I don’t love Tarantino as a person, nor do I think of him as a genius filmmaker, but he is a good solid film technician who knows his shit and loves himself a very wide range of movies. I don’t know if I agree that we are in the worst age of cinema, but I would argue there’s an abundance of film that is designed around an increasingly homogeneous approach to filmmaking and can be entertaining but quickly forgettable. There are a lot of films that I enjoy while watching but move on from without any real desire to revisit. A lot of this has to do with the vast number of streaming companies pumping a lot of money into a very narrow or limited film mould that produces quite a lot of disposable content. I would argue that there are still many great films, but there are simply so many more mediocre films thanks to exceptionally high industry output that obscures many of the better films. Or I’ll put it another way, there aren’t fewer great films right now, there are just many, many, many more average to bad films available and we as audiences just don’t have the capacity to take in the majority of what’s out there.
And I’ll give this to Tarantino, it’s a particularly depressing time from an industry and cinephile standpoint, because we’ve basically renewed the old studio system through the combination of streaming giants and the repeal of the Paramount Decree, and large corporations are largely buying up screen time in cinemas making it much, much harder for independent filmmakers to get their films to audiences. The industry is growing more consolidated and putting out increasingly homogenized work, and it’s even less feasible for anyone outside the large industry machine to make profitable films. And streaming has vastly changed how and what we can access film to the point that variation and variety is actually narrowing rather than expanding as companies invest in safe bets over taking risks. Think what you will of Tarantino’s work, but there are many ways in which “the now” is not the best of times for movie lovers even if it’s not necessarily the worst age in cinema.