It’s time to send the Cool Directors into retirement.

Hollywood needs fewer directors laboring desperately to be cool.?

Scorsese is all mean streets and montages and needle drops and voice-overs and de Niro, making the same lowest-common-denominator street thug movie over and over again.

Tarantino exploits tragedy for cheap kicks, praises the absurd alpha-male nonsense of Sergio Leone, embraces schlock like Showgirls, celebrates making movie violence cool.

Spielberg, Howard and Spike Lee trying so hard to be Important Cool Directors.?

David Lynch, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers want to be the Weird Cool Directors.??

Sorkin is the Smart Cool Director, every script is like a string of Wikipedia articles.

The Juvenile Bad Boys, not just Tarantino but also Kevin Smith, Lucas and Spielberg.

Innaritu with his artsy scarves abusing cast and crew with his long-take shooting.

Spielberg, Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Tarantino putting their noses in the air because they are Film Snobs who think that digital is the devil. Fellas, some people can’t afford film. Tarantino wasted time and money shooting Hateful Eight in extreme wide-screen 70mm, despite the fact that most of the film takes place in a tiny stagecoach lodge; this is a key reason why this cinematic pig cost over $50 million.

You know who can do great work? The guys who learned, like most adults, that cool is what happens when you stop trying so hard to be cool.

And stop with the “homage”: you’re still ripping someone else off, and no one really cares that you saw Truffault do that camera move in film school.

Gimmicks are cheesy. Capra, Lumet, Wilder and Ford shot simple and efficient stories with no showing off. Contrariwise when Innaritu was wasting everyone’s time with the one-shot sequences, even Lubezki objected, a guy you should listen to; the slightest errors sent everyone to Position 1 for retakes, and there was no room to improvise.

You only move the camera or the focus for a reason: as Lumet pointed out, the camera shouldn’t call attention to itself. Gimmicky closeups, Scorsese’s freeze frames and slo-mo, painting pretty pictures, tracking shots, breakaway sets, fog machines, anamorphic shots. Unless you’re shooting a cheesy music video, just stop. The exception would be someone like Melies, for whom the gimmicky effects were the whole point.

Directors have been known to show off by presenting very long takes or even entire movies in one shot. It’s a pain in the neck for cast and crew, it needs a lot of setting up, it almost always requires lots of motion to avoid boring the audience. And it costs money. And in the end no one but a cameraman would notice what the camera did.

A long take can work when it moves the story forward. In Touch Of Evil with its creepy sound, and again in Vast Of Night, we sensed it was a great night for an adventure out in the streets of a strange town. Henry V used stage tricks to overcome a tiny budget and show the panorama of an entire battlefield in a few snapshot vignettes. La La Land worked with sheer insane chutzpah.

Contrariwise Rope and Birdman were the work of directors showing off for no reason, and the Goodfellas Copacabana shot was pointless, a shot they did only because the club wouldn’t let them go in the front.

Can we finally stop telling hundreds of stories about how hard life is for white guys?

White male cops who are in constant danger of exploding because something bad happened to him, like literally every woman on earth and probably every black guy too.

One action hero after another who is “damaged”: Batman, the Lethal Weapon guy, Rambo. Murdered wives, murdered parents, kidnapped kids.

Guys like Scorsese endlessly celebrating violent white knuckledraggers like Jake LaMotta and Tommy DiSimone and Travis Bickle because they’re just so cool.

Guys like Eastwood making movies about how oppressed rednecks are in America; they think they built the country unassisted and it is their birthright to control the nation and amble down a smooth easy path to success, and they collapse at every hangnail-sized tragedy.

Directors aren’t cool. Actors aren’t cool. Stories are cool.

Jack is a writer with 29 feature screenplays and a series completed, almost all of them with female leads, three under option. Check them out on this site and let’s get one filmed! https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/