8 percent approval rating at RottenTomatoes.com. #4 at the box office. What's wrong with this picture?

James Rocchi, former lead movie critic for Netflix, has a great essay up at Cinematical right now, arguing that it isn't just our imagination, or nostalgia run amok -- that movies in our modern age really are getting worse and worse with each passing year, and especially during the summer "blockbuster season" which he claims is anymore a three-month period of almost nothing but completely unwatchable films. Rocchi brings up some excellent points in his essay regarding all this, in fact, and points out all kinds of unnatural things that have happened to the movie industry that have led to this situation, elements which have happened so slowly as to make most of us think that they've been around forever:

--More and more emphasis on special effects than ever before; such an emphasis, in fact, that the point no longer seems to be to impress humans but literally other machines. ("After being told that the transforming in Transformers was so complex, so 'real' that it contained more motions than the human eye can follow, all you can do is sincerely hope that someone out there can remember that the point of a movie is to be followed by the human eye.")

--The customer weariness over every summer movie now having to be tied to a grand and all-pervasive global marketing scheme, which most of the time anymore actually has a larger budget than the movie itself.

--This new mindset among Hollywood that seems to say that a movie can't possibly make any money after its second week in theatres, so for God's sake, you better do everything possible to make your money those first three days it's out. And boy, do the facts back this one up -- the average #1 movie this summer, in fact, has lost over 45 percent in box-office revenue potential by its second weekend, with some films (like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) losing a whopping 65 percent of its former revenue potential by the time they're over a week old.

--And of course the biggest problem of all, something that I've gone on about in the past as well -- that contemporary Hollywood, with its near-total emphasis these days on marketers and money people and the various other Suits of the world, have simply driven away the vast majority of human beings who actually have original artistic concepts; that the people who Hollywood usually counted on for the fresh new maverick breakout hits each year are now out there producing their films themselves, shooting on digital and distributing them online, or in lots of cases aren't even working in the film medium at all anymore. And this, according to Rocchi, accounts for a number of things wrong in Hollywood right now -- from the emphasis on sequels and remakes to a graying list of "marquee players" (the Scorseses of the world, the Spielbergs of the world), with no one young and legitimately brilliant to replace them, because no one young and legitimately brilliant will go even near Hollywood anymore with a ten-foot pole.

The entire thing is an out-of-control mess, Rocchi argues, and I have to admit that I quite plainly agree with him; that it's not just a case of rose-colored glasses, that Hollywood's past really is demonstrably better than its present, and that we can all expect the situation to get even worse than it currently is, as long as that industry continues bumbling around in the dark and kicking out all the people with actual talent, like they've made a policy of over the last decade or so. It's quite a thought-provoking article, and I encourage you to check it out when you have a chance.