The main criticism of this YouTube video is that the main character doesn't really have to put in any effort and has all those skills from the very beginning.
While I agree that this trope can make kids think they're special without trying in life (and that they will be a hero in the future), I think there have been similar tropes in the past.
Just take basic story writing of many old movies: There is always a hero that is living a boring or even sad life, often unsuccessful and unhappy. Suddenly, a "mentor" appears who takes our hero into this new magical world and teaches him the most amazing things in no time. Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, basically all Disney movies, even Sailor Moon.
That doesn't teach kids very positive things either: just wait for a mentor to come along and show you the way to become a hero, don't worry, you will be a hero because someone shows you the way.
So I don't see the development described in the YouTube video as dramatically, it has existed forever.
I think the difference is that the mentor might introduce them to the magical world, but its still up to the character what they want to do with it e.g. to quote the matrix "But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." And the decision as to what to do with it has consequences and changes them.
Or to use another example - gandalf might mentor frodo, but yet it always seems like frodo's accomplishments are his own and gandalf didn't really do all that much for him when all is said and done. Frodo is a hero and an interesting character, but i wouldn't want to be him.
Anyways i don't think the problem is lack of life lessons (even if they are lacking) its static characters and lack of stakes. Characters that were born ready are boring to watch. We like watching characters that change and adapt to circumstances whose choices are meaningful and consequential. The protagonist who was basically born with super powers, does not face a challenge and doesn't have to adapt their personality, is a boring character.
Nah. Superman, spiderman, hluk, any of these got skills by accident. Even karate kid which shown some training, shown imaginary low effort low time investment training. The typical action movie of my youth had guys winning all the fights for no reason other then that they are awesome. Audiences loved it. The past movies had enough of pure power fantasy or other "just gonna win" in it for the whole generation to drawn in it.
And not just American movies. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill were super famous and did basically nothing but that. They don't train, never ever, they are lazy as cool factor and are strongest guys most sharpest shooters around. Franch movies, fairly often the same thing. Random middle aged man thrown in situation and suddenly climbing and jumping roofs.
And series targetted at kids still show plenty of training. Lego ninja go, winx club, all show training or classroom scenes often.
> Nah. Superman, spiderman, hluk, any of these got skills by accident
And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.
> And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.
There is no way for Hulk to ignore or reject the powers. Nor for superman or spiderman for that matter. Superman in particular is just born that way, full stop. And speaking about action movies that nope, no big deep choices there. Even in matrix, the choice is singular scene where main character picks the pill so that movie can happen.
And I liked Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies, so I have seen them multiple times and consequences for choices and actions are not the theme there at all.
I have also read Spiderman comic targeted at kids back then. Half the time he just reacts to what is going on around, not having much choice nor choice being theme beyond "Am I going to do the right thing or not" false choice. Ninja Turtles had training in them ... but also they are essentially magical turtles due to some experiments or what done on them.
Average movie and entertainment in 90ties just was not that deep.
It's true it's not new. But when AI is mainly responsible for rewriting old scripts over and over, every 10 years, and telling children they're new movies, it may be missing out on the human elements that made those stories good the first time.
> Even karate kid which shown some training, shown imaginary low effort low time investment training.
The point of his training is that the moves have completely become muscle memory/second nature. I have no clue how long that would take, but it would be significantly more than "low time investment".
Note also that (1) he claimed to have had karate training before; (2) after hebuilds up the needed muscle memory, training continues to teach him when to use what muscle memory.
It takes over summer or something like that. He is 17 when movie starts and tournament he wins is when is 18 birthsday gift. Bulk of training is housework chores. No, you cant do housework for few months and emerge tournaments winning fighter out of it. That is literally plot of first Karate Kid.
However, it is kid/teenage fantasy. Which is fine! But not some kind of hard work message movie.
2-3 years of regular training is a good guideline for the movements to become autonomic in real-time situations with fluent synchrony situational context, for someone reasonably coordinated at the start.
> I think the difference is that the mentor might introduce them to the magical world, but its still up to the character what they want to do with it e.g. to quote the matrix "But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it." And the decision as to what to do with it has consequences and changes them.
And in most cases they accept blindly, otherwise there's no story. Madoka Magica is one of the few stories that I know where this trope is broken by the characters questioning the decision.
No, think about Star Wars. Luke doesn't believe in the Force, doesn't believe Obi Wan is anything but a crazy old man. He has to come to his realization himself and then find the Force in himself. He isn't gifted with it. That truly is a big difference between the classic hero's journey and the newer 2010s films where people just have a magic power.
And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?
Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.
There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.
Luke Skywalker was just born with superpowers. Sure he had to learn to use the force properly, but there was still no other person in that story capable of using the force. Luke could have replaced either Wedge or Biggs, but they were not capable of replacing him.
Luke Skywalker is shown as natural born talent. Which is why he can become Jedi despite being too old for it and emotional. His hero journey starts with right genetical inheritance.
> Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable.
I think he is just powerful rather then impossible to understand. Not that I am expert, but Greek gods don't come across to me as something alien. They are fairly human, emotional at times rational at others, political among themselves, but definitely too strong for actual humans to handle.
This has been a standard trope for well over a century. It's not really about "being shown the way" because heroes still have to do some active hero-ing to get to the end.
Movies and fiction are about moral lessons packaged into fantasies and escapism. If movies were relentlessly realistic no one would go to see them, because there would be nothing to see.
Even "gritty realism" isn't realistic. It's usually just the same trope populated with shady underworld characters and a flawed or outcast anti-hero instead of inspirational mentors.
Knew this was Critical Drinker before I clicked on it. Mate introduced me to it and he is absolutely spot on for the most part.
Modern movies (and TV for that matter) have become so commercialized and expensive that the series they are now rehashing (Star Wars for instance) wouldn't be possible to create today. George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
It's weird because I feel like some other forms of media, namely games and music have gone in the opposite direction because of the availability and power of tools for independent production. However movies just need so much more resources the same indie competition hasn't been able to come in and shake things up sadly.
I think all media you mentioned have similar effects and all have both Hollywood and indie areas.
I mean, some sports games are definitely hollywoodized with "let's just swap some colours, change 2021 to 2022 and charge another $70". On the other hand Bill Wurtz still releases new tunes on YouTube and Ben Levin continues doing... Ben stuff. In movies you can still get quality indie productions like Joel Haver's full movies. My random selection of course, but the point is, there's definitely indie stuff available if you want it.
I mean there’s indie games that are works of art just like there are indie movies for the lack of a better term. Similarly there are plenty of popcorn games with big budgets and shallow content.
This might be true. But to me it seems like Indie games make real money. Mosty because making a good game requires less personel than making a good movie.
> George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
I don't know if that's entirely true. George Lucas had come off the back of American Graffiti, which was an incredible commercial success. It had made 50x its budget, and in 1977 was the 13th highest grossing film of all time.
The question was really whether Lucas could turn his hand to a completely different genre. It's down to American Graffiti's success that Lucas was able to re-negotiate a deal for Star Wars that gave him merchandising rights.
True, American Graffiti was pivotal in him getting the shot he did. What I am saying is I don't think that plays out the same way today given movie budgets, you can't just have one person like one film you made and force through the production budget of a AAA film anymore.
Was "Star Wars" a AAA film though? I don't know what typical budgets were for films from that studio at that time were but in so many other regards it feels like it was a B-movie that over-achieved.
