Reading between the lines it seems the writer has mainly watched American movies that are easily accessible. I recommend instead of scrolling through the Amazon catalogue like he described, he might want to see if there is a local film festival that screens world cinema. Cinema from other parts of the world for me often leads to great new perspectives and insights. Outside of Hollywood there is plenty of auteurs and refreshing cinema happening. Or take a deep dive into the best of the best without the American lens with lists like the TSPDT.
Unfortunately still not legally accessible outside the US.
[Although I managed to get trial access with a VPN, but then I did not work anyway with a laptop running linux connected to TV with HDMI due to a certain DRM protection]
I have been enjoying MUBI a lot, the European alternative to Criterion Channel. Especially since they added a fixed catalogue aside from their new movie a day model. They also usually highlight three great reviews as a companion reading to the movie plus the user base is delightfully snobby, with no low effort jokes like you will see on Letterboxd.
They also do great retrospectives, currently Kelly Reichardt and Christian Petzold.
I found Criterion to be quite easy to VPN actually compared to some other services. You have to use a VPN to signup, but watching the movies doesn’t require it which is nice. And they don’t have any issues accepting international payments either.
(For reference, this was about 6 months ago, and I live in Australia)
I don't understand why sites like Netflix or MUBI do not allow an easy search or easy browsing of their ENTIRE catalog by certain criteria (country, length, rating, budget, etc.)
Pirates do an incredibly better job at it and it amazes me every time.
Netflix makes their user interface terrible to search. This is by design: when things get pulled due to licensing or whatever other arrangements are made with studios or their parent companies, users are all none the wiser.
The reason why P2P will reign supreme is because it cuts through the bullshit of backwards business restrictions and empowers people to watch content on whatever device they want, when they want, and how they want. Netflix has, what, 30,000 titles available? Compared to the 400,000 titles at your nearest P2P based source.
There is a way to browse by genre which map to a generic URL but are much more direct than the default aimless auto-playing nightmare of their default interface.
Kanopy. Free with many library cards. Views are rate-limited per month, which limit I think may vary by library system, but still, you can watch at least a movie or two a week for free if you're part of a participating system. Some major, recent films, lots of mid-tier non-blockbusters and the kind of thing that plays the film festival circuit. Tons of (often political) documentaries, if you're into that. Damn good, for free, and you can ignore the documentaries and just focus on the movies and still have loads of content. Only weakness is that, oddly, it's awful for kids' content.
Really? We were amazed by the amount and quality of kids content. It's a completely separate section, so it's not part of the main Kanopy app, but it has tons of movies and dramatized readings of children's books. But yeah, the first thing I thought when I read this was "Kanopy".
I drunkenly and blindly bought the Criterion Blu-ray for just a little south of a Benjamin and it was totally worth it, and the price for the originals began climbing after the release of the revised version included in the box set. It's my favorite from WKW's oeuvre; it has the same feeling as Lost in Translation which is another one of my favorite films.
As I grow older, I realize that my interests have shifted from big explosion-a-minute blockbusters towards simple movies of people doing, essentially, nothing.
Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love is one of the most beautiful movies ever made and, rightly, considered one of the greatest movies made in the modern era.
Back in '90 I acquired a laser disc player. The conventional wisdom of the moment was laser discs were on their way out, and people were selling and giving away laser disc collections for cheap. I bought the entire Criterion Collection, what it was at the time. Something like 5 crates of discs, all classic black and white films. I watched most of them, but many do not hold up and feel like experiments today. I don't know where they are now - in a box somewhere in long term storage.
Wow, I bet you could get some seriously good money for those if they are in decent shape. There is a massive retro video resurgence going on now, so folks paying big money for rare VHS tapes, I'm sure the Laserdisc market is just the same too.
I think so, too. Although I'm almost lost for cinema nowadays because of a lack of time (I write novels in most of my spare time), my girlfriend still goes to the cinemas very often and I know from her that I'm missing several outstanding movies every month. There are also good US productions every year.
What the author perhaps means is the decline of US action movies. They have become faster and dumber over the years and arguably are mostly unwatchable by now, at least in comparison to action movies from the 1970s. Why have they become so bad? I used to think it's just because they are cut too fast and 30 minutes of unnecessary action is added at the end, but now I believe the scripts have also become worse. It would be interesting to hear from an insider like a script writer what has changed.
Maybe I'm just not enough of a film connoisseur but I just watched Fury Road last night and thought it was mediocre. Sure the action was okay and it was cool how you just started with the action but the storyline seemed superficial at best and I felt like the climax came way too late in the film.
A lot of what's good about the film's wrapped up in technical film-making appreciation. The remarkable quality of the action-storytelling, how "legible" the action is, the quality of both those things despite the by-modern-standards limited use of CG, how good the practical effects themselves are, the costuming and set-building and world-realization stuff, simple efficiency and competence at "set-up, pay-off" screenwriting (less common than it should be, especially in flashy action movies), that kind of thing.
[EDIT] Basically, I think there are three general viewer-categories for the film, here presented as their reactions:
1) "It had lots of action. Seemed like normal action in an action movie, I guess. Hated the story and characters. Movie sucked overall, don't get why people like it."
2) "The action was notably good. I can't explain why, but it was definitely good. Film overall was just OK. Liked it fine, some stuff about it was neat, but don't get why some people are raving about it."
3) "Oh my god I'm going to need several days and pages of notes to unpack everything that was great about the action and storytelling, and especially the two of those together, in that movie. There's so much to cover. I can't wait to be able to watch it at home so I can analyze the editing more closely, that's going to be great. A+."
Agreed 100%, perhaps the most impressive thing about the movie is how economical it is with storytelling and worldbuilding. Think about the fact that it is largely just fantastic action set pieces and incredible visuals. The consider how much you understand the world and characters within it. A lesser movie would have a 10-minute exposition dialog scene early on, telling you in excrutiating detail exactly what Immortan Joe is doing and why he is bad. Fury Road is the absolute pinnacle of "Show, don't tell" for me.
Then there's the niche category (cannot speak for Fury Road, but can speak for, among others, True Lies):
"Wow, putting a reel transition there is BRAVE." (yep, that's a multi-projector projectionist reaction, True Lies has a reel-to-reel transition in the middle of a conversation, and you have up to "seconds" of lost frames in a switch-over).
My best friend and I watch hundreds of movies per year (about 1 every day) and we thought Fury Road was horrid as well. By contrast, Thunderdome, was a very smart film, as far as hollywood movies go.
The recent "Nobody" is a good twist on action, as well as "Hardcore Henry" is interesting. When the storyline takes unexpected turns, or uses clichés as bait and does not follow through on the cliché can be fresh. In general, a feature length film is too short to do many literary works justice, and serialization does a far better job relating a quality story. For example, Netflix's "Ozark" would not be called "action" in the feature film sense, but the intellectual violence in that show is far and above stupid gun/car/fist violence. Films like "The Congress", "Terminator 2", and "Tropic Thunder" represent the best the Hollywood feature film system can produce.
My family saw the Star Wars that came out in 2016 for Christmas. I was shocked to find myself bored out of my skull. I thought, "How can Star Wars be so popular among my friends if I hate it?" A year later I told the story to someone and they helped me realize that it's not Star Wars in particular, it's action movies in general that I hate.
They can be fun in 10-minute snippets, though. And pretty.
To be fair, the latest Star Wars trilogy shat out by Disney is crap compared to the masterpiece that was the original.
The original trilogy had a great cast of charismatic actors with chemistry and a great story that kept you invested in the characters, while the latest one hasn't got any of those and is just cashing in on the nostalgia of the original.
That is true. Also? The Star Wars universe at the time felt open & surprising, like anything could happen. By the end of the newest prequels, it felt like the movies were highly constrained by everyone’s expectations. They were Marvel-ified by Abrams, and then they handed over the franchise to a more controversial film maker who couldn’t quite pull it off either, and then you had an impossible situation that Abrams made the best he could of, but was ultimately a mess.
Whatever. Nowadays, I will watch scifi movies simply for the visual aspect, and there were some nice scenes in the new trilogy. But the surprise and novelty of the original trilogy could never really be satisfied, in part because I’m not 12. :)
I could live very well with a Star Wars universe consisting of the original trilogy plus Rogue One. The sequels had their moments but not enough of them.
I can only offer counter-anecdata, but whenever I see a kid wearing Star Wars merchandise, it is from the original trilogy. I think the last trilogy will have even less cultural impact than episodes 1-3.
The original trilogy had mediocre acting but had one-liners that were on par with Evil Dead. I think that's what made it a cult classic.
None of the other movies will be remembered for their one-liners, but from what I can tell that's not what Disney is trying to do anyway. They're selling characters, not movies.
Author here -- No, I have never been a particular fan of action movies. I find them pretty boring; they're perhaps the worst offenders in the "all movies are the same" category.
A lot of it comes down to legible editing and camerawork. If you have a big name actor who can’t do the action that well, you can use shakycam and fast cuts to obscure that. That specific trend is probably on its way out thanks to John Wick, though.
on a serious note I found some fantastic serials that are not so well known and which I will remember for a long time (e.g. Indian "Sacred Games", Italian "Gomorrha" or "Suburra", British "Small Axe", USA "Snowfall", German "Dogs of Berlin" or "Dark", French "The Bureau"). In fact there wasn't a single show in the last 2 years where I felt I ended up wasting my time or were forced to bail out after S01E02 because it didn't resonate. The alternative to great serials is only a good book and from my pov a movie can never give the same depth as a good serial.
That was exactly my reading. I watched 75 films so far this year, most of them obscure at least in a sense that I had to make an effort to get them and while not all of them were great, a lot of them were interesting and that's after four decades of watching movies and seeing surely more thousands of them. I am sure I would feel similar to the article's author if I limited my choice only to what streaming services offer.
I think interesting and competent is what you might strive for after you've consumed enough of a type of media. You see it in music and video games too. Eventually the big hits and blockbuster games are all pretty boring, if you're an engaged consumer of the medium, you'll start looking for more novel ways to be interested, and start appreciating competency more than you used to.
Maybe? I'm willing to bet that after 810+ movies he'll have seen all of the tropes and techniques trotted out by those outside of Hollywood. How many ways can you really tell a compelling story or possibly show an artistic experience?
As long as you're not overly obsessed with identifying every variation of a cliche, there's plenty to enjoy.
The stories will have different backdrops, and they can proceed in ways that foreigners might find quite unexpected. Different cultures have different assumptions about how to make a love story truly romantic, what's funny or weird, or what counts as a faux pas that eventually dooms the protagonist. Even the same trope can be executed very differently because of these factors.
The cinematography will be different. The music will be different -- Bollywood BGM feels very different from K-Pop. The fact that you'll be reading subtitles all the time will certainly make for a fresh experience, especially when you're listening to something like Japanese where the sentence structure makes it difficult to translate the timing of the punchline into English. Action sequences will emphasize different things, often because of budget or location constraints, but sometimes simply because there was a local fad for something. There will be references to local traditions, literature, and historic events that make really interesting rabbit holes to follow.
If I'm wrong list some movies, please. I will watch them. I've seen enough foreign films to see many of the techniques used between films and between directors.
1770 films so far and as a European I'm more in awe with early Iranian cinema than ever. Definitely a world away from Hollywood, in the best possible sense.
(Sorry, I must've turned off the notifications in HN, because I never know when someone replies to a comment I've made.)
Rather than recommending films, which can turn into a long list since I'd find it difficult to decide which deserves more attention, I've shorlisted a number of highly respected and influential directors that I've closely followed (not in a social media kind of way)
> Reading between the lines it seems the writer has mainly watched American movies that are easily accessible.
Bingo. I mostly gave up on those decades ago. Come on, I remember walking more than once into a Blockbuster video rental store (remember those?). I'd make a few rounds of the isles, come up empty-handed, then walk out the door.
I started mostly going to an outlet called called Tom's Video on Grandview Highway in Vancouver, Canada. You could rent lots of Asian cinema there. HK movies, Japanese movies, Korean movies, Chinese movies, and from other parts of the world as well.
The author of this blog has simply burned out on one kind of movie and lost perspective.
A movie doesn't have to be entirely original. Even if the stories are tropes, there are always different actors, different cinematography and so on.
Blues songs are more similar to each other than American movies, yet there is a point in coming back to the Blues. If you say, "what's the point of listening to the Blues; it's the same song structures and soloing cliches", you're missing the point.
Yeah, that is my impression as well. Mass market film is extremely narrow by definition, and as Hollywood gets more globalized, the themes need to be even more narrow to be widely relatable. But video production costs have plummeted. You could make an incredible and quite experimental film with an iPhone and and a few freelance actors. I think the real problem is our discovery "algorithms" are winner takes all.
Author here. I've watched a lot of international films, probably between 250 and 300. These are pretty much the only films I watch nowadays -- you're right that the American lens on film gets tiresome. Nonetheless, I still have many of the same issues with international film, given by constraints of the medium.
When I see these kinds of takes on movie quality dropping I typically encounter the impact CGI has had over time. I was surprised that you did not similarly decry the impact of CGI on cinema and the over reliance on it.
I really hate dubbing and love hearing the actors talk in their native language even when I don't understand it. I'm extremely fast at reading subtitles too, so that's never a problem for me.
I never understood those countries, like Spain, which make dubbing some sort of national pride. No, Spaniards: dubbing sucks, you just don't know any better ;)
I don't like dubs either. Which is why I mostly watch American movies. I can just listen to the dialog. I have watched some Japanese and Korean content on Netflix. I tried to watch it with subs at first, but I gave up pretty fast since when I want to watch a movie/show I want to watch it not read it. I have backlog of books for reading, but even then I am mostly reading books in English.
Agreed, of course with English (which is a learned language for me) it's way easier since I don't need to read the subtitles.
But even with other foreign languages I enjoy watching with subtitles. For starters, you learn what other languages sound like. Plus, let's face it, most dubs are terrible quality. And finally, it's surprising but you start picking up the language! I've never studied Japanese but I started picking up words and inflections just from watching Japanese movies (and the same happens with Korean, Chinese, etc).
There are worse things than dubbing... In Polish TV all movie dialogs are read by a single person, typically male. I guess they came up with this horrible idea during communism, because dubbing was too expensive, and now we're stuck with it.
In cinemas however, movies typically have subtitles.
No, I've never seen this. Except maybe in rare cases when the joke is really idiomatic and the translator screwed up the job by explaining joke rather than translating it.
I’m the opposite, I can’t stand watching TV or movies without subtitles because I want to know exactly what is being said at all times, and don’t want to miss part of the story because I couldn’t hear a couple of words. But, I’m also originally from Europe, so am quite used to it.
I agree, I love subtitles, and prefer watching everything with (English) subtitles, even films/TV shows in English. Mainly because of the same reason as you, and just to add, I also watch a lot of stuff that has strong regional UK accents. Sometimes, it's not just the accent, but the regional usage of very specific slang that is simply just incomprehensible because I'm not familiar with the word's usage in that manner and can't infer from context, even if the words themselves are in my vocabulary. (A recent example that comes to mind is Derry Girls...)
But I also wonder if there's something related to how people read that factors into this aversion to subtitles?
For me, subtitles are almost invisible and I spend zero-to-negligible effort "actively reading" them -- they just sort of get absorbed by my brain while I'm watching what's on screen. So it doesn't really negatively affect my enjoyment or engagement with the show/film at all.
I think maybe the folks that struggle with or dislike subtitles view the act of "reading" subtitles as a mental context switch that interferes with the parallel act of watching and listening.
Watching English show with English subtitles is different, because I can just ignore the text (this is actually how I learned to watch movies since all movies in movie theaters here are subtitled so I just listened for the English words and watched the movie).
Sometimes I do watch some TV shows with subtitles on (English dub & sub) if they have very inconsistent audio equalization i.e. during some scenes music is super loud and then they dip into really quiet dialog so I don't miss the beginning part.
I agree.
Even with Netflix I find myself looking for British, Australian or French productions I. Film and series as they seem fresh, less repetitive and deeper in character than recent American productions.
Roger Ebert wrote an essay [0] in 1992 reflecting on his career as a critic. He writes
>In the past 25 years I have probably seen 10,000 movies and reviewed 6,000 of them. I have forgotten most of those films, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind.
Overall, he seems never to have lost the joy of watching movies. A relevant quote:
>When you go to the movies every day, it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes, instead of educating them. Then you see something absolutely miraculous. Something like "Wings of Desire," or "Do the Right Thing," or "Drugstore Cowboy," or "Gates of Heaven," or "Beauty and the Beast," or "Life Is Sweet," and on your way home through the White Hen Pantry you look distracted, as if you had just experienced some kind of a vision.
Love this quote from Roger Ebert. Thanks for posting it. He was a great reviewer because he loved what he did. His passion came through in everything he wrote.
The root cause of this is basically Hollywood (i.e. who makes what gets shown in your local multiplex) has given up on making movies exclusively for American audiences. You need a global audience, and you need the potential to get a billion dollars + in revenue. E.G. as he points out comedies have died, that's because comedy is highly localized versus the kids movies + adventure plots which are more universal. End result is everything gets boiled down to its rawest, most accessible elements and everything feels samey.
this is what i've started calling the "it takes one to tango" fallacy, where an issue has two responsible parties but only one gets blame. hollywood's not forcing people to spend their money on mass-produced uninspired movies - worse! thats what people pay to go see!
Sure, the consumer does have some degree of influence here, but they're still picking from the menu of options the studio makes available.
If someone likes movies as recreation, even if they would prefer something different than the action blockbusters, their choices are "don't enjoy yourself to send a message to the studios" or "watch a movie you might enjoy less than something from another genre"... most people who enjoy watching movies are probably gonna chose the route that still lets them enjoy watching a movie.
The incentives don't line up. Its like buying McDonalds at an isolated highway rest stop - I don't particularly love McDonalds, but if my choices are a hot meal or whatever I can get from a vending machine or pack with me, I'll take the hot meal every time. Its not an enthusiastic endorsement of globalized fast food chains despite my paying for it.
this is again "it takes one to tango" - the people create the incentives the studios follow. movies largely make money with sales volume. this is important; tickets arent more expensive for different movies, its strictly a numbers game (ignoring uncommon deals like toys and video games, etc). according to the first link i clicked, marvel's last movie infinity war grossed two BILLION dollars. you are simply wrong if you think some novel, avant-garde sundance indie is going to interest that many people.
the world is the way people want it to be. this is the tyranny of the majority. if we want non-incentivized things to exist, we're gonna have to invent new socioeconomic theories in this movie thread : )
You are assuming a fair and competitive market where the consumer is actually in charge. False assumption.
The world is the way the people with money want it to be, because it’s the lowest effort, most extractive model they can legally get away with. That’s not to say people didn’t like Endgame, but we all could have done without the last 3 or 4 Transformer movies. There are plenty of examples of trash movies that only get made because the story is watered down enough to pass globally.
The entire premise here is a bit odd to me; are people forced to spend their time and money watching a sub-par movie? Couldn't they watch one of the innumerable television shows that are available, watch YouTube, older movies, etc., etc.? The comparison made above to having to eat McDonald's in a desert doesn't make any sense in this context since that is talking about needing life-supporting nutrients in a literal desert.
If there's nothing in movie theaters but trash, but your culture values movie-going experience, then you have no choice but either watch trash or forgo this part of your cultural experience altogether. I've been choosing the latter for years now, but I can understand people that choose the former - because I still miss the experience. I'd love to go back to it - but not with trash.
The McDonalds analogy is actually better than you think - imagine by some market quirk most of the restaurants in your city hired chefs that suck at their job. Because, say, The American Culinary Institute declared food is not supposed to taste good, it is supposed to send the right message, and the taste is secondary. It's not like the food isn't edible or harmful anymore - it still delivers the nutrition, and still kinda edible, but sucks. Ignoring the fact you could cook for yourself - let's imagine for a minute you have to dine out - what would you do? You'd go and eat sucky food. And since you do, the business model is provably working. Maybe if the whole town agreed to not eat out for a couple of months as a protest against sucky food, it could be changed - but what are the chances of that actually happening?
Invert it. I want to watch a movie in theaters because that's a treasured pasttime. What's available to see is what's most profitable to the producer (which is measured globally), rather than what's pleasing to the customer (which is measured locally). It doesn't matter that there are alternative avenues - we're talking about a specific, consolidated economic sector that is behaving irrationally at the local level.
I didn't write the McDonald's thing, so I'm not gonna try to contextualize it.
I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike. Their decisions must also by necessity happen in a context where there are many other media options available.
I also enjoy the cinema but I only go when there are films that I find interesting and worthwhile. In my specific case this means that over the past few years I've seen Parasite, a showing of the original Alien, a few midnight B-tier horror movies, etc. I don't get to go to the movies as often as I would prefer but the alternative of wasting my time on films that I don't find attractive while simultaneously financially supporting an industry I disagree with seems obviously non-viable to me.
Lots of people go to movies to go out with a group of friends. They have to agree on the movie, and don't each pick their own one. They enjoy spending time together maybe more than they enjoy the actual movie.
