The typography and music composition both communicate volumes for this show. The band (SURVIVE) behind most of the compositions is totally stellar too... https://survive.bandcamp.com/
This show was a great watch for me, and I think the typography and music were absolutely key in doing so. The entire feel of the show was a reminder of my youth, and I had a lot of fun with Stranger Things.
It's an entire genre from the early 2000s called "synthwave" (or "retrowave"). The band that did the intro is called S U R V I V E, some other noteworthy bands are GUNSHIP and Kavinsky. They're heavily inspired by 80s movies, particularly John Carpenter's.
This show was the complete package and one of the most entertaining shows I've watched in some time. It had something for everyone. I can't wait for season 2.
I'm not sure what you are suggesting? Do you feel it's an anachronism? PEX was invented in the late 1950's and was certainly around in 1983. (though there was one or two things that made me think it was 1984/85, but can't quite remember, so going on the He-Man reference)
Edit: Oh, it was the "All The Right Moves" reference, "it's still playing" which suggests it was several months after it released in late October 1983, so I think I pegged it as Spring-ish of 1984...
Edit 2: The Clash's "Should I stay or Should I Go" came out in 1982, and was in a flashback which seemed a year or two back, so if this was 1983, it wasn't out of date, but him having it on a mix tape was pretty soon after it's release, not an anachronism necessarily, but borderline.
Edit 3: The Bangle's version of Hazy Shade of Winter came out in 1987 (though they played it live as far back as March 1983).
I liked how this show was set in the eighties, but wasn't about them. It could almost have been made thirty years ago.
One of my other recent title sequence favourites is 'Halt and Catch Fire'[1], again set in the 80s, in no small part because of the nod towards Apple's advertising fonts[2].
When I started watching it I was expecting some cringe-worthy 80s nostalgia panning, but it was very tasteful. The little universe they set up for themselves is taken very seriously.
This is a complaint I have in most "___-Porn" instances... Why porn? It feels like the wrong context most of the time.
Porn is graphic, over stimulating and often without class or artistic direction.
Typography is an art. Great typography is subtle, often soothing and harmonious. It's not porn.
I get some earth-porn stuff because we in cities live so removed from nature that it's like BAM, Massive Earth In Your Face.
I don't know, it just feel gross to call good typography porn. Good typography is like an athlete in motion or a perfectly fitted outfit on a beautiful model.
Don't take the complaint personally, I get that it's "a thing".
I dunno, that's language... sometimes vague, sometimes misleading, always keeping you on your toes. ;)
I don't take the porn analogy as trying to be a precision term in every possible way, it's not referring to the sometimes lack of class or over stimulation, and it's literally not sexual, so yeah, no perfect analogy here.
Porn and it's associated activities is primarily and always self-absorbed, and going after raw physical attraction, those are the things the analogy "Typography porn" is trying to get across. The typography here is crafted so finely that to someone who studies typography, it looks almost masturbatory. Unnecessarily and over the top amounts of craft. An amount of craft and subtlety that as a nerd, you keep to yourself and only talk about or work on with other people who appreciate your weird fetishes.
It's porn because it's sexy, it has allure, it's hard to look away, it's attractive and it makes you want more. I think on the whole typography porn is a pretty decent term here.
And really, attaching porn to non-sexual things is meant in the spirit of fun, intended to be a teensy bit shocking, aimed for effect, designed for exaggeration, and above all a little silly. Just enjoy it! :)
> This is a complaint I have in most "___-Porn" instances... Why porn?
I think the term reflects exuberant hedonism and/or complete lack of inhibition exhibited by, or in appreciating the said ___-porn activity. In my mind, it's similar to saying "unapologetic ____", but in a positive sense of the word.
I watched the show entirely on the strength of the title song; Netflix was playing promos for the show in the weeks leading up to its release, and I loved the music so much. It references classic 80s themes like Terminator, as well as horror scores from the era, but is still modern and interesting. It isn't merely nostalgic, just like the intro video sequence isn't merely nostalgic. They use modern techniques to manipulate classic imagery and sounds to come up with a thing that is both nostalgic and novel. It's awesome.