I mean just one aging star (sorry, Alec) in the film's credits.... That doesn't sound like a AAA studio effort.
My recollection of the history of The Star Wars though was that Lucas had begun to shop it around before Graffiti's success. Also "American Graffiti" was not an instant success but had more of a slow-burn upon its release.
Of course then "American Graffiti" caught fire and I suspect that (and the urgings of Francis Ford Coppola) is when Ladd gave the green light.
The biggest problem with movies is none of the labor has been automated much.
You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.
Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.
One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.
I would actually say, "almost nothing" in movie terms means, "human scale almost nothing" all the way to perhaps, "cost of a house". We all have phones, video editing software is free, there's plenty of distribution channels. If you want to make a movie for "almost nothing", you can do so.
Doesn't mean it's going to be good, or that anyone wants to see it.
Is this a peculiar concept? We all work OSS every day, right?
True, to the extent that any 90 minutes of smartphone footage uploaded to youtube is technically "a movie". In order to be "a movie" in the sense that Evil Dead or Primer are movies, I would say you need a bit more than that.
You're not going to have multiple locations, good actors, good writing, good composition, quality cinematography, etc - unless you're incredibly talented and not counting how much your time is actually worth.
Films for a wide audience these days basically require - at a minimum - 6 specialists working for a month of shooting. Plus 5+ actors.
The absolute minimum that costs in labor - if you actually counted the value of your time - is ~$200k+.
A good script itself is worth well over $100k...
Realistically - it's almost impossible to make something with wide appeal for less than $2m in the US - or $1m internationally.
I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot. Not so much in big, effects driven movies, but in everyday type shots where they can change backgrounds or remove things so they don't need to make big elaborate sets or control environments quite so much. That's my guess at least. Film was also a huge cost of production and especially distribution that's essentially gone now. I think Hollywood unions also add a lot of jobs - look up the job of focus puller sometime.
On the other hand to all the expensive stuff - you can just not do those. I'd take Primer as an example. I believe it was shot for the cost of a Toyota Corolla and became a fairly significant film. I've also seen "low budget" movies (meaning $3-5 million or so) in the last decade or so that probably would not have been possible 20 years or more ago, so I feel like there has been some progress.
> I feel like CGI has increased productivity a lot.
Yeah, but take a look at the massive number of VFX people listed in the end-credits of CGI-heavy films. Often several different companies (e.g. DNEG) each with its own array of artists, modellers, riggers, tech, pipeline engineers, asset developers, IT support, etc etc.
Yep, that's what I mean when I say not so much in big, effects driven films - I suspect those will always consume as much budget as you throw at them because there's always a cutting edge to push. But in smaller and less effect driven films/TV shows, the tech seems to be a net win for productivity.
I agree with the box office movie theater experience, and yet movies as a whole still allow the offshoots. You cant find them in theaters, but you can fine them on streaming services.
I don't think this argument holds for TV. Unlike movies which have a large sunk cost, require a coordinated rollout and expensive marketing, television can make a short proof of concept pilot season and doesn't require a marketing blitz. Television also doesn't have the expectation of budget breaking CGI/effects. As a result, TV can take chances and do things the suits would never approve for movies. If a show fails, it fails small, but if it succeeds it can do just as well as any movie (e.g. friends).
I think the video doesn't go deep enough: the problem is not that movies teach the wrong lessons, but rather that the movies are so hyper-optimized for engagement and ROI that there's no room for nuance. He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money.
That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there. There are lots of good movies out there, but most people aren't watching them.
If you have the chance, I suggest everyone spend a couple weeks going to a "mystery movie night". Sure, sometimes you may end up watching "Blackhat" (or even worse, "Tracers"), but the good movies you'll end up also watching will make up for it.
This video is actually just one in a series of videos on the subject, you might want to watch the others if you want a more complete picture of his views.
> uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there
They kinda are. Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room, and movies are given money on the premise that they will make money. Edit: not just money. But shit-tons of money that can be milked from multiple angles for many years.
Already 10 years ago filmmakers were struggling to find funding for their projects. Birdman and Gravity were very close to not being made even they had Oscar-winning directors and stellar casts. It's significantly worse today.
If you could make 1 big movie that pays out a lot (enough to cover the "duds"), then why not just drop the "duds" and keep making those big movies?
the current status quo is a natural evolution of the prior status quo. That's why i think you have to have a new status quo by finding an alternative funding model.
I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).
I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision. This can't happen with a crowd funding model, since the crowd cannot directly manipulate the director (after all, the money is already paid, the director would not need to acquiesce to anyone but his own artistic direction!).
Whether these funding models can out-compete a studio big budget funding model remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath tho.
> the current status quo is a natural evolution of the prior status quo.
Indeed, unfortunately.
> I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).
This is a pipe dream. A few amateur movies managed to get funding this way, but that's about as far as you can go. Movies cost a lot. And even if the cast agrees to work for no money, there's still equipment, and sets, and all the people responsible for those, and editing, and music, and about a million other things.
> I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision.
There's also corruption and lack of transparency. France and Russia both subsidise movies heavily, and the results are ... mixed. In Russia award-winning directors and producers are still looking for sponsors to fund their movies because state money goes to some truly awful shit.
> Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room
Ahh, to remember the 1970's when a whole new crop of young American filmmakers were given the reigns to create some of the more original but still engaging content.
These days everyone is immediately drafted into <Franchise X Phase Y Spin Off Z Origin Story> :)
IIRC Marvel had trouble finding directors for their latest phase (or the one before that) because everyone was tied up doing franchise movies (or series).
Check out non-US filmmakers, there are some incredible films outside the Hollywood/Netflix cabal. For example, if you want nuance, check out "I am not an easy man", a French film, on Netflix at the moment, where a male chauvinist is transported to a world where females are the dominant gender, and he's forced into a frivolous, weak and sensitive male stereotype. That's just the setup, and it is multiple view worthy for all the nuance.
I enjoy watching French comedy dramas becuase the humour is incredibly subtle, unlike the majority of Hollywood films that are the exact opposite. I'll tolerate Jeniffer Aniston though.
> He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money.
So "franchise" is golden.
I suspect all of us can agree that in some alternate universe where the prequels were released before "Star Wars" ... there never would have been a franchise.
> Basically what this means is they are teaching people really sht lessons now, and if this sort of thing continues for too long, it's going to produce an entire generation of shtty people.
Out of curiosity, how much influence do movies/tv shows have in shaping society? Could it be that the seemingly casual link between movies and culture be opposite? Or, in other words:
B (bad movies) = "this sort of thing continues for too long"
S (shtty people) = "produce an entire generation of shtty people"
B -> S is claimed in the video, is !B || S always true? Could it be B <- S instead? B <-> S?
I’d see this as an already well established field we call either “propaganda” or “advertisement.
No need to go real deep, with a “follow the money” approach, the amounts that are spent im product placement and effort to shape narratives through work of art speak for themselves.
This gets pondered everywhere but product placement was worse in the beginning of television like the "The Colgate Comedy Hour" and it's abbreviations from Coke etc. or the characters from sponsors directly integrated into the plot of a tv show. Imagine your favorite character going into the kitchen making a coffee and the coffee salesperson comes in and makes a 5-minute pitch. You can say about modern advertisement what you want but it was way more subliminal in the beginning.
I hear you. France had to pass rulings limiting the frequency you can say a product name on tv.