> I understand your frustration but I still cannot get past the point that, generally speaking, an individual must make a specific, conscious, and unforced series of decisions in order to repeatedly end up in front of movies that they dislike.
That seems like another odd assumption to make. It doesn't need to be based on individual choices, social dynamics drive plenty of decision making [1]. FWIW, I've only seen 1 new movie this year, and I only plan to see 1 other, so it's not like I disagree with you at an individual level. That's not how it works out in the larger population though - for many people it's their leisure activity of choice.
Another way of wording this is there's plenty of sequels that play to the long tail of fans of the original who will see anything relating to it
The consumer is in charge of what movies they see. To suppose otherwise assigns people no agency: it's easy to do when it's others, but, it's not a valid way of analyzing it.
I see this as a slippery slope argument that supposes any people who choose to see movies are drowned out by zombies who see only what ads tell them to see and think they're happy, but they're actually not
> The consumer is in charge of what movies they see
No they are not. The consumer is in charge of what they see given the options available. If what the consumer wants is not being produced, then the consumer is choosing the least-bad option (which is sometimes to choose a different activity).
I agree, and the next step would be to argue if there's _any_ options that pass arrosenberg's 'bad' filter, and I feel it gets awkward from there: I can't tell you what passes your filter. I respect your opinion and often say as much myself, but the argumentation is weak in several areas
In general I agree with you. But I think you're committing the fallacy illustrated by the following joke:
Two economists go walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, "is that a $100 bill on the sidewalk?". The other economist says, "it can't be, someone would have picked it up already", so they ignore it and walk on by.
Hollywood is controlled by a small number of corporate conglomerates, many of which have their hands in too many pies to keep track of. Their movies are largely stagnating, which is probably creating an opportunity for better movies to capture an outsized share of the market. Some day, some of those movies are going to come out and make a lot of money. Studios will scramble to react and get stuck in a newer and more different rut.
This is the same kind of cycle that Hollywood has gone through over and over again since the beginning. We're just in the trough of the cycle.
I know more than a handful of people who complain about Hollywood originality, but only go to the theater for Marvel or Star Wars movies.
Or who only go to see a movie that has 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (unless its a franchise movie).
The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie. All that is left is blockbuster spectacle (which costs too much to take risks with) or art house stuff.
>The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie.
You're 70 years too late. Life magazine in 1957 talked about how one of the consequences of the Hollywood studio system (from both TV, and the 1948 Paramount antitrust case) was the death of the "million-dollar mediocrity" (<https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA146>):
"It wasn't good entertainment and it wasn't art, and most of the movies produced had a uniform mediocrity, but they were also uniformly profitable ... The million-dollar mediocrity was the very backbone of Hollywood".
The "million-dollar mediocrity" died because the Paramount case forbade block booking, in which studios required that theaters purchase said mediocrities to also buy big films. Original TV movies appeared in the 1960s but their budgets and production values were too low to really fill the hole in Hollywood, but today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series).
> today's streaming companies' insatiable appetite for content has opened a new outlet for middle-tier films (and, more importantly, series)
Also consider that a home entertainment room has a comfort and quality level that surpasses that of a typical budget [movie] theater (though I've been to a more luxurious theater that I would gladly pay money for even if I had a proper home theater -- it was that good).
What I miss by staying at home and watching a Netflix film is the social aspect, and after the past 14 months, I think people are hungry for that. It's fun to cheer when your favorite star makes a cameo, or sing along to a Disney musical. If someone could figure out how to market it, I think there's money to be made there.
> The real problem is that TV killed the middle-rung movie
I nodded away to your last paragraph, but then I thought about my old Saturday job at an independent cinema. We charged £2.50 for a ticket (now £3.50, just checked; about US$3.50 & $5 in today's), the money was in the snacks, and of course it is in major chains too.
I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre. Which they are, at major chains fully laden with snacks, but don't have to be. Television is no doubt a contributor to that image of cinema, but not I think in itself the cause of this.
> I think the real problem is consumer perception/treatment of cinemas as expensive rare treats comparable (in price) to going to a theatre.
My happiest relationship with film was when I was able to go to the movies every week (some weeks even twice!). I was going alone, during the week, to independent movie theaters that charge 4-5€. It's a great experience, even if you don't love the movie. It never feels like a ripoff.
The main problem IMO is that people don't want to get out of their comfort zone (and lack time/interest to find new stuff they might like). But of course when tickets are 15€ instead of 4€ people are much less willing to take the risk.
The price of popcorn and a soda/pop at one of the big cinemas is comparable in price to a movie with dinner at one of the local places that serves a meal with the movie. Given the choice, I know what my dinner-and-a-movie date night choice is.
What we are paying for as consumers is the experience, but the experience keeps getting worse, and the price keeps going up. I suspect this is also part of what's killing the drive-in theaters too.
To assign blame to diffuse 'consumers' as well as the Hollywood/politicians/FAANG/manufacturers/international megacorporations that are the other side of whatever 'it takes two to tango' issue, the consumers need to have the capability to effectively communicate their demands back to their partner in the trap. Not only do they need the capability, they also need the expectation that the communication will be heard, else there is no reason to do it. But that line of communication is lost at large scales. Maybe a few purists will make a principled stand for nuanced, poignant, artistic, deep films, against the degeneration of the film industry towards bland, repetitive, shallow superhero rehashes, and will refuse to buy a ticket. But capturing those ticket sales would likely mean that more casual viewers didn't bother with the more difficult films. The only number that matters to Hollywood in the end is the box office gross sales; artistic purity is either counterproductive or immeasurable in that context and therefore irrelevant.
I want to make responsible choices, and want to reject bland movies, or disposable packaging, or privacy-invading ad trackers, or greenhouse gassy lifestyle choices, or any number of similar issues. And I do make personal sacrifices that reflect these preferences. But I fully expect that Hollywood will continue to churn out uninspired movies, that the 'local' Walmart and, shortly thereafter, the landfill will contain almost as much plastic as product, that websites will increasingly pack their pages with ever-more-invasive trackers, that people will still live in single-family housing with multiple internal-combustion vehicles and long commutes.
To be clear, I believe the blame actually lies with neither of the dancers, but with the system in which they operate. You can't expect the biggest studios like Universal/Paramount/Warner Bros/Disney/Columbia to make any decisions other than those which they're incentivized to make. They have no reason to do so, and if they did, they'd soon be replaced by a competitor who didn't. A corporation is not a moral entity, it's essentially an AI that attempts to maximize quarterly financial numbers, you can only expect it to act in the narrow context of incentives and consequences on which it operates. That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy, not any individual consumer and not any individual corporation.
You're simultaneously claiming that movie viewers have no way to communicate and that Hollywood listens very hard to ticket sales. I think you'll have to pick one.
I agree these are systemic problems, but I think it's a giant mistake to absolve a corporation's execs and employees for moral responsibility for their actions. The social context is also part of the system, and it's one of the easiest parts to change.
It's simultaneously true that a single individual cannot communicate and that the actions of a diffuse, uncoordinated population are heard. That population can always be expected to contain a lot of uninformed, irrational consumers. "But what if everyone simultaneously thought very carefully about they want to consume" is not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.
I don't absolve executives of moral guilt, they're clearly doing something wrong. I distinguish between this condition of being in the wrong with the condition of being to blame or responsible for the result. They are guilty, but if they didn't make the call, there will always be another greedy, narcisistic, power-hungry sociopath ready to take their place in the boardroom. "But what if all executives in the entire competitive industry rejected the cash grab and instead made the moral choice" is also not a thing that will ever happen and therefore not a valid solution.
Without a mechanism for coordination, neither consumers nor producers can effect change; the system is all that's left to blame. Therefore, instead of moralizing or advocating individual action, we should build mechanisms to help people coordinate, work to shift the Overton window, and change the system to incentivize the behaviors you want, building very carefully to make sure that your changes are self-reinforcing.
Movies aren't made for single individuals, so I'm not sure why you think explicit communication from a single individual is the important kind of communication here.
Who gets to decide that the consumers are uninformed and irrational? I presume that's you judging people for their tastes? In my view people are in fact pretty good at picking the kind of entertainment they want.
A lot of critics complaining about mass tastes seem to have not thought through what is economically viable in mass media. The complaint is effectively, "I, a discerning person who had studied this medium, want different things out of it than casual consumers." Which is almost tautological. What restaurant critic goes to McDonald's and complains that the food's not amazing? Its job isn't to amaze the kind of person who becomes a restaurant critic.
But there is a mechanism for coordination. You're using it. Fans use it all the time to push entertainment industries in directions the like. In my view, that this isn't happening with film is not because of lack of communication. It's that the number of movie tickets sold peaked in 2007: https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
Innovation has moved away from the dying medium because the economic incentives for film have shifted.
> That cultural/social/political/economic context is the enemy
quite right! what to do?
i usually dead-end with some question like "how to reverse incentives" or "forcibly generated counter-incentives" or "inherently diversified incentive portfolios". i wonder if we need some kind of knights-errant (justicars from mass effect), agents small in number but large in power to correct wrongs.
in daniel suarez's freedom, there is a meter/gauge that measures the concentration of power. the desired state is not diffuse OR centralized, but in the middle. you need both. the public needs power to be involved and feel involved, but there is not always time for a decision by committee and there is a time for prompt, decisive action.
I think this is ignoring the problem of the global market. Studios found that it was more profitable to cater to multiple countries and cultures simultaneously.
For example, even if 100% of America went to see a film, that only represents approximately 1/3 of China's population. As a studio, ignoring that market would be seen as throwing away money. So you will see immense pressure to make your movie marketable in China as well as America.
Even if many American consumers choose to watch a film catering to them that studio would still be pressured to view that film as a commercial failure.
It doesn't seem to matter so much what the local consumers want since their demand is dwarfed by global demand.
Every US movie watcher could stop watching certain movies and the studios would still make a lot more money globally than a US centric comedy, for example.
The consumer does not have that much power. The individual consumer almost certainly doesn’t.
Don't forget product placement and merchandise sales; those can pretty significantly offset the cost of making a movie. Ticket sales are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie over time.
I do blame consumers as well. Lowest common denominator consumers are absolutely to blame for their exceptionally poor taste. Unfortunately, they happen to be the majority of consumers.
This opinion simply doesn't get expressed very often. People think it's elitism or something and react negatively to it.
One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people.
To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand.
Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars.
You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it.
Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go.
PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”
Yeah i guess the root root cause is TV + streaming competition has squeezed them so much that's the only way to get people to come out to the multiplex.
Edit: Well since I introduced the idea of a "root cause" I concede the truth is the root cause of all business decisions is, has been, and always will be market forces.
Hollywood certainly involved, but I think something closer to the root cause is that the number of tickets sold for films in the US peaked in 2007: https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
I think the root cause of the ticket shift is technological: cheaper screens, higher resolutions, better bandwidth. People have lots of entertainment at home.
So what does that shift mean? Execs get risk-averse in flat/contracting markets, which alone would account for some of the perceived decline. Artists and execs who are excited for innovation/risk are going to move toward expanding market segments, meaning toward streaming.
Also important here is who is buying tickets. 20 years ago I would happily haul my ass out to an art-house theater to see something novel and interesting. Now it's almost all available from my couch; the hard problem is picking something. More educated audiences are more likely to have the money and technology to watch from home, making niche theater-distributed films even riskier.
What's still going to work in theaters? Things with mass appeal and audiences, especially ones that take advantage of the kind of sound/video that most people don't have at home. Things where audiences know what they're getting. Of the top 20 films from 2019, 18 were related to existing IP, and the other two were from famous directors: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/
That’s an interesting. It seems then that French cinema, or European cinema in general is more localized and thus rarely becomes an international blockbuster (with rare exceptions).
Mexico tends to export to Latin America (southern cone) altho one could argue that while there are regional differences, in broad strokes mainstream latam culture jives with each other.
Industry knows that. Netflix did damage to the industry (and ultimately to themselves) according to the actual Hollywood. Lynda Obst talks about it here (how Netflix did damage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_oHW31jQfg I recommend watching the full interview, it gets to the bottom of it.
It's why we don't see many satirical films in the same vein as Robocop and Starship Troopers anymore. It would be something that the Chinese censors would never allow. Whether it's the over the top violence or the skewering of the state and corporate power structure. Stuff like that annoys the Chinese govt more than most, so Hollywood would just bow out on such a film
It's funny how many strange one off films and games are being made online through crowd funding now (not all are good but a few are decent) due to this global pleaser approach to film making.
I don't think the modern Paul Verhoeven would be poking fun at just America. I think that hypothetical director would be poking fun at China and its attempts to bully other nation states in Africa and the world as well. That enough would throw it in the "not in China" camp of films.
Because people might view it as making fun of Chinese capitalism and imperialism.
Avatar was viewed by some as being about problems in China relating to demolishing people's existing homes to build new buildings in their place. There was some discussion at the time that they only allowed it due to being the top grossing movie of all time.
Comedies have most certainly not died. They've just changed in tone.
A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.
For sure. Or look at things like Knives Out or Thor: Ragnarok. Solid comedies both and mass-market successes.
The notion that people can't be funny anymore just because they can no longer use particular groups as punchlines is just lazy. A great example is Get Out. It's a lot of things, but it can reasonably be called a comedy: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-ge...
I thought both of these movies were hilarious, and they worked with extremely "challenging" social topics.
As an old, when people start talking about movies were only funny back in the day, I suspect they just imprinted on whatever was funny in their youth. Time moves on, and humor has to move with it.
Booksmart was the first thing I thought of too when he said, “since 2012, the only successful comedies have been animations aimed at young children.” (edit: I mean to say, you can still see movies with originality even if they're not "successful" i.e. blockbusters)
In 2018 when I originally got AMC A-list subscription, I tried going to 3 movie a week at first, so I went to a lot more movies I was unsure about but they were very original and memorable, but they weren’t super popular (at least I was the only person I personally knew who had seen it).
Sorry to Bother You was so interesting, especially how they approached the first 2 acts. It was like a surrealist version of Do the right Thing. the 3rd act is well, it's different and while it doesn't live up to the build up... it's unforgettable .
I concur. Sorry to Bother You was a really good movie. It is often missed how good this movie actually is. I feel like there needs to be a louder conversation on how brilliant this movie is in so many ways.
The Death of Stalin is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. Cannot recommend enough. Sorry I don't have much more to add, but it's so good I wanted to add my recommendation to the pile
'Superbad' was a big, hollywood thing. A cultural touchstone that we remember, make jokes about, memes.
Very few people ever saw Booskmart or The Death of Stalin.
The Globalization of Hollywood - and increased cultural sensitivities have changed this.
Comedy doesn't cross borders as well as Thor.
Without going into details, cultural sensitivities and fear of Twitter mobs is a 'fundamental' issue. It's not a side issue it's a primary driver. Have a listen to the podcasts and talks by various comedy writers, you can see the evolution.
People with power have their knives out to destroy others - some of them obviously need to be cancelled, and some others raise some questions, but there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want. Everyone else has to kowtow in fear. Comedy requires 'absolute safe spaces' in order to work, particularly writers rooms, which, if we could record what they say ... my god we'd all be offended.
I'm hoping that this will just be a 'phase' but I'm afraid it may not be as the issues overlay with ostensibly historical issues of social justice, and as soon as we broach that domain, everything becomes deadly serious and we all act like good corporate citizens.
It may very well take an established 'provider' like a different kind of Netflix with a different set of sensibilities.
Edit: listen to Tina Fey and Judd Apatow podcasts and less public interviews, they hint at the shift while being very polite about it.
> there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want.
I guess Spike Lee (Blackkklansman, 2018), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You, 2018), Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, 2019), etc. are one of the few people left with the power to make the jokes they want. Or are those not the kinds of jokes you were thinking about?
(TW: next paragraph) I get the sense that you are simply wrong about this. I don’t know of any examples where a good comedy was ‘cancelled’ because of a twitter mob. If you are afraid that the era of the prison rape joke is over, then I hate to brake it to you, that joke was never funny, and even if it was, it certainly isn’t any more[1].
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
1) Superbad was sleeper hit - it did well in the theatres but far better in the long run. It launched a bunch of careers into the mainstream. It's also a broad comedy.
It was no more or less 'Hollywood' than the films you listed.
2) The films you listed are mostly Oscar Winners - which get a massive, global boost from that kind of exposure. They're also 100% 'artsy' kind of comedies made by highly respected auteurs - they're not broad comedies like Airplane or Animal House (or Superbad).
3) They're also mostly from the 2000's era, in which the general point is being made about 'challenging to make comedies' these days.
4) I don't think the box office differential rally helps that much as conceivably Superbad is going to naturally appeal a little bit more to North American audiences for the reasons you stated.
Here is a Hollywood reporter take on it [1] the decline of comedy is not a controversial idea.
"It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise. "
"The studios have backed away from comedies, just as they have mid-budget dramas, perceiving both as far harder to sell than tentpoles. "
"Even a comedy superstar like Will Ferrell has had trouble getting movies made. “It’s becoming a little finicky,” he told the podcast Armchair Expert in early June. “I’ve recently come across things where I thought, ‘Boy, what a great idea,’ and went around town and everyone just went, ‘Nope.’ “"
Comedy is way too broadly defined. Maybe my definition of comedy is too narrow, but I at least expect to laugh out loud during a comedy once in a while. Too many comedies lately just reach for the "cynicism" and "dark comedy" tools rather than genuinely make you laugh. Another thread put it better: We need more slapstick. We need more irreverence. We need a modern Mel Brooks or David Zucker / Leslie Nielsen combo to come back and show moviegoers how to totally run out of breath laughing again. Be able to poke fun at people, or companies, or institutions, or at least something outside of politics, and not worry so much about the Twitter mob sharpening their knives.
What you're referring to is 'broad comedy' - and that's my point. They don't make them in a big way.
The films listed above are not 'broad comedies' they're comedy/dramas.
I'm not sure of the 'Mel Brooks is not an argument' (link in one of the responses) is a defence at all, because the fact is, he took excessive risks while trying to make a point, risks which would not be made today.
He was Jewish and took on very serious issues with Nazis ... but he definitely was not Black, and Blazing Saddles ... wold be too much for today.
By all accounts, Tropic Thunder would not get made today because of the ostensibly 'blackface' character - I think that's a really good 'threshold' to analyze because while I don't think the character is generally offensive and most wouldn't see it as that - but it's definitely going to be for some, to the point where Execs just couldn't back making the movie. There's going to be guaranteed outrage, and that outrage, if the press decides to amplify it, will kill a film and have all the parties involved running scared with apologies.
The Kids in the Hall (Kevin McDonald) indicated they couldn't make what they made today. They did indicate they got pushback back in the day from some of their bits that mocked religion - particularly from the US - but they still got to make it, which is the point.
Casting for any role which involves 'mixed' anything is a minefield which risks overthrowing a project. The casting of Cleopatra (who was Macedonian), caused controversy by people speaking on behalf of ... Ancient Egyptians? Whom even modern Egyptians could hardly make a claim to?
There's a lot of good talk about having more people from different backgrounds in roles, and especially have them among rank and file production, which is obviously good, but this should be a different theme from say, what jokes are acceptable and not.
Those are different kinds of issues that are getting crossed up in a cacophony of Twitter noise.
HBO, Disney and Netflix are not interested in creative expression, they're inserted in products, broader audiences, and films that speak to their choice narratives. If you listen to some podcasts you can hear the opinions of these executives themselves speak about it. These are not your 'creativity first' type of people.
Cable TV has always allowed for a narrow set of channels that challenged conventions, kind of a 'Late Night Loophole' in which naughty stuff was tolerated. We need this equivalent for streaming sources. We need an 'Adult Swim' version of Netflix that invests heavily in outrageous things.
Blackkklansman was a relatively big budged film starring popular actors and made by an established director back in 2018, Spike Lee, and oh boy did he take risks. Despite being a historic drama/comedy the movie ends with the horrors of the Trump presidency. Just like Mel Brooks, the message is pretty obvious. Despite these risks this movie was aired in most big cinemas throughout the USA for several weeks (just like any other big budged drama/comedy would).
Casting: I don’t remember a time when casting didn’t cause the hate mobs to go haywire. When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger people went nuts. Some historians raised issue with the fact that Xerxes II was acted by a black man in the movie 300 despite being Persian. And I’m sure casting a black man as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar was equally controversial. Now in the era of people realizing how much representation matters, of course it is going to cause controversy if you hire an actor to play a role of a underrepresented group while the actor does not belong to said group. This didn’t used to be the case, but it is today. However this has such an obvious solution that I doubt it has hindered the production of a single movie.
> "It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise."
The times change. At one point hiring a white actor to play a black role did not stir a huge controversy, now it does. Franchises come into fashion, people get tired of them, creators move on. Just because comedy franchises aren’t big today, it doesn’t mean they are not possible. More likely is that people have seen enough sequels in other genres that they don’t want to see Baby Driver 2 no more then they like to see Dump and Dumber 5. And I think for a reason, comedy sequels tend to be pretty shitty (and I guess it makes sense, how often can you tell the same joke before it stops being funny).
