The First Inaugural "Dan Haren Apathetic Face Awards" go to...

Baseball

By Louis Lalire

Last season was magical. It was the year that my favorite team, and baby franchise, the Washington Nationals, became relevant within the national baseball scene. They were young, talented, and when the end of September came, they'd arguably had the best season of any team. They had, inarguably, the best pitching staff (okay, not "inarguably", but it was between them and the Reds), a knack for come-from-behind wins, a lights out bullpen, and despite the fact that the offense would come and go, they played with a reckless, energetic innocence that fueled the whole team, young and old, on a nightly basis.

I lived through most of it on the other side of a radio, catching almost all of the Charlie Slowes-Dave Jaegeler broadcasts...

Side Note: It disturbs me how awesome Charlie and Dave are and how terrible Bob Carpenter and FP Santangelo--the TV crew on MASN--are. I'd be willing to bet its the largest disparagement of talent between Radio and TV teams of one franchise in all the MLB. Super Side Note: Can we create a system for weekly broadcaster power rankings? Is Vin Scully immovable at #1? Is Tim McCarver immovable at 77,000? Super Super Side Note: That's not a random number, by the way, I could name 76,999 better baseball broadcasters than Mr. "Something to Keep in Mind" McCarver himself). 

This year its been the same routine, mostly, although I've watched quite a few more games, but the mood is different. I know longer drool over when 7:10 pm will get here, nor do I get angry when I realize the Nats or on the road in LA (a 10:10 start time). I listen to each game, and I have a good time, mostly, but I know longer relish listening to these games. I do it out of necessity.My mood has reflected that of the team itself: that youthful, reckless exuberance has been subdued, as if, after winning their first division title last year, they became "too cool" for it (Side Note: this year's youthful exuberance title is going to be a down-to-the-wire race between the Red Sox--what!--the Pirates, and the Indians). The face of all this apathy: Dan fucking Haren. He was the addition to the Nats pitching staff this year and he has pitched exceptionally well recently. Too bad he was so atrociously awful the first 2/3rds of the season that his ERA still clocks in just under 5.00. The funny thing about Dan Haren is that his face when he's pitching "exceptionally well" and "atrociously awful" is EXACTLY THE SAME. Here is Dan Haren's face:

Here is Dan Haren's face after a win:

And after a loss:

When you google image, "Dan Haren having a good time", this is the 4th picture that comes up:

This guy has given up the 6th most homers in the MLB this year. Whenever he gives up one, whether its a game-tying three run shot in the seventh, or a meaningless add-on solo HR, he gives the same, "oh darn, there it goes again" expression. Hey wait! That expression, above, right there--that's it!

That's also the expression he has on as he walks to the dugout, as he shakes his teammates hands after the game, and as he's making sweet, sweet love. 

The runner-up to this year's inaugural Dan Haren award is this man: 

Rafael Soriano! No one is less excited to come into the game. His "I'm determined" face, as he walks out of the bullpen in the ninth inning, could easily be confused for, "you mean I have to walk all the way over there and pitch?" I think he started the "untuck" so that fans who'd just missed the end of the game could tell who won.

The interesting thing about these two players is that they were two of the four major moves the Nats executed in the offseason. They brought in a over-the-hill closer with a sad case of "Dan Haren face" and also brought in Dan Haren himself! And overpaid them both.

The other two moves they pulled off this off-season involved the acquisition of centerfielder Denard Span from the Twins, and the re-signing of first basemen Adam Laroche, who was coming off his best season in the majors. They came in third and fourth in this year's award race:

                         

The acquisition of Span and re-signing of Laroche meant there were three guys for two positions, which meant the Nationals had to trade this guy:

                                   

MICHAEL MORSE! I mean, the guy's walkup song had turned into the rally cry at Nationals Park. "Take on Me" by Ah Ha may still echo through the stadium, but the man who brought it there is gone. It seems though that neither the song nor the man could be away from the other, as Michael Morse has struggled mightily this year in Seattle. 

All of these offseason moves executed by GM Mike Rizzo, by the way, were heralded (by me as well) as sly moves that would improve an already improving ball club even more, and its completely ludicrous to claim that these four players' facial expressions are the sole reason for the Nationals decline this year. I mean, the clubhouse mood and feel has a limited impact on a team's success and failure, and the facial expressions of a few guys has little if any impact on the clubhouse mood of the whole team...but then again, lest not forget the powers we deal with...