Advertisement and propaganda have always been the bread and butter of tvs (and to a lesser extent movies). The whole industry grew leaps and bounds during the last century, yet people still dismiss it as low brow, or only care about images/narratives influence when it’s children looking at boobs or games that are supposed to be too violent.
On getting better or worse, I think it got more sophisticated as the reach increased and the market for attention became more competitive. All in all I don’t think the core of it changes much, the army is still heavily supporting war movies and games to the same extent for instance, the landscape just got more diverse making it less prominent.
This is something I ponder pretty often, and I think the best you can say is that there are causal loops.
Certainly, planned media campaigns seem to cause (in some but not all cases) large shifts in mass behavior. (E.g. Bernays getting women to smoke cigarettes[1], or pedestrians being removed from the streets to make way for automobiles by deriding them as "jaywalkers" and then criminalizing the until-then ancient and universal custom[2].)
On the other hand, as much as I don't like to "blame the user" I can't help but feel like we have personal responsibility for our behavior. E.g. on the individual level it feel to me like a "cop out" to say, e.g. advertising made me eat this junk food and get fat (or whatever.)
In any event, if you want to study this sort of thing using formal symbolic systems, you have to use systems that can handle causal loops, i.e. Cybernetics: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
Extremely quick cuts are a staple of YouTube videos that my 10 year old nieces and nephews seem to enjoy watching. Very annoying to me and a good filter of the part of a YouTube to avoid.
I agree it's not very pleasant to watch and this style is often abused, but it serves a real purpose in this video. He's making broad points about movies as whole in two different timeframes and comparing between them. When he's discussing a particular movie the shots illustrate which movie (and in many cases which parts of it) he's referring to. When making broad statements about whole clases of movies the shots provide examples of the points being made.
Using shots like this is much more information-dense than verbally listing a load of titles and scene descriptions and triggers the viewer's memory much more effectively. Keeping the clips very short allows more examples to be packed in and also protects against intellectual property complaints. (The need for the latter is highly regrettable but a daily reality for youtubers.)
I don't mind that modern films are flat end empty, because then I have more time for watch tons of good old films and I do not have regrets that I miss something.
Last week I saw "Three colours" from Kieślowski. Absolutely amazing trilogy about liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Good pick- it’s to the point that I try to express my love of these movies and I just start sobbing. At once because of how beautiful these films are and also that I fear an audience for them no longer exist in a world where movies = The MCU.
I kind of appreciate the gamer-style review of Mulan, just, like, not having as much difficulty or leveling up in the live-action version. Putting it in that way makes a meaningful point and is something that can actually be fixed. What can't be fixed, unfortunately, is Disney's enslavement to China. The classic Disney narrative was at one time was aimed at selling the American Dream. Which, bullshit as it may have turned out for most pepole, at least vaunted (can you use that as a verb?) the advancement of the underdog and, like, bootstrapping peasants or immigrants into responsible leadership by their talents. (It was a Universal film, but "An American Tail" was the only movie my parents took us to see TWICE in the theater when I was a kid). I think you could trace the decline in meaningful storytelling to a political posture in China that is deeply at odds with anything that smacks of peasant uprisings, or power to the people, which in spite of its corporate undertones in production Hollywood writers actually used to somewhat be allowed to champion. Remember that even though these are huge multinational corporations, most actual screenwriters were for all functional purposes extreme liberals or communists up until they were killed and replaced with regurgitating AI bots in the mid-2000s.
> I think you could trace the decline in meaningful storytelling to a political posture in China that is deeply at odds with anything that smacks of peasant uprisings, or power to the people
The first disney mulan is a story about a girl who overcame discrimination and gender roles to come into a position of great honour to the state.
Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.
>> Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.
True, and fair. I didn't mean to cast Disney as some kind of revolutionary force for anti-authoritarianism at any point in its history. But the Joan of Arc myth means different things to different people, and it's inherently dangerous to the status quo even if it's used for the glory of the state. Such a legend could not be told now in China, because there's too much room for subversion in the individual's self-empowerment.
I think this argument is overstretching into a political argument.
The live action Mulan movie is consider a flop in China. The Chinese audience hate it. It is more successful in Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Disney remove one of main major male character to be aligned with the MeeToo movement.
For the Animation version the Chinese complained for their foreign looking character and it is too different from myth.
China love Kung Fu panda. The find kung fu panda show a sincere love to Chinese culture without over trying too be a chinese.
Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, with quiet, mumbled lines[1]. I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on, or to miss a good chunk of the dialogue.
And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase, speech patterns, or novel vocabulary choices when the audience is struggling to understand even the most basic, predictable sentences.
Edit: for people mentioning audio mixing and stereo, that's only part of the problem. Even with my (admittedly cheap) 5.1 setup, I sometimes miss most of the dialogue in some scenes. I think the change from theatrical to more realistic enunciation is also to blame.
I'm guessing you're using a stereo setup then, dialogue is usually mixed into the centre channel, downmixing a 5.1 or 7.1 stream to stereo will produce those results.
even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue
As a counterpoint, I have both 5.1 via ARC and Dolby Atmos system hooked up via eARC and dialogue is still quiet in some modern releases. Older movies sound great though.
this will be because more recent movies will be utilising high dynamic ranges for audio, worked around by compressing/limiting but in doing so, you lose quality.
trade-offs for everything.
there was a time when stereo was seen as unnecessary faff, too.
edit: movies are mixed for theatres and no longer are the home releases adjusted to suit.
In many cases, people ostensibly using stereo sound may as well be using mono sound. Stereo speakers built into a TV that's 20 feet away, or watching a video on their smartphone without headphones; technically these people are using stereo sound but with the speakers so close to each other relative to the listener, it might as well be mono.
I think if you want to make widely accessible audio content, you should be taking this into account. Make it intelligible in mono first, then worry about the rest.
There are a few ffmpeg filters you can use with mpv to get this effect, though you may have to fiddle with their options to get what you want. acompressor or dynaudnorm might be what you're looking for.
I've got the full klipsch THX ultra 2 system (7.2), and I also find dialogues in modern movies much harder to understand than in older releases. I think they should mix in more of the dialogue in the front left and right channels
Christopher Nolan's Tenet was a prime example of horrible stereo translation. I could hardly understand the dialog. I've never changed volume so much during a movie. IIRC he refused to produce any audio mixes aside from those meant for the most premium 7.1 stream theatres. What a shame.
The “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast” got me as much as “let’s make the sound inaudible on stereo to drive up the sale of 7.1 sound systems.”
VLC should have a setting such as “flatten sound to 70dB all the time and luminosity to 50% the ability of the display in average”. Even pirated packs are becoming unwatchable.
> The “let’s turn luminosity to 0 to drive up the sale of screens with 5000000:1 contrast.
Pitch Meeting recently gave up the game there.
(in the latest video, Ryan jokes that they're making the screen darker and darker until they don't even have to project a video and can just play an audiobook over the speakers)
The silver lining here may be that people stop treating subtitles as torture and see some non-English titles more often. There are some fun movie cultures out there beyond Hollywood, but I've found the "ugh, I've got to read‽" response common.
I've always found that subtitles for a non english movie actually results in me watching the move an walking away with a more memorable experience than if I'd just been listening. I'm not sure if that's a common experience but it's mine at least.
As it happens, I was watching a foreign film (Italian) last night with english subtitles but the dialogue was also muffled and I found it just as difficult to watch.