The show isn't bad, either, but the intro really is a perfect thing. It gives me that weird creepy feeling I got from Stephen King movies on VHS when I was a kid. I feel like the composers and the folks behind the intro should be getting higher billing in the credits. It's so integral to the success of the show.
Wow I had a bad reaction to the show. I feel like half of it needed to head to the cutting room floor. Episodes are 48 minutes long, but very little interesting happens.
A lot of it is worn out tropes involving child and "teenage" actors that don't make it any more interesting to watch.
The photography is pretty uninspired and makes very little interesting use of composition, color, perspective, DOF. Sure you get a bone once in a while but most of it is pretty boring.
There is a passable few episodes in there somewhere waiting to be ruthlessly edited out. But really instead of subverting expectations in it's storytelling it hews very closely to the expectations that come with the tropes and genre. That puts a hard ceiling on how good it's ever going to be given that I'm not tuning in for the acting, sets, or photography.
The show is not as good as the intro. And, the show is, like the intro, an homage to a bunch of 80s stuff. If you didn't grow up loving Stephen King novels and movies, and the like, you may not sync up with the stories they're telling.
They really are retreading a bunch of 80s tropes; I enjoy it, but I recognize that the kids are rehashing a Spielberg-ian kidventure flick along the lines of Goonies or ET, the teenagers are stuck in a horror flick ala Friday the 13th, and the grownups are in a paranoid government conspiracy movie. Any of it would also fit comfortably into an X Files episode. I like all those things; even while I recognize they're pandering to my inner child. Then again, my girlfriend really likes it, too, and she's young enough to have not grown up on any of these things.
So, I don't know. I like it. It's not high art, but it's definitely fun pop culture, for me.
There's this interesting thing with the Netflix originals - they feel fantastically formulaic. Or, maybe a better way to put it - I feel like I can see the genes (memes?) in the story, and it comes out the better for it.
In my imagination, it starts with the data scientists identifying a gap or opportunity based on people's viewing habits - House of Cards being the prime example; a show by X staring Y in Z genre.
That provides the baseline; queue the writers raised on TV Tropes. I don't think there's an intact trope in the whole show; anything that is primarily subverted has sub-tropes done straight; anything done straight has sub-tropes subverted.
The Marvel series do this the least; the pure Netflix originals do this the most. I'd say maybe you could call it "high craft"? Like Michelangelo versus Picasso.
House of Cards had the British version to build on, so it's not entirely a Netflix taste triangulation.
But, the CEO or somebody from Netflix has actually spelled out in the past that though they're taking risks in making a bunch of their own content, the risk is smaller than it has historically been. They know the taste of their audience (on a nearly individual level) better than any entertainment company in history ever has. And, they extract the value of their viewers directly and without middlemen, unlike almost every other entertainment company in history. So, for them, a successful show is one that brings in X number of new subscribers and keeps them around through multiple seasons...and that X number is smaller than it's ever needed to be.
So, you're right; they are triangulating in on very specific sub-genres and very specific audiences in ways that entertainment companies in the past couldn't afford to do. This is long-tail television production. Stranger Things, while it is a niche market, is actually one of the bigger niche markets they've tapped into, thus far. It's gotten far more buzz than a lot of the other Netflix original programming.
So, they're either getting better at the triangulation (likely) or they got lucky with this particular toss at the dart board of niche programming, or maybe it's a little of both. And, maybe the people making this show happened to be particularly passionate about it, and it shows in the attention to detail; they're having fun with it, and it makes it fun for viewers who like this sort of thing (or, are at least nostalgic about it...I don't read/watch Stephen King novels/movies very frequently as an adult, but loved them as a kid).