I think you are over-reading into the twitter mobs. I don’t think they have as much power as you give them credit for. I think the biggest achievement of the twitter mob in the film industry was to give Sonic the Hedgehog a makeover. I don’t know of a single example where a comedy was cancelled because twitter didn’t like it. And I think comedies get made today just like they did yesteryear. And I think producers of comedies had to be careful about the subject matter before just like today. And I think they stirred controversies before, and they will continue to do so, irregardless of the political climate.
Obviously comedies will still get made on some level - and certainly times will adjust ...
... but I am I am listening to Conan O'Brian's podcast with Sean Penn at this very instant and they've literally brought up the challenges of comedy writing in cancel culture. Literally today's episode.
These are comedy/acting figureheads discussing the problem, so I'll take the word that it's an issue.
Casting is far more controversial that it's ever been, with an ever developing set of rules for who can play what under what terms. 'Progress' in the 1960's was allowed more expansive casting, i.e. breaking taboos. We are now in the process of establishing taboos.
Sean Penn just said 'I would not be allowed to play Harvey Milk in today's climate'. He then indicated that it's important to support people who have not had opportunities, but said in private conversations (this would be Hollywood 'elite' - Sean Penn is extremely connected) - the view is universal that anyone should be allowed to play anyone and that it's only on podiums on TV do the more radical voices come out. He and Conan then both agreed to terminology as 'Virtue Signalling'. It's a thoughtful discussion I recommend the podcast episode.
Kevin Hart was cancelled for the Oscars and that's a 'huge' thing as it's a global brand and they were left without a host. They've made all sorts of adjustments due to popular outrage. Just as a quick example.
It's not so much 'cancellation' as the mobs influence over the very sensitive Studio Execs and their various decisions.
Superbad would not get made today. It could (if they cleaned it up a bit) but it's just not thematically right: it's way too young white guy, crude, the tranny jokes, the 'girl on period jokes' - it just wouldn't make it past the ideation stage. Seth Rogen is now doing 'Social Progress' movies aka 'Long Shot' with definitive feminist values. Nothing wrong with that at all (it was modestly funny) - other than to say - that's what's being made instead of Superbad.
Tropic Thunder is comedy genius and it simply could not get made because of the main character's blackface, and the other major characters portrayal of mentally handicapped people. They couldn't adjust the script around that. So forget 'ideation' even if it was pitched it would be a 'no go'.
The Hollywood system is very sensitive these things and all sorts of deviations are made. A lot of it is good spirit, but a lot of it is just suffocating.
You should not be downvoted for this—you are correct. These are exactly the conversations that film executives are having internally, especially on the buying side. They don’t see it as a Twitter thing entirely, but as an engagement with the social “conversation” and the realities of the marketplace. However, the incentives are primarily fear-based. Why court the risk of a backlash when you could develop something else (they think)?
... and the root cause of that is the commercial nature of most popular film production.
This might sound like a trivial statement, but as we are finding out - the profit motive can take us down a highly problematic and noticeable path.
A challenge, though, is figuring out what paths, content-wise, this has already taken us down with us simply having internalized the choices as axiomatic.
I view that as a positive. Like a lot of other things in the US, the film industry has a long and racist past starting with the infamous "Birth of a Nation," which was highly profitable at the time of its production, but you couldn't make a blatant racist propaganda film like that now, which I'd say is for the better. The article mentions "Borat" which is an interesting example because I'd imagine a lot of people just don't get the joke and would also view it as a racist and anti-semitic film.
> the profit motive can take us down a highly problematic and noticeable path
when i was writing a sibling comment i had this same realization. the fault of capitalism is that its an expression of populism, of the tyranny of the majority.
i think the american founders had this correct, at least in principle: there needs to be a system of checks and balances with populism meeting elitism.
i wonder how one would go about architecting such an economic system. free market capitalism only for small businesses, no larger than one state? stronger government intervention interstate?
That’s a misapplication of the principles they sought to apply and why they sought to apply them.
To put “checks and balances” in context, the United States was not at the time a “state” in the post-Napoleon sense, it was a Union of States that better fit that model, and what they were trying to create was something in between the completely impotent Congress of the Articles of Confederation and a centralized Congress with carte Blanche authority. We got a Congress that could do more stuff, with theoretically carte Blanche authority, but unable to act with that because Congress cannot speak with one voice, and we gave it a whitelist of powers that it could exercise, later supplemented with a blacklist of powers it was forbidden from exercising. The United States also for the first time had its own Executive authority separate from the militias and armies it paid for and its own courts and revenue separate from the States.
The impetus for this by the way was not successfully prosecuting a war of Independence, that made the Constitutional Convention more possible and peaceful than it otherwise might have been, but because Congress, as it existed at the time under the Articles of Confederation where each State had effectively one vote, could not effectively resolve State and marketplace disputes. If Rhode Island’s government was knocked out and taken over by a militia of debtors devoted to the cause of cancelling their own debts, especially their out of State debts, there was not a damn thing Congress could do on its own. No bankruptcy courts, no protections, no courts of any kind flying the American flag and a Massachusetts Court couldn’t effect action beyond the borders of Massachusetts; Massachusetts would have to go to war to effect any action in Rhode Island.
Political systems are considered dangerous and hard to manage, in need of those checks and balances, because their powers as seats of authority are a target for ambitious people who seek to control or abuse their fellow men, and those powers range all the way up to cancelling debts, seizing private property and putting people to death. Economies don’t have offices of power because they are not organizations to be managed and controlled: only the results of human activity.
> when i was writing a sibling comment i had this same realization. the fault of capitalism is that its an expression of populism, of the tyranny of the majority.
Then, you had the opposite realization to mine, since I described a "tyranny" of the capital-owning minority, who, in particular, control the large film production studios. And if you believe they simply must give the people "what they want", then I'll quite some Bakunin at you:
> ...That abstraction called the common interest, the public good, the public safety, ... where all real wills cancel each other in that other abstraction which bears the name of the will of the people. ... this so-called will of the people is never anything else than the sacrifice and the negation of all the real wills of the population; just as this so-called public good is nothing else than the sacrifice of their interests."
obviously these harsh words are not directed at the outpouring of Kung-Fu Panda and Marvel superhero films, but if you tone it down a few notches it sort of applies.
China does this to some degree. Small businesses are free to transact without much intervention but very large companies get influenced/controlled by the small government elite in the Chinese Communist Party.
The great American comedies are loved worldwide from the classics like the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello to the "modern" dumb movies like the Hangover or Superbad. The pull to milquetoast, harmless comedies come from INSIDE the US by the usual suspects.
A comedy like Borat can be made because it makes fun of the "right" people, a FSU country, Islam, Roma people, American conservatives, rednecks, etc, so it is New-York-Times readership approved. Keep the same script but change the demographics and you will get pages upon pages of harsh criticism all over the media.
Young people need to understand that there is always an ideologically war going and the powerful people push their worldview unto us.
FYI The Hangover came out 12 years ago, Superbad came out 14 years ago. The rest of your post I'm not so interested in discussing, but comedy to me appears to be a genre that has moved to TV, like most genre fare for adults these days.
FYI Bradley Cooper stars in the Hangover, now that we are sharing useless and obvious facts. The point is that those kind of irreverent movies were loved abroad so the current situation is not because the globalization of the audience, a thing which btw is 40 years old at the very least.
I just found it interesting how you called them modern, they were probably some of the comedies I would call modern, and then I looked and realized they basically predate the founding of Uber.
Those movies you mention weren't necessarily made to cater to foreign audiences, Hollywood may have always enjoyed making money from foreign audiences but the balance has largely shifted over the last several years to the point where foreign box offices and audiences come first and determine what films get made and their content, that's a big shift in my opinion.
Let me narrow things up... Hollywood's global market is located in Red China. Tailoring for them is the reason why HW's products are so dull so they hardly can compete with high-class TV series.
There's a lot more than Marvel going on today no matter what the author implies here.
>2. Self-Censorship. Comedy was big in the early 2000s.
Claiming that there have been no comedies since 2012 is just ridicilous and pointing at Deadpool as the only potential counter-example just shows how little the author has explored beyond blockbusters.
> 3. Most Stories are the Same.
> 4. You Learn the Tricks.
This is mostly the same point and if the author didn't just watch the biggest blockbusters he'd have found how much pleasure you can get at that point by going for deconstructions, Meta, movies who play with, ignore or go against the tropes etc.
>Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad.
Fundamentally? He spent 2-3 hours on movies every 5 days, I doubt he doesnt spend as much time on something that he'd deem empty calories now, too.
At any rate, you've hardly exhausted that much after 819 movies even after including those he'd seen before when he was watching less.
Yeah the the author circles around the root issue but ultimately misses it: it's not a quality problem, but a consumption behavior problem. Thinking that it's possible to be amazed by a new movie everyday is a consumerist myth, that's not how the brain works. When they say :
> Those films of childhood were special – they’d fill me with wonder and ideas, inspiration for scenes to then recreate in The Sims or Lego
It's not the film that were special, it was the fact that they watched few movies and had time to tinker about them. The wonder was not only in the passive watching experience, so the author will always be disappointed if their quest is to find the movie that could do that. Of course that's also applicable to video games or any other media when you feel the magic is lost.
I really thought that he'd touch on the fact that one of the differences between movies when he was a child and movies when he is adult is his age. That he doesn't still play with Legos is probably not the fault of cinema.
> There's a lot more than Marvel going on today no matter what the author implies here.
I agree. It now costs a lot less to propel TV to have “good enough” special effects that nearly rival movies. Pair that with better plots and more time for telling stories, it’s not hard to see why TV is more enjoyable these days.
It's not just that TV has more time but, with streaming, TV has a lot more flexibility to choose the right amount of time and the right format. Aside from the odd miniseries, traditional broadcast TV was pretty much limited to 30 minute and 60 minute slots with ads, typically in episodic form although that started to change with VCRs and then, especially, DVRs. Oh, and there was a significant incentive to hit enough episodes for syndication deals.
I will agree with the point about comedies is somewhat true, comedic releases have diminished greatly. We used to get a great new comedy every year. I can name 20 great comedies in the 80s, 90s and 2000s respectively, but in the 2010s there's only a handful.
Comedies - Spontaneous, Popstar, Everybody Wants Some
Deconstruction/Meta/Anti-trope -Jump Street movies (count for both this and comedy as do some of the others), The Lego Movie, Cabin in the Woods, Better Watch Out, I'm Thinking of Ending Things
'Film' instead of movie - Another Round, Thorougbreads, The Lighthouse, Ex Machina
I feel like this will happen if you watch 74 movies a year that you've never seen before. Even when I had time to engross myself in international cinema in the mid 00s with none of today's level of distraction I wasn't hitting 74 a year and that was with Netflix DVDs and a membership with a few private BT trackers and DC++ on top (of course one had to wait hours to days to pull things down).
I think that the real ceiling for quality content, film or no, is the writing and there's no way to generate more high-quality writers on demand. Editing? You can walk down a street in Brooklyn and find an editor no problem. Cinematography? Art schools produce tons of people who are good at taking pretty pictures.
But there's only one Charlie Kaufman. There's only one Aaron Sorkin. There's only one Quintin Tarantino. There's just the Coen Brothers. No amount of art school or trial and error can make you a compelling writer.
So we're at a point where there's an abundance of people who can help you make a movie technically, an abundance of people who will finance a movie, an abundance of people who will act in your movie (everyone I remember from the 90s is still available as an actor on top of everyone else trying to be one) but just not an abundance of good writers and that'll probably always be true.
I don't think writing is special compared to other arts. Sure, there are many editors and cinematographers, but there are very few who can actually make an interesting edit, or interesting cinematography. Similarly, there are many writers in the world, but only a handful of really great ones, even fewer great writers who know how to write for film (being a great novelist doesn't mean you'll automatically be great, or even good, at writing a great screenplay).
What makes the writers more special than cinematographers, audio engineers, set designers, editors.
Each of these skills can be learned and each of these also have some level of personal creativity and discovery that can't be learned and is intrinsic to a person.
I basically stopped watching movies a long time ago—I was never much of a cinephile to begin with—but last week, out of either boredom or curiosity, I streamed a Hollywood blockbuster from the 2000s that I had read about somewhere.
What struck me most was how the action scenes, editing, costuming, sets, casting, and acting all seemed—to my nonexpert eye—to have been carefully and professionally done, while the storytelling was horrible: implausible, unnatural, and full of obvious holes. The story didn’t need to be great literature, but it should not have been hard to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense.
I don't know whether to blame the writers, the director, or the commercial motivation for making the film. This particular movie was obviously intended to lead to spinoffs in video games and other forms of merchandising, and that may have influenced the editing in a way that garbled the story.
There has been huge trend from the audience towards overanalysing plots and story details. Specifically, to analyse them independently from the emotional and storytelling aspects. Jump onto reddit and you see everyone ripping apart the details of Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Chris Nolan films, etc.
I think that this is a mistake. The point of the plot is to support the story. It doesn't matter if it's logical if it makes you feel something powerful. The plot needs to be strong enough to hold up during the running of the film when the viewer immersed in the story.
>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.
no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable.
There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable.
Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.
Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?
I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.
Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what.
It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.
It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...
>It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.
This is quite likely the intent. The same style that makes Robocop to be understood as a classic action movie even if the intention was to subvert.
There was an interview with the scriptwriter (can’t find it though) who said they wanted to make a film about nazi germany and the young people who bought into the cause. If you look at the costumes I think it is not so far fetched that was one aspect of it.
I heard the movie was basically ready to go when someone noticed how similar the story was to Starship Troopers. They had to get the rights just to avoid a lawsuit. I'm not really sure I agree on how similar they are.
>The movie followed the book pretty closely except for the mecha-suits.
There's a surface similarity but the tone is completely different. To me, the film is pretty obviously a largely satirical retelling of the book's story.
The director, Paul Verhoeven, has been very interested in World War 2 and has in fact made multiple movies set in WW2. The satiric elements in Starship Troopers and its parallels to Nazi Germany (and especially the propaganda elements) were definitely intentional.
yeah, 1 in a 100 movies I don't know - not sure I put Sorkin at 1 in a 100 as a writer. Also one person's 1 in a 100 is another person's pretentious piece of whatever.
I think for a lot of people Star Wars is a 1 in a 100 - if so, to quote Harrison Ford: "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!"
on edit: I had missed that he was looking for a 1 in a 100 movie originally so I went back and reread, he says "Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience." so it is not that he is looking for an objective 1 in 100 movie, but rather the 1 in a 100 he likes, thus Con Air and The Rock could stand for someone as those 1 in a 100 - for example I like both those movies but I hate everything else Michael Bay has ever done (don't know who directed Con Air - hmm Simon West quick google, yeah looks like I hate all those too)
There is an old US crime show, which nobody in the US liked, but was a hit in Germany - the people tasked with translating and dubbing realized how bad the original was and decided to rewrite it into a comedy.
I can't remember the name of the show, but I read about it in a reputable newspaper, so I hope I'm not spreading an urban legend.
I have stopped watching German dubs long ago, but I watched a lot of the German dub of Scrubs during its original run, and much later came across the original English version. It's incredibly striking how the dubbing changed the character of Dr Cox: In the German dub, he's portrayed in a high-pitched voice, rendering him a maniacal goofball, whereas McGinley's original performance uses a deeper flatter voice that made him appear much more psychopathic (though admittedly I only saw one episode in English, so that may be cherry-picking).
A movie doesn’t have to be cerebral to be good. The Rock is a good movie for the type of movie it is. There are bad movies in the same basic genre as The Rock or Con Air, many of which also starred Nicolas Cage.
You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.
If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.
For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.
>For some not so extreme examples think about what happens if the actors are shit - The Room is a good example. The story is good but the acting is what made it into a "so bad - let's troll this" movie.
I never thought I'd see someone praise the writing of The Room. The acting is bad, but the dialogue is so completely inhuman that I can't imagine anyone doing it well.
>You can come up with the best story you have but if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.
But we're talking about basic competency now, not what makes a movie the very best it can be.
> If the cinematographer has constant camera shakes in every shot - even a dialogue scene - then also you can salvage the movie.
I wonder if you had Paul Greengrass movies in mind
> if I as an audio engineer create a mix where you can't legibly hear dialogue you'd walk out of the theater in anger.
Tenet? No one I know in the US could watch that film, but my international friends liked it, presumably because they had subtitles.. the theater had to blast the sound to make the audio vaguely discernible
The theater I was at reached a point of nearly physically hurting. It doesn’t really work when it’s distressing during passive explanatory scenes. I didn’t even get the chance to be confused by the technobabble
> I think that the real ceiling for quality content, film or no, is the writing and there's no way to generate more high-quality writers on demand.
Pretty sure there's a decent number of writers out there in the world beyond the handful you mentioned, and plenty more trying to break in. For example, somehow you failed to mention any women writers.
Almost anything can be learnt, including writing well. Unfortunately, today’s incentive for anything is money, and Hollywood is no exception. And so we've fed a diet of trite, banal, and contrived writing because it fits the now-established recipe for box office returns.
Agree 100%. There are only so many good writers out there. Notice who the writers are on your favorite TV shows and then what happens to the quality of said TV show when the writers switch to other projects.
I think the bottleneck you're describing isn't "writing" but creators who will be trusted with a $X0 million budget without excessive oversight.
Sorkin or Tarantino get the leeway to create something without executives second-guessing every little decision, most people, even very talented people won't.
There are tons of talented writers producing things, but in a less expensive medium. The cost to produce a novel is literally 0.1% of a Hollywood movie. There is a lot more freedom to work there than when you're spending tens of millions of dollars.
One of the cool things about having kids is that you get to go through all the movies again from the start.
I got to get all excited about Star Wars again. And Indiana Jones. And Back to the Future. One day soon they’ll be old enough for The Matrix. How cool will that be? I’m gonna get to watch Terminator with these guys for the first time one day.
You also get all the old TV. We’re 4 seasons into The A-Team, and have watched every episode of The original Battlestar Galactica and a bunch of other series from the time when television was suitable for children.
There’s tons of stuff out there. It’s cool too get a fresh start on it all.
And that’s the reason I’m all in for remakes : if we fail to create new interesting games (although we are not yet where the movie industry is), at least we can make the old marvels of some decades ago bearable again for the new kids.
Well crafted remakes like the Spyro’s one are a breeze to share with nowadays kids and I truly hope we get more of them alongside new games.
I have come to the same conclusion as an author. My two thoughts why this happened:
1. Writers and directors use all the accumulated information about what viewers like and not like, extract patterns, and churn out new movies according to the same small set of rules. E.g. first time the main hero is approached to save the world, he/she/it should refuse. Then something bad happens and the main hero agrees to save the world.
This makes all movies and TV series pretty boring and predictable. Everything is written according to some meta-script. And I've read blogs of some writers so I know that such meta-scripts exist.
2. Storm of political correctness and other movements that took over USA, that look totally irrelevant and crazy outside of the USA. E.g. I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history. There're even more crazier examples.
Same reason why I stopped reading american Sci Fi written in the last 15 years. There're passages that are weird and loathsome.
Frankly, I'm happy that it happens. Movies, books, music is a powerful way to influence the people. USA used it successfully to spread its influence over the world. But if they continue pushing all their crazy beliefs down our throats, people start to avoid that.
I have a feeling that it's already happening although I don't know how to prove it. Probably Netflix has the numbers but it would be grossly politically incorrect to publish them. I know that Disney already experience losses from pushing current US ideology in their movies.
It's also interesting to watch what will win: ideology or greed.
> ” pushing all their crazy beliefs down our throats,”
It always sound both funny and silly to me when people use these terms to describe the presence of equality ideas in movies/shows. I read a review of Brooklyn 99 where the reviewer complained that the episode was ”force-feeding” political discussions to them.
Really? That’s the analogy for it? What is remotely mandatory about including a political topic in a movie? I couldn’t think of anything less mandatory than an arbitrary American movie or show. There are literally thousands and thousands of them. And movie watching is not “required” in any sense or circumstances.
And when you compare one black actor performing a role that you have an opinion that should not be black inside a movie with how much white washing and under representation of black people happen in Hollywood movies, it becomes even sillier to say that you are entitled to have your allegedly white roles being performed by white actors.
How can someone seriously use analogies such as “down the throat” for this kind of message?
Some things are germaine to a plot, some are not. This is a frequent issue in hero movies where a producer wants some particular detail added for nostalgia, or wants an extra villian added because they scored well in audience opinion testing.
The standard example of this is romantic subplots. Frequently stories with no romantic subplot are modified to have one to align with a studios research - and these romantic subplots always feel fake, pushed down your throat and overall contrived, especially for characters never written to have chemistry.
Social justice bingo is the romantic subplot of our time. I have no doubt there are general mandates around including certain ideas or themes, or removing others. See eg, the huge plot change in "WandaVision" where they even left in the Doctor Strange commercials (plot point from original story) but totally removed him from the ending.