I definitely watch all movies, English and foreign, with subtitles, and can't stand dubbed movies. I've found an amusing effect of well subtitled movies is that sometimes I forget that they're on, and, if I walk away and can only hear the dialogue but not see the subtitles, then I have to take a minute to process why I can no longer understand it ….
I have the opposite problem. Subtitles draw my attention, even when I understand what's said just fine. And then it's extra distracting when the subtitles change the meaning of what is said (which happens both when watching Japanese movies with English or French subtitles, or English or French movies with Japanese subtitles)
> which happens both when watching Japanese movies with English or French subtitles, or English or French movies with Japanese subtitles.
Also, though with less frequency, sometimes when the subtitles are in the same language as the speech, which I agree is distracting. (I am monolingual, so do not experience it otherwise.) But I had rather experience that dislocation than dubbing, which to me reliably ruins even a beautiful movie. Of course à chacun son goût!
I do love watching foreign shows on their original audio track. Korean especially has an awesome sound! For example right in the first ep of Squid Games, protagonist talking with his elderly mom, lines where he is disagreeing or making excuses end with this long up-and-down "huuuuuuuuuh!" sound that is the coolest thing ever :-)
That problem is due to wrong downmix from multichannel to stereo. both VLC and Kodi have options to compress audio so that louder parts can be lowered.
Here's the relevant Kodi wiki page: https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/System/Audio
I thought about something like that too but than there are dialogues which are already hard to understand because they're not loud enough just before you get blasted with sound effects again...well yeah..one more reason why I don't go to the movies so much anymore.
Not in particular. At the time I was residing in the UK and just swung by a music store on the way to a show and asked the guy what he recommended and it's been on my keychain for several years.
A response to your edit, I was on a zoom call with current musical editors / producers and that is 100% part of the problem. Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.
They are trying to be authentic. That is what actors are taught these days, to portray "realistic" characters that move and sound as realworld people. The net result is mumbling and tiny little movements that in turn mandate tight closeups and asmr-like microphone placement. Try that on a stage or in any live performance and you will be called wooden. Compare actors like Samuel L Jackson, Percival Ulysses, Jane Lynch or Rowand Atkinson. They dont need closeups and microphones secreted in hairlines. But they also rarely get leading drama roles, more often appearing as side characters who run on stage to tell the team the dramatic news.
One big problem is that US actors have a history of recording adverts, so they are not classically trained, unlike a lot of British actors who have backgrounds on the stage and so have learned to speak clearly.
I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.
You probably hate clips like this. Male characters are dramatic, with big movements and loud voices to portray fear and disorder. The three female characters, including a very tough marine, are quiet and docile to engender escapist feelings of worry and protection. So which volume setting do you use? The camera is forced into an awkward zoom to reconcile the two.
I'd say the editors did a good job in this case, considering both "they mostly come at night, mostly." and "game over man, game over!" have both become iconic often-quoted lines.
Real people aren’t quiet around intense emotions and loud noises. This often comes off really silly, when actual people would be yelling they come off as mumbling to themselves.
Instead, actors are often chatting in front of green screens without any of the appropriate ambient sounds or emotional context.
I am not saying intense emotions universally result in yelling, but people very rarely whisper when say calling 9/11. Even just kids playing tag get lauder.
People normally get mute in stressful situation. They normally have troubles to express things, they talk in weak voice, whisper or not at all. They have one word answers to complex questions. And anything in between. Some dissociate and act normal or follow normal script by routine.
They don't whisper to the phone, they will put more conscious effort to talk into 911 call ... or the shaken mute person won't be the one making call.
You seriously never had to ask people to talk louder in noise environment? The "people yell" assumption is artifact of movies, not reality.
Asking someone to speak lauder in a noisy environment is normally because they aren’t raising their voice enough rather than them failing to raise their voice at all. It’s not easy to judge how laud you need to be but the basic feedback of failing to hear your own voice if you don’t speak up prompts raising your own voice.
As to going mute, some people do completely shut down in an stressful situation, but that’s associated with for more than their voice. I have no issue with an actor in a war movie endlessly stacking ammo from point A to B. But if their having a coherent conversation, activity and productively responding to stimulation, that’s very different.
I'm not a native speaker, but, I think it's rather the opposite. It's very inauthentic.
English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.
What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.
> English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.
Sorry but this sounds like nonsense. Vowel distinctions absolutely matter in English. Think of how many words would be indistinguishable otherwise: bout, bought, bet, bat, bit, beet, boot, boat, bite, but, and bait are all distinguished from each other only by a vowel.
(And, yes, these all sound quite different to me, an American, though non-native speakers often have trouble making or recognizing some of the distinctions. Some native speakers further distinguish “bot” from “bought”, but I don’t.)
> I bet you could understand almost everything with all vowels replaced with schwas.
No. Have you tried understanding someone who can only pronounce consonants but also whose dialect is foreign? It's unintelligible. Vowels absolutely serve a purpose. You're just used to hearing your own words spoken back to you in the same way you've always expected them.
Different accents use different vowels, but they remain comprehensible. It's specifically those accents that also change consonants that are taken as hard to understand, such as Scouse.
You can replace unstressed vowels with schwas and usually end up with something understandable. Stressed vowels cannot be schwaed. This is also specific to american English and doesn't work for other dialects, or even all american accents.
It may sound like nonsense, but in comparison to many other languages, English is super flexible with how vowels are pronounced and toned (entoned?). If you've ever tried to learn a tonal language, or one with more specific vowels like Khmer (which has 33 consonants and 22 vowels) you'd realize how relaxed English can be.
Generally this is in English's favor, I pronounce button differently than my NZ friends, but they still understand me.
American English has something like 15 distinct vowels. That’s not that much less than your citation of Khmer, and way more than many languages. Any claim that American English has a uniquely poor vowel inventory is just wrong.
Perhaps I didn't specify that perfectly. I wasn't saying English is poor in vowels, I'm saying that it is flexible in how you use them. Khmer has 22 specific vowel letters, each letter that indicates exactly how the sound is made, even the differences that of how the previous letter will effect the sound.
English has 5, and no real consensus on how they are used, let alone the tone of voice that you need to use to indicate a specific word.
In tonal languages a rising vowel note is different than a falling, rising and then falling, falling then rising, flat or tumbling tone. The closest English has is the rising tone one makes when asking a question, but that doesn't change the meaning of the words entirely, just the context.
“Letters” are irrelevant. We are talking about the spoken language, not the writing system. American English has 15 or 16 vowels, and (not counting tone) the distinctions between them are just as meaningful as in Khmer or any other language. “Bit” and “beet”, or “but” and “boot” are different words, after all. Where are you seeing “flexibility” in the use of vowels?
Again, we are not talking about “letters” or the writing system here. Yes, there are many distinct vowels that are written the same, and conversely many different ways of writing the same vowel, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of spoken language.
And, yes, I know what a tonal language is, and you’re right that English isn’t one. It’s hardly unique or special in that. Most languages aren’t tonal.
There are tons of examples, take "no" for example, you can pronounce it 'nooh', 'nah', 'nuh', 'neh', and yet it will be transcribed as "no". That one could be dismissed as negating is a pretty primitive concept.
My previous example of how to pronounce 'button' varies depending upon where you're from...but is still recognized by the most English speakers. Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.
Water can be pronounce in a variety of ways. Actually the list is endless...I'm surprised you're arguing the opposite. Compared to Spanish, or any number of languages where the vowels are very specific (disregarding the Castilian ascent), English is very forgiving. Bringing up Khmer's letters was to show that the vowel sounds have been formalized in that language, where English allows for much more variance.