I find the quality of the Netflix originals to vary pretty wildly, and I don't get hooked on most of them. But, I enjoyed Stranger Things. It's a fun escapist bit of entertainment. It's no House of Cards, or even Orange is the New Black, in terms of quality, but it delivers very effectively on what it promises.
I wonder how well Stranger Things is doing among viewers who aren't old enough to have grown up surrounded by this stuff? I know many of my friends on facebook are hooked, but mostly the ones really talking about it are around my age. It's an interesting phenomenon, I think; the stuff it is paying homage to and modeled after was mostly targeted at kids and young adults, but the people most excited about it are maybe middle aged. Weird how that happens.
I liked how they depicted being a kid in the 1980s -- that's really how it kind of was -- we just hung out with each other playing D&D and riding bikes, etc. These days kids have such a regulated life style -- they generally aren't allowed to wander off on their own but are expected to be in regulated environments like organized sports, swim lessons, etc.
I think this is more prevalent in suburbs. Plenty of kids outside playing in my generally working class urban neighborhood.
To be fair to the parents, a lot of stuff related to college or jobs is way more competitive hence the push for extracurriculars. They do go a bit overboard though : )
Having grown up in the 80s, I caught a ton of the pop culture nods in the series. I was the exact same age as these kids during the time the show was taking place.
I like how you broke it down by age group vs movies/tropes, something I hadn't considered.
To add to your list, the adults' situations were mirroring much from Jaws (the iconic typewriter scene, the Chief's plodding hunt for the thing), Poltergeist (the mom talking to the room, addressing her child as "Baby"), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the mom's obsessive behavior w/ the lights).
Though I'm not a huge fan, I thought Winona Rider's performance was incredible. She had that perfect balance of almost-over-the-top motherly worry about her son, yet cognizant and brave enough to not quite hit the level of crazy hysterics.
I can understand you disliking the photography but I wouldn't say that the storytelling hewed "very closely to the expectations".
I'm trying to avoid spoiling things for those who haven't seen it, but almost every character became more multi-dimensional and the story progressed in unexpected ways. It took the worn-out tropes and flipped them over. Even your singular use of the word "genre" confuses me. Was there only one genre? It started out as a horror movie and then evolved into some sci-fi secret experiment narrative.
Certainly it blends multiple genres, but to me it's the "X-files" genre.
My complaint is not that it doesn't get better it's that it shouldn't have to get better. That's a pacing issue and when a show has enough solid material in it I theorize most pacing issues can be solved with editing and usually by removing extraneous material.
I think the impact that editing can have on how you perceive a story is profound.
same. not just this show, but all the Netflix originals have this "uncanny valley" aspect to them, where you can tell they're being crafted according to an algorithm, and almost entirely derivative as a result. always very "safe" and according to expectations.
Stranger Things felt to me almost entirely like a sequence of tropes borrowed from other movies. From the Freaks & Geeks cast composition, to the Spielberg Sci-Fi, bald blue-eyed psychic child, etc. Just about the only truly original thing was the design of the threat itself, and it was easily the worst part of the show. Sure, it's a "love letter" to the era, but it's just that.
you can't really A/B test your way out of a local maxima, which is why in spite of most Netflix shows being decent, none of them have actually stood out as "good" in my mind.
Thank you, you've been able to accurately describe my problem with all the true Netflix originals ("true" in that they haven't been bought from other countries or licensed). Except for OITNB, I kinda love that show and it doesn't seem entirely created and written to pander to a demo.
I'd love to see a day when Netflix premiers a show on the level of Better Call Saul or The Wire.
That would be at least the first few seasons of House of Cards for me. I wouldn't rank it quite as high as those two, but I was excited to watch it and any show that elicits that reaction is doing fine by me.
My problem with House of Cards is that it's devoid of mystery. I'm only interested when the plot is moving fast, which is probably 4 episodes a season. There's no introspection, none of the characters have personal motives (except for the "transient" girl who lasted 2 seasons).
