Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Whenever people complain that the quality of today's movies is not as good as, say, the movies of the 1970s or the 1950s or 1930s, it's generally been my habit to wonder if they're remembering the hits and forgetting the misses -- in other words, if they're nostalgically overvaluing the time periods that produced Singin' In The Rain or Taxi Driver or Gone With the Wind while forgetting the dozens, if not hundreds, of lousy films that must have been produced during those periods. I used to watch some of the movies that showed up on AMC in the middle of the night or in the afternoon and thought, "My God, they used to make some bad movies." It's also been my general belief that in any particular time period, the people living in that period are the least adequate to the task of judging the art they're producing -- whether it's movies, music, architecture or anything else. This is because such judgments are two-pronged: greatness depends not just on inherent qualities but also on the roads taken after, and since by definition the people in a given epoch are not able to foretell what is to come, they can only basically judge works on the basis of their own response to it, which is colored mainly by what's gone before. So, to return to my original statement above, I tend to not get worked up when someone tells me how bad today's movies are. I figure we'll know in twenty or thirty years how our movies were. Not now.

But then, maybe I'm wrong and our filmmakers really are a bankrupt bunch of yutzes.

I'm trying to think of a film project I would less like to see. I'm not having much success.