Listen to any non-native English speaker, they can be all over the place and still understood.
This is a distinction in consonants! Different realizations of the /t/ phoneme. The whole claim that started this thread was that English expresses information almost exclusively in consonants, not vowels. Your example directly contradicts that very claim.
Anyway, English is _far_ from the only language where different dialects have a different set of vowels. Quebec French for example has completely different ones from French French.
It seems pretty short-sighted to blame it on actors. They are a low-level cog in the machine that are trained to exactly what they are told. It's the job of the director to get the performance out of them that will look good on screen. Can't the sound teams talk to them?
Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.
> Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.
There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.
There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).
Are lines ever recorded live? I imagined that they almost always re-record them in a sound booth later, it just seems like it would be so hard to get good sound on-set in most circumstances.
Yes, on-set audio is often used if possible. Re-recording is a bunch of extra work (you need to pay your potentially quite expensive actors for), needs matching, might not be as "in-the-moment" as the original, ... But re-recording is of course done where needed.
I remember that back in the day, actors re-voiced what they said on the set, but from a studio with proper recording gear, and sound engineers mixed these voices into the general soundscape.
Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.
In some recent musical-to-film adaptations they recorded the voices ON THE SET during filming, often with no backing track or metronome, and then forced the music director, post-filming, to conduct the orchestra along with whatever the hell the actor was filmed doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ikqU6G6Xgs
Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.
Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.
Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.
I always wondered what people have against Tenet's audio. I originally saw it with headphones and using vlc and it was fine. Then I saw it on a TV and it was awful. I wonder if it was tested in normal environments.
Gameplay and enunciation look quite standardized in modern movies. I remember a quote from a vietnamese director who said he cannot stand movies where you do not see people breath. Look at blockbusters: you never see people breath. When you do see them breath it is very much overplayed.
Female characters get to breath. Look at marvel movies. Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are seen pausing and breathing, mostly breathing in, but that is more for male gaze than anything else. In the pauses of fight scenes they are mouth agape, almost panting as the male characters stand like stones.
I’d wager that many engineers are still mixing for the cinema experience, but the vast majority of people are consuming media via their TV’s, laptops, tablets and phones, with an extremely diverse range of audio quality and placement.
Findings a happy medium is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
There’s certainly a need for a ‘context aware’ format that can dynamically change the way sound - particularly speech - is delivered based on the device, volume, or even physical setting. (I suspect that this is about as useful as the ‘loudness’ button on many older amps though.)
I can’t wait for the day Netflix gives us the ability to adjust volume by category like video games. Different sliders for dialogue, background music, explosions, etc.
I've watched Interstellar with multiple audio setups and didn't have an issue understanding the dialog. It may have a higher dynamic range than most movies but that's a good thing.
And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 . I'm not a native speaker, but (1) I've been communicating exclusively in English for years, (2) my hearing is quite good, (3) I'm wearing headphones, (4) there's nothing else happening in the scene apart from dialogue and music. But I still cannot understand Anne Hathaway's two sentences following the time I linked.
This movie also had a lot of another pet peeve of mine, which is shoulder dialogue where the foreground character is clearly not speaking, or saying something different.
I've noticed an even newer effect: Making scenes almost all black. It might be a software problem with the HBO Max app's gamma and brightness settings, but it's absolutely the case that, during the day with thin curtains drawn, I had to put a thick blanket over my head and an iPad in order to see the highlights in some of the darker scenes in one of their recent original productions (probably Raised by Wolves Season One; can't remember for sure).
These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.
In the past I have adjusted the black level on my video player to make movies like this watchable. It won't look good, but you can make the few shades they used visibly different.
This sounds a lot like "dynamic contrast", i.e. varying the display's light source brightness with the scene brightness. I can't speak to whether or how the iPad implements it, but it's a common behavior of LCD screens. It's configurable on some devices.
Yep I subbed to HBO to get GoT a couple of hours before "other sources" and immediately cancelled mid-way through last season. Night-time fights were just pitch black and a few smudges moving around the screen.
They probably just throw the thing into ffmpeg with the fewest amount of arguments that satisfies a codec and bandwidth cost metric and call it a day.
However, I've never had any problems under the same situations on Netflix using a "blessed" 4K HDR10 set-up (Fire TV Cube and a cheap Hisense TV).
If this were a conversation about mixing for recorded or live music, someone would invariably mention hearing damage. It's a huge problem. Could it be that the technicians are deaf?
It’s also because producers and directors make more use of the “dynamic range” that theatre sounds systems are capable of today. They paid a ton of money for that music and they’re going to make sure you hear it. In surround setups, most of the dialogue is mixed into the center channel, which is behind the screen in theaters. At home, if you don’t have a center channel, you’re either relying on the stereo mix and however they decided to balance the speech on that, or if you play the surround version on a nice processor, it’ll probably let you adjust the center channel.
An audio compressor would also help here on consumer devices, as that would allow a variable degree and ratio of dynamic range flattening. Basically, it can form a band of volume and ensure that quiet sounds and loud sounds both fit into that. Sadly, most consumer gear, although already equipped with all the DSP they need to implement this in software, thinks consumers are absolute morons and/or that this wouldn’t be a selling point, so we get watered-down poorly-implemented dialogue boost features or largely no option at all except for the consumer to “ride the fader” and constantly adjust the volume. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-he... has some info on what’s out there today to address this, but yeah: it’s mostly fixable if consumers had control of the center channel mix + a configurable compressor + configurable EQ. There are ways to do this in consumer-friendly ways for folks who don’t know of care to learn about mastering audio for film, but the current situation is pretty bad and it really makes me wonder why so much mixing targets home theater setups vs built-in crap TV speakers. At very least, streaming companies could provide an alternate audio track [algorithmically] mixed specifically for built-in audio devices that has more clear dialogue.
I personally watch with subtitles because I don’t want to miss a word.
I agree with you on the former, not the latter. I find the "mumbling" more realistic dialogue (often in scenes where the script is supposed to be cramped and confusing) and feels more like natural human interaction.
But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.
I've often thought that the look of 1950s films (and of other decades, I guess) was the result of a reinforcing positive feedback loop between film (and TV) and society.
If this is the case, what enables us to break out of the loop?
Another aspect which is often neglected in movies of today is character development. A character's backstory is either completely unknown, or is told instead of being shown, or is shown in a couple seconds, and then something happens to them that was aimed to supposedly instil some emotions in me as a viewer, but no, I don't care about this character. If they die, I guess they will be replaced by another character I don't care about. Example of this chasm between the old and the new is Moffat-era Doctor Who vs post-Moffat Doctor Who. This YouTube review shows it best: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMbZkR9vOrw>
Also, romantic scenes all look the same, completely generic. They're basically copy-pasted between movies. They're so flat and devoid of any genuine feeling I end up hitting the right arrow to skip them entirely.
Usually I don't have those issues with older movies (and movies of a couple selected directors still making good movies to this day).
Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The biggest film in history was "Birth of a Nation" until it was replaced by "Gone with the Wind", "Star Wars" may have been a rebellion against a vaguely Nazi empire, but it was still about hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars.
Overall, the trajectory seems fairly positive. The good old days were pretty crappy and that was reflected in their books, films and songs. Though I suppose if you're young enough that Mulan 1998 is a classic film from the good old days you might simply be ignorant of a lot of the crazy shit that went on.