I don't know, it's just been disappointing even though I marathon all the episodes when they appear.
Indeed. They need to cut a lot more if I were to watch any more than the first few episodes. The show feels a bit like the first season of true detective, except it's boring and nothing happens...
Totally agree. The title sequence and music taps into some primitive nostalgic core parts of my history I can't even accurately articulate. As soon as it came on, it's like a light in my childhood blinked on. Wonderful.
But the show itself is just meh.
The acting is uniformly bad. Given that it applies to all of the actors, I assume it says more about the directors than the cast. Everyone is too loud and too over the top, all the time, which has the effect of making everything boring. There's no dynamic range in the emotion (except for the mysterious girl, who is pretty great).
I like the story mainly because I enjoy the all the tropes it rehashes. But the dialogue is pedestrian, the pacing is semi-random, and the episodes I've seen so far feel like more of a pastiche of scenes than something tightly polished.
The cinematography is everything I hate about digital film production. It's so easy to color correct every frame that now you're obligated too and everyone does it the exact same way: Crank up the shadows so 90% of the frame is pure solid black (with none of the subtle detail that would still be just perceptible in there if it were film). Get the that's left and kill every color that isn't orange or blue [1].
Cinematographers! You can do amazing things with color today. Stop always doing the same thing!
Still, having said all that, I do enjoy watching it. I think a more experience hand could tighten it into something more spectacular, but it scratches a nostalgic itch that not many other things do.
Wow, we must've watched different shows then. I thought the cinematography was incredible! easily beats out almost anything hollywood produces otherwise. A beautiful show perspecitve-wise.
I just really don't agree with your interpretation, but to each their own. Great show all around.
Sturgeon's law applies to musical genres: 90% of everything is crap.
But, those are pretty good. I'm aware of the genre, though not super familiar with it, most of it doesn't grab me. SURVIVE doesn't seem to fall into the nostalgia trap; wherein things have to sound exactly like the old thing it is paying homage to. A lot of retro stuff, in many genres (punk, country, rock and roll, metal, etc. it goes on and on), is just annoying and trite retreads of good stuff that happened 20+ years ago.
I'm maybe sounding way more grumpy about it than I actually am, and I'm not specifically criticizing the links you've provided; I'm checking them out now, and mostly liking them. Just rambling, in general, about how retro in the arts can be a trap, and it takes a really strong artist to escape that trap.
So, umm...after that rant: Thanks for the links! I'm checking them out as we speak.
The great thing about electronic music is that anyone can get a setup for cheap and start producing tracks. The terrible thing about electronic music is that anyone can get a setup for cheap and start producing tracks. I have some producer friends (none of them renown), and the approaches taken by those with a musical background and those without are wildly different.
The ones without the background tend to shovel out tracks, wipe their hands, and say, "Look! Easy!" They fail to realize that while their tracks do constitute as a musical piece, they have no idea about any of the composition. They claim their tracks are bangers just like everyone else's, but they're either making new arrangements or missing subtleties on why some tracks are considered great.
All of that was to say that Sturgeon's law is especially prevalent with electronic music. Everyone is just as good as that one world famous producer, and there is nothing difficult about producing electronic music. However, your 100 plays across your 25 tracks on SoundCloud beg to differ.
Yeah, I didn't know they were an Austin band at first (I'm from Austin, though I've been traveling for the past several months). I learned they were from Austin when friends started congratulating them and tagging them on facebook.
Their other work is quite good, and available on bandcamp. I've been listening to their stuff pretty much daily lately.
Yeah these guys are the real deal. Saw them play live a few times around Austin. All-hardware setup, no laptops, just raw knowledge of old synths. Michael Stein (one of the composers) worked at Switched On for a long time as a repair technician.
The show itself looks to be a mix of key parts of Poltergeist and Silent Hill with better characters. Rewatched Poltergeist a day or so ago to find three people in the family even look close to Stranger Things family. Especially the boy. So, I thought it was a tribute to those or tapping into recognition of them. Without spoiling, the ending was great, too. Lots of producers seem to give middle finger to audience with how a season ends these days. That ending could be a decent finale or allow for another Season. Right way to do it.
