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 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.
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.
>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...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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
>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.
> 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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].
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
580 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
Not true for the other roles.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Neil Patrick Harris!
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.
The same director made Robocop which had similar satire and themes.
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)
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.
Now I finally understand why they are always raving about those crappy old westerns on a German image board I often visit.
LOL, by some reason this phrase causes search engines to reduce ad hitlerum
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
There's cool editing and shooting on reddit filmmaking subs not to mention the super competitive music video market for cinematographers and editors
> 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
I feel like this is what I indicated as well.
There's cool writing on reddit writing subs as well. Nice snippets do not a great whole movie make, in any part of the art form.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/zhdBNVY55oM
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.
I was never into superhero comic books though so perhaps it's just my lack of taste.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/the-death-of-the-dvd-why-sal...
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 think you mean large-scale, mass acceptance of piracy. Streaming took a while longer to take off in big numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theyshootpictures.com/
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.
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)
* Majid Majidi
* Abbas Kiarostami
* The Makhmalbaf family (https://www.makhmalbaf.com)
* Dariush Mehrjui
* Bahman Ghobadi
* Jafar Panahi
* Bahram Beizai
* Asghar Farhadi
Most of these managed to create amazing films despite being closely watched and heavily censored by the authorities.
Is this a joke? Do you actually think american film captures every single possible artistic experience?
I'm not sure if this movie is funny (it's very subjective) but, thank you.
That's one of the most original movie I've seen in a long time, it's so clever and unpredictable.
Really, thank you :-) !
The current Neo-Noir and Wong Kar-Wai collections are worth at least quadruple that price out of the gate.
https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/neonoir-intro
https://www.criterionchannel.com/world-of-wong-kar-wai
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.
(For reference, this was about 6 months ago, and I live in Australia)
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.
https://www.finder.com/netflix/genre-list
http://ogres-crypt.com/public/NetFlix-Streaming-Genres2.html
Some don't resolve to any results, which I think is a result of their poor catalog.
http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/68778 = Action & Adventure starring Tom Cruise
https://www.lddb.com/
Chungking Express is such a beautiful movie. You can also take a look there at a bit less developed and less modern Hong Kong.
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.
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.
Unfortunately no other directors have carried baton forward, and now I'm just waiting for the sequel..
[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+."
"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).
They can be fun in 10-minute snippets, though. And pretty.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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 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 ;)
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).
In cinemas however, movies typically have subtitles.
I highly recommend Scandinavian crime drama's they are under rated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-OOpZitfd0
the work of Jurgen Haabermaster is also outstanding for all those who want to break out of the bland diet Hollywood serves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAlxNNvfvJs
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.
I sometimes wonder if we will ever have the quality of films Hollywood made in the 60's, and 70's.
(On technical note, I'm waiting for the day dubbing is perfected. I will watch a good subtitled movie, but prefer not to.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
[0]: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/reflections-after-25-...
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-megaplex/
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.
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 :))
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.
0: https://mubi.com/showing
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:
https://www.finder.com/uk/netflix-around-the-world/genre-lis...
I just wish Netflix would open up these lists to be browsable in their own UI.
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 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.
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.
[1] gopher://g.nixers.net/0/~vnm/classic_movies Also available on proxies such as: https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/g.nixers.net/0/~vnm/classic_...
A couple sites I recommend are EasternEuropeanMovies.com and CriterionChannel.com. Tons of excellent old films.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Day%27s_Journey_into_Ni...
Has a 59 minute long cut at the end if anyone's into that kind of thing.
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.
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.
With improvement in tech (e.g internet speeds) and new accessibility nodes (like streaming services) the rate of consumption has increased even more.
After few years the same thing will happen to TV-series as well (e.g. [1])
[1] Game Of Thrones explored and doubled down on grey characters. Now, a lot of others will do it and it will become a trope.
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.
[Never Look Away (2018)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5311542/)
Looks good, thanks for the rec.
Lindsay Ellis had a pretty good refute to when people say this about Mel Brooks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cPPSyoQkE
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.
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.
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.
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?
Don’t waste time. A lot of movies suck.
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.
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.
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.
It strikes me as the absolute height of arrogance, for anyone to believe they can bring a concept through to full maturity entirely alone.
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.
It's like "Calling someone gay isn't fashionable anymore so what's the use!?"
boop