I don't share the opinion that it's "foced down the throat", but at least for young adults, many conversations are about the currently popular TV show or movie. So while it's not "forced down your throat", I think many people watch them to fit in. From what I saw it started with Breaking Bad, then Game of Thrones, and then it started getting faster and faster.
Meh. Let me guess: you live in USA. You're obliged to justify all this out of the fear of being "canceled": fired from your job, removed from social networks for saying politically incorrect stuff or supporting wrong political party or saying that there're less or more genders that is proclaimed by some powerful minority organization with the right to cancel.
From other places this is experienced as craziness. What is "equal and ethical" about black women playing King of Sweden from IX century (this is a contrived example as I haven't even attempted to watch any of the contemporary historical movies from USA)? He wasn't black, he wasn't woman, why violate the history?
Especially, considering that most of the world has nothing to do with the slave trade in the US, or with genocide of Indians in the US, or any consequences of it. So why we should suffer raping of the history just so that Americans could "restore the balance"?.. Besides, I don't even think that it restores the balance. It's a superficial measure that is very cheap compared to restoring the equality indeed.
I live in Brazil, I am Brazilian. Why did you feel such strong rejection of a black woman playing a white king? I have no idea which movie are you talking about, but I am pretty sure their intention was not to trick, mislead, or miseducated viewers that the Swedish king was not a white male. You continue to sound silly to me.
1) I'm annoyed that US tries to impose its cultural norms on all other countries in the world, like they have monopoly on some absolute truth. Some of their cultural norms are weird and repulsive.
2) They include huge fragments dedicated to the ideology in all the movies and all the books, like it is obligatory by law. E.g. when I open almost any recent Sci Fi book of US author, it would be filled with graphic descriptions of various sexual deviations. Or something even less relevant, e.g. that "half of the country is filled with dumb bigots supporting Republican party". I didn't buy the book to read about US politics, I don't care. I want my Sci Fi, not read about gender 33 and gender 45 group sex orgy every second page.
I just made a conclusion that it's simply not worth the time to watch recent US movies and read US books.
It has almost nothing to do with equal rights, etc, etc. Besides, like I said in the other comment, including this in the movies doesn't make people equal. People at Amazon will work for measly pay, while Bezos will continue to get richer. Black people will be put in jails instead of giving them education and jobs - including them in the movies doesn't change that a single bit.
> He wasn't black, he wasn't woman, why violate the history?
Because it's acting. Maybe women are just trying to have some fun playing men, given that historically in the West, women were always played by men (or boys). Cross-gender and cross-race acting is nothing new. Have you ever seen a play? Are you upset whenever Othello is played by a white person?
> What is remotely mandatory about including a political topic in a movie?
We are talking about fairly subjective preferences or perceptions. You don't have to be a film student to know that films/movies/tv are frequently used as tools for social engineering. When you notice, you can either feel positively or negatively about it and most importantly, you dont need to have a "good reason" for feeling either way.
Re point number 2: The example you give is not really supporting your point, and is pretty much an on the nose example of (cognitive) bias that comes off looking quite hypocritical, and slightly racist (for lack of a less loaded term).
Please do not get your emotions up, I will try to explain. Your comment strongly implies a preference for movies from the past. Hollywood movies were/are notorious for “whitewashing” characters - i.e. using white characters / actors in roles where this would be very implausible according to the internal logic of the story (or history in cases where it applies). Objecting to one but not the other seems extremely hypocritical - there is a lack of consistency / fairness there. And then the question is why the preference for one vs the other?
The more interesting question IMO is whether that preference is something inherent, or the result of years of exposure / programming that has normalized the practice one way - such that you are still able to suspend disbelief - but not the other?
This is what I'm really talking about: this kind of craziness requires a lot of scaffolding and mental gymnastics to explain.
While you live in the states, you're surrounded by it. It's aggressively pushed from everywhere. You can't resist, because disobedience will likely cause harm to you (e.g. losing a job and failure to pay the mortgage).
So you naturally start to believe that it's all true and justified and the only way. I get it.
But if you're outside of your society, outside of the pressure of making everyone accept this, it looks weird, even deranged in many cases. I'm pretty sure it causes and will cause loss of sales outside of the US. It would be carefully hidden and hard to prove, but I don't have to prove it. E.g. I just know that nobody from my friends and family would like to watch such a movie. Yeah, we discuss it and the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers.
It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
> It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
It (and this is usually fiction in historical settings, not historical movies, which are different genres, unless you are talking about black people playing black historical figures, which is a weird thing to object to) repairs (or, more accurately, mitigates) the injustice of current, active discrimination and underrepresentation of blacks in the film industry, not some distant historical injustice more closely tied to the slave trade.
> you live in the states, you're surrounded by it.
When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too (usually much more harshly than in the US). Your assumptions about actors' skin colors are as much influenced by the culture of your country as they are influenced by the US culture in the US, as evidenced by the phrase "the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers." Please don't conflate a view from your culture with nebulous "obvious objectivity".
> making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.
It does not repair injustices of the past, but it helps fix the injustices of today: non-white actors of today should not be kept out of movies just because of a specific historical setting.
Any historical movie is just a modern interpretation of true events. There is no actor that can be a completely authentic reflection of a historical character. A respectful, non-mocking actor play by a person of different race can be a good reminder of that.
> When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too
Yes, it is true. But my country doesn't try to impose its cultural norms all over the world like they are universal truth that should be applied everywhere.
Also, I don't really want to argue whether the society and processes in the US are just or not. It's that they're not interesting to dive into for somebody living in another country.
E.g. I've started reading a sci fi book recently (won't name an author), and stopped after reading like 60 pages most of them describing all kinds of deviate sexual relationships. It's that I want to read the sci fi book, not an encyclopedia about 50 genders and how they mate with each other in all the intricate details.
But I have a feeling that writers and directors in the US are forced to put that in their work. It's like communist system is commonly described: not only you are forbidden to object, you must also constantly demonstrate that you support it.
Point 2 is completely backwards in my opinion. The "political correctness" not at all emanating from America. It's emanating from China. Sensitivity to Chinese censors has colored a lot of major blockbusters. There remains little to no filter on what gets produced for US audiences and the latest from Eric Andre on Netflix is proof positive of that. Eric Andre pushes some of the same buttons as Borat with more emphasize on physical danger than parody, but he still got his movie made and released and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The difference is you expect that from China, but not from US that has something called a First Amendment that used to mean something in the past. If you justify censure in USA with examples from China, that's saying USA is going down.
But USA is ‘going down’ isn’t it? Media is created more and more for Chinese audiences. The market there is simply more appealing for producers. What gets produced has always been economically motivated, why would that change now?
The first amendment is very much in tact and is not applicable here at all. Artistic freedom in the US and Europe is arguably at all-time high from a public acceptance point of view.
The First is not about artistic freedom only and it is visibly under attack from all sides. I am an European and I don't take sides, it is just what I have observed.
> I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history. There're even more crazier examples.
A Whitewashed Earthsea
How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
By Ursula K. Le Guin
On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don’t know what the film is about. It’s full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the film, he’s a petulant white kid.
Maybe when things like this stop happening we'll understand what you mean by "storm of political correctness", but until then, it's too little, too late.
I've tried to find the proof but failed. Maybe I misremember something. Maybe it's my wishful thinking.
Although I'm pretty sure I've read something that impertinent pushing of current US values causes aversion and losses in the viewers. Such things are really hard to find, you won't ever find this on a first page of CNN or BBC because it is an inconvenient truth.
But I've found the confirmation that the first point (using big numbers and meta-script) is successful and increases revenue of Disney.
I think you need to open your mind more. 90% of entertainment has always been garbage, often with an agenda. Just look at "The Turner Diaries", or "Rise of the Nation".
There is plenty of good stuff on the screen. Movies, games, and television are all competing for the same audiences and I do think Movies are losing out. They are essentially Novellas, which are not as popular as Novels.
> I won't be able to ever understand why historical persons in the movies should be black even if they couldn't be black in that position at that point of history.
If they are historical persons, they either were or weren't black. You are probably talking about fictional persons in more-or-less historical fiction. And both inclusion that minimizes the racism of the historical period and exclusion are potentially seen as problematic (from the Left; obviously, you’ve kind-of articulated the Right objection to inclusion.)
Of course, whitewashing by placing White characters where they make no historical sense, often simply inserting white characters into adaptations of existing stories from other cultures (especially in lead roles) is still (not only historically) more common than implausible inclusion of non-Whites, and remains a big complaint by (AFAICT) lots more foreigners to US media than occasionally including black people in improbable historical positions.
Sensibilities have changed and the target audience has become larger. Since the 2000s films have sloooowly become less sexist, racist, homophobe and used less flat gross-out humor. Because you can make jokes that are not made at the expense of minorities.
And this is not something purely happening in the US. It might just be perceived that way because they have such a large cultural influence around the world. There is racism, sexism and all the other stuff everywhere in the world, and the cultural reckoning is happening there too, just in very different ways.
The article mentions a new Borat couldn't be made now, and the footnote, probably added after the new one came out, excuses the author being wrong by saying Sasha Baron Cohen already has popularity and support so could get away with it.
It's simpler than that though and fits other points made - the new Borat was actually a lot more politically correct and followed the American ideology that has emerged recently, adding a woman character and going after Trump republicans.
> the new Borat was actually a lot more politically correct
No it wasn't PC (IMHO). It went out of its way to offend and pushed the envelope. I couldn't watch it to the end because of this. It brought up tired old stereotypes which I thought were long gone.
Or because sequels often add new characters. And the Trump Republicans made themselves ridiculously easy targets...see the Four Seasons Landscaping fiasco, paying off Playboy models and pornstars, suggesting publicly that people inject themselves with bleach or somehow use sunlight internally...
People mock them because they do stupid things. Those are called consequences.
“ Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see. It’s almost always a disappointment.”
Had you done this two decades ago using the equivalent (blockbuster), you probably would have felt the same. What I do think is manifestly different now is that we don’t have nearly as accessible good film criticism. It still exists, but it’s mixed in with a bunch of internet dross. Filtering mechanisms have always been essential to life online and our current ones massively favor eyeballs over quality.
> “ Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see. It’s almost always a disappointment.”
... how can he use this the basis for his argument? Every day, I curl up in front of my PC, look through some Reddit threads about movies and find a handful of incredible movies that I'm thankful for that people pointed out. What should the title of my article be?
> Every day, I curl up in front of my PC, look through some Reddit threads about movies and find a handful of incredible movies that I'm thankful for that people pointed out. What should the title of my article be?
Probably "hundreds of good movies are made every year, but if you don't move your ass and try to find them they won't magically land on your lap".
The author has identified these problems himself (point 5) but looks like he just doesn't want to put in the effort.
Well, different people, different tastes. I myself almost never enjoy movies, even though I haven’t watched many of them. I have tried using reddit, IMDB, Metacritic, etc, to select movies, but it doesn’t make a difference.
The self-censorship point is completely ridiculous, and borders on complaining about "cancel culture'. It literally mentions Superbad as an example of a film that can't be made today, entirely ignoring that it got a spiritual successor two years ago in Booksmart, which was amazingly funny without punching down.
Looks like the author of the video misses the point by about a mile, taking it in the most literal sense possible. His argument is basically "yes, you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today because it was playing off the contemporary popularity of Western and its tropes, and since that is long gone, repeating it in a literal sense, as a Western parody, would be a no go now, because nobody cares anymore about Westerns". Which as I said, misses the point about a mile - the point is not about recreating the same movie, it's about making the same kind of movie - the movie pushing the boundaries and being as offensive as possible on purpose, the movie highlighting the hot topics not by solemnly lecturing the viewer, but by lampooning the hell out of it. The refutation of this point would be to provide an example of current irreverent offense-to-11 lampooning of current tropes-de-jour. I don't know - Marvel movies? Woke diversity-inclusion drama? Something else?
So the author is right - nobody wants to literally make the same movie today, because the same movie is already have been made! It's however a prime example of being right on technicality and completely wrong on substance - the point is not to make a copy of Blazing Saddles, the point is making that kind of irreverent and boundless satire, which is appropriate in all times and all societies - but I can't see how Woke Hollywood could ever make something like that.
Another argument is "but we don't submit to every woke demand and not everybody is getting cancelled" - of course not! If Hollywood tried to submit to every woke demand and avoid every complaint from twitter mob, no movie would be ever made at all. Of course, there's a lot of complaints that are ignored. That doesn't exclude the fact that there are clear boundaries where Woke Hollywood would never dare to tread. And irreverent no-holds-barred satire of the Blazing Saddles mold is out of these boundaries.
Next argument is "well, there are stand-up comics and they aren't thrown in jail". Yeah, sure, we're not there yet. But we also not where we were when Blazing Saddles was made. We're somewhere in between the one and the other. And we're moving away from the Blazing Saddles.
What, and whom, do you think BS was lampooning? I'd expect a true modern successor to lean pretty far toward the "woke diversity-inclusion drama" side of things.
BS is lampooning a lot of things - corrupt politicians, demagogues, racists, ignorance, religious intolerance, Western movie tropes, cinema tropes in general, and by the end it turns into a total glorious mayhem where everybody gets a pie in the face (in both metaphorical and the most literal sense).
So you'd be tempted to ask - why would Woke Hollywood or their woke twitter mob watchdogs object to lampooning corrupt politicians or racists? And the answer to that is exactly the reason why woke cancel culture is so awful - because the intent does not matter. If something can be taken as offensive by any construction of the most hostile reading of it - and a hostile reading (watching) of Blazing Saddles surely could find a lot of "problematic" things within it - completely ignoring the intent, the context and concentrating only on the form and the worst possible interpretation of it that could be invented - then it's unacceptable and must be destroyed.
That's exactly the crux of the problem and the point of the argument about Blazing Saddles - the problem is that even when you agree on the premises, like racism is bad, corrupt politicians are bad, etc. - if you express it in a manner that may seem to somebody, even in theory, "problematic", you're still the enemy.
yeah, they literally made a borat sequel last year. Eric Andre also released a very borat-inspired movie recently that was also great. its a dumb point
I'm neither for or against the author's argument. However, he addresses the fact that a Borat sequel was made by saying that it succeeded because the director is already successful and it's a sequel to an already successful comedy.
I don't think the author's argument is that comedies can't be made but more that we're seeing less of them because there is more cultural friction today and that prevents aspiring directors from branching out.
> I don't think the author's argument is that comedies can't be made
They literally say "Borat could not be made today". Trying to justify that in a footnote has the same energy as advertising "Our product cures cancer*" and then having "*no it doesn't" on the back of the box. It's just an egregiously false statement.
Maybe that wasn't their argument - they do emphasise the importance of being an established director, and that's a fair thing to assess. But when someone finds themselves having to add a footnote saying "When I said this couldn't be made today, I was ignoring that it was", that should probably be a hint that the argument actually being presented is pretty poor.
Why would you choose Borat as the kind of comedy which "isn't allowed to be made today" when you know you're going to have to contrive a reason for the existence of a sequel which was near enough made today in a footnote...?
Most of the points express a disappointment with mainstream Hollywood movies, which if you don't broaden your horizons is eventually going to lead to disappointment for any cinephile.
"The sitcom-and-laugh-track era appears to be over, thank heavens" I would agree about the laugh-track era being over - but thats hardly a new development. I've been watching the Larry Sanders show from the early 90s which was a landmark show without a laughter track. But to say the era of the sitcom is over is nonsense? There are so many great recent ones.
The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience
Otherwise, I don't know... I've been watching movies at varying frequencies for decades and I certainly don't feel I've come close to even really tapping the surface, don't feel like I can guess immediately where the director will take me & don't feel really constrained by Vonnegut's theory about there only being six types of story.
> The one thing I agree with is that scrolling through Amazon Prime / Netflix is a draining & dissatisfying experience
But not (only) because they lack a good catalog. It's mainly because they don't (want you to) have the tools to find content you'd truly like. They're focused on promoting new and trending content. The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and not use providers as discovery tools. (Edited a typo.)
You need an external list anyway just to keep track of where things moved around to across subscription services. I wouldn't mind the current segmented streaming market as much if the people that are selling their media rights around provider to provider would do any effort to guide your eyeballs to their work, but they don't seem to be incentivized to do that and would rather direct you to a buy/rent situation instead which makes the whole streaming subscription piece redundant. Right now nobody's running the job as the promoter where they do an end to end hype train, it feels like everyone's just leaning on passive advertising and waiting to sell media rights to the next group. With the direct to consumer digital media purchase option only becoming more prevalent it seems like the subscription movies are going to be in purgatory for a very long time.
>The proper approach is to have a list outside content providers and use not use providers as discovery tools.
As an aside, justwatch.com (and their mobile app) do a good job of filling this role. They have the same "promote the stuff that's already trending" problem, but will recommend things across services or that aren't available for streaming but you might want to track down anyway. (No affiliation beyond being a happy user)
This is why I believe it should be a legal requirement for digital storefronts to have an API that allows 3rd parties to create custom UI for them. I understand that they want to have marketing control over their content, but as a result we're creating an objectively worse experience for customers with no way for competition to step in a solve it.
When Amazon Prime video first came out, the catalog was extremely poor - I suspect they cheaply licensed a large library of old, obscure releases in order to have something to launch. But they also had simple, effective algorithms for content discovery as opposed to the herding algorithms of today. I seem to recall they even had a "random" categorization which seemed to be truly randomized and which was wonderfully hit or miss.
I think you’re confusing “would not be allowed to be made today” with “would face a ~48 hour Twitter outrage cycle then the world would move on”.
I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.
It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.
I mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put.
However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.
What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)
I agree about the description of the outrage cycle, but I think what you're leaving out is people frequently get fired/ostracized for these things. That really does have a cooling effect.
I also think that as more high profile people leave Twitter, the extremes of canceling are going to die down. It's pretty well accepted in the leftist communities that canceling has become more than a bit too impulsive and reductionist (this latter factor, I would suggest, due in part to Twitter's tiny character limits), and I think at this point everyone wants to leave Twitter and be done with it, but it's a technical issue now. Twitter is addicting, and honestly so is the adrenaline rush from knowing some rich guy's day/week was ruined. imo, it's easier to just not think about Twitter when people you know/admire aren't on there, and if you're not thinking, you're not tweeting, and if you're not tweeting, you're not recklessly canceling.
Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.
Your conclusion misses the fact that those outraged people move the needle.
Studio Execs are very sensitive to outrage. It's part of the calculus.
Often, the outrage is perpetuated within the industry as well.
That said - Airplane would get made - they'd just adjust the jokes accordingly.
When they made Airplane, there were a lot of gags they didn't use because they just were 'too much' - or not funny.
So adjusting the content a bit is always something going on.
That said, the 'fear bar' is much, much lower for certain formats.
My canary for that is Tina Fey. And Judd Apatow. These are staunchly progressive people, but with serious comedy chops. They have been making some passive aggressive public statements lately with respect to this stuff, you can hear what they think on podcasts.
What we need is for Mel Brooks is to come back and save us. He's too old, but if he backed a Ben Stiller remake of 'Blazing Saddles' - I think it would be the funniest thing of the century.
I'd maybe agree that they occupy similar spaces in their respective media landscapes, though Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition. But either way I wouldn't say they are the exact same thing. An example: recently Tucker Carlson recently took time in an episode to detail an entirely unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the January 6th Capitol attacks. It was completely and utterly false, and easily proven as such. But he has not (to date) admitted that.
If there are examples of this level of disinformation coming from Samantha Bee and/or Joy Reid I'd be interested to see them.
> Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition
That's a bit of a cop-out in some ways, especially depending on how it's meant.
If it's meant to indicate that Samantha Bee uses humor, that's fine. But by the same token, Rush Limbaugh used humor. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder use humor. None of those people do a show with their primary intention being to get a laugh, though. They do a show with their primary intention being to express a point of view, and if they can use humor to do that, all the better.
If it's meant to indicate that we shouldn't take Samantha Bee too seriously, don't worry; I don't. I also don't take Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson too seriously, either.
But usually, it's meant to deflect criticism. Jon Stewart did the same thing. He would make serious criticisms of commentators (including a much younger Tucker Carlson) as if he was trying to be taken seriously, but as soon as anyone criticized him he would immediately fall back to, "I'm a comedian!"
To his credit though, John Oliver (who was on the Daily Show along with Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert back in the day) doesn't seem to hide behind the "I'm a comedian" shield anymore.
Shock horror, society has moved on in the 40 years since Airplane was made...
How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried?
Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!".
In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days
> Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.
> "Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally...This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled...I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context."
> “…They’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’”
Obviously the Office isn't in the limelight anywhere near as much as it used to be, but I never hear people having a problem with its tone or style of comedy. A few other sitcoms have had scenes removed from streaming platforms / boxsets (Peep Show, Fawlty Towers etc). But the Office I've never really seen mentioned in a similar way. In fact it's still pretty much beloved by everyone and regularly polls amongst the best British sitcoms of all time.