The opening is great. I marathon watched them but still enjoyed seeing opening each time. I agree with OP that it's refreshingly simple. Agree with you the music is like 70's or 80's style mixed with what I'd describe as common, background music for building suspense or interest in what's coming. Visuals for large letters and coloring were neat, too. I want to see more like it.
I've been meaning to watch this show, but haven't yet gotten around to it. But, having just watched the title song video, I absolutely agree with the music aspect. I just recently saw the movie It Follows an 80's-influenced horror/suspense movie from 2014, and it has a lot of the same aspects as what I saw in the trailer, especially with the music. I'd recommend it to anyone based on the music alone, but as far as horror movies go (I'm usually not a fan) it was brilliant.
It goes deeper. Look at some lights in the main programme: the way they have glowing halos. Especially the red lights in the opening sequence of ep1, or the bike headlights when they are facing the camera. It's probably CGI for cost reasons, but it's been deliberately done "badly" so it looks like traditional effects.
Low content comment: I love that someone wrote this, because I was literally wondering if an article with this title would show up on HN.
Really cool typography (also a fantastic show). I know almost nil about the subject, but the title font also reminds me a lot of Friz Quadrata [1], the font famously used by Black Flag, which gives me another kind of 80s nostalgia.
A few nice quotes about the design direction and a pair of comments at the end with illustrations of the source material with the original cut of Benguait.
There was a wonderful post [1] on r/italy (unfortunately in Italian), by a guy that works in cinema that explained all this and more.
He explains not only the motion blur and the film grain, but also things like how color shift when white fades out (it's about different color sensitivity curves in real film).
I'm not really getting the excitement. I remember this look from the 80s and it's... a look I remember from the 80s.
The music is half Carpenter and half late 1970s Tangerine Dream with more oscillator detuning than usual - e.g. the score TD did for a William Friedkin movie called Sorcerer.
I LOVED the show, but hated the intro because it broke into the binge watching flow. Eg, because it was not at the beginning and/or just after "previous episode" scenes meant that it didn't get auto-skipped when binge watching. So it interrupted my viewing experience every hour or so.
I watched the entire Stranger Things season all in one sitting. Sadly, the opening title and musical score was the best part of it. I was completely pumped when I heard a show based in 80's nostalgia was coming to Netflix. Unfortunately that was about all it offered. It ticked off every 80's cliche; Stephen King fonts, Spielbergesque characters and settings, tired cop given a second chance to do something meaningful, single mom raising boys away from a deadbeat dad, group of nerdy young kids solving issues on their BMX bikes, alien hiding in a shed (ET), and a secret megacorp coverup. The story was completely uninspiring, that even some exceptional acting couldn't rescue. The actress playing Eleven was fantastic! But Winona Ryder was WAS over dramatic.
The lettering of this title is indeed thoroughly thought through. By the way many Chinese movies these day present very nice eye-pleasers from a typographycal perspective. Its a pity the Western eye lacks criteria for admiration of those.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadThere are tons of artists on Spotify/YouTube for this genre to check out too which is a good thing.
Edit: Oh, it was the "All The Right Moves" reference, "it's still playing" which suggests it was several months after it released in late October 1983, so I think I pegged it as Spring-ish of 1984...
Edit 2: The Clash's "Should I stay or Should I Go" came out in 1982, and was in a flashback which seemed a year or two back, so if this was 1983, it wasn't out of date, but him having it on a mix tape was pretty soon after it's release, not an anachronism necessarily, but borderline.
Edit 3: The Bangle's version of Hazy Shade of Winter came out in 1987 (though they played it live as far back as March 1983).
One of my other recent title sequence favourites is 'Halt and Catch Fire'[1], again set in the 80s, in no small part because of the nod towards Apple's advertising fonts[2].