                                   

                        

                                     

"Gosh darn't. There it goes again!"

The season is not over. The Braves have won the division, but the Nationals hold onto a tiny hope of a wild card. They would have to overcome either the Reds, Cardinals or Pirates, who all play each other a number of times town the stretch, and who are all immeasurably more consistent than the Nats. But I'll keep listening to Slowes and Jageler on the radio, I'll keep routing for my Nats, and I'll imagine a world in which they pull off a miraculous stretch of wins against their sub-par September competition (mostly against their division--the worst in baseball), steamroll into the playoffs as a wild card team, win the Wild Card game behind a dominant Stephen Strasburg (who'll earn his first playoff victory), carry this momentum through the Division and Conference series until they win the Pennant!!! And then I'll imagine Dan Haren in this world. But I won't have to imagine. Because it will be this:

                                                

The Nationals win the Pennant! The Nationals win the Pennant!

Who cares about apathy? God bless you Dan Haren.

10 Words or Less: An Exercise in Minimalism

Redbox Roundup: Mud and Trance

By Louis Lalire

Mud

1. Oscar-worthy

2. Southern

3. Tom & Huck

4. Character-mystery

5. Love

6. Ain't 

7. Shit

8. But

9. Hoes

10. 'n' Tricks.

(God bless hyphens!)

Mud

Lionsgate - 2013

Directed and Written by: Jeff Nichols

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Reese Witherspoon

4.5/5 Stars

MORE INFO

Trance

1. Paintings

2. Thieves

3. Boyle

4. Stylish

5. Hypnosis

6. Empowered Female

7. Empowered Contrivances

8. Twisty

9. Twistier

10. Tylennol

(God Bless Flat-out Cheating!)

Trance

Fox Searchlight - 2013

Directed by: Danny Boyle

Written by: Joe Ahearne and John Hodge

Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel

2.5/5 Stars

MORE INFO

The Last of Us and the Case for "Greatest Game Ever"

An Analysis

By Louis Lalire

Part 1: The Game

I beat The Last of Us in four sittings across four days. The rest of my time during those four days, at work, mostly, I either spent recovering from what had just occurred within the games bleak, post-apocalyptic world, or spent pondering what would happen next to the game's two leads, Joel and Ellie. For those four days I, pardon the expression, lived and breathed The Last of Us. This game is the definition of "immersion", an oft-used word within video game criticism dictating an absorption to a game so deep that the player is psychologically unable to stop playing; or, to simplify colloquially, "So good you can't put the controller down." The Last of Us achieves its own unheralded level of immersion through a genuine dedication to character and world, and the binding of the two together.

This is the first game, in my personal experience, that has been able to so organically marry character and world in such a way that its varied, multi-dimensional characters are not overshadowed by the depth of their environment. In almost all games, even the best ones, the characters take a back seat to the world. Take Bethesda Games' excellent Fallout 3, for instance: the main character is interesting for the sole reason that we play as him (or her). They are merely the device through which we explore the world. Exploring miles of digital space is something that games have been able to capture for a decade, but exploring within the psyche of characters is something that games have been very uncomfortable with. Joel and Ellie do act as this same device through which the player can explore the world, but the more prominent means of exploration in  The Last of Us is that of Joel and Ellie themselves, as well as those they come across.

Playing as Joel, you are tasked by a militia group known as the Fireflies to transport a very important 14-year old girl, Ellie, across the post-apocalyptic United States. The cause of this societal destruction is kept intentionally vague, but it involved some sort of airborne virus, which has infected much of the population and turned them into some very disgusting and scary things. The surviving humans, meanwhile, are perhaps even more dangerous––they're cannibals and cutthroats that are willing to kill you for the clothes on your back. These are the two types of enemies that Joel and Ellie will encounter in their cross country journey, and they require quite different strategy and technique to overcome.

The fact that I have already talked so much about the world is an injustice to what is at the heart of the game: the relationship between two people. A girl and a man. A man, Joel, who's had everything taken away from him and keeps on surviving, for better or for worse, and a girl, Ellie, who was born in this world, wholly curious about how life was before all hell broke loose. It is extremely rare that a video game puts so much focus on an intimate relationship between two people, and as a result the game not only achieves a visceral immersion, but an emotional one.

