today than put in the effort to find the great films of today, then it’s not the film industry that’s the problem; it’s us.
All this to say, don’t ever use social media as a basis for grounding your reality. Most of these accounts probably aren’t real people anyway, and were designed specifically to make the world feel far more hopeless than it actually is. Now, chin up, and go watch The Iron Claw. Bring tissues for the tears, and a stopwatch so as to time your standing ovation.