Look up parents re-watching films from their youth with their children, to realise, horrified, what passed as entertainment in their youth that is now shocking to them and stuff they don't want their kids to emulate or look up to.
> The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.
Trying to spin people glorifying classic movies to be a form of Nazi degenerate art would've worked better (though I disagree with this even being remotely the same thing and view it as hyperbolic.) This still has nothing to do with fascism.
It is nostalgia for movie era that never really was. By cherry picking old movies and seeing in them what you want to see. Which is something different then trying to analyse actual past production as it actually was.
It is seeing decadence in contrast to past heavenly era, because you want it to be like that.
Okay, you can have a problem with people glorifying the old days. But that still has nothing to do with fascism. My above question has yet to be answered.
So my affinity and longing for simpler times with 8-bit computers can be used to manipulate me for someones ideological purposes? There is a huge gap between someone saying 'it used to be better' and the primrose path to embracing a fascists autocrat!
I'm just replying to the notion of that the critique has a undertone of fascist feeling. The comment is somehow anchored in that any critique of modern movies is reactionary and does not have any merit of its own. What I'm trying to convey is that there is a difference between critique that is somewhat nostalgic and it would be different if the critique was ideological. I don't find much ideological bias in "the critical drinker" videos more of nostalgic bias.
He literally starts by saying that these modern films are creating "a generation of shit people" and as proof asks you to log into TikTok and flashes up a clip of a young woman.
Why is this person 'shit'? I have no idea. Why is this whole generation 'shit'? Especially compared with a slightly older male Youtuber talking about Mulan, which many impartial observers would place in broadly the same class of pointless internet celeb.
If I wanted to briefly indicate the problems of this (or any other) generation, I could think of better things to flash up than a girl talking on TikTok, but apparently this wholesome nostalgia for the movies of his youth requires him to do this and say those things. And you didn't even notice this?
I never claimed that it was 'wholesome' that is something you filled in. I'm pointing out that the your analysis is flawed that you are trying to pin ideological label on a "scottish alcoholic" and conflating that somehow the youtube algorithm is fueling a 'fascist feeling'. The truth is that all of these algorithm are maximising for engagement and the signal that it is latching onto here isn't fascism it is nostalgia. Is this persona being 'wholesome' and 'kind' in his speech? And the answer is no!
Fascism uses the nostalgic feeling specifically around national mythos and the character of its citizens but it is the nostalgia that comes first and the demogogs latch onto that feeling. And I fail to see how the The Critical Drinker would constitute a fascist demagogue although he is not wholesome in anyway.
Yes but my point isn't about this content in particular. My reply was a little
facetious.
> Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The Youtube algorithm only cares about you watching as many videos as possible. You are not watching it optimize for complex ideology like fascism but to the nostalgic feelings. It drives conspiracy rabbit holes like flat-earthers because the algorithm doesn't care that the earth is round it cares that you watch as many minutes as possible so they can continue presenting ads. If you are curious about Modern Monetary Theory it doesn't care that it recommends after a bunch of next videos an anti-semitic conspiracy theory about the Rotschild banker family a straight up neo-nazi. Just so they can keep you watching and getting ads along the line. And you can't teach the algorithm to avoid complex mechanism like how people succumb to conspiracies or fascism... and in some cases both...
> hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars
Star Wars (New Hope) is nothing of the sort. The universe just got progressively smaller as they retconned every character into being related to every other character.
I meant that as general dig at "princesses" in film and history, not the specific weird Star Wars geneaology.
Star Wars is basically old War Movies, Flash Gordon serials and Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies spliced together, as such it draws on the long history of storytelling that, in turn reflecting their own 'good old days', often revolves around the beautiful and genetically superior children of heriditary dictators who murdererd their way into power and how they deserve to be the rightful ruler and basically owner of the populace.
This is not a good lesson and is exactly the kind of thing Terry Pratchett satirizes with Lance Constable Carrot Ironfoundersson in Discworld, or George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
the english second language market is several times larger than the english market, so mega franchises like Marvel really need to keep it simple. a lesson for entrepreneurs as well.
These foreign cinemas have their own industries. Plus, Marvel as an entity has been around for years before they started making those crap movies. It's just hollywood kowtowing to other countries for more money.
Ehh, I think he's asking movies to do too much. It's not the responsibility of hollywood to teach cultural mores.
I do think blockbuster movies are (perhaps) increasingly just glorified cartoons, though, and Marvel/Disney are probably significantly to blame. Is fighting _really_ that interesting? Does the wire pull _have_ to be used in every fight? Why are big dumb CGI animals so popular? Why does every small CGI animal make the same wuk wuk wuk noise? Why does every large CGI animal snort like a buffalo?
On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series.
Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision.
The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a fairly unique reason. Back when I lived in LA I basically went out with this girl who knew she was a model and I wasted a ton of time and money on her.
When I moved to Chicago, I met a dorky awkward girl, who became my first real girlfriend. This is priceless dating advice, go for that dorky awkward girl that actually likes you.
Of course this really pissed a lot of people off, so they basically got rid of that story arc for the last movie. Looking at the entire series, I really think someone at Disney got uncomfortable with interracial dating, and thus Finn ends up making no sense as his two previous love arcs need to be eliminated by the last movie. This is understandable because even in America I've met people who are very uncomfortable with it, and Disney needs to distribute these movies to a global audience.
That might actually be the root of the problem, you have to make a movie that goes out of its way to keep everybody comfortable. In various countries showing LGBT plotlines are a big no-no, so you have reports coming out of Disney that they've cut these at the last moment from various movies.
The moment you have to make a movie that's okay for every single person, you end up creating these devoid visual spectacles. As in, most action movies are just a bunch of explosions and music. You can replace all the dialogue with gibberish and still get the idea of what happened.
I was trying to watch Free Guy and had to turn it off 10 minutes in. Stop with the freaking music for a second and let people speak.
However, other countries are still making real movies. I think a big part of the Korean wave is you don't have as much pandering to every single possible audience in K-pop dramas. Even then, I've had friends post that the subtitles are often toned down. Edit: Language Reactor is a great Chrome plugin which offers alternative subtitles as well as context. It's a great tool for language learning as well
I can't imagine ever going to a movie theater again, congratulations Disney You've ruined cinema.
Maybe I'll put one of these mediocre movies on in the background while I do other things, but they're not worthy of my undivided attention.
yeah I think the bright side is that foreign film can shine now; it's amazing how korea has been entering the american zeitgeist regularly now, that’s no small feat
I would say 8 is by far the worst of the generally terrible new trilogy.
8 abandons pretty much everything from 7 and then tries to make a large sub plot about how the real evil is the oligarchical weapon vendors funding both sides. Ffs, the star wars universe has a faction self identifying as the evil dark side. It's not the place for his kind of thing.
Start Wars, at least episode III, meaning the first one, is clearly structured around the hero's journey, a story archetype that has been around since time immemorial, in every culture on earth. A story that old and enduring must resonate deeply with something deep and true about the human condition and a talented director cannot help but be successful by retelling it skillfully. Many modern movies eschew any such ballast . Instead the weapons of choice are technical prowess, amygdala hacking and the parroting of the ideological fad of the day. Needless to say nothing inspiring comes out of these efforts and in a generation no one will watch these things.
I'd rather announce the end of American cinematography. It's entirely product placement pulp, preceded by numerous ads when displayed in cinema or the internet, and any form of sharing them on the internet oftentimes implies a vicious strike of copyright predators. Shut down this industry already.