[1]https://vimeo.com/97089384
[2]http://i.imgur.com/xuCBYgZ.png
Stranger Things is one of the best shows I've seen in a while. That 53 seconds is still the best part every time though.
TYPORNOGRAPHY
Porn is graphic, over stimulating and often without class or artistic direction.
Typography is an art. Great typography is subtle, often soothing and harmonious. It's not porn.
I get some earth-porn stuff because we in cities live so removed from nature that it's like BAM, Massive Earth In Your Face.
I don't know, it just feel gross to call good typography porn. Good typography is like an athlete in motion or a perfectly fitted outfit on a beautiful model.
Don't take the complaint personally, I get that it's "a thing".
I don't take the porn analogy as trying to be a precision term in every possible way, it's not referring to the sometimes lack of class or over stimulation, and it's literally not sexual, so yeah, no perfect analogy here.
Porn and it's associated activities is primarily and always self-absorbed, and going after raw physical attraction, those are the things the analogy "Typography porn" is trying to get across. The typography here is crafted so finely that to someone who studies typography, it looks almost masturbatory. Unnecessarily and over the top amounts of craft. An amount of craft and subtlety that as a nerd, you keep to yourself and only talk about or work on with other people who appreciate your weird fetishes.
It's porn because it's sexy, it has allure, it's hard to look away, it's attractive and it makes you want more. I think on the whole typography porn is a pretty decent term here.
And really, attaching porn to non-sexual things is meant in the spirit of fun, intended to be a teensy bit shocking, aimed for effect, designed for exaggeration, and above all a little silly. Just enjoy it! :)
I think the term reflects exuberant hedonism and/or complete lack of inhibition exhibited by, or in appreciating the said ___-porn activity. In my mind, it's similar to saying "unapologetic ____", but in a positive sense of the word.
The show isn't bad, either, but the intro really is a perfect thing. It gives me that weird creepy feeling I got from Stephen King movies on VHS when I was a kid. I feel like the composers and the folks behind the intro should be getting higher billing in the credits. It's so integral to the success of the show.
I feel slightly bad after the first 3-4 episodes, when I skip the intro though.
A lot of it is worn out tropes involving child and "teenage" actors that don't make it any more interesting to watch.
The photography is pretty uninspired and makes very little interesting use of composition, color, perspective, DOF. Sure you get a bone once in a while but most of it is pretty boring.
There is a passable few episodes in there somewhere waiting to be ruthlessly edited out. But really instead of subverting expectations in it's storytelling it hews very closely to the expectations that come with the tropes and genre. That puts a hard ceiling on how good it's ever going to be given that I'm not tuning in for the acting, sets, or photography.
They really are retreading a bunch of 80s tropes; I enjoy it, but I recognize that the kids are rehashing a Spielberg-ian kidventure flick along the lines of Goonies or ET, the teenagers are stuck in a horror flick ala Friday the 13th, and the grownups are in a paranoid government conspiracy movie. Any of it would also fit comfortably into an X Files episode. I like all those things; even while I recognize they're pandering to my inner child. Then again, my girlfriend really likes it, too, and she's young enough to have not grown up on any of these things.
So, I don't know. I like it. It's not high art, but it's definitely fun pop culture, for me.
In my imagination, it starts with the data scientists identifying a gap or opportunity based on people's viewing habits - House of Cards being the prime example; a show by X staring Y in Z genre.
That provides the baseline; queue the writers raised on TV Tropes. I don't think there's an intact trope in the whole show; anything that is primarily subverted has sub-tropes done straight; anything done straight has sub-tropes subverted.
The Marvel series do this the least; the pure Netflix originals do this the most. I'd say maybe you could call it "high craft"? Like Michelangelo versus Picasso.