There are many segments in the game in which Joel and Ellie are temporarily separated, and each time this happens I am overcome with fear. Playing as Joel, I feel a basic human need to protect Ellie because I care for her, not to complete an objective. This is the fundamental key to creating immersion: the player should be completing "objectives" or "missions" or what have you, without being conscience of it. They should not complete simply to complete, but to further their relationship with the main character, and the main character's relationships with the other characters in the world. It is this critics' belief that great games cannot simply be exceptional at the hands of just great gameplay or great story, nor should gameplay and story be in competition with one another, nor is one necessarily more important than the other. A great game is created when story and gameplay are intertwined so seamlessly that the player is unable to differentiate between the two. Story is dependent on gameplay, and gameplay is dependent on story.  If one completely outweighs the other, the player's immersion is subject to breaking.

Joel and Ellie's journey is consistently grim in tone, which may turn some players off, but its also consistently unpredictable, and I mean this, again, from both a gameplay and story perspective. While stealth is often the most effective means of moving forward, each scenario you find yourself in is different. One criticism I have of the game, which is also a flaw I found in the beloved Uncharted games, also by Naughty Dog, is that from time to time the segments feel very arena-like and enclosed. Its a gameplay flaw that is well masked, but I noticed, particularly in the Pittsburgh section, a choppiness in the action. Clear or sneak pass this "arena" of guys. Walk some. Then clear this "arena" of guys. Walk a little more and then clear this "arena" of guys. Despite this qualm, the gameplay as a whole remains dynamic. Right when you get used to fighting the infected, the game throws a bunch of human enemies at you. When you get used to being stealthy, the game will throw you into a full-fledged, Uncharted-like action set piece, whether its a panicked sprint away from a tank or a group of infected, a sniper section, or a boss battle. At this juncture, I find it necessary to point out the two most thrilling sequences in the game. The first involves Joel being separated from Ellie and getting stuck in a flooded hotel basement. This sequence was truly horrifying for me, and I escaped it by using all my ammo, bombs and molotov cocktails––down to my last arrow. The second was another sequence in which Joel and Ellie are separated, and the player must play as both of them as they try to locate each other in a thick blizzard, while also evading a group of cannibals.

The story matches the intensity of the action in and out of cutscenes. I will refrain from giving story details away, but I will say that Naughty Dog has created a narrative that is not afraid to stray away from the typical one-minded pace that linear stories provide. For years, linear story tellers, with very few exceptions (most of them coming out of Japan), have seemed to be of the mindset that the player will immediately lose interest if the pace is slowed down from breakneck speed. This thought process has been consistently undermining the developers' goals to create immersion. Developers think that if they keep throwing grandiose set pieces and large explosions at players, this will prevent them from "putting the controller down." But a turnstile of explosions every five minutes do not maintain the player's excitement. What keeps someone immersed is the ability to build tension and suspense in a way that makes each explosion that much bigger, and that much more memorable.

On much broader and significant terms, The Last of Us proves that video games have the potential to connect the player to characters just as profoundly as movies can connect the viewer and books the reader. It is preposterous that the debate of whether games are art or not is still relevant. Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, Game Director and Creative Director, respectively, are artists, as are the rest of the team at Naughty Dog, and with The Last of Us they have created art. Those that still wish to try and deny that fact do so out of ignorance.




Part 2: The Greatest Game Ever

Video Games are by far the most difficult medium to attempt to derive a "greatest of" list from because they are constantly improving. Video game purists and old school gamers may want to scream at me for saying this, but it is difficult to deny. Technological advancements, unlike in music and film, have a direct correlation with product quality in the world of gaming. It is a worthless exercise to compare The Last of Us with Tetris (1984) or Super Mario World (1990) (or even, for that matter, to compare Super Mario World to Tetris).