I didn't downvote you, but the office was very much censored and there were articles about it[1]. The same article discusses Community having one of its best episodes ever yanked over black face that was explicitly explained in the episode. People have lost their collective minds.
Yeah, as another comment mentioned I was specifically referring to the UK Office. I've seen the first couple of seasons of the US Office and so not enough to really comment on this particular scene being removed.
However, they are vastly different shows tonally and so I imagine a scene featuring black face would be handled very differently by the US version
People have lost their minds, because they don't want to see blackface, even in an ironic context? I wish you wouldn't say those things, because I feel the same way, I really don't want to see it, and I don't find it funny or worth seeing in any context. Please don't assume that everyone likes the same jokes that you do.
> Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was
But that’s exactly why it could not be made today. Today, you can’t say anything which can be taken out of context. Quote mining has become a national pastime.
So, how do you explain Ricky Gervais' ongoing presence in TV, standup & social media where he routinely says objectively worse stuff than ever appeared in the Office with no real damage done to his career?
His recent standup work has far more objectionable content in it than the Office ever did
A standup is the producer/director/writer/actor for the program. An sitcom/romcom has multiple producers/directors/writers/actors involved, so there is a much broader level of editorial. The producers deciding what directors/writers to hire is in and of itself editorial control. The writers agreeing what jokes to use is editorial control. Even the actors will get their say while on set with lines like "i just don't feel this is what my character would say", then you get rewrites onset.
TL;DR: of course a standup's routine is much less scrutanized than any other type of content by the nature of it.
Yawn, everyone always uses this film as a "prime" example. I don't even think it's true. This film (like Borat) was clearly satirical and the real targets of the jokes quite obvious...
I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination).
I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases
I mean, this already happened. Ted Danson was semi-cancelled in the early 90s for wearing blackface to a Friar's Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.
Blackface being problematic isn't something we just figured out in the last 12 years, and people trying to do something funny with it anyway isn't new either.
I don't disagree with the fact that blackface is an old phenomenon, I think RDJ's prodigal-son-returns factor and headlining a tentpole summer blockbuster helped brace the impact a bit.
I'm pretty skeptical of the "couldn't be made today" tropes. Some types of films have gone out of style. And there probably are cultural/ethnic stereotypes that would have been mostly considered funny by many audiences that would be more broadly seen as just offensive today.
But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.
The 22 Jump Street movie kiss/fight scene could never be done today, nor could the other kissing scenes, but the kiss/fight scene was a pivotal part of the movie.
Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical'
Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change.
have you ever seen an episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia? the show is regularly far more offensive than any line in airplane, and nobody cares.
Including blackface, which other threads are suggesting is just totally impossible to pull off. The reality is it's perfectly fine to do anything offensive so long as the the joke isn't just reinforcing those beliefs.
Not any different than the very common older, white racist character in sitcoms today. They're funny! Not because racism is funny, but because the unacceptability of their racism is funny.
I think it's actually pretty debatable, depending on what you count "longest running" to mean. Curb Your Enthusiasm has been on since 2000 but has taken years-long breaks. Is that longest running?
FWIW It's Always Sunny is, I believe, considered the longest running live action sitcom. Longest running sitcom overall is The Simpsons.
I can't see a critic taking that dictionary definition very seriously. If you had looked at Wikipedia instead, you'd see no animated show is discussed in the article on sitcom, suggesting animated shows are considered a separate genre.
If you opened a textbook on mass media, it might have a definition of sitcom that is more culturally relevant.
From The Simpson Wikipedia page: "The Simpsons is an American adult animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company." The sentence links to the "Animated sitcom" page, which states, "An animated sitcom is a subgenre of the sitcom that is animated instead of live action that is geared toward adult audiences in most cases. South Park and The Simpsons are two of the longest running animated sitcoms."
Not the longest running show... soap operas, and possibly some news programs, hold that title. For example, the soap 'Days of Our Lives' has been running since 1965.
I'm not sure it's our job to keep adding qualifiers to the OP's bold statement that "Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period." until it's finally accurate.
In any case... PBS' Nova is 47 years old. Frontline is 37. I believe those are aired in prime time. And they are "not considered a sitcom" either.
I think the problem is that a lot of the humor in Airplane has aged like sour milk - it's not a comedy made to stand the test of time. Consider "Blazing Saddles", which does not suffer from this problem nearly as much and is 6 years older. I could see it getting made today just fine with a few tweaks.
> And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.
Blazing Saddles was the poster child for that when many of the movies that argument is now made about were made, too.
Because its the kind of movie that could never be made, except that it was. And if there was a Mel Brooks-in-his-prime now, the modern equivalent (which, presumably, Blazing Samurai this year will not be) could get made today.
> Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"
Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how.
The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).
The, "Could not be made today," line of thinking is overblown. I predicted around 2015 that a movie in the style of "Falling Down" could never be made with a black lead. Less than 2 years later, Get Out was released. And as far as scandal-worthiness goes, I think if Sorry To Bother You got past the salacity filter, we're doing pretty good.
Yeah, you're right - I hadn't seen the shapes of stories video in quite a while, i was just taking the authors comment about it.
I think if you watch that Vonnegut video and come away with the conclusion that there are only "x" ways to tell the story then you've missed the point entirely, agreed with your post basically.
There is infinite space to explore within those 'story shapes' (like how we still get fresh + unique takes on the Heroes Journey for example) that it doesn't really matter
It's not hard to notice that the two Borat movies are very different in style
Who is ridiculed in the subsequent moviefilm? Orange man, anti-abortion activists, libertarians, holocaust deniers - they are all safe to laught at. Just compare with who was the laughing stock at the original one - feminists, blacks, gays, jews. That wouldn't fly today
No, I understand that the movie was about common americans as the name suggests. But now, even using these groups as props for jokes will get you bombarded with thousands of angry tweets starting with the word "Normalizing"
It's been shown time and time again that a lot of cult movies are popular less for their satirical bent and more for the shock value and edgy premises in which the satire plays out.
That's why there are innumerable comments of the "They wouldn't be allowed to make this today" variety. Shock first, nuance second (if at all).
So the acceptable targets have just changed. I don't think the complaint was that you can't make fun of jews (or whoever) specifically but about whether comedies of that general type are being made.
Sacha Baron Cohen has changed targets 6+ times in his carrer so there's nothing new there.
For anyone who finds themselves getting bored scrolling through the film options on Netflix, or utterly disinterested in watching Marvel film #593 then I'd recommend Mubi [0]. It mainly shows independent films from around the world and it cycles through them relatively quickly - they add a new movie every day so there's always something you haven't considered watching yet.
Netflix does an impressive job of hiding from you 90%+ of what it has available if it's algorithm decides you are not interested in those genres.
However, there are plenty of sites out there that have compiled links to the thousands of genres that Netflix have categorised everything into. For example:
I just search for random words sometimes and find really interesting movies that way :D sounds crazy but really works as you're really right: the algorithm, like YouTube, tends to show you all the same things you've already watched and probably got tired of already.
I wonder what percentage of „movies and tv suck nowadays“ is just the poor discoverability on Netflix, Amazon, etc.
Does Netflix license content with a pay per view model, so that they will get the content for those who are seeking it, but wont offer unless requested?
> I wonder what percentage of „movies and tv suck nowadays“ is just the poor discoverability on Netflix, Amazon, etc.
I wonder what percentage of it is people having both higher expectations of them (in part becaise of competing entertainment) and exhausting the supply of what they do like faster (binging, etc.)
I don't know if it's in other countries, but in the UK you get a free cinema ticket with your subscription every week (Mubi GO) and I've seen so many great films I would never have even heard of because of that service.
Streaming services have kind of ruined movies for me a bit.
When using Netflix you get the impression that what they really want customers to do is to kind of "hang around in the lobby", scroll and experience the frustration of re-rejecting all the content you have already rejected a hundred times by scrolling past them.
And Amazon...I can never quite figure out why they show me so much content that I can't access as part of my subscription or that requires some form of extra payment to watch. I guess it fits in with the overall Amazon theme of showing me merchandize that doesn't actually ship to where I live on their main site. Or that awful iPhone app that keeps asking me which amazon store I want to use, because after many years, Amazon still haven't figured out how to fix this.
It is becoming ever more rare that me and the wife find something to watch. We scroll around for 10 minutes without finding anything, get bored, watch the news, turn off the TV and go do something else.
The thing is: there is no UX innovation on streaming sites. They don't actually do anything intelligent about the knowledge they have about you. They keep showing you stuff you are not interested in and you have no way of telling them "look, I'm not into superhero movies" or "please don't show me anything Nick Cage is in".
It would help if you could rapidly mark content as "I'm not interested", and remove it from sight so you don't have to scroll through screens of stuff you aren't going to watch again and again.
Apple's movie thing is slightly better. You can actually navigate through a slightly better catalogue of movies, but the UX isn't great. And it makes no use of any knowledge about you to find content.
Why has innovation on streaming service user experience stopped? Why are they so terrible?
Designers and programmers seem to have a blind spot for the "I'm not interested" idea. I've pushed this for 15 years whenever I can in products we make, and literally no one gets it (I call it the "Sucks" button). What would make Netflix browsing, or any search result list, way better? Getting to go down the list and quickly say "Sucks. Sucks. Sucks."
The usual counter-point is "What will people do if they change their minds later?", which makes me tear my hair out.
Before culling a few, I was subscribed to 5 streaming services. Typically, it would take me about 3 weeks to find something worth watching, and then a week or two to binge it. That’s TV. I can barely ever find a movie I can sit through. Netflix was always like that as long as I can remember, and the others work the same way. A few gems sitting on a haystack of blah.
> And Amazon...I can never quite figure out why they show me so much content that I can't access
If you click the "Free to me" link at the top then it works pretty well for just what you can access. The filter carries forward if you then filter for genres.
Yeah, but why show me content I can't even buy? And showing it prominently? That's just terrible design and makes Amazon the last streaming service I browse. If at all.
The only time I actually end up watching stuff on Amazon is those 1-2 times per year they have something bingeworthy that I've learned about somewhere else. And then it's always "aw crud, Amazon - wonder if I even have access to it at all".
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
What happened around 2006 is streaming. This caused DVD sales to tank, which had a massive effect on the film industry’s bottom line. DVD sales were a money printer and that cash allowed studios to take more risk. Once DVD sales started tanking the indie film divisions of major studios (like Fox Searchlight) started to die, which is a big reason that films became less interesting. Also, the shift to making money mostly off the box office rather than DVDs meant that a movie needed to make more money in its opening weekend, which meant needing to make tent pole movies that appealed to all ages and international markets. Imagine how hard it is to write a movie for all ages in all countries.
But streaming did not get any significant market share before ~2014.
DVD was replaced by "non-consumption". My guess is that blue-ray should have been the replacement, but they were priced too high, so consumers dropped buying movies for a while.
Social media networks and smart phones came around at that time, and in conjunction with increasing popularity of video games probably destroyed a lot of demand for video content.
There was simply a lot more choice for how one can spend time, and a ton of it at a higher cost to enjoyment ratio than movie tickets or DVD or Blu Ray.
I don't think digital itself is the problem. Rather, much like the music industry, the knowledge of how to monetize most efficiently has killed creativity to a great extent in mainstream culture. You can make a hundred Eyes Wide Shuts and you wouldn't get the profit of The Avengers.
I'd also note that a passion for film has been culled out of the Hollywood management class almost entirely. They are running corporations, not film studios, unlike some older generations. Not to say that profit wasn't an important motivator ever since film began, but it was never the sole reason for funding movies across the industry like it is today.
It's also very sad that taste in movies will be fundamentally altered by this period. Taste for complex movies needs to be formed - in a world of Marvel movies, it's very hard to even understand what is good about a film like A Clockwork Orange or Birdman.
Hmmm.... I guess it is when you grew up? I thought the 70's were king for U.S. filmmakers. And 70's sci-fi was some of the best. Until "Star Wars" came along and killed it.
I loved "Star Wars" when it came out, was blown away. But in hindsight I am sad to see it was marked the end of 70's sci-fi.
And then "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which I loved, was more or less the modern blueprint for all the crap that has come out since. It represents a storyboard approach to the screenplay/film: basically action sequences tied together with a thin thread of plot.
The various "Pirates of the Caribbean" are classic examples of the rot that followed as are every superhero film, every "Fast and Furious" film, "Transformers", etc.
I don't have the cycles to spend on all the "streamed content" that HBO, Netflix, etc. are cranking out now so I can't comment on whether "TV" is better these days.
The original Pirates of the Caribbean was a superb work of its genre with classic acting, humor, and subtle characterization that you do not give it credit for.
As far as claiming “every superhero film” - that’s a tall order. While one can say most MCU (and perhaps DCEU films) share a certain level of formulaic quality that make them easy to reduce and denounce, there are always outliers. Consider the neo-Western greatness of Logan. The contemplative complexity of Unbreakable. I didn’t even mention the late Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight.
You're focusing on a very specific niche. Sci-fi and adventure were rarely the interest of good film makers, so few sci-fi or adventure films were made.
But that does not reflect on the larger film industry of the 80s and 90s, which was producing many more incredible movies which stood the test of time. 1999 alone gave us Fight Club, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Iron Giant, Eyes Wide Shut, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile.
There has always been a lot of schlock cinema being produced, but right now it is dominating much more than in the last few decades.
I was focusing on sci-fi as more of an example. In all other areas of cinema though you had a kind of second "New Wave" in the 70's with films like "Chinatown", "The Godfather" — throw in Wood Allen's films.... My only gripe is how out of control the violence could be in that decade of filmmaking.
In the 2000s-ish I started to think music was in decline and could never again rival the music of the late 20th century.
But then I thought maybe I was just getting older, and maybe the kids all loved new 2000s music.
But then after 2010-ish, it was like music came back, and is now great again, and it turns out I wasn’t just getting older - music really did go through a creative wasteland in the 2000s.
Naturally, these are very broad strokes, and there are exceptions.
I think if you only look at the biggest budget or most advertised movies you are right. But there are lots of great indie or lower budget, but not 'low budget's movies coming out. It's just hard to find these movies because they are drowned out by the noise of all the other ones. People said the same about music, but really I think things like discover weekly from Spotify and just general YouTube recommendations have proven that statement totally false and it's just people didn't have a way of finding anything.
Also, if you go back and watch some (not all) of those 90s movies some are pretty meh. Independence Day really stands out as being really boring and if anything the template for all the action movies you dislike. It has a very similar, shallow feel to it.
> From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Really? ID4 is fun in the manner of that a formulaic, paint-by-numbers, checklist action-adventure can be, but there's non shortage of equally well-done iterations of that model today. (And ID4 wasn’t a groundbreaking example others since arw copying, it was rote, predictable, and formulaic for its time.)
I think a lot of this is just the same kind of nostalgia you see in every generation.
I do think something changed with cheap, ubiquitous CG, including how capable modern action heroes are, which is perfectly capable, because nothing's actually happening and there are no limits. Film used to be larger than life, obviously, but now even movies with a "realistic" setting are full-on fantasy.
Compare the action in Bullitt to something like a later entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise, for example. Imagine an already fairly intense and over-the-top scene like Ripley fighting the alien queen in the loader-mech—there'd just be so much more in a modern movie. They'd smash between rooms, swing from the ceiling, shit would be exploding everywhere but Our Hero would always not quite get hurt by it. Indiana Jones 1-3? Way too tame, needs more stuff flying all over the screen and expert-level acrobatic stunts by the hero.
I haven't watched the Independence Day sequel, but I bet a higher percentage of its runtime was special-effects-heavy action, because that's so cheap now. You can even fill in more of that to cut down on your shooting schedule (less time that the actors are on screen).
Action in high-budget modern films is more perfect and precise—the hero must always be narrowly avoiding something—and the heroes tend to be even less relatable than before, and the balance of talking to action has shifted toward action. That may not be worse, but it is different, and noticing that difference or preferring one over the other need not be pure nostalgia.
Strongly disagree with #2. There are more good films than ever being made now - including comedies - and changing social trends making some types of humour more or less viable hardly affects this. (Some of the best films ever were made under much stricter and more explicit rules about content!) But sure, all passive consumption of entertainment stales over time as you get used to the various tricks. A better response to this can be switching to active consumption.
We see this already in the fine arts. No-one today comes into a museum just to be wowed by pretty images, since we're already saturated with prettier images all the time. Instead people come in from the outset to learn about the work as a representative of the social and technical conditions of its production, and as a statement in a centuries-long conversation among different artists. The pleasure of the experience comes from learning about and interpreting it, not passively admiring it.
Another type of "self censorship" is trying to make China happy by not talking about anything they think is controversial, because it such a huge market.
His criticisms of contemporary American cinema are apt. But on an individual level, he just needs to watch more old movies and more foreign cinema. In my experience, many people can’t name more than one or two movies from Eastern Europe, USSR/Russia, Japan, Yugoslavia, Mexico, etc. Especially older movies from these places, which developed almost independently from Hollywood. Something like Solaris (Tarkovsky version) doesn’t quite have an equivalent Western sci-fi analogue.
A couple sites I recommend are EasternEuropeanMovies.com and CriterionChannel.com. Tons of excellent old films.
Agreed. One of the best movies I've seen is "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu). I'd never seen anything else with cinematography like it (almost entirely static cameras, with actors looking directly at them), and the storytelling fits the Kishōtenketsu structure rather than the standard Western three-act structure.
It's slow paced, with no action, but the novelty was enough to hold my attention until I engaged with the story, and then I wasn't bored at all. Film critics rate it very highly, and I can see why.
One of my favorite movies[1] is Chinese and I loved some of Tarkovsky's movies so I wholeheartedly agree. We are fortunate to have so much media available today. It's hard to believe someone can't find anymore good content.
I agree, it sounds like this person either 1) hasn't looked very hard and is relying on streaming services to feed him a selection of movies, or 2) has no interest or experience with "world" cinema.
Stuff like Aleksei German's Hard to be A God, Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day, Maren Ade's Toni Erdman, or Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, are recent movies that are incredible and very different from Hollywood style movies. They're long, not in English, and situate the viewer in a different cultural context that requires some effort for understanding, but the payoff is immense. They are movies you can get lost in.
Also Toni Erdman is the last comedy movie I watched where I truly came close to pissing myself from laughing so hard.
I have been a cinephile for at least ten years, watching several movies per week. I agree with some of the sentiments expressed here, and I can say I have been in a similar place in my film-watching hobby. It used to feel that "I've seen all the good ones", but no, not really. You certainly go into more obscure teritorry, but reasons for obscurity differ: it can be a bad movie, or it could be produced in Mexico, or it could have been produced sometime in 1934, or only available on torrents in 240p, or all of the above. Another thing that helps is knowing how you watch the movie: you're not watching Tarantino and Tarkovsky the same way. That would explain the disappointment with Lost Highway which has been rather coherent (compared to post Mulholland dr. Lynch). With this attitude, the author is locking himself out of a class of directors that are not catering to you (like Marvel does, lol), but require active participation and adapting from the film watcher. You can not enjoy El Topo or The Mountain by passively consuming.
It's OK to not like David Lynch's work, it isn't for everyone, what with the "doing surrealism in a highly literal medium" and the logic of nightmares used.
To state that Lynch is "obviously awful movies ... had no clue .. disaster ... incapable" as an objective truth is just a category error.
it's like saying that a Mondrian is an obviously awful painting because it's not a good landscape composition, or that Jackson Pollock has no clue, because he paints trees in an unrealistic colour.
The idea that you can start with the good ones doesn't make sense to me. It's the same with literature. There's no guarantee you'll enjoy the "classics". How many books you had to read at school did you really like ?
Finding good works of art is a really hard problem, because what you'll like depends a lot on your personal taste and experience, and it evolves with time. Once you've seen a lot of films you can orient yourself by following directors you like, and if you're lucky you find a film critic you can trust.
There is an alternate theory for why movies were more varied, creative and experimental from the late 80s until the 00s: The rise of Megaplexes, particularly AMC, which greatly increased the number of screens and showings available and made smaller, non-mainstream films economically viable. However, by the early 00s a sort of "movie screen bubble" had formed and weird movies declined again in favor of blockbusters.
I don’t know. I watch a similar amount of movies each year, and I still enjoy it. If anyone is looking for some more obscure recommendations, can check out The Dreamers, and Stilyagi.
EDIT: I have to add that I reference movies a lot in conversation. Often, I’ll watch a movie then immediately call a family or friend to discuss some finer point. This happens frequently, sometimes for a fairly mundane movie detail.
EDIT2: Now I really want to make a list of movies just from this year, since my number has definitely gone up since COVID. I think I’d easily break 100 in 2021 alone.
EDIT3: Here’s a list from my Netflix history since June 1. Mix of TV and movies. I added Justice League Extended Edition and Replica even though they’re HBO because I watched them recently (within the last week). This isn’t really a representative list of my watching, plus I tend to watch a bunch of similar movies/shows, then switch to a new cluster. This group is particularly action heavy because I was playing a lot in the background recently while doing other work. All of these were fun! Even if I don’t think they are the best ever :))
Movies 2021 June-July
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
Replica
The Take
Darc
American Assassin
S.W.A.T.
