Movie Trends, Part 3: “Did movies get better or worse in 2010?”

We end our 3-part dipping of the toe in end-of-year movie analysis with perhaps the perfect article. Perfect because it basically says, “Who the hell knows what’s happening.” It’s from the LA Times “24 Frames” blog: Did movies get better or worse in 2010?. And guess what? It references none other than Brooks Barnes:

The end of the year tends to prompt reflection on all things on God’s green earth, including what for film buffs is perhaps the most important thing of all — the state of our movie culture. So that subject was already much on people’s minds when a New York Times article this week about studios’ willingness to gamble on original ideas began kicking up some dust, eliciting both scoffs and nods of agreement. And it made everyone, including us at 24 Frames, wonder if movies as a whole got better or worse in 2010.

Is it possible to say both?

Of course, there’s no objective truth on any of this — one man’s mess is another man’s masterpiece — but a lot of us may have had a general feeling that it was a tale of two seasons. The summer brought more than its typical share of live-action critical clunkers — for every “Inception” there was an “A-Team,” a “Last Airbender,” or a “Grown-Ups” — while the fall seemed to yield an unusually large number of gems.

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The widening in quality between summer and fall films may not be an accident. As studios continue to go for sequels and brand-driven films — not exactly the place one looks for creativity — big-budget summer releases find themselves in a creative rut.

Meanwhile, the independent-film world, still reeling from a shakeout, may be experiencing a cream-rising-to-the-top effect. It’s possible “Black Swan” or “The Fighter” would have been made five years ago, when financing flowed more freely. But they might not have been made as rigorously, and they might have been diluted in a sea of lesser films.

Given how studios continue to remain focused on remakes while the indie world finds itself in a state of semi-recession, we can probably expect more of the same in ’11. That’s the bad news — and the good news too.

That seems about right to me, only I might add a few more categories of what to expect in 2011:

* Great movies
* Good movies
* Mediocre movies
* Crap movies
* Utterly crap movies
* What were they thinking movies
* I hate 3-D movie movies 
* Why the hell is that actor in this movies
* It’s astonishing this gem of a film somehow got produced movies
* OMG, another contained thriller movies
* Jessica Alba ad libs all her dialogue movies 
* Hey, guess what? The world is in danger comic book superhero movies
* And hopefully something from Neil Blomkamp that explains this:

Any other movie types we can expect to see in 2011?

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