But, the CEO or somebody from Netflix has actually spelled out in the past that though they're taking risks in making a bunch of their own content, the risk is smaller than it has historically been. They know the taste of their audience (on a nearly individual level) better than any entertainment company in history ever has. And, they extract the value of their viewers directly and without middlemen, unlike almost every other entertainment company in history. So, for them, a successful show is one that brings in X number of new subscribers and keeps them around through multiple seasons...and that X number is smaller than it's ever needed to be.
So, you're right; they are triangulating in on very specific sub-genres and very specific audiences in ways that entertainment companies in the past couldn't afford to do. This is long-tail television production. Stranger Things, while it is a niche market, is actually one of the bigger niche markets they've tapped into, thus far. It's gotten far more buzz than a lot of the other Netflix original programming.
So, they're either getting better at the triangulation (likely) or they got lucky with this particular toss at the dart board of niche programming, or maybe it's a little of both. And, maybe the people making this show happened to be particularly passionate about it, and it shows in the attention to detail; they're having fun with it, and it makes it fun for viewers who like this sort of thing (or, are at least nostalgic about it...I don't read/watch Stephen King novels/movies very frequently as an adult, but loved them as a kid).
I find the quality of the Netflix originals to vary pretty wildly, and I don't get hooked on most of them. But, I enjoyed Stranger Things. It's a fun escapist bit of entertainment. It's no House of Cards, or even Orange is the New Black, in terms of quality, but it delivers very effectively on what it promises.
I wonder how well Stranger Things is doing among viewers who aren't old enough to have grown up surrounded by this stuff? I know many of my friends on facebook are hooked, but mostly the ones really talking about it are around my age. It's an interesting phenomenon, I think; the stuff it is paying homage to and modeled after was mostly targeted at kids and young adults, but the people most excited about it are maybe middle aged. Weird how that happens.
To be fair to the parents, a lot of stuff related to college or jobs is way more competitive hence the push for extracurriculars. They do go a bit overboard though : )
I like how you broke it down by age group vs movies/tropes, something I hadn't considered.
To add to your list, the adults' situations were mirroring much from Jaws (the iconic typewriter scene, the Chief's plodding hunt for the thing), Poltergeist (the mom talking to the room, addressing her child as "Baby"), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the mom's obsessive behavior w/ the lights).
Though I'm not a huge fan, I thought Winona Rider's performance was incredible. She had that perfect balance of almost-over-the-top motherly worry about her son, yet cognizant and brave enough to not quite hit the level of crazy hysterics.
I really hope there's a 2nd season.
I'm trying to avoid spoiling things for those who haven't seen it, but almost every character became more multi-dimensional and the story progressed in unexpected ways. It took the worn-out tropes and flipped them over. Even your singular use of the word "genre" confuses me. Was there only one genre? It started out as a horror movie and then evolved into some sci-fi secret experiment narrative.
My complaint is not that it doesn't get better it's that it shouldn't have to get better. That's a pacing issue and when a show has enough solid material in it I theorize most pacing issues can be solved with editing and usually by removing extraneous material.
I think the impact that editing can have on how you perceive a story is profound.
Stranger Things felt to me almost entirely like a sequence of tropes borrowed from other movies. From the Freaks & Geeks cast composition, to the Spielberg Sci-Fi, bald blue-eyed psychic child, etc. Just about the only truly original thing was the design of the threat itself, and it was easily the worst part of the show. Sure, it's a "love letter" to the era, but it's just that.
you can't really A/B test your way out of a local maxima, which is why in spite of most Netflix shows being decent, none of them have actually stood out as "good" in my mind.
I'd love to see a day when Netflix premiers a show on the level of Better Call Saul or The Wire.
I don't know, it's just been disappointing even though I marathon all the episodes when they appear.
But the show itself is just meh.
The acting is uniformly bad. Given that it applies to all of the actors, I assume it says more about the directors than the cast. Everyone is too loud and too over the top, all the time, which has the effect of making everything boring. There's no dynamic range in the emotion (except for the mysterious girl, who is pretty great).