Sniper Legacy
The Interpreter
Redemption
Extraction
Spenser Confidential
TV
Biohackers
Shooter
Quantico
Sweet Tooth
Record of Ragnorak
Bodyguard
Hollywood
I started watching movies and series..deliberately about 10 years ago. I've kept a record of almost all of them[0]. (Before that I'd mostly just watch whatever good stuff happened to be shown on TV. Getting rid of the TV was one of the best things ever.) I've done a lot of research into what to watch, firstly best-of lists, then exploring various genres, directors, periods, countries. I don't watch anything without first reading a page or two of IMDb user reviews, which I've found the best way of almost never watching something bad/that I didn't like, and finding out what we're likely to really love. (Also a very few almost-always-reliable critics, like Roger Ebert and Louise Keller.) Watched them all with the SO, and although we have totally different interests and tastes, we seem to mostly love the same movies/series. No end in sight yet! It's been amazing. "Still" a lot of great movies and series being made, and documentaries, animations, etc. Still a lot more to explore. Whole countries yet to explore (e.g. China).
Thanks, this is great, I've started watching some international movies recently, so this comes really in handy.
Have you checked "La vita è bella" if it's worth watching? or do you have scheduled?
:-) I saw it when it came out, so long ago I hardly remember, but I vaguely recall loving it. Just look at the user reviews https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118799/reviews/ — rave reviews.
This is a very frustrating article because, and I'm making assumptions here, it seems like the author hasn't tried that much to go beyond canonical american cinema. If I'm wrong, then my mistake, but the only films mentioned here are hollywood productions and it seems like the movies they're dissapointed by browsing Amazon Prime are the latest big-budget Hollywood production that doesn't have much special going on
Also, the #5 footnote says a lot. I'm a huge David Lynch fan, so understand I'm speaking with bias here, but to fully dismiss movies that are loved by many as "objectively bad" speaks to a small imagination of what films can be. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean the director is "shooting from the hip and doesn't know anything"... and so what if Lynch is? He finds beauty in the subconscious and dreams and connects things together that don't have an immediately obvious connection. To dismiss Twin Peaks (something which is awe-inspiring in the way it displays the raw power of human imagination) as "a disaster" to me means that the author has not really pushed themselves to expand their horizons.
International cinema constantly amazes and inspires me. I've been logging 50+ movies a year for 7-8 years now and all the time am enjoying and finding more enrichment in it. That's not to say it's not valid for someone to not experience things the way I experience them, but this author speaks with an objectivity that really frustrates me.
Author here. I've dug reasonably far into international cinema -- at a glance, about 250 - 300 outside US Cinema, across various time periods: French New Wave, Korean, Iranian, etc.
On David Lynch -- I like stuff that is weird and unusual. I LOVED the first three or four episodes of Twin Peaks. But after that, it was an unbelievable disappointment. You cannot seriously tell me that the latter half of Season Two was good. It was clear that Lynch had drafted the body of a Blue Velvet-style movie that lent itself well to a few hours of material, but once you got past the first three or four episodes, there was no material left. From there on, the attempts to keep the plot together became more and more abstruse.
With a guy like Lynch, these movies do not showcase the "raw power of the human imagination" -- what they showcase is a man who is deeply disorganized.
To the extent that his films are flawed, they are always flawed in the same way: execution of the latter half. Premise and first half is always fine. That pattern speaks volumes.
Thanks for responding! I really hope I didn't come across as too harsh, I definitely made some assumptions and probably straw-manned you.
For Twin peaks, of course the latter half of season two isn't great, but that's because David lynch left after the network made him reveal the killer, which was never a part of the plan.
So then after the incredible 3-4 lynch directed episode of early season 2 and he leaves, it falls down a cliff before what is perhaps my favorite 42 minutes of media ever in the Season 2 finale, where Lynch comes back and delivers such a dizzying and intoxicating episode with so many questions left lingering that I find it genuinely inspiring.
Then I'm guessing you haven't seen Twin Peaks The Return, but that is the thing that cements twin peaks as a masterpiece imo.
And a lot of lynch movies have an amazing second half, Mulholland Drive being the prime example where it's revealed what the film is actually about and it explores the psyche and dreams of a woman unable to live up to what she thought she could.
Of course, there is no objectivity in film and opinions; especially with Lynch. if you don't like his stuff more power to you! But my only issue is feels like you levy that people who like his stuff are pretentious, only liking it because it's 'cool' to pretend to understand his stuff.
And to be honest, I believe that his stuff has a dense internal logic that is fascinating to try to unpack and it does always have a deeper meaning.. but to take what you say I don't see the big deal if he genuinely is fumbling about because the things I draw from his best creations are so deep and inspiring to me. It's like a dream you have, where if you break it down it makes no sense yet still you ascribe meaning to these things. And to be clear, I really believe most great lynch projects are internally cohesive and do have something they are meant to say/explain; understanding what the second half of Mulholland drive actually was and connecting it all together is probably my favorite experience that I've ever had with film, I really felt like a detective finally cracking a hard case!
But again, this is not to say Lynch is objectively good, just that I'm insanely biased and really really like his specific brand of shit. My main point is just to say that I don't think the way you phrased your criticisms of him are valid because you took a very objective tone
>He finds beauty in the subconscious and dreams and connects things together that don't have an immediately obvious connection.
Lynch has obsessions with domestic relationships that get predictable, and are immediately obvious. I still like twin peaks but its dumb to assume he "doesn't get it" just because he doesn't care for it. If he's watched 600+ movies he probably gets it. And the show WAS a disaster if only for the 100 loose ends it never tied up before being canceled.
I also concur on the bad take re: Lynch. He's definitely an acquired taste, but reading beyond the "text" (screen?) a bit into his creative process has helped me appreciate his works and inspires my own creativity.
> Another argument you could advance is that TV and Film have generally been moving away from comedy as a genre
I noticed this for movies and it makes me sad. I asked people around me what's the latest funny, full-on comedy they've seen, and I think the newest one would be "Tropic Thunder" which is 13 years old.
There are still a couple around, but I can't think of an equivalent of "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles" for the current generation. The closest one is probably half of "Zoolander", and even that one is almost old enough to drink.
21 Jump Street, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, Game Night, This Is the End are big mainstream comedies that pop up in my mind. If you go a bit broader, What We Do in the Shadows and The Death of Stalin [mockumentary] and The Nice Guys [buddy cop comedy].
The author clearly has not tapped the goldmine of world cinema (or American film history for that matter) if Superbad is their paradigmatic case of a challenging film.
Interesting piece that made me reflect on experiencing some similar feelings in my own life.
The thing about Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad stuck out too. Reminded me (and I know this will go against many HNers and tech ppl) of anyone who watches YouTube. (Subscribes to channels/watches video games being played/watches personalities talk about stuff or them experiencing something etc). YouTube is horribly passive and alot seems like a cesspool of low bar content if you can even call it that with negative societal and cultural ramifications. I mostly steer clear of any long format/regularly posting YouTube content for that very reason. It irks me that guys who review gear or whatever have a million subscribers and while they might be ok ppl it's the subscribers that really are somewhat concerning spending that much time consuming consuming consuming drawn out passive content. Ugggh. Suppose this applies to 'Twitch streamers' very much so also.
Anyways could go on but that element of the post garnered a thought anyways.
You describe subscribers as "consuming consuming consuming drawn out passive content". But I think your analysis leaves aside those who go on to participate in related forums, create new content ranging from memes and comics to their own channels, discuss the ideas on Twitter, and so on. If anything, I believe the current generation is creating more than the previous one - not everyone has the energy to publish a book, but everyone can make a reaction comic.
I'm personally not a fan of Twitch streams, but I do watch once in a while when I'm eating alone and want something to fill the silence. And I don't think it is any worse than what we had before - my nieces are learning that buying toys is fun, while at their age I was learning that war is a good solution to social problems and that it also leads to fun toys.
I'm also going down that rabbit hole and I think the experience is mostly about getting out of a single mainstream cultural narrative and to increase cognitive diversity. This can be achieved by either watching movies from multiple different cultures or from completely different era. I've opted for both, and I've started writing reviews on my gopher[1] about the (mostly B&W and silent) movies I've been watching. I can clearly say, some of these are so impressive that they make contemporary movies (particularly Hollywood) look like slapstick jokes with a single plot.
This sounds like the worst empty slogan. Similar to those thrown around by all sorts of life coaches.
The author gives no definition of 'passive' entertainment. Therefore, a few supporting questions: Is playing games passive or not? If I stomp my foot to music is it no longer passive? Is reading a book passive?
Huge arrogance, by the way:
"consumption of any media – film or television [...](means) to be filled with other people's mediocre thoughts and games".
For me, movies, games, books or music are an extension of my mediocre thoughts. They give a glimpse of how other people feel or see similar situations. They show them from a different perspective.
If the author thinks he has already seen all the perspectives of the world then I am purely sorry.
My personal opinion... We've basically stopped watching Hollywood-fodder: it's largely formulaic, largely caters to the Politically Correct/Woke and seems intent on destroying the Good Stuff that came before. I'll give Mad Max, Alien and Jurassic Park as examples. Prequels? Sequels? How many sequels do you need? There's plenty of Good Stuff left though, and it needs a little research: look at what used to be called World Cinema and there are some real gems. You may need to get used to subtitles, but the works are inspiring and unlike the Hollywood Fast Food Burger movies will actually give you something to discuss afterwards.
> Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see
I think this is big part of the problem. If you rely exclusively on a mainstream subscription service, you're not really going to be satisfied, and it's been that way for a long time now. You will be more successful selecting movies another way and paying for them individually if you need to. Think about the incentives or the selective pressure. Paying for movies individually selects directly for great movies, whereas the movies available on a subscription service just need to be plentiful enough and bearable enough to keep enough people paying for the service.
> To unthinkingly let a wave of content break over you
This is amplified by letting a subscription service choose your content. You can be an active consumer, for example by thinking critically of the movie after you've watched it, and I think that starts with actively choosing your films (or festivals, etc).
> In film, you start with the best and make your way down to the worst.
I think this is an interesting point. But there are so many great films. 819 is not that many, right? And as you watch more, I think you can appreciate more, too. A deep dive into Ozu is likely to be a lot more rewarding for an experienced film enthusiast than for someone who watches a few blockbusters a year. "Learning the tricks" means you can see how the director is playing with them.
I strongly recommend criticker for automatic recommendations. It is independent of a distributor. I've found it really quite accurate, and definitely good enough to skip the movies that will leave you feeling like you wasted your time and suggest movies you might not find otherwise.
I have been noticing in myself a sense of eroding novelty in all fiction, where every device of comedy and tragedy is becoming a familiarity. I think this is a kind of maturity, where continued fulfillment necessitates meaningful participation in the eternal drama of real Life.
Like the author, I thought Lost in Translation was okay when I first watched it in my late teens. I watched it again when I was living in Japan and it brought me to tears, particularly that scene where she's calls up her relative from her hotel room. I think the original Neon Genesis Evangelion is a masterpiece and hits differently as an adult compared to when I first watched it when I was the same age as the teenage protagonists.
Anything worth watching is worth watching again, and again, and again. I may be behind the times and have to silently take the back seat whenever discussions move towards the latest episode of Breaking Thrones 99, but I'd rather consume media when it's been divorced from the hype.
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you." - The Catcher in the Rye.
For anyone looking for recommendations for slightly more obscure, but high quality movies, I've found Jesse Walker's lists to be a fantastic source. At the end of every year he has a tradition of listing his top 10 movies, but not for the year that just ended. Instead he lists his top 10 movies from 10 years ago.
His philosophy is that he hasn't seen most of the movies that just came out, let alone figured out if they've stood the test of time. So instead he reviews his top 10 movies from a decade earlier. And then another 10 years before that. And then 10 years before that and so on until he gets to the early 1920s or 1910s and there aren't any movies in existence.
I feel like just his way of finding and watching movies is not optimal? If I would limit myself to Amazon Prime/Netflix offering and recommendation I would probably not enjoy them as well.
The way to go is just to explore different artistic directions and rabbit holes that are interesting to you, regardless of country and time. You can dive into filipino arthouse movies, some cozy european cinema, korean thrillers, etc. They would all require different level of "engagement" in a sense of paying attention and thinking, and the story or plot of the movie is often hard to define or not it is not that important at all.
American writers have been mind fucked by the over abundance of content.
And since the rest of the worlds writers use the American content factories as their lodestone, everything is converging to pure garbage. Add a mindlessly over optimizing corporate robot class supervising societies creativity and we get a firehose of sewage jacked into every brain.
Whats the route out for creative people - disconnect. If you have some confidence in your own creativity and imagination nuture it. Overloading it with info is like over watering a plant. It will die.
1. There is a phenomena that happens to people that get immersed in an art form, they stop seeing the art as a whole, and only see the parts. For a musician listening to music, they will start picking out their instrument and maybe the percussion, effectively ignoring the rest of the song. After doing this for a while, it becomes automatic, and then becomes real work to be able to hear the work as a whole. I suspect this has happened to this writer with movies.
2. I want to see his list of movies. I want to know how far back his movie watching has gone. According to google there have been 579 Best Picture nominees over the 92 years the Academy Awards have been running. Has he seen all of those? I admit, Best Picture isn't a standard to rank good movies, but there are some real gems that didn't win. (Also, how many of the Hammer Films has he seen? There is 158, many are delightfully bad.)
I grew up watching old movies (30's - 50's) One of my favorite movies is "It Happened One Night" from 1934. I think these old sliver screen movies are better due to writing. To be successful back then, you couldn't hide a bad script behind explosions and cgi, you had to tell a compelling story. Nowadays mass appeal relies not on telling a good story, but on how many big name actors can you get into cosplay suits, fly around the screen, and blow up buildings.
Reading books is passive media consumption too. You could reframe this article (with substantial changes) to talk about books, wine, food, board games, music, or anything else you can appreciate as a hobby.
Books are fundamentally more active - reading inherently involves at least a certain amount of abstract reasoning to turn a meaningless pattern of symbols into something that you can enjoy.
I wish someone would. I've had a feeling that the way I consume music is probably a net negative for me, and I'd love to hear someone smarter than me explore that idea.
If passive media consumption is bad for the soul, my soul is probably in pretty rough shape, so I'd love to hear this complete argument so I can figure out whether or not this idea has merit.
You'd like to passively consume someone's ideas about passive consumption? It's a matter of the soul, not that it makes you dumber or any objective worsening. No one is qualified to talk about it; everyone is just opining. Only you can decide for yourself whether a life of passive consumption is meaningful to you.
Perhaps your instinctive desire to consume someone's ideas betrays the truth of the matter already? I think a healthy soul would look to itself and its own intrinsic virtue for guidance first, before anyone external.
Anyone who you'd be reading has engendered their own ideas. Of course all great minds are inspired by other great minds, but this kind of inspiration is not really what you said to begin with.
There is a stark difference between creating an idea indirectly inspired by great works, and just wanting to read someone's idea. Aristotle was inspired by Plato, but he did not defer thought to him, or wait to write Metaphysics until he had read someone "smarter" write about it.
Reading pulp genre fiction, sure. There are many genres of books that go beyond passive consumption, and even require active engagement to understand. In the span of all history, the vast majority of them fit into that category.
Yeah, there's a fine argument to be had about passive media consumption, but it does not hinge on any specific medium. An engaged mind can actively consume any piece of media.
I remember reading once about Bunuel having a small room with couch and a giant Miro painting in his apartment. Bunuel would take a drink and sit on that couch and look at that Miro for a couple hours, his mind doing the work. It is common to read in XIXth century literature (Dostoevsky comes to mind) how even characters portrayed as somewhat shallow would spend an hour or two in front of some famous (as in 'in vogue') Old Master's painting, constructing the internal dialogue with the creator.
The piece in this text about passive consumption of media being bad for the... soul(?) reads like something from a person who failed to perform the mental work necessary to perceive "passive consumption" as something active, inspiring and enriching.
After seeing Superbad or Deadpool (that in the context of cinema possess the cultural significance of screensavers) used as a reference with a mention of Eyes Wide Shut as a peak viewership effort, it is really upsetting to see piece this get traction on Hackernews.
Coming across this text after a randomly encountered masterpiece that is "Riders of Justice" is hilarious and a bit sad.
What a well written blog post. I couldn't agree more. I've almost entirely given up on movies as form of entertainment. Just like the author of the post notes, just about every new movie that comes out is predictable and boring.
I've been trying to transition to reading more literature for entertainment just because the variety of stories are a lot more diverse and interesting.
> just about every new movie that comes out is predictable and boring.
Complaining about the lack of good new "x" (be it movies, music, books, etc.) is more a reflection of the complainer than of reality. Assuming you live in the US, around 800 new movies are released every year in theaters alone. If we include movies that go directly to streaming, and international movies that don't release in the US due to distribution rights issues (or just lack of interest), we are well in the thousands.
So, unless you did watch those 800 movies, you lack the authority and grasp on reality to claim "just about every new movie that comes out is predictable and boring". Again, the sentence is a reflection of your tastes and habits of media consumption (and of course of those of the general society in which you live), not of reality. No offense intended.
The miniaturization and democratization of technology has made extremely affordable and easy the creation of new movies and music. There are lots of new garbage, of course, but just about anyone in a Western country can create a masterpiece. The prime example is Kevin Smith financing Clerks with his credit card.
"In film, you start with the best and make your way down to the worst" is just a restatement of the fact that everything enjoyable tends to give diminishing returns, heightened by survivorship bias. I don't actually think literature, or music, or video games, or porn, or walking through nature is any different.
There are definitely things that are fundamentally wrong with movies today, but there have always been things that are fundamentally wrong with movies. I don't think things like self-censorship in film are new at all, it just used to be topics like the existence of homosexuality.
Finally, if you distinctly smell shit everywhere you go, then maybe you should explore other possibilities than that your sense of smell has become too sophisticated, or the entire world just started smelling more like shit. I think the conclusion the author is searching for is that his own expectations and approach to "understanding" movies is what ruined his passion.
> is just a restatement of the fact that everything enjoyable tends to give diminishing returns. I don't actually think literature, or music, or video games, or porn, or walking through nature is any different.
I disagree - maybe passive-type entertainment like movies have diminishing returns. But lots of genres of books certainly don't. Maybe reading fantasy has diminishing returns, but some genres of books aren't written purely to entertain, but to inform and educate. Reading biographies won't burn you out on biographies due to overused biographical tropes or other mechanisms that cause "diminishing returns" - because biographies aren't made to entertain, though entertainment is often a side effect. They are made to educate you on a person's life and accomplishments.
First, what makes a book any less of a "passive-type" entertainment option? It is basically the same as a movie or tv show in that regard - you're not creating anything, you're consuming content.
Second, I'm not sure why you think that you get diminishing returns from fantasy, but not from reading biographies. The biggest problem with both is that you start by reading the best books, but eventually you can run out of those. After you've read the 10 best biographies or 10 best fantasy novels, if you continue, you're necessarily going to read 10 lesser books. [1]
Third, it's absolutely true that after reading a bunch of biographies, you start getting used to certain standard tropes and ways of writing.
Notes:
[1]
There is of course no real definitive list of best books, as it's highly individual, and it's hard to know ahead of time which books are the best for you so as you keep reading you can always find more gems. Still, as you read more of a genre, you'll tend to gradually work your way to works that have less chance of being good (though reading a new genre allows you to "restart" this process somewhat, and the more you read, the better you might get about finding good books... so there are ways to mitigate this effect.)
> in film, you start with the best and make your way down to the worst. With literature, you grow as a reader and work your way up to the greatest works
To me this is an endorsement of literature over film. There is so much more that can be done in a book that takes dozen of hours compared to film which is only a few. By comparison all film is essentially short stories.
Sounds like the guy just overdid it. Like anything else, movies/books/games can be enjoyed in a healthy way, or can turn into an addiction. When I consume too much, it makes me feel pointless and hate myself. When I consume from time to time, in a limited and healthy amount (like a weekly episode of Rick and Morty or Dimension 20) - it makes me happy and adds to my life.
When the consumption tunrs into an addiction, you keep seeking the joy you felt when you watched your first few great movies/episodes, and then you run out and start scraping the bottom of the barrel, naturally the quality of the available entertainment declines, so you end up feeling like the author does.
Just take a break, watch fewer movies, new amazing ones come out all the time, now more than ever, just not as often as once per day. Find a healthy balance between consuming and creating, and you'll enjoy both again.
I agree. Also, I used to write movie reviews and found myself thinking about what I was going to write during each movie. Stop writing reviews of all the movies you watch. Just watch. Then, if you feel you really want to write a review, watch the movie again and compose your review. You will probably enjoy those first viewings a lot more; I did.
> Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video, and pick something to see.
Here is the main problem. After having seen most of the classics, the best you can do is just take a break and wait for the next big release that will make your eyes sparkle. Drowning your soul into the endless pit that is Amazon Prime Video or Netflix is a fantastic way to waste time and lose faith in the industry.
