Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu is currently in Bosnia to collect the Heart award at the 2019 Sarajevo Film Festival.
Iñárritu took the time to offer up a scathing screed of the current state of cinema in 2019 [via Variety]. Coming off being President of the Jury at this past May’s Cannes Film Festival, Iñárritu is concerned that movies are moving at too-fast a pace and that our luring 21st century eyeballs cannot keep up with the rhythms made popular by serialized narratives on Television. The filmmaker went on to add that film “needs much more contemplation, a little bit more patience” and to be “more mysterious, more impenetrable, more poetic, more soulful.”
“The language is changing, the need of plot and narrative is so much that it’s starting to deform the way we can explore themes,” he said. “People are very impatient now, they are like: ‘Give me more. Kill somebody! Do something.'”
He added that films of the past “were exploring different ways of telling stories, trying to push language. Those have disappeared. Now it’s the big tentpoles… or the TV streaming experience.
The last part is quite interesting. Just this decade we’ve had movies which explored different and original ways of telling a story; movies such as “Under the Skin,” “The Master,” “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Upstream Color,” “Dogtooth,” “Carol,” “Holy Motors,” “Uncle Boonmee,” “Margaret,” “The Tree of Life” — all of which would never air on Television because, well, these movies are far removed from what is currently allowed, narratively-speaking, on the small screen and would isolate audiences. That is why cinema will last longer than people are willing to believe. A series like David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” was such a landmark event because of that very reason; there was absolutely nothing like it on television. It’s almost too crazy to think of any other network except Showtime having the gutso to air all 18 episodes of ‘The Return,’ which was incredibly artsy and barely had a plot.
New Yorker film critic Richard Brody explained the creative roots of our current cinematic dilemma quite well, pointing to Television’s knack for trying to recreate classic Hollywood instead of moving towards more risk-taking storytelling: "The very mode of analysis invoked by a series—in which the parsing of character and study of intention take precedence—is the one for which “The Godfather” seems to have been created, and which, for that matter, those films may have created. Francis Ford Coppola should properly be considered the founder of modern television."
I wouldn't call this film great — it stops short of that because of how neatly it resolves itself — but I'll give Rock his due here: this is much better than his previous directorial effort, "Top Five."