Column - A Decade of Mirrors

With 2013 now over with, it also sounded what in Australian Football terms would be called the quarter time siren and 2014 now marks the start of the 2nd quarter of the teens.

And with that part of me began to think "how has the decade in movies gone so far" and for me it has begun to mirror the decade of film in the 1990s, how so you might ask well let me now expand on that for you in 3 key reasons:

The first of those is that like in the 1990s you have a golden age of television shows swamping the networks, in the 90s you had shows like the Simpsons, Star Trek, Friends, Seinfeld, the X Files and Twin Peaks to use as examples as shows that you sat down and made time for to watch.

The equivalent of those shows now would be shows like Sherlock, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Blacklist, Community and Doctor Who, shows that like those ones mentioned above from the 90s were must watch shows, you waited through your day until that time came and you could watch the new episode or waited for loved ones to watch it with in some cases.

The second reason is that like the 1990s you have the rise of Video Games as an entertainment medium, no longer would they be confined to arcades or video stores in some cases but now console machines would allow them to be played in the privacy in your own home.

And in the 90s you had consoles like the Super Nintendo, the Sega Mega Drive/Master System, the Game Boy which you could take with you wherever you went and you also had the PC system as well, all of these delivered great games like Donkey Kong Country, the Mortal Kombat trilogy, Mega Race, Warcraft (before it became an MMO), Command and Conquer and later on with the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation you got Mario 64, Goldeneye, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo to name as examples.

But now as was the case then you have the Playstation and Xbox with titles like the Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto 5, Tomb Raider, Battlefield and Call of Duty to name as examples as well as a small resurgence in PC gaming.

And the last reason comes back to the films themselves and for me a lot of the big ones after 1993 come across as fine but forgettable, films like Independence Day, The Mask, Batman Forever, Jumanji and many others while smaller films like Pulp Fiction and the Shawshank Redemption capture the audiences imagination.

And like then, we see that scenario playing out very much now with so many of the big films out there at the moment having budgets in excess of a quarter of a trillion dollars thrown at them as well as state of the art special effects and big time stars but having almost no resonance with audiences who for the most part see them, enjoy them but probably wouldn't go back to them any time soon.

And again like in the 90s it's the smaller less seen films that are drawing people to them and leaving a resonance, films like Drive, Tree of Life, Blue Jasmine, the Act of Killing and 12 Years a Slave, films that not necessarily got a large run in cinemas but have found a home with audiences.

And so that ends this column, I hope you found it an interesting read.