Death of the Hollywood Creative

“Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?” Sorry Maximus, but no, we’re not. Russel Crowe’s Gladiator II (2024) was even more of a let down for the Paul Mescal girlies than Normal People’s (2020) ending. With a 71 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score after opening weekend, Paramount’s highly anticipated next installment in the Ancient-Rome-verse fell short on all fronts. As Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson put it, “the sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling”; essentially, the zeitgeist for this year’s cinematic landscape is bad. You’ve definitely heard someone say something along the lines of “why are movies so bad now?” With budgets at all-time highs and audience retention at all-time lows, directors seem to favor hyper-stylized visuals over nuanced storytelling. 

One such offender was The Substance (2024), a film that took the world by storm this fall yet relied far too heavily on shock value at the expense of thematic profundity. While the film’s subject matter and societal critique has been done numerous times before, Coralie Fargeat’s feminist body horror was rescued by some incredible visual effects, especially in its latter acts. Still, spectacle alone isn’t the only thing holding Hollywood back. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), and Inside Out 2 (2024) mark 2024 as the “age of the sequel/remake.” Modern studios lack the resilience to innovate, instead opting for nostalgia-rooted cash grabs. Originality and the strive for cinematic excellence have been thrown out the window. So, where does this leave the future of film? Are upcoming releases just going to be more oversaturated carbon copies of each other? How do we break this cycle? It’s simple: we have to take a look at the state of Persian film in the 1980s.

Where Is the Friend’s House (1987) was Iranian-born director Abbas Kiarostami’s first film to receive major international acclaim. It’s a highly personal and intimate look at the innocence of youth through the lens of realism. The story opens with a classroom of elementary school children waiting for their teacher to check their homework—a setup that, on the surface, seems mundane. One by one, the teacher (Khodabakhsh Defai) eyes up his prey. Check. Check. Che—wait. He stops, lingering at one student’s desk. This would be Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh’s (Ahmed Ahmadpour) second offense. Homework should be done in one’s notebook only, but Mohammed Reza did his on scrap paper—an innocuous peccadillo, but even so, he must be made an example of. One more slip-up would mean permanent expulsion. Reza is mortified; tears are everywhere—how Stuyvesant-esque. End scene. 

Kiarostami’s masterpiece is entirely established. Our lead, Ahmad Ahmadpour (Babak Ahmadpour), mistook Mohammed’s notebook for his own. Now home, he understands the severity of his error. Mohammed’s fate is completely dependent on Ahmad—an insurmountable burden on the eight-year-old. Suddenly, you’re right there alongside Ahmad; his mission becomes just as important to you as one of your own. Just like that, Abbas Kiarostami caught you. You’ve entered his domain: a narrative deceptively simple yet eminently expanded upon. He’s taking you on an unorthodox hero’s journey, one structured based on what little information Ahmad is able to piece together. You’re in the dark alongside Ahmad, relying on the misguidance of adults. Where Is the Friend’s House is a film about the difficulty of doing the right thing. Released right after the Islamic Republic of Iran’s rise to power, the film challenged the new authoritarian rule by promoting virtues of compassion and integrity. However, most of all, Kiarostami’s authenticity shines. The audience becomes so utterly captivated that they start to feel like flies on the wall—onlookers observing genuine interactions between real people.

There are no over-the-top visuals or striking mise-en-scéne. That's the beauty of it; the narrative of Where Is the Friend’s House is so powerful that it can stand alone. Too often today do we see directors try to compensate for their derivative and prosaic plots with distracting technical components. For instance, take Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024). Coppola poured $120 million out of his own pocket into a self-indulgent passion project that lacks structure, depth, and, most importantly, quality storytelling. But, hey, at least it looks nice, right? The next generation of filmmakers needs to take a page out of Abbas Kiarostami’s book. Sometimes, less is more; in a market so surfeit with consumer garbage, it will be the masters of nuance who stand out.