Despite the technological advancements that have occurred in film, for example, sound, color, etc., they have little to no effect on our critical understanding of the medium. From a 2013 perspective, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, a silent film, can still create a deeper emotional response from its audience than J.J. Abram's Star Trek Into Darkness, a film in color, with sound, and, possibly, in IMAX (side note: I really do enjoy Into Darkness, by the way.). Just because Star Trek is ultimately more technically impressive by today's standards, that has little effect on the aspects of film that are timeless: story and character. In gaming, nothing is timeless. What makes a game special, the pillars that must combine to create an immersive experience: story, character, gameplay, and world, are all at least somewhat dependent on technology. For example, from a 2013 perspective, it is impossible to argue that Metal Gear Solid (1998) is a better game than The Last of Us. The world of The Last of Us is aesthetically pleasing, each house you enter is fully realized, and a college you visit and the city of Pittsburgh have a scope and size unseen in games not long ago. Technology creates this depth, it allows the world to be realized to this extent. The characters of The Last of Us, through impressive use of mo-cap, create facial expressions and body language that convey subtle emotions without even speaking. Technology creates this depth, it allows these characters to be realized to this extent. Video games are heavily dependent on a writers vision and an artists vision and a level designers vision and so on, but, alas, they are still very dependent on the technology itself, and what allows, far more than artists in film and music and literature. This is what creates such a conundrum when one tries to make a "greatest of" video games list. In 1998, Metal Gear Solid may have been one of the five greatest games in existence, but not today. By today's standards, it is still a good game, but its characters seem dull and emotionless, and its gameplay simple and its AI stupid.

By no means am I arguing that if a game is newer it is definitely better. I am arguing that technology has far more of an impact on video games than any other comparable medium, so, naturally, as technology improves, games, in general, will improve. And to flip this sentence onto itself, this also means that games do not last like movies and songs. Their dependence on current technology diminishes their value over time, and technology has improved so rapidly over video games' short lifespan, that it is pointless to argue, when nostalgia is removed from the equation, that the best game of twenty years ago, or ten years ago, can match up to the best game today. Spyro the Dragon is one of my five favorite games of all time, and I still play it at least once a year. But it has become one of my favorite games through my own personal experience with it. I grew up with it. If I were to look at it through an omnipresent eye, it would be silly to argue that its one of the five greatest games ever.

It is important to form a distinction between "greatest" and "most influential." How does one define "greatest"?  I believe it is some combination of immersion, influence, and innovation. There is no correct formula, for any medium that is, but out of these three criteria, "immersive" must be deemed the most important, because it is the most measurable. There is still very measurable value in originality and innovation within the video game world, but these things are much more difficult to quantify. One could convince me that Metal Gear Solid was more groundbreaking and influential for the stealth genre than The Last of Us is. However, you would be unable to convince me that this makes Metal Gear Solid better than the The Last of Us, a game insurmountably more complex and intricate in its gameplay, more sensitive and subtle in its depiction of character and world, and exponentially more immersive. It creates a more profound and emotionally involved experience for the player than any other game today, and more than any game in the past had the technology to do. This is my case for why The Last of Us is the greatest game of all time, and why, in 2017, it definitively won't be.

The Last of Us

Developed by Naughty Dog
Produced by Sony Computer Entertainment 
Rated M

Goldfinger and the Importance of Pace in Escapist Cinema

An Analysis

By Louis Lalire

Goldfinger is about to be 50 years old, but it’s a George Clooney 50, not a Mickey Rourke one. It has, along with many early Bond films, proven to be extremely durable, playing just as well in 2013 as it did when it grossed 51 million in 1964. It’s a film that encourages, begs even, for repeat viewings.

This is in large part due to its understanding of pace. It may seem like it breezes by, and that you have briefly left your surroundings and taken a short detour from life, which, in the end, should be the main goal of all escapist cinema such as this. Unfortunately, escapist cinema has become so that it is less focused on creating a pace determined by a film’s narrative than one determined by “one-upping” or outdoing the technical capability of what came before. The stakes must be higher and the action must be louder. This tendency is not what convinces an intellectual audience to dive into this detour of action/adventure surrealism, and it has led to some atrociously boring films in recent times, in which the firefights, explosions and car chases that once provided the thrills have now become mindlessly redundant. This is admittedly a generalization, spawned from being frequently disappointed this blockbuster season, but it has become so that even when the action is visually impressive, it is more arduous than exhilarating. The bloated, chaotic scenes of violence in Man of Steel and The Lone Ranger, for example, seem scared to stop, as if they fear they lack the substance to allow the audience to sit back and breath, a fear that is compounded by the fact that these extended scenes of violence almost always bring any sort of narrative momentum to a halt. Instead of thinking of original ways to create action scenes, Hollywood is using the same formula over and over again, just making it a little longer each time. What Hollywood is essentially telling us is that it is decidedly more exciting and satisfying to see Superman crash through eight Metropolis skyscrapers as opposed to three.