I disagree that one learns anything important from a (non-documentary) movie. Movies are an experiential but non-interactive art form that resists internalisation. At best they make you feel a certain way for a short while, in my experience.
Movies (non-documentary) can moot and champion whole ideologies, psychologies, and philosophies, for example Fight Club (nihilism), Logan's Run (progressivism, anti-establishmentism), Lost in Translation (existentialism, contemporary anomie), Magnolia (existentialism, fugue) etc.
I suggest you broaden your viewing.
My viewing is pretty broad, I’ve seen these movies except Magnolia. What you are describing is the placing of a movie in a cultural context. This is criticism, not learning on an individual level. For example, take Mulan. I can generate a feminist counter-critique that the new Mulan is in fact better because women are born with special qualities men don’t have, and often are superior when given equal opportunities. This isn’t a lesson the movie teaches however, it’s academic bloviating.
I mean I think actual existentialist philosophers would laugh if you tried to tell them that Lost in Translation is an existentialist movie. Also I think you mean ennui not anomie.
I think I agree with the thrust of the video. My caveats would be:
1) When anybody dunks on "modern movies", they mean "modern movies with $>100m marketing budgets". Which is actually a small minority of modern movies.
2) The messaging has changed, but movies have always had terrible messaging in them.
Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.
> Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.
Did you have particular movies in mind with this? The whole Marvel universe is riddled with male protagonists who are simply better than other people. That's the whole schtick that the Watchmen criticises.
Surely the whole point of Watchmen was that superheros aren't better than other people. For the last couple of decades cinema's been reinventing (male) superheroes as "complex characters" with flaws, moral weaknesses and questionable motivations.
Like you say, maybe I'm remembering selectively but I think that's less the case for Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman than it is for Iron Man, Superman or Batman.
Can you imagine Marvel greenlighting a female-led equivalent of Logan?
For what it's worth, I now regret saying anything, and will try to restrain myself from saying anything else.
> Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.
Do you watch many superhero movies? Because I feel like you must not.
Many of the characters are literal gods, and many more are just uncannily good at everything because of some hand wavey backstory.
Even the characters that start off "normal" tend to become awesome by simply being in the right place at the right time and being exposed to some external force (rather than through overcoming flaws or weaknesses on their own).
I think it's more about the stakes, obstacles, "psychic wounds" etc, than the actual superpowers. Being born with superpowers isn't that big a deal, if you're in a film where every other significant character also has superpowers.
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
James Bond is as generically "the best at everything" as you can get.
Whatever the villain is into, golf, fencing, gambling, etc. James Bond will challenge the villain at his hobby and beat him before the action even begins.
Edited to add: But the biggest example is probably Superman, just born super at everything.
That's more a description of 20th century Bond than Craig-era Bond. Contemporary Bond is a traumatized alcoholic who only passes a medical because M fixes his results. IIRC In Casino Royale he crashes his DB5 and is captured by his nemesis, who proceeds to beat his genitals with a knotted rope. That sort of thing doesn't happen to Captain Marvel (or Roger Moore).
It's admittedly a while since I've followed anything to do with Superman. I'm imagining he's undergone a similar reinvention, but I admit I'm guessing.
As far as I'm concerned we could stop making movies right now (or 10 years ago really). We would still have enough great movies to watch for several life times.
As a side note, I strongly recommend checking out Drinker's books - published under his real name Will Jordan. While I was skeptical at first, I have to say I really enjoyed them.
A lack of moral subtlety is also hurting modern productions. I nearly cringed out of my skin when Peacemaker and Resident Alien managed to have blunt anti-anti-masker scenes in the same week. I really don't need to see my own opinions fed back to me out of a baby food jar.
One thing I've noticed is that is seems more recent movies lack character observations. Everything is done is in service of the plot.
I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).
It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.
Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."
How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.
There was a lot of trope in those movies, but I think we'll look back at today's bad movies as 99% trope. It's just we don't see the tropes so clearly right now without a little distance.
The 99% trope thing has an associated concept of its own: fan service.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is
because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.
The first time you see a huge trope or cliche, its not actually a huge trope or cliche because to you its new and you get the full impact of whatever it is.
Its only over time that you get the "I know this situation", "I've been here before" possibly reaching the point of not wanting it again because you're oversaturated with said trope/cliche and now recognise them as such.
But the first ones stick with you and you remember them differently to the others.
The thing with tropes is that they weren't always tropes.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.
Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.
So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.
People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.
Tropes are nothing more than patterns we can observe in multiple stories. Clichés are tropes used extremely frequently. There's nothing inherently wrong about either of those things, it's only the way they're being used, the execution, that can be good or bad.
The James Bond one manages to add a touch of comedy, gives more information to the viewer about the characters who the characters are and how well they know each other, and makes the viewer remain attentive in what would otherwise be a fairly boring exposition scene.
It has become used over and over again in various precisely because of how effective it is.
I call that sort of "good" plots "character-oriented plot".
One best example is Breaking Bad, which is not movie, but it is a great show anyway. The episode of Fly is a good example how well BB portrayed character's personality.
with character-oriented plot, we have character first, and let them play drama. It is like having initial condition and seeing how things evolve in Ordinary Differential Equation. Everything seems natural. I don't think screen play is not that simple, but good plot makes people think in that way.
On the other hand, with plot for the sake of plot, there is a predetermined plot
at the outset, and as the show progresses, the actions and personalities of the characters are adjusted accordingly. There is no real personality there, just a cog in the wheel.
Breaking Bad is my usual example of bad plot building. I'm sure I haven't given it a fair chance as it's universally so highly liked, but the plot events were very much built up so that you could see what's coming. You are already anticipating some events, or they feel predictable and made up, as if precisely to serve the show. They don't come through as authentic.
I stopped watching Breaking Bad in the first or second season due to this poor plot building, and Better Call Saul after a couple of episodes when I realized it's just more of that very same style of bad plotting. The difference to well written shows such as Sopranos is like night and day.
Negative comments about Breaking Bad and pointing out its flaws seems to often receive controversial reactions. I suppose it's because it's the favourite show for so many.
Well, if you only watched 1.5 seasons and you have this strong an opinion about it, you deserve the downvotes. Like any good story, the ending is completely inevitable from the outset, when if you don't always see it coming. I hate when stories are unpredictable in an unearned way, just to be surprising, particularly when it betrays who the characters actually are.
I'm not claiming I got the overarching plot or character development of the series. It was the small plot hooks during the episodes that I found poor enough to make the show unwatchable. I've stopped watching a bunch of other shows for the same reason so it's not exclusive to Breaking Bad, it's just the most popular show to suffer from this style of writing.
The 70's were a great time for character driven film.
A more recent character-driven film that reminds me of the 70's was "About Schmidt" with, of course, that veteran of 70's films and filmmaking, Jack Nicholson.
Oh, "Frances Ha" comes to mind as well. You'll probably have to pick through the indie films to find character these days.
I feel like I'm going to call bullshit on this. I'm not convinced at all that this is less common in modern films. This one off example is nothing noteworthy. Plenty of similar examples in recent films.
I suspect younger people generally understand this and watch streaming shows instead. A creative who wants to tell a deep nuanced story would prefer 10 episodes where they get more time and probably better terms.
People lamenting the death of movies don't get this. The good stuff is still out there, it's just in a different format.
