The Problem with Movies Today?

I was catching up on reading something the other day, when I ran across this passage that seemed to be a perfect summary of the problems I often see in films these days.

The most important [thing] is the combination of the incidents of the story.  Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery.  All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality.  Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions -- what we do -- that we are happy or the reverse.  In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the Characters; they include the Characters for the sake of the action.  So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing.

...

The tragedies of most of the moderns are characterless -- a defect common among [writers] of all kinds ... One may string together a series of speeches of the utmost finish as regards Diction and Thought, and yet fail to produce the true tragic effect; but one will have much better success with a tragedy which, however inferior in these respects, has a Plot, a combination of incidents, in it.  And again: the most powerful elements of attraction ... are parts of the Plot.

...

The Spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has the least to do with the art of poetry.  The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the getting up of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumier than the poet.

So the criticism is obviously old -- that is obvious from the stilted language and the reference to "tragedy" as being the main product and "poets" as the primary authors.  But how old?  Aristotle, in 335 BC.  I took the quote from Great Books translation. (My father bought the whole set many years ago; it was one of his prize possessions, along with a particularly notable copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Anyway, I found it amusing that even Aristotle was complaining that the new stuff was plotless and unnecessarily full of meaningless spectacle.  Are you listening Michael Bay and Baz Luhrmann?