The filmmakers we deserve?

Depression-era films reflected human experience in a way the filmmakers of today could never replicate, says David Thomson. Are you listening, Brett Ratner? (Guardian)

Those people and much of the audience have lost the habit, or even the memory, of hard times. And the connection between that dismay and great hopes has had 60 years of prosperity, supremacy and self-satisfaction. The last is the most alarming trait, for it indicates the loss of a critical spirit and a sense of politics that believes in the steady decay of power. The critical spirit that made My Man Godfrey and wrote The Grapes of Wrath is not coming back at a snap of the fingers. Americans (and the people of many other nations) need to reacquire a capacity for experience, for registering what happens to you and seeing it writ large in the people as a whole.