I’ve a few Westerns but not many – mostly the more predictable titles. The only thing approaching a Western that really captured my imagination was the absolutely brilliant Deadwood.

And ahh… no sums!

I wonder, sometimes, at the rose-tinted spectacles that people view the past of sf cinema thorugh. Almost all the films that people now regard as classics struggled through the studio system. There might have been a brief period from the late 60s to mid 70s when films like Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Rollerball could get made without too much interference despite large budgets, when Hollywood fell in love with the idea of the “auteur” but it was an aberration in the overall pattern, and it isn’t as if every great movie that emerged from that period didn’t have its own Zardoz or Beware! The Blob. And sci-fi had its own blossoming in the late 70s and early 80s because Star Wars was making so much money and everybody wanted a slice of the action – but like any fad, that was always going end.

The truth is most “blockbusters” are necessarily compromised because to put the kind of deal together to make something that huge, the creative people involved have to cede control to accountants. That’s neither, necessarily, good or bad, it just is.

I can enjoy Transformers on a variety of levels – admiring the construction, the technique and the skill involved in making things real – while conceding that it’s not a particularly good film. But to say that the failure of that movie (or others like it) to be particularly good (as sf, as “art”) means that sf cinema is dead is just wrong.

There was a similar discussion on TTA Interaction a few months back, about the death of SF cinema, which I thought an even more outrageous claim than Scott’s…

http://www.ttapress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=203