I’ve Loved The Movies All My Life Then The Movies Left Me Behind

I’ve Loved The Movies All My Life Then The Movies Left Me Behind

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.lenzwelling.com/2025/12/a-regifting-for-the-new-year/.

You may remember this blog from New Years Day 2026. In it, I gifted to my readers some of the best advice I have ever received from my therapist of many years who formulated these seven pieces of wisdom for me.

I want to focus in on one of them:

Gratitude grounds me—I breathe in what I have, not what I have lost.

I want to discuss something that I have lost. It is something that I have to let go of and it is very hard for me to do so.

I think that I was first taken to the movies at about three years of age. It was Pinocchio and the whale scared the hell out of me. I can still remember the moment. My father was also an avid home movie buff and my sister and I were shown films, including those taken at my parents’ wedding, since we could sit upright. I very rapidly graduated to more adult movies including North By Northwest and the Man Who Knew Too Much by Alfred Hitchcock by the time I was about ten.

I remember begging my parents to take me to see Tom Jones in 1963 when I was still 12. I think most of the sexual inuendo went over my head, but I had read in the newspaper review that it was a great film and so had to see it. I was reading movie reviews every Friday by then.

I saw the original Manchurian Candidate the same year just before President Kennedy was shot making the film unpalatable to many given the assassination plot at its heart.

But the moment I was thoroughly hooked came the year before in 1962 when I took the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan and saw Lawrence of Arabia in the only theater in which it was playing. I was stunned at its size, its music, and its story. It genuinely transported me to a place I imagined I would never see with my own eyes. I have seen it in the theater two more times. It is still the best film I have ever seen.

Many years later, when I rode a camel in Eilat very close to the Aqaba Lawrence conquered, I thought I was in heaven. I saw in person what I had only seen on screen before and what I saw on the screen as a new reality was very real on the top of that camel.

In other words, I love movies and have since I was a little boy. But, the movies seemed to have left me.

Hollywood is no longer making films I wish to see. I saw most of the Academy Award Best Picture nominated films last year and many from this year’s crop as well. None of them was a great film. None. Last year’s winner, Anora, was supposed to be a comedy. I thought it was a pornographic mess. This year’s winner, One Battle After Another, is aptly named. That’s what it was. One action sequence with attendant violence after another. True crap. And Sinners, I didn’t get at all. Weapons was even worse. All of these were hit films at the box office.

I won’t go to super hero films although I took my grandsons to see last year’s Superman and had no idea what was going on. The boys liked it. Maybe Hollywood is after the grade school crowd.

Hollywood is a self-congratulatory liberal bastion that is out of sync with average Americans. Most of what I have seen in the past few years is dreadful. The writing is shoddy. The acting is spotty at best. And the stories are about nothing of interest to me. They do look expensive, however, as if money is the only thing that makes a great film. I don’t think Woody Allen spent a lot on Annie Hall, a truly great film.

I do watch some series television and find some of it quite good especially The Pitt, Slow Horses, and Hacks. But Hollywood movies, not so much.

This weekend brought my career of going into a theater to see a movie close to an end.

Do you know what 4DX is? I didn’t either. Here’s the definition on the web that I should have checked before I bought the tickets.

The 4DX auditorium features motion seats and special effects including wind, fog, mist/rain, scents and more that perfectly sync to the on-screen action.

Not knowing what I was doing, I bought tickets to the 4DX version of Project Hail Mary, a new film starring Ryan Gosling that got very good notices. During the coming attractions the hard seats started to shake. We rapidly realized what we had gotten ourselves into, a roller coaster in a theater, and got our money back before getting rained on inside the theater.

This cannot be anyone’s idea of what the movie experience is supposed to be. Film has many elements beyond the pictures—the script, the direction, the sound, and the music. It does not consist of having the seat in which you are watching the film wired to the sound track so that it can shake when the volume goes up.

If a motion picture (that’s right, it’s the pictures that are supposed to move, not the audience) cannot stand on the director’s own creativity to use the classic elements of cinema to tell a story AND to entertain or the theaters are so desperate for business that they need to create what no director imagined, then the movies have really left me. In turn, I have left the theater.

A week or so later, we returned to give it one more try. We saw Project Hail Mary in regular seats. It was entertaining but very contrived, very derivative, and overly long. I fear they DO make them like they used to and I felt that I’d seen this one before in Interstellar, Arrival, ET, and numerous other space operas.

I hope that I will see a new, great film this year, but I don’t expect to. The real question is why do I keep trying to find one in the multiplex? I have Lawrence of Arabia on DVD. Maybe I’ll watch that.