I like the story mainly because I enjoy the all the tropes it rehashes. But the dialogue is pedestrian, the pacing is semi-random, and the episodes I've seen so far feel like more of a pastiche of scenes than something tightly polished.
The cinematography is everything I hate about digital film production. It's so easy to color correct every frame that now you're obligated too and everyone does it the exact same way: Crank up the shadows so 90% of the frame is pure solid black (with none of the subtle detail that would still be just perceptible in there if it were film). Get the that's left and kill every color that isn't orange or blue [1].
Cinematographers! You can do amazing things with color today. Stop always doing the same thing!
Still, having said all that, I do enjoy watching it. I think a more experience hand could tighten it into something more spectacular, but it scratches a nostalgic itch that not many other things do.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=stranger+things&espv=2&biw=1...
I just really don't agree with your interpretation, but to each their own. Great show all around.
Some examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1s9SmrQRE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpDn4-Na5co
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egAB2qtVWFQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vsf3zYppP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv1ZN8c4_Gs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSGnNMnvM6M
But, those are pretty good. I'm aware of the genre, though not super familiar with it, most of it doesn't grab me. SURVIVE doesn't seem to fall into the nostalgia trap; wherein things have to sound exactly like the old thing it is paying homage to. A lot of retro stuff, in many genres (punk, country, rock and roll, metal, etc. it goes on and on), is just annoying and trite retreads of good stuff that happened 20+ years ago.
I'm maybe sounding way more grumpy about it than I actually am, and I'm not specifically criticizing the links you've provided; I'm checking them out now, and mostly liking them. Just rambling, in general, about how retro in the arts can be a trap, and it takes a really strong artist to escape that trap.
So, umm...after that rant: Thanks for the links! I'm checking them out as we speak.
The great thing about electronic music is that anyone can get a setup for cheap and start producing tracks. The terrible thing about electronic music is that anyone can get a setup for cheap and start producing tracks. I have some producer friends (none of them renown), and the approaches taken by those with a musical background and those without are wildly different.
The ones without the background tend to shovel out tracks, wipe their hands, and say, "Look! Easy!" They fail to realize that while their tracks do constitute as a musical piece, they have no idea about any of the composition. They claim their tracks are bangers just like everyone else's, but they're either making new arrangements or missing subtleties on why some tracks are considered great.
All of that was to say that Sturgeon's law is especially prevalent with electronic music. Everyone is just as good as that one world famous producer, and there is nothing difficult about producing electronic music. However, your 100 plays across your 25 tracks on SoundCloud beg to differ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rk3ksaIl84
https://carpenterbrut.bandcamp.com/album/trilogy
Their other work is quite good, and available on bandcamp. I've been listening to their stuff pretty much daily lately.
The opening is great. I marathon watched them but still enjoyed seeing opening each time. I agree with OP that it's refreshingly simple. Agree with you the music is like 70's or 80's style mixed with what I'd describe as common, background music for building suspense or interest in what's coming. Visuals for large letters and coloring were neat, too. I want to see more like it.
Really cool typography (also a fantastic show). I know almost nil about the subject, but the title font also reminds me a lot of Friz Quadrata [1], the font famously used by Black Flag, which gives me another kind of 80s nostalgia.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friz_Quadrata
A few nice quotes about the design direction and a pair of comments at the end with illustrations of the source material with the original cut of Benguait.
He explains not only the motion blur and the film grain, but also things like how color shift when white fades out (it's about different color sensitivity curves in real film).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/italy/comments/4te9hl/stranger_thin...?
This is my favorite detail - very subtle and authentic looking. I was hoping someone could explain it, thanks for the pointer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhO_YjAJq_w
I'm not really getting the excitement. I remember this look from the 80s and it's... a look I remember from the 80s.
The music is half Carpenter and half late 1970s Tangerine Dream with more oscillator detuning than usual - e.g. the score TD did for a William Friedkin movie called Sorcerer.
Yeah, I know, first world problems.