In the space of two days I was accosted by two trailers for two different films based on the life of Alfred Hitchcock. The first was for a HBO TV movie called The Girl, based on the making ofThe Birds. It stars Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren and Toby Jones as the master of suspense. The second trailer was for a Sacha Gervasi film simply titledHitchcock. It focuses on the making of Psycho with Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Anthony Hopkins as the legendary director. While the HBO film was shown in October we must wait until February next year to see Hopkins play the plump director. It seems Hitchcock is in vogue at the moment.

People who say that an aspect of our society used to be better in the past are usually wrong. No, people didn’t dress better in the past, kids weren’t nicer in the past, and society certainly wasn’t safer in the past. Very few things were better in the past than in the present, no matter what your grumpy middle aged neighbor wants you to believe. However, there is one area of our culture that has stagnated and perhaps gotten worse: film.

For a while there you just couldn’t get away from the hoopla surrounding Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson with her forty something director of her film Snow White and the Hunstman, Rupert Sanders. It was breaking news across all media outlets, from tabloids to twitter and everything in between.