The article also doesn't speak much about direction and acting. I appreciate some actors and directors and would see movies for them, and even if it doesn't blow my mind it will often be like seeing an old friend telling me a new story in a way that I enjoy.
Of course, being amazed watching movies like Werk ohne Autor or Ex Machina happens once a year at best now, but people (not algorithms) on the Internet can help anyone spotting such gems easily without wasting too much time on average content.
If you are unfamiliar with Lindsey Ellis, she is a popular media/cultural critic. Probably most famous for her breakdown of the Hobbit movies as well as Disney animations. Her reviews are often more positive then what you would expect from a more traditional film critic, but do point out troublesome aspects of media as well as the culture around it.
I’m not a media critic my self and will do a terrible job summarizing her point in a paragraph, a point which took her weeks to formulate, film and edit to a 40 minute video essay.
My gist is that people reacted just as badly to Mel Brooks back in his days to his movies as the supposed ‘twitter mob’ does today. Mel Brooks even set him self some boundaries about which lines he shouldn’t cross, what not to make fun of etc. Mel Brooks even criticized other film makers for stepping over their boundaries in a subject matter that was too sensitive. That is, if you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie today, then you couldn’t make a Mel Brooks movie back then either.
Streaming services are the bottom of the barrel, they greenlight everything and every metric they use to suggest or reveal “whats good” is a lie that diverges from a century of what people expect. Well funded studios diverging from what established Hollywood was greenlighting is interesting but the potential has so far been squandered.
Discovery is bad. This is a different topic than this blog.
Almost everything the author wrote was not a strong truth or reason.
“Shock Comedy” not being created has nothing to do with people’s sensitivities. It is just the same symptom you already noticed, movie theaters are for Marvel right now. So to make a separate standard for the lack of shock comedies is just latching on to unquantified assumptions that paranoid people are saying about cancel culture.
I hope they find a way to branch out, I have been pleasantly surprised at film festivals.
The post resonated a lot with me. You might be right that we're looking in the wrong place -- but confoundingly, at this point I don't even want to.
It's hard to know what I'm giving up by not looking for good movies. My imagination tends to light on the many bad movies I've seen, not the few moments of awe or other positive emotions. But it's easy to know what I gain -- something like four hours a week! That's so much time!
I experience the same and my solutions are to follow the works of specific directors and actors, as well as look forward to attending film festivals again.
> is a lie that diverges from a century of what people expect. Well funded studios diverging from what established Hollywood was greenlighting is interesting
It was not so much as century of what people expect as increasing predictability ans repetitiveness of Hollywood movies.
This was an interesting, well-written post. I myself was an avid movie buff up until graduating college, after which point I became interested in other hobbies. My two cents:
1) I wonder to what extent the anhedonia is due to not the movie industry changing, but the author themselves changing, maturing, becoming more interested in other things in life. I used to consume copious amounts of anime / manga, now that stuff doesn't nearly interest me as much anymore, even though there is lots of fresh new content out there.
2) To the author: perhaps a new level of appreciation in films can be attained by trying to shoot a film, do a cel animation, write a storyboard of your own? The act of trying to create that which is so familiar can help you see things in an entirely new perspective.
Having turned 30 and watched a lot of movies, I have a similar feeling. I still pay for Netflix (even if I only use it a couple times a month) and look forward to movies, like the upcoming Dune, and occasionally rewatch some of my favorites, like Blade Runner, but these days I'm much more into YouTube. There's so much good content out there, and a lot of time it's interesting, and I'll learn something useful.
As the author says, TV shows have really gained foothold, but I don't have time to watch several hours of content only to find out whether I might enjoy it. It's too big a time commitment for me.
OK, we can figure this out. Are movies still good? Let's take a poll! If you like or don't like movies, leave a comment, and tell us why. This is gonna be so interesting to hear what everyone thinks about movies!!
Having seen amazing movies on Prime, when I struggle to find anything decent to watch, I blame it on the fact that Prime is only listing a small fraction of movies that exist, not that movies are dead.
Many years ago, a friend tried to convince me that the passive consumption of any media – film or television, maybe even music – was bad for the soul. To unthinkingly let a wave of content break over you is to inundate yourself with noise, to be filled with other people’s mediocre thoughts and games.
I think the act of media consumption has an element of surrender to it - you let other people's willpower and their creative output consume some of your inner world. It makes your ego a bit smaller. To suspend disbelief means to raise the white flag.
Hollywood and some streaming companies lately started creating a lot of politically correct or politically activist movies that have no other value than having the "right theme" with the right actor race, gender or sexual orientation. This decreases the quality of the movies a lot, republicans kind of boycott these movies, the pandemic makes the earnings a lot lower than usual so there are less money on the table for more movies.
As an European I switched to watching more European movies in the past decade. It is harder to access (there is no European movie market), but I saw nice Norwegian movies, Italian or Russian on top of my favorite - French. Unfortunately UK got into the same direction as USA, so it is out of the list. Strange, I saw no German movies for a long time, I have no explanation for that.
And there is also some international selection of Brazilian or (south) Korean, even Chinese. I would like to have access to good Japanese movies, but I don't. Unfortunately Bollywood movies are a dime a dozen, good Aussie movies are rare and the movies from the rest of the world are inaccessible to me.
In regards to the big screen versus TV, I found TV was less affected by the woke movement and SciFi, while rare these days, is still available (The Expanse). There are movies hit really bad (The Witcher), but still there are a few options left.
Teacher is totally right. I used to be a movie buff, I started with the best movies and drilled down like. If I like a movie, I will check director or hero/heroine and start watching their flims. This started in 2004 beginning of torrents. I almost all movies, I ever liked in a 2tb hard disk. Nowadays I just re-download for better print but even I am not sure why I am doing I do it. When it started to hitt downturn is, at a point I was watching movies just to understand what the director is trying to tell as someone has produced this movie. I slowly started to cut back like I don't watch movies if it's more than 130mins and started cutting down the time.
If is say what's my best its mostly the ones between 1980 to 2005. Everything after that was too much CGI or it was like okay movie.
Like comedies I liked were Encino man, son in law, first few parts of police academy, jury duty.
Action movies Conair, lost in space, broken Arrow, specialist, assassins. Desperado.
Interesting to read someone else's insights and to find so many of them resonate.
One point that I don't think has been touched on is manipulating the plot for non-storytelling grounds, which usually happens as they are nearing the end of a season and/or they're leaving it open for a sequel (season or film).
This creates a real lack of resolution now. In the era of serious films, they could occasionally leave unresolved turns at the end of a film on purpose ("life isn't neat") but it was usually done with the eloquence of an accomplished director.
Now it's so mercenary that it is really starting to detract. Add to this that many series use guest directors who seem to wander off on a personal mission, and it's a recipe for the sort of mess we've seen in so many big budgets series.
Whilst I liked aspects of the final season, Game of Thrones didn't tie up even a fraction of the main plots let alone the sub plots. In the UK there were similar split opinions on Line of Duty. You can only take so much of your audiences time and squander it before people lose trust. A clear ending shouldn't be that hard to write.
If you feel like this you may be interested in anime. If you're ok with reading subtitles, or watching a smaller subset of the entire corpus with good English voice overs, you'll find some pretty amazing stories and a very different story telling method from what is available in Hollywood.
Great places to start:
- Mob Psycho (good English voice overs): A show about a high schooler who has magical powers (telekinesis, etc). He works for a "Psychic" (con artist) to help people who encountered ghosts or spirits. This is a coming of age story about emotions and friendship.
- One Punch Man: Super heros are common place and there's one guy who is determined to become the best. He starts a work out routine where he does 100 sit ups, 100 push ups, and 100 squats every day and, somehow, he becomes the strongest thing in the universe able to destroy anything with a single punch.
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: A Japanese manga author's attempt at taking inspiration from 1800s western story telling and American culture. It's a story about how something happened which changed the destiny of the Joestar family.
Something to expect is the motifs, character archetypes, and method of showing something are very different from the movies and TV I grew up on. Jojo has done some things that aren't a good look in western media.
Also, a lot of really good anime is only really good because it is a masterful subversion of tropes which makes it hard to give people recommendations to some of the best shows out there. The recommendation would go "please watch these 15 garbage shows (~40hr of content) so you can watch this one 14 episode (~5 hr of content) show that's been cancelled. It's worth it, I swear."
Another great recommendation would be Tatami Galaxy, though you really need to be good at reading subtitles. It features some truly mind bending animation.
I've seen some really fun or thought provoking movies recently: Parasite, El Hoyo (The Platform), Quo Vadis, Aida?, 200 Meters, Luzzu, El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century). Just don't watch the mind-numbing crap that hollywood churns out every year. Truth be told, I've enjoyed some excellent american movies as well, like "Knives Out", "Us" or "Get Out".
I guess it depends. Older stuff that makes it through the years tends to be better quality than the stuff that doesn't make it, so you have less stuff to sort through. If time and effort are big concerns, then that approach makes some sense.
But, people are always making great stuff if you care to look for it. Some of it is even popular and doesn't take much searching.
From "My two cents" on, I disagree with everything you've said. I think it's all in your head.
I think this is true. But like... ok? Longer form series are better for a lot of content. Characters and relationships are better developed. TV has taken on film-like quality in many cases I don't know that I really see the difference.
> Most Stories are the Same & You Learn the Tricks
Than the formulaic comedies and romantic films and action films churned out in the 90s and 2000s? Yeah right. This has always been true. I find inventive plots are much easier to find these days. Especially with more foreign film getting up to speed.
It's difficult to break the mold in a single film, not to imply plenty of films don't do this frequently. But this is another advantages of TV series. There's a lot more room to explore different directions. Creative freedom has never been more alive.
Even the superhero film franchise that must not be named does some creative stuff these days besides two beefy boys punching through explosions.
> Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad
This is my favorite kind of review on Steam.
"I played this game for 200 hours. I would not recommend it. "
I echo the sentiment. It has become harder and harder to find movies you truly like. When I was in late teens, I had made the goal to watch every good movie out there. So I quickly ran through hundreds of 8+ rated movies on IMDb and I liked most of them.
Now, there are pretty good movies in 7+ rated class too, but they are often hit or miss. But it's not impossible to find them. There are hundreds of classic I still have to go through, but having watched the 8+ my expectations are high, and it's pretty difficult to match them. But still, I find myself appreciating little things in movies. For eg, Fantastic Planet (1973) doesn't have a smart plot per se, but I like how it reflects surrealism of the 70s and it's not the kind of movie that will ever be made again.
The hardest thing is it's impossible to find recommendations that truly match my taste. Memories of Murder (2003) is rated 8+ on IMDb but I absolutely hated it. It's slow and pathetic. Misery (1990) on the other hand was A+ movie for me, but I almost found it accidentally.
There's no question that Hollywood has increased their reliance on tie-in franchises and sequels and remakes for money-making--any chart of top-grossing films over the past few decades will make the trend clear. Good non-franchise movies are still getting made, you might just have to look a little harder to find them. Some of it is not coming from Hollywood, but elsewhere.
The trend of higher-quality tv really began with HBO and shows like the Sopranos, when they realized they could get away with stuff you couldn't do on broadcast tv, and have bigger budgets for production and talent. I remember not even having a TV for much of the 1980s--network tv was so bad it was entirely missable. Streaming and cable channels have given a lot of opportunities for niche productions that wouldn't have survived in the old days, or made it past the censors.
Sure, there's tropes and common story elements, that's not new, and it's a feature of every media. Film comedies are still cribbing from stuff invented by Chaplin and Keaton.
I mostly agree, but I don't think Blazing Saddles could get made today; whether that would be because people are offended at the language or offended at how it mocks racist attitudes is up for debate.
> Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story.
There are countless writers who have said that there are only X types of stories. Sometimes there are 3, 6, 12, or 50. They all claim that their categorization is the one that captures every story ever told, and they all manage to fit any story into one of their categories (it really helps that they're vague and people are willing to stretch and shoehorn things).
All stories are the same in the way all songs or poetry are the same. They have a structure (well, a bunch of different structures) that audiences tend to enjoy, and that artists follow because it helps them to have a more structured process (or sometimes they break/ignore the rules, or just don't know them, and create awesome works of art anyway). But that doesn't make every story "the same" just like using the rules of perspective, construction, and anatomy doesn't make every painting the same.
If I were to analyse what I watched over the past 12 months, it would probably breakdown into 80% TV and 20% movies. If the breakdown was 'hours-watched' the movies percentage would be WAY lower.
For me, the reason for this is simple: You can't tell a good story in 90-ish minutes.
The best time frame for a screen story, is as the author of the piece said, the 8-10 hour/part mini-series. It's the TV equivalent of a mid sized book, and has enough room to breathe without the pace being too slow, or the content too shallow.
Movies on the other hand, rush through their 'stories' via 3 main set pieces, and offer little new that viewer hasn't already seen many times before, all lit against an amber and teal backdrop.
World cinema is better than the typical Hollywood junk, and there really are some good gems out there (which is why I've not abandoned movies all together), but are still restricted in their story telling due to running time.
Sounds like some old pal who misses old "good" American movies with "good" old American jokes. If you're serious about movies, try learning other languages and do not expect to find a good movie to watch every 5 days ...
I agree that American humor isn't the same as 10 years ago, but I am not sure that's a bad thing.
I struggle to understand why some random individuals realisation he's not that into movies any more is worthy of any attention at all?
Interests and tastes come and go with age.
Truly we live in the most narcissistic of times that people even feel the need to discuss something like this as if it were of any interest to any besides to author.
I didn't really agree with the author's points but it did get me thinking about my own video consumption habits and I realized that this year I have only watched two movies in full. I've watched a lot of shows, but movies - no.
As for why that is, my current theory is that streaming at home has largely eviscerated my ability to sit down and dedicate a block of time to watching one thing. There is a strange form of FOMO that I get when I sit down and scroll through netflix. I get stuck in the browsing mode and can't ever make a decision because of too many options.
I find the entire streaming experience pushes me towards finding good series just to avoid having to make a decision. Finding a good film will alleviate me of the cognitive load of choosing for one night but finding a good series I'll be off the hook for months.
If you are content with the genre of normal drama, without special effects or stunts or expensive sets or glamorous stars, then there's a wealth of good stuff out there, often made for TV rather than cinema. For instance, all the Inspector Morse episodes are essentially standalone films, and all of them have exceptional acting and writing and stories (usually adapted from the novels). Many great 'mini-series' also (like 4-6 hours total). Look up an actor like Brian Dennehy and notice all the films he made for television. No matter how jaded you get with cinema, I don't think you tire of a good story. (Often in cinema they seem to want to make films that are brilliant despite an uninteresting story.)
I wish there were better options for watching televised plays. Outside of Shakespeare, the options seem sadly limited.
I'm not going to dispute the author's lived experience and their personal attitude to movie watching, but the arguments seem so alien to me.
Being tired of an entire medium because there are patterns and tropes would, to me, be like being entirely bored of music because most of it uses similar scales and chord sequences, tired of nature because, well, you've seen a lot of trees before, or, heck, being bored of being alive due to all that boring breathing, eating (how many food groups are there, really?), and copulation (only so many positions..) you have to partake in.
I watch a few hundred movies a year and continue to be blown away by the diversity of the experience, much as I do when reading, watching YouTube videos, meeting random strangers, or even reading Hacker News comment threads.
As I said before, I can't dismiss the OP's personal opinion, but at the objective level I think boredom is an undefinable concept, proven by how what's boring to one person can be hugely invigorating to another (or even to the same person at a different time of their life).
Boredom with an entire medium is what really caught me here. I can appreciate being bored by, say, "1950s Westerns", once you have exhausted the majority of the genre, but being bored of the entire premise of movies in general suggests a very restricted diet or a lack of imagination.
But that's just my take. My favorite author absolutely detested music and almost listened to none in his entire lifetime. Different strokes and all that. But the idea of being wholly bored of one of the deepest, plentiful, and most creative media invented by man remains alien to me.
It's right that mainstream Hollywood movies chase an ever more mainstream blockbuster audience and narrow the types of movies made as a result. Much of the article seems emotionally challenged. If a friend came to me with this much talk of losing joy in a hobby, I'd recommend they see a doctor or therapist. I hear the words, but mixed with echoes of depression.
The thought that there's nothing good from a century of cinema in the entire world left to see is a little hard to imagine, especially after only six movies a month for some years. If that's really true and not just the author being cynical, then there are lots of other hobbies. I think either the article reflects more on the author than on cinema or perhaps the author's selection process needs improvement.
I'm a huge movie buff, and have watched thousands of movies over the past 25 years - what I like about movies:
1. Many movies are acquired taste - so even though you don't like them the first views, they can turn out to be fantastic movies down the road. Some movies, I've had to watch as much as 4 times, over the span of many years, before I finally fell in love with them.
2. There's so much information. You have the music, visuals, storyline, the actors themselves, etc. I've watched some pretty terrible movies, which still had some redeeming values, deep down if I you just looked hard enough.
3. The market is HUGE! Like with music - if you can't find any good new music, you're likely not looking hard enough. Indie movies, foreign movies, art movies, they're all out there.
I got into movies way back and I'm clocking over 1600 watched according to IMDB.
I agree that movies get trite the more you watch. The secret is to watch less mainstream movies.
I disagree with the article. Lately I've been watching less movies, but only because lack of time. In fact I've been wishing I spent a bit more watching movies and catching up with my endless TODO list.
So yes, movies (or any for of media) can become less surprising the more you consume it, but I believe there is always venue for novelty.
By the way if you feel like the author I recommend this list of weird movies [1]. I don't promise they will be good, but at least they will be different.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe there are enough movies. As in, we don't need to make anymore. This applies to music as well in some ways. Music in particular is relatively timeless, transmits well across history, and doesn't suffer technological obsolescence, which means that great music accretes over time. You can't listen to Beethoven and think "Not bad but it's woefully out of date." Old music is also remarkably accessible when you think about it, and one can ejoyably listen to the same music over and over again. Eventually there will be too much to listen to, if that is not the case already. At any rate, the proportion of music to which nobody listens is growing rapidly.
Movies are a bit different, so reaching saturation point will take longer. They depict the world and the world changes. It certainly is possible to watch an old movie and find the not so contemporary context quite jarring. I doubt the next generation will enjoy 1990s American sex comedies very much. Improving movie-making technologies also means that new movies can have something unique, but this seems to have had relatively little impact in the last 50 years and tends to be anti-correlated with quality. Another point arguing against reaching the saturation point is that old movies do become inaccessible. I wanted to watch Au Hasard Balthazar [1] recently and could not find it anywhere.
But the number of movies being made goes up all the time and the world isn't changing so fast anymore. Taxi Driver is nearly 50 years old now but the setting is almost completely familiar. It is in no way diminished by the fact that Travis Bickle doesn't have an iphone. Technology is also going to improve to the point of democratising movie making, where a small team or an individual can make (and even remake!) a feature length movie with relative ease, without leaving their bedroom. So perhaps we will reach the point where there is just too much to watch for people with average consumption rates.
Of course as you watch more and more movies (regardless of the time frame) there are going to be fewer and fewer that surprise you. That's just the birthday problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem translated into film concepts. It's on you, the viewer, to remain comfortable with familiarity, or to seek out the novel, like a person who is bored with fast food taking up Thai food -- maybe when they started out flavors that unusual would have seemed awful, but after your fortieth Big Mac, pad Thai seems interesting. Likewise after seeing many films, maybe The Lobster seems interesting.
That was me a couple of years ago. As someone who has been into writing, music, and photography professionally, it became very hard to watch a movie without analyzing all those aspects.
I've then learned that to enjoy movies again, one has to try to quiet the analytical mind. That doesn't mean you will enjoy all movies, but at least your brain will be more focused on the experience itself.
I don't accomplish this every time I watch a movie or tv show, but at least I try when I catch myself analyzing the lens used or lighting of a shot. I simply "tell" my brain to shut off and force myself to focus, for example, on the actors expressions.
As my father used to put it "You're only riding a train when you can't see it".
I couldn’t disagree with a post more. Where to start?
For one, there’s so many amazing films. Instead of listing directors or films, I’ll list movements: French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Parallel Cinema, Iranian New Wave, German New Wave, Taiwanese New Wave, New Queer Cinema, New Hollywood, Cinema Du Look. All of these have 10-20 films worth watching if not more. Then expand your search to masters like Kurosawa or Bergman who churned out films, yes some worse than others, but a lot of really amazing ones! Then look at all of the talented people making film today, both the established (Bong Joon Ho, Olivier Assayas, Lucrecia Martel) and the new. There’s an incredible wealth of great film out there.
Honestly the author sounds like they’re in the false confidence part of the Dunning Kruger effect. Just because you know a few tropes and the standard plot archetypes doesn’t mean you’re above film. Lemme just point out that nowhere in this post did the author discuss the visual aspect of film. Or the editing, sound, really anything about film other than plot. If movies were Wikipedia plot summaries I’d agree that film is tired and repetitive. But what distinguishes a director is not the story beats but how they use camera, light, sound, editing and actors to make the narrative.