Goldfinger is a film from an era long ago, before the term “blockbuster season” existed. It would be scary to think about how Goldfinger would look if it were made today: perhaps two and a half hours long, with the golf scene being replaced by something more boisterous and the final conflict at Fort Knox being drawn out an extra 15 minutes. But Goldfinger as it stands, despite being an old man and far more technically limited than any action film is today, remains exciting and satisfying through its supreme understanding of pace. It’s comparable in this sense to the original Star Wars, another action film that has held up over the years despite the fact that, by today’s high standards, is technically limited (Sorry for this interjection, I had to get a Star Wars reference in here).

The pace of Goldfinger, written by Richard Maibaum and directed by Guy Hamilton, is one of the main reasons that it has been used as a model for countless other Bonds, a series that has not, it should be noted, been immune to the “one-upping” syndrome of action movies. The film starts out with an action set piece, the first of what would become known as the “pre-titles sequences” within the Bond canon, meaning an action scene often unaffiliated with the main plot that precedes the opening credits.  In Goldfinger, and in many other Bond films for that matter, the pre-titles sequence’s goal is to engage the audience from the moment the curtains open by, as the expression goes, “starting with a bang.” The film historian in me wants to say that the idea of blasting off with a large action set piece originated with Goldfinger, but that may be entirely false. What is true is that this strategy has been replicated in hundreds of action films; think of the D-day opening in Saving Private Ryan or the Joker’s bank heist in The Dark Knight.

Goldfinger opens with an infiltration that involves Bond planting some plastic explosives, before he unveils a tuxedo below his wet suit and steps into a bar for a moment, when the resulting detonation occurs and he returns to his hotel room, where he narrowly evades an assassination attempt, before deadpanning the now famous line "Shocking. Positively shocking," to his electrocuted victim and his sexy, double-crossing night partner. In short, it is 6 minutes of fun at the beginning of the film that not only start things “off with a bang” (shoot me if I use that again), but also introduces us, in this case, re-introduces us, to our hero. Six minutes is all we need to remember how much of a bad ass James Bond is.

One of the biggest concerns it seems, within the action genre, is the avoidance of a lull after the opening action set piece. This section of any film usually deals with more exposition than any other, and the goal must be to disguise the exposition in a manner so that the audience takes it all in without being completely conscious of it. It is this section that most action film aficionados would agree is the dullest of most genre films, and, yet, in Goldfinger, it is perhaps the best sequence of the entire movie. The obstacles are as follows: we must introduce Bond’s mission and explain it, we must introduce Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe/Michael Collins) and give an impression of who he is, and we must vaguely explain Goldfinger’s plan (or in this case explain what MI6 thinks his plan is: smuggling gold across country borders in order to sell it at a much higher market value). The reason that this sequence of Goldfinger excels is because it disguises much of this necessary exposition well and always feels as if it’s building to something, despite the absence of a large, follow-up action set piece. Bond and Goldfinger butt heads in both cheeky and hostile ways. First Bond foils Goldfinger’s gin rummy scheme, which explicates Goldfinger’s over-competitive nature as well as his penchant for blondes. Then, Goldfinger suffocates and kills Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) by painting her gold (fucking painting her gold! still gets me), which introduces us to his deadly henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and also tells us a lot about Goldfinger himself: how far he is willing to go, how little he cares for those close to him, how little thought he gives before having someone killed, and, of course, how much he loves “gooooooold”, while also reinforcing his over-competitive nature. The final part of this exposition-laden section is filled by Bond’s meetings with M and Q, both of which set up major payoffs later in the film. A foremost aspect of the meaning behind “building towards something” is the idea of a set-up and a payoff. The Q scene in Goldfinger in which Q (Desmond Llewelyen) shows Bond his cool new toy, the Aston Martin DB5, and all the tricks it has to offer is now famous. But no one would care about the oil slick, the machine gun headlights or, most significantly, the ejector seat that make this Q scene so well-remembered if we didn’t get the payoff later in the film, in which all of these gadgets are put to perfect use.

 That is the reason why, to briefly discuss another Bond film for a moment, the exploding pen from Goldeneye is such a memorable gadget. Near the end of the film, Bond uses the exploding to pen to escape. Even though Q has lectured us about the exploding pen, by the time we get to the finale in which Bond is captured at Alec Trevelyan’s (Sean Beam's) underwater base, we have all but completely forgotten about the pen. And we have no idea how Bond is going to escape until we get that sudden moment of realization…“Oh shit! Boris is clicking the exploding pen right now!”

