Go For Independent

Recently I have seen a lot of blogs about how films have declined over the past few years/decades. What I want to suggest to you is that you go and watch independent films. As a person who plans on being a director one day, as someone who has been to the Sundance Film Festival twice, and as a person who goes to Blockbuster looking for titles I have never heard of before, I think I know what I am talking about.

It is true that Hollywood has become a place of business, and is no longer a dream world, making movies to entertain the intellectual. They use a cookie cutter on their films, and if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t get made. Think about the past ten movies you saw, how many of them had some sort of explosion, or car crash? How many of them starred an A-list star like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. I would imagine most of them.

No imagine films with interesting plots, no special effects, and great acting. What do you get? An independent film. Independent films are made with smaller budgets and therefore strip away all of the Hollywood glitz and glam. I also means that they aren’t answering to a studio, whose main goal is to make a huge profit. This means that filmmakers can tell the story they want, not the one the studio wants to produce.

If you are interested in independent films, you may also be interested in foreign films. A lot of times the subtitles turns people away, but trust me they are worth it. They may take a little time to get used to, because foreign films do not follow the story format as American films. I can’t tell you how many foreign films I have seen and thought afterward, why can’t American films be like this?

I want to say in closing that this is by no mean bashing studio pictures. I loved The Dark Knight, just like everyone else. In fact many of my favorite movie are studio films. Vanilla isn’t the only flavor out there. So go out and rent a independent film, you wont be disappointed.