Brad Pitt in Fury

Action movies are, of course, wonderful, as long as the director and the writer control their impulses to blow us away with violence. I suppose today’s films are made for those that blog, text, and post selfies: nonreaders, whose imagination has to be jarred from its narcissistic state. Mind you, I’m not a fan of French films where everyone sits around and talks and nothing, but nothing ever happens. (Directors of such movies are called auteurs.) Nor am I mad about films, or books for that matter, that focus on everyday grievances, the regrets that pile up as the years crawl by. (I tend to hit the popcorn too much.) But there is a happy medium, and the old flicks had it in spades.

Was there violence in Rebecca? In Wuthering Heights? In Laura? Could anyone ever get bored in The Best Years of Our Lives? Or the best war film ever, Go Tell the Spartans, about early Vietnam, starring the great Burt Lancaster? And if you hate the Germans and the fascists, go see The Garden of The Finzi-Continis, written and directed by Vittorio de Sica, starring the best looking woman of her time, Dominique Sanda. I could go on and on and on. But I won’t. All I’d like to know is, where has all the talent gone? And as always I will answer my own question: Movies today reflect what the audience wants to see, and the audiences are imbeciles and uneducated fools, and that’s why Fury will be a hit, so help me God.