A great payoff is dependent on two things, 1) that there is a set-up and 2) that the set-up is so far out of our minds by the time the payoff rolls around that we are completely unprepared for it, until that is, we are hit with that “Oh shit!” moment. What you can essentially boil Goldfinger down to is a series of well-constructed and well-executed set-ups and payoffs: Bond learning about Goldfinger’s over-competitive nature sets up Bond using this against him to win a game of “strict rules of golf,”; Goldfinger’s thoughtless double-crossing and murder of Jill sets up his thoughtless double-crossing and murder of his mafia colleagues, as well as his business partner Mr. Ling (Burt Kwouk); Goldfinger’s murder of Jill sets up her sister’s, Tilly Masterson’s (Tania Mallet), assassination attempts on Goldfinger;  Goldfinger’s use of the Delta 9 Nerve Gas to kill his mafia colleagues sets up what we think is the mass murder of thousands using the Delta 9 Nerve Gas during the final action set piece; Bond warning Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) about firing guns on planes sets up Bond killing Goldfinger by doing just that; Oddjob using his bowler hat to slice off the head of a stone statue sets up Oddjob using his hat to kill Tilly Masterson (side note: poor, poor Masterson sisters. You could practically have a Saving Private Ryan-esque spinoff in which Bond is tasked by the government to track down the last of the Masterson sisters and return her home, safely to her mother, after being pretty much directly responsible for the death of both of her sisters, Tilly and Jill. Only thing is that she's being pursued by an evil mute named Oddjob! Who wouldn’t want to watch that movie!); a scene showing Goldfinger’s car being loaded onto an airplane sets up a scene showing the car itself being melted down into gold bars (which also serves as the payoff for how he is transporting gold across country borders); a scene showing Bond overhearing the words “operation grand slam” sets up a scene in which Bond avoids being split in two by a giant, gold-powered laser, by convincing Goldfinger he knows what “operation grand slam” is; that same introduction of the giant, gold-powered laser sets up its use in breaking into Fort Knox in the action finale. The list could go on and on with examples of set-ups and payoffs of varying degrees of importance and subtlety that are littered throughout and that drive the film forward. The one payoff in Goldfinger that is not completely satisfying and thus not satisfactorily set-up is Pussy Galore’s double-crossing of Goldfinger. It is reliant on the idea that having sex with James Bond is so life-changing that it causes women to rethink their morality. It is the least logical facet in the film and a lazy set-up and payoff, something that has, in today’s cinema, become a major, widespread problem within the action genre.

It is my belief that most writers and directors have either overlooked the importance or lost the touch for executing a compelling set up and payoff. Writers, filmmakers and studio heads are often guilty for either one of two things: 1) they are so worried about having a so-called “lull” in the first half of the film that they skip the set-up altogether and bombard the audience with payoff after payoff until they no longer deserve to be described as such or 2) they are so worried about the audience’s lack of intelligence and short attention span that they will have a set-up which will be paid off minutes later. When payoffs become this obvious they are ineffective. Christopher Nolan has practically gained a religious following simply by being one of the few directors of action today who understands how to set-up a rewarding payoff.

The mastery of set-ups and payoffs is what makes Goldfinger so entertaining, fun, and enduring. The execution or lack of execution of these set-ups and payoffs, however major or minor they may be within the narrative of the film, helps create the impression of having things like “momentum” and “fast pace.” A fast pace distracts us. It can effectively disguise loads of exposition. It makes it easier for the audience to take the detour from reality and get lost in the surreal world of action and adventure and sex that a great James Bond film can create, and that all escapist and blockbuster cinema focuses on creating. The problem is not that Hollywood has forgotten that cinema has the ability to liberate us from everyday life, to the contrary escapist cinema is more prominent now than perhaps ever. The problem is that Hollywood has forgotten the keys to getting the audience to take the detour.

An over-emphasis has been put on technical bravado and having bigger and better explosions than the film that came out the week prior, and an under-emphasis has been put on what makes a big explosion feel BIG. To a modern audience, the explosions of a fifty year old movie like Goldfinger are unable to appear big from a technical standpoint, after years of innovation in visual effects, but they do indeed still appear BIG from a narrative standpoint, because they've been set up in such a way that the audience can relish in the delightfully satisfying payoffs that they provide, and that feeling has a timeless effect.