The Last Movie I Saw

I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia 3: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader the other day, and it was a reasonably easy way to pass the afternoon. I don't have much to say about this specific movie aside from that, but it did start me to thinking about something (the previews before the feature also contributed to this thought). Has anyone noticed just how prevalent fantasy adventures have become over the past few years? I'm sure some of this, and maybe the Narnia series in particular, is the result of the massive success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I wonder if there isn't another factor involved. Back in the 1930s there was a spate of lavish musicals that became quite popular, and it's become something of a truism to ascribe some of their success to the demand of depression-era audiences for pure escapism. That's probably a bit of an over-simplification, but the recent fantasy boom strikes me as being the same kind of deal. At a time when so many things are changing, and not really much for the better for most Americans, why not seek a little temporary respite at the cineplex, where super-heroic figures promise to set everything right in the space of a couple of hours. If you think about it, these films require the greatest suspension of disbelief, and getting outside of one's head for a bit might be considered a great form of cheap therapy in troubled times. Personally, I generally find these films too much of a type, with little to offer beyond computer-generated thrills that rarely impress (they're just slightly more sophisticated than cartoons). Give me some real human-scaled drama any day. To put it in historical terms, again referring to the 1930s precedent, let's see more descendants of the likes of Frank Borzage and Frank Capra, and not so much Busby Berkeley.