I found this excellent film site via Powerline. Note this critique of what passed for art at the Sundance Film Festival. A snippet:
Not always, but for the most part, a dark, cynical take on things is the easy way out for an artist. Politics aside, the glut of these kinds of films reflects a dearth of talent in contemporary filmmaking. Successful art makes its audience feel something. So, a piece of art in the form of a film that makes the viewer feel ugly, dirty, depressed, or ill is in itself successful, but it’s much more difficult to uplift an audience.
A shot of a rancid maggot covered piece of meat can make an audience feel something. And any pretentious moron in a beret can call it a metaphor for anything. But if you want to make an audience feel good it takes more than a shot of a flower. It takes music and lighting and mood. It takes talent.
I do not desire a return to the regime of the Hays Code, which was surely too restrictive, but one could argue that better films were made under its restrictions than under the open regime starting in the early 60s. Indeed, in my opinion the worst era of Hollywood film is from the mid-60s through the 1970s as Hollywood drank deeply from the draught of new found freedom, all the way down to the dreck at the bottom of the cup. Hollywood (and entertainment in general) now too often goes for the cheap thrill of coarse language, blood and guts, crude sexual innuendo and vulgar humor. This is not talent but cheap gimmicks. Film noir flourished under the production code, even a film like The Big Sleep that had a subplot involving pornography. Hitchcock could make tremendous films of thrills and eroticism without resorting to vulgarity. For example, in To Catch A Thief, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant go on a picnic. Kelly offers chicken to Grant and, with a mischievous look in her eye, inquires, "Would you like a thigh or a breast." Now that's clever film making.
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