If you curl up on your own couch and pull something off a streaming service, IMO you are watching TV. Even if it’s a 120 minute movie.
Seeing a movie in a full theater is just a different experience. And whether the author realizes it or not, that may be coloring his recollection of movies in the 90s. People saw big movies in the theater in the 90s. T2 in a packed theater full of people who don’t know what is going to happen next, is a different movie from T2 on TV in your living room.
One way to rekindle a love of movies is to go see a bunch in the theater, with a lot of other people, spoiler free. Ideally, on opening night.
Someone else in the thread mentioned Roger Ebert. Most of the movies he saw during his life, he saw in a theater.
About the comment about “only 6 plots”. Indeed almost all plots can be bucketed in a few categories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
When a scene looks like it has been done before, it’s the small differences from the previous time that make it stand out. Much like Jazz can sound the same for many people, but for people who listened to a lot of it different sounds make it interesting.
I’ll take a very obvious example: Frozen’s true love kiss. It works just because it is the same old shtick used in every princess story, without it, it’s uniqueness would not exist.
It might be the same 6 plots, but it’s like complaining you’re eating beef again. The question is what is different about this red meat dish vs the others.
For someone who claims to know movies, these opinions are pretty bad.
Borat couldn't be made today... Except a sequel was made... but only because he's already famous? Certainly he had to know that Says Baron Cohen already had a TV show before making borat?
And scrolling through Amazon Prime to watch movies? Who in their right mind does this when they want to watch good movies? Streaming services rarely have good movies on them because their catalog is intended for the kind of people who want to binge watch The Office. These are not curated lists of the best films ever. In fact, even just scrolling through the IMDB top 250, I doubt you can even watch half of them on Prime/Netflix combined.
While I understand some of what the author is expressing, they give a strong impression of American cultural homogeny and would do well to give themselves a dose of "World Cinema", that is, cinema outside their own narrow cultural sphere.
The critics curse, the reason you enjoy movies when you are young is because you don't have critical thinking. the more of it you have, the less you enjoy. until you enjoy nothing.
The solution is simple, turn it off and let yourself breathe.
There is so much more to film than story, but story seems to be the author's focus (especially with point #3 and the Lynch footnote.) At a movie every 5 days for 11 years, though, I can't blame the author for burning out.
> Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story.
I see others quoting this here, but I'm not aware of Vonnegut actually saying this anywhere. This is the type of thing that needs a reference.
If I infer using what I know of Vonnegut and his presentations on the shapes of stories, I'd wager that he simply thought many stories fit into certain shapes but that not all stories fit into these. That is, there are stories that don't have well defined or common shapes. Plus, as we all know, Vonnegut liked to have fun. I highly doubt Vonnegut ever thought there were only <x> amount of story shapes.
I’ve seen a video of him giving a talk or a lecture where he discussed this, but the ideas were at an extraordinarily high-level and in part he was going for comedic affect with the audience.
Even there, in an incomplete copy, there are seven unique story shapes. And there's a major difference between saying here are some shapes of some stories and here are the only story shapes.
I have stopped watching movies because I am getting old. I think that many movies nowadays are way better that what I used to like. It is just that I have seen it already, it is not new but re-shuffles of the same ideas that I have already been exposed to.
Each generation has to criticize the previous one for not measuring to the experiences that they had as children.
Why a movie in 2021 cannot move me like a movie when I was a kid? Surprise me? Scare me? Maybe movies are getting worse, that is possible, but probably the biggest change is inside yourself.
“ Many years ago, a friend tried to convince me that the passive consumption of any media – film or television, maybe even music – was bad for the soul.”
This is so melodramatic. But no, it’s not going to poison your soul to Netflix binge. In fact, I guess no one ever wrote anything called uncle toms cabin and that novel certainly did nothing toward the abolishment of slavery in North America
A modern parallel is Dharma and Greg and LGBTQ liberation in the 2000s
There’s no such a thing as passive consumption of art. Its in its entirety a subsconscious thing.
Hi, @author. I just wanted to say that if something brought you joy and now no longer does, you might be depressed. I’ve been there. Therapy helps. Try a few if the first one doesn’t click.
819!? 819 is not a lot of movies. Some folks over on Criticker [1] have thousands of reviews. Think 15,000. I myself have reviewed 440, and I've never seen a lot of well-known movies. To say "no more" after 819 just seems odd. Perhaps one needs a break.
I do agree that miniseries have grown as a genre, but I wouldn't be confident in saying it caused movies to decline.
> in film, you start with the best and make your way down to the worst
only if you take imdb top films ranking...
take a tour through Kurosawa or other Japanese masters, get deep into korean cinema, lose yourself in the Italian masterpieces, and jump into French movies as soon as you can. You'll get challenged, immersed, and amazed again!
You'll see that you really start at the bottom and move upwards
Criterion and similar alternative streaming platforms sound like where you should be spending your time, instead of amazon prime ;)
I keep finding winners of movies. Burn After Reading has been jumped up to my top 10 list just because of how benign and absurd it all is. A cool tragedy I think most people should see is "Into the Fade" with Diane Krueger and the drug addict from Babylon Berlin (dont know his name off the top of my head). A lot of mainstream "marvel-the-good-guys-win" type of people won't like it but if you want cold blooded reality it does it well.
And, honestly, I think it is the fact that we have access to media everywhere we go. Seeing a movie decades ago was an event. You anticipated going because you didn't have access [0] to so much media. Now, we just pull out our tablet or phone. Our lives are filled with instant gratification. So much so that very little every has any meaning anymore. Our mental reward system is broken.
[0] Yes, HBO existed, but that was NOTHING compared to today.
I’m trying to watch movies with my kids (18 and 22) just to have something to connect in and they have zero interest in sitting down to watch something that long. I don’t know what to pick from modern ones and the classics that i can hype are old and weird to them.
I think I/we suffer a bit from analysis paralysis with the huge catalogs available, are there any good communities that pick a movie each week or whatever that we can use to break the logjam?
Watch only 30 minutes of the movie (possibly even only 20 minutes). If it didn’t grip all of you, pick another one. Discuss why the first 30 minutes sucked and why it didn’t (concept good, pacing bad, concept terrible, acting good, etc).
There are only so many ways to skin a cat and have something that a consumer wants to buy...
On the netflix thing. I feel like the digital platforms are watering down choice and contributing to that feeling. Rental stores always had a broad selection of films across genres / distributors / producers that grew over time, digital platforms only have some content available for a certain time period and then it's gone.
I used to think that movie reviewers were out of touch with the common man. The fact that they would give movies like Transformers a low score but rave about obscure boring movies would always annoy me.
But several years ago I worked on a side project where I reviewed a movie every week for two years, and when it was over I became much more sympathetic towards movie critics.
I agree with this blog post when he says that movies are repetitive. The same gimmicks and tropes are used over and over. It really does become boring and annoying to see different shades of the same thing again and again.
This is why critics rave about the obscure weird movies that you never heard of. They have to sit through thousands of hours of generic crap and anything that is different is like a breath of fresh air to them.
Something really exasperates this problem of generic movie making that wasn’t touched on in the article is the soulless Hollywood factory system that is currently cranking out worthless junk that was designed by committee.
Look no further than the recent Star Wars trilogy for evidence of this.
Very rarely to we see movies that a result of a singular vision, directors are now just replaceable cogs that have to bend completely to the will of the studio or they will be replaced during production (like the Han Solo movie)
Ok
Movies are a short profit item, Studios need to keep making them to stay relevant, Movies are 'profitable' that aren't good.
How many zombie movies can you possibly make and still keep the quality up? (Have you looked at what's on page 5 of the Netflix Sci-Fi category? The Effects are convincing, the movies aren't good.)
I came to the same conclusion about passive media in general. Spending time, yet gaining nothing but being filled with others' mediocre thoughts describes it well. I'd rather spend that time building things, advancing our society's technology and productivity and at the same time being rewarded for my efforts.
Really? I've given up on TV since too many shows keep getting renewed when they should have been concluded soundly.
There are plenty of old movies I have not seen, so if I'm going to vegetate for two hours, then I'd prefer to take something off the backlog than start some show which will continue nebulously for far too long.
> Adult comedy thrives on irreverence. Over the past decade, we’ve become touchy about what’s okay to say or laugh at. Borat could not be made today.
What a load of bs. What isn't ok anymore is making fun at the expense of handicapped people, minorities and the like. But that was never funny. Not really.
Author mentions backdraws of passive watching. I always watch movies with a remote to skip ahead/back/pause 3 seconds, which I do on long boring shots, expected plot, thin conversation etc. It allows for a more concentrated, reading-like experience.
Why doesn't music fall victim to this? Is it that visual demands more complete attention? One can "half-listen" to music, but not "half-watch" a movie so repetition isn't as annoying as quickly, so it happens, but more slowly?
I'm jealous of sooo many of you. I didn't like so many mainstream hits. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Bourne and Bond series, all the Marvel / DC movies probably a lot more I've forgotten to mention.
I don't think most self-described film buffs who are keeping track and logging 50+ movies they watch a year would disagree with you. There's a lot more to film than just the canonical big-budget American hollywood productions
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
Agreed, I was over 2000 movies seen and the list of ones to watch was ever getting larger the more I knew (5000+). With only 800 seen I guarantee they didn't know what they didn't know. I stopped focusing on movies for the opposite reason of him, I knew I would never get to see all of the good ones I wanted to.
I feel like the TL;DR here is "I'm too smart for films now and also PC culture ruined comedy"
The first part is clearly not true. There are film critics that have worked for decades and don't start to hate films suddenly. There is more than one critic because films are not something you consume objectively but that can move you personally.
Also comedy films are not self-censored! Sensibilities have changed and the target audience has become larger, wich results in films that are gradually less sexist, racist, homophobe or have flat gross-out humor. Turns out you can be funny without using these as a comedic device!
I guess, it's also a generational thing. I wrote a thesis in film theory and appeared regularly in a show as a critic and had about the same feelings in the 2000s.
That said, Hollywood's safe bets, like superhero movies or bigger-than-life stories are exceptionally uninteresting to at least some non-Americans. (What get's a story going are not the wow-character traits, but the deficits of the heroins and heroes. Compare Jane Austen! :-) )
Thanks, I read this expecting not to like it, but it resonated with me a lot. This past Oscars show, I'd seen only two of the Best Films nominees, and they were both streamed. I also tried Nomadland and I turned it off.
TV has indeed taken over. The creativity of Breaking Bad or Succession or Yellowstone is what we used to watch movies for. Real creativity is always there and it'll go where it's appreciated.
I don't want to make this tl;dr so just one more thing: I hosted A.O. Scott at Google [1] and I mentioned that I never look at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic. I read him, and whoever's on the Roger Ebert site. An 80% "score" from a bunch of stupid people is still stupid.
OP hasn't watched any real cinema (European/South East Asian), just few commercial movies which are mostly based on a set formula. OP needs to improve his taste.
My 2 cents on the same topic, except to literature and a potential "cure" to the issue. I'm trying to break into being a fiction writer. Once you learn the tools of the trade of storytelling, it doesn't really matter the medium, you know where the story is going. There's an editor that mentioned this in passing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP_SmnCQA_Y It's in the first 5 minutes of the video. But he explains about some little challenge of being able to predict the end of a novel based on a page or two. The editor slam dunked the literary scholars. When you see a story as a bunch of gears, chains and a motor or two (writers and editors) instead of some ethereal wisp of magic beyond mortal understanding (literary twats and "scholars"), there isn't much that surprises you. Sorry, storytelling isn't magic. It's more formula and structure, no matter how much chest beating "analysts" drum up. Like, when everyone was "surprised" by Knives Out's ending, I was more confused since I figured it out after about 15 minutes into the movie. I enjoyed the little thriller part that was thrown in. That was unexpected. Beyond that, it was a paint by numbers story. With a SJW writer/director and the basic setup of the family, you immediately know what's going to happen and how. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Christie, another one of those where every writer figures out who killed the guy once the body was found because it's stupid easy when you know the mechanics. Analysts, "What a surprising twist!" Also, like no "movie reviewing/analysis expert" has picked up that The Tomorrow War is an allegory to climate change (more important the sacrifice theme of a generation for a future generation) in the disguise of an alien/monster flick. Either none of them actually watched the movie, just watched the trailer or I'm some sort of genius. I'm the first to say I'm an idiot by the way.
Anyways! I had a slog of a time with this when I started to realize this with every movie, show and book. "Alright, they got their milestone and in 3, 2, 1, kick in the balls to the protagonist (things get worser-er). And then in 3, 2, 1, Chekhov's [object/wisdom] helps them out of the problem..." Then I went to a friend's grill party during this woe-is-me phase. Basic American outdoor party. Hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, soda, beer, etc. Nothing surprising, yet, still enjoyable. Maybe this is more of a philosophical, Buddhist, enlightenment change in perception or just me over analyzing, but... who the fuck cares? No, seriously, who the fuck cares about things being completely different every single damn time? Sure, I like variety in food. Fish, salads, chilis, soups, pierogi, curries, sushi etc. But when you really think about it, there's a level of expectations even when you eat "variety". A level of, "not surprises" I and like 90+% of people out there demand in food. 10-20% surprise is okay, but I have to be in the mood for something completely different. Yes, that looks different to everyone. Everyone has different expectations. But you still expect certain things because you like it. This weird demand that everything is different, every time, is really weird.
Beating to the punch: No, you are not Andrew Zimmern. There's a 99.9% chance you're in denial that you like eating a small subset of food on a regular basis. Nothing wrong with trying and appreciating new, I do it too. But new happens extremely rarely with 99.9% of the population. You don't eat new anywhere as often as you may imagine. My point is, don't pretend you don't enjoy eating the same foods you've enjoyed hundreds of times before.
The same thing goes in stories. There are elements and methods those elements are brought together that I enjoy, just like food. Once I learned to enjoy the things that I actually enjoy in stories, I think my love of books and movies skyrocketed. Doesn't mean I think other genres/subgenres are bad. I just learned, "That's good, but it's not for me and that's okay". I like scifi settings more than fantasy. I used to think I had to like fantasy. Thus, I always chased the "new" to fantasy or I thought it was "derivative". Honestly, if someone ever says a story is derivative, it's code for, "I don't like this genre, setting or general intent of this story. Thus, I'm going to get on my high horse and speak down to this." There's a reason some people can watch all 20+ seasons of Law and Order, but others can't watch more than 1 episode. Or read all cozy mysteries and love them all while others read one and go, "Yea, you read one, you read them all". Which is true. You read 1, maybe 2 different cozy mysteries... they're all the same. But you can also say the same about scifi, fantasy, political thrillers, horror, etc. If you didn't like what it's generally about to begin with, you're probably not going to like it anyways. Other than breakout pieces, this is the truth to story telling. You gravitate to aspects of a story. Settings, character types, plot types, certain themes, etc. Learn what those are and enjoy those. Nothing wrong with hating "popular" or "classics" because they don't speak to you. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Oh well. Find your own pond and build your own cabin. Then enjoy it.
I think I've probably watched 1000+ movies. I've tapered off as I got older (I'm in my 40s now) but at least one movie every 5 days seems like a low bar I would regularly hit.
What the author says is true, I tend to see common patterns and can often predict who's a secret villain by the first act or have a general idea of how the movie will end. At the same time, these clues are what make a movie compelling and provide subtle clues where the movie is going, so shouldn't be discounted as "tropes" or cheap. George RR Martin talks about ignoring fans who have correctly predicted what will later be revealed at the end, saying that instead of retconning or changing course, it's best to keep on and not be influenced by the (correct) predictions. The groundwork is laid and the foreshadowing gives active readers an excuse to engage with the material.
I can also say that many movies overuse tropes (time travel in sci-fi for example) but often, even with movies that are mediocre or bad, there's a gem of an idea. Sometimes it's a premise, sometimes is a character interaction, what have you, but that's what, in my opinion, people who get into this state should be looking for. It's a version of "strongmaning" an argument, but instead applying it to the movie you're watching.
Also, sometimes the pleasure is in seeing how the movie plays out, even if you know the ending beforehand. I've seen quite a few movies multiple times and often enjoy them more on subsequent viewings.
I'm pretty skeptical of the author touching on "Godfather", "Eyes Wide Shut" and "The Hangover" as it sounds like their taste is pretty immature. They touch on this with the mention of "Lost in Translation" being unrelatable but delving deeper, it might be that they like those movies for other more superficial reasons that might not be so predominant later on in their life. I'm also pretty critical of "not being surprised anymore". This means that they're either so cynical and jaded or they're not looking hard enough for movies. It's rare but surprises do happen and the lack of surprise on the author's part points, in my opinion, to an unjustified superiority complex.
A final point: The author touches on it but then abandons it. TV is the new media. TV has the ability to delve much deeper into plot arcs and character development. We're living in a golden age of television where there are some shows that rival and surpass the best movies out there in terms breadth, scope and depth. There will always be a place for movies but I think at this point it's the difference between a short story and a novel. There's only so much you can pack in a two hour limit (or 6 hours if you're part of a trilogy) whereas the 12-24+ hour limit for TV allows you the space to explore in more depth.
I'm a movie lover, though I do find that the majority of films I see are forgettable and I never want to see them again. Still, I enjoy watching them anyway, and every now and then a movie will blow you away. But I think the human mind can only handle so much information, so it's almost impossible to avoid at least some level of generalizing large loads of films into mind's deserts of blandness. (And this goes for just about everything that humans can consume in large number; memories of days at the office, people's faces, etc.) We might blame a particular movie for not being special enough to stand out, but that also depends on our ability to compare it with large swaths of experience.
> TV and Film have switched spots
I don't think they've really switched. The advent of streaming has let many TV programs tell longer narratives across multiple episodes, which some filmmakers may prefer to the time limits of a film, but that extra expanse of time can be both a strength and a weakness.
> You Learn the Tricks
While this does make some films more predictable, learning the tricks has actually made me enjoy watching them more. I'm interested to see how they use common patterns and tricks, and I like finding patterns and tropes myself that change how I think of story structures. For example, midpoints tend to include a shift in location, or the "unnatural" character tends to sacrafice himself at movie's end (Groot, Baymax, ET). It's like learning a language. Yes, perhaps 95% of what people say with it will be boring and predictable, but there are seemingly infinite little variations, and the language becomes interesting in itself.
You'll also notice how different directors, actors, composers, cinematographers, screenwriters, etc. have their own sorts of style, and how those styles develop over the years. Obvious examples would be Terrence Malick's wide-angle wandering, Christopher Nolan's cross-cutting tension crescendoes, Carol Reed's wet cobblestones and dutch angles, Sergio Leone's eye closeups, Scorsese's overhead "God's POV" shots, etc.
> Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad ... Film is passive by definition, because it's best when you're fully immersed.
So... film is best when it's fundamentally bad? Maybe don't consume it passively? I enjoy looking for patterns, I enjoy thinking of story possibilities, I enjoy laughing at how stupid a movie or its characters might be, I enjoy trying to understand why a film doesn't work for me and how I might fix it if I could, etc. Sometimes a movie sucks me in and I just enjoy the ride the whole way through, I guess that's being "fully immersed", but that's rare, and when it doesn't happen I don't try to force it. Of course you'll grow bored of movies if you try to force that all the time.
> Thus comes the slow disappointment of watching movies. First you don’t understand them. Then you understand them, and they’re captivating. Then you understand them too well, and they’re boring. ... Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience.
I agree with this, and yet I want to watch more movies. Yes, most of them are boring by themselves (like all experiences), but there's still plenty to explore in their relations to other works, all the creative decisions that went into them, etc. And, yes, the movies that blow you away are exceedingly rare, but, for me at least, completely worth the treasure hunt.
> I don't think they've really switched. The advent of streaming has let many TV programs tell longer narratives across multiple episodes, which some filmmakers may prefer to the time limits of a film, but that extra expanse of time can be both a strength and a weakness.
As a viewer, the drawn out nature of TV shows is an insufferable time waste these days. I can only stand short productions which have a definite end, like Chernobyl.
Otherwise, I have to assume random time wasting tangents or filler scenes and cliff hangers due to trying to sell as much play time as possible.
> I can only stand short productions which have a definite end, like Chernobyl.
Same. TV writing seems to forgive (perhaps even encourage) a lot of writing laziness. I can't stand shows that end up rushing plot points to end a series, like GOT Season 8, or even worse, ones that never deliver an ending at all. (Worst are series that end on cliffhangers as a gimmick to get renewed, but get cancelled.)
I've read that a lot of Korean dramas are like what we might call a "miniseries" and actually have a beginning, middle, and end so that viewers know the story will wrap up.
Borat 2.0 is basically an anti-Trump agitation based on rerun of Borat 1.0 (at a bit of The Dictator), that's all, they didn't even bother to elaborate «wear mask» from the cover.
Lynch is severely overrated, watching his works is much more about flatulence than enjoying the fine art.
https://www.theyshootpictures.com/