Movies are now more occasions to go out to the theatre. They have to be mass appeal, family friendly, nothing too complex.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadWhile I agree that this trope can make kids think they're special without trying in life (and that they will be a hero in the future), I think there have been similar tropes in the past.
Just take basic story writing of many old movies: There is always a hero that is living a boring or even sad life, often unsuccessful and unhappy. Suddenly, a "mentor" appears who takes our hero into this new magical world and teaches him the most amazing things in no time. Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, basically all Disney movies, even Sailor Moon.
That doesn't teach kids very positive things either: just wait for a mentor to come along and show you the way to become a hero, don't worry, you will be a hero because someone shows you the way.
So I don't see the development described in the YouTube video as dramatically, it has existed forever.
Or to use another example - gandalf might mentor frodo, but yet it always seems like frodo's accomplishments are his own and gandalf didn't really do all that much for him when all is said and done. Frodo is a hero and an interesting character, but i wouldn't want to be him.
Anyways i don't think the problem is lack of life lessons (even if they are lacking) its static characters and lack of stakes. Characters that were born ready are boring to watch. We like watching characters that change and adapt to circumstances whose choices are meaningful and consequential. The protagonist who was basically born with super powers, does not face a challenge and doesn't have to adapt their personality, is a boring character.
And not just American movies. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill were super famous and did basically nothing but that. They don't train, never ever, they are lazy as cool factor and are strongest guys most sharpest shooters around. Franch movies, fairly often the same thing. Random middle aged man thrown in situation and suddenly climbing and jumping roofs.
And series targetted at kids still show plenty of training. Lego ninja go, winx club, all show training or classroom scenes often.
And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.
There is no way for Hulk to ignore or reject the powers. Nor for superman or spiderman for that matter. Superman in particular is just born that way, full stop. And speaking about action movies that nope, no big deep choices there. Even in matrix, the choice is singular scene where main character picks the pill so that movie can happen.
And I liked Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill movies, so I have seen them multiple times and consequences for choices and actions are not the theme there at all.
I have also read Spiderman comic targeted at kids back then. Half the time he just reacts to what is going on around, not having much choice nor choice being theme beyond "Am I going to do the right thing or not" false choice. Ninja Turtles had training in them ... but also they are essentially magical turtles due to some experiments or what done on them.
Average movie and entertainment in 90ties just was not that deep.
The point of his training is that the moves have completely become muscle memory/second nature. I have no clue how long that would take, but it would be significantly more than "low time investment".
Note also that (1) he claimed to have had karate training before; (2) after hebuilds up the needed muscle memory, training continues to teach him when to use what muscle memory.
However, it is kid/teenage fantasy. Which is fine! But not some kind of hard work message movie.
And in most cases they accept blindly, otherwise there's no story. Madoka Magica is one of the few stories that I know where this trope is broken by the characters questioning the decision.
I would also say that people dismissing other people's arguments without even listening to them is a major problem with internet.
And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?
Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.
There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.
> Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable.
I think he is just powerful rather then impossible to understand. Not that I am expert, but Greek gods don't come across to me as something alien. They are fairly human, emotional at times rational at others, political among themselves, but definitely too strong for actual humans to handle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
Movies and fiction are about moral lessons packaged into fantasies and escapism. If movies were relentlessly realistic no one would go to see them, because there would be nothing to see.
Even "gritty realism" isn't realistic. It's usually just the same trope populated with shady underworld characters and a flawed or outcast anti-hero instead of inspirational mentors.
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
Modern movies (and TV for that matter) have become so commercialized and expensive that the series they are now rehashing (Star Wars for instance) wouldn't be possible to create today. George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
It's weird because I feel like some other forms of media, namely games and music have gone in the opposite direction because of the availability and power of tools for independent production. However movies just need so much more resources the same indie competition hasn't been able to come in and shake things up sadly.
I feared the Hollywoodization of the game industry.
But it never happened in the mindless extend of movies and music.
Indie games are still going strong.
I mean, some sports games are definitely hollywoodized with "let's just swap some colours, change 2021 to 2022 and charge another $70". On the other hand Bill Wurtz still releases new tunes on YouTube and Ben Levin continues doing... Ben stuff. In movies you can still get quality indie productions like Joel Haver's full movies. My random selection of course, but the point is, there's definitely indie stuff available if you want it.
I don't know if that's entirely true. George Lucas had come off the back of American Graffiti, which was an incredible commercial success. It had made 50x its budget, and in 1977 was the 13th highest grossing film of all time.
The question was really whether Lucas could turn his hand to a completely different genre. It's down to American Graffiti's success that Lucas was able to re-negotiate a deal for Star Wars that gave him merchandising rights.
I mean just one aging star (sorry, Alec) in the film's credits.... That doesn't sound like a AAA studio effort.
Of course then "American Graffiti" caught fire and I suspect that (and the urgings of Francis Ford Coppola) is when Ladd gave the green light.
You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.
Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.
One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.
You just can't do that with film.
You can make a compelling story via flip book.
Doesn't mean it's going to be good, or that anyone wants to see it.
Is this a peculiar concept? We all work OSS every day, right?
You're not going to have multiple locations, good actors, good writing, good composition, quality cinematography, etc - unless you're incredibly talented and not counting how much your time is actually worth.
Films for a wide audience these days basically require - at a minimum - 6 specialists working for a month of shooting. Plus 5+ actors.
The absolute minimum that costs in labor - if you actually counted the value of your time - is ~$200k+.
A good script itself is worth well over $100k...
Realistically - it's almost impossible to make something with wide appeal for less than $2m in the US - or $1m internationally.
On the other hand to all the expensive stuff - you can just not do those. I'd take Primer as an example. I believe it was shot for the cost of a Toyota Corolla and became a fairly significant film. I've also seen "low budget" movies (meaning $3-5 million or so) in the last decade or so that probably would not have been possible 20 years or more ago, so I feel like there has been some progress.
Yeah, but take a look at the massive number of VFX people listed in the end-credits of CGI-heavy films. Often several different companies (e.g. DNEG) each with its own array of artists, modellers, riggers, tech, pipeline engineers, asset developers, IT support, etc etc.
Absolutely. He seems to be consistently spot-on with his analysis of TV and Movies and the wider industry. I also enjoy Red Letter Media:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia
Both channels use a humours approach to their reviews and analysis.
That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there. There are lots of good movies out there, but most people aren't watching them.
If you have the chance, I suggest everyone spend a couple weeks going to a "mystery movie night". Sure, sometimes you may end up watching "Blackhat" (or even worse, "Tracers"), but the good movies you'll end up also watching will make up for it.
They kinda are. Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room, and movies are given money on the premise that they will make money. Edit: not just money. But shit-tons of money that can be milked from multiple angles for many years.
Already 10 years ago filmmakers were struggling to find funding for their projects. Birdman and Gravity were very close to not being made even they had Oscar-winning directors and stellar casts. It's significantly worse today.
so what would be an alternative funding model?
A patreon or kickstarter like model where directors and stars are pre-paid via crowd funding?
A state sponsored funding model?
Non-profit model?
Too bad we may never return to that.
the current status quo is a natural evolution of the prior status quo. That's why i think you have to have a new status quo by finding an alternative funding model.
I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).
I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision. This can't happen with a crowd funding model, since the crowd cannot directly manipulate the director (after all, the money is already paid, the director would not need to acquiesce to anyone but his own artistic direction!).
Whether these funding models can out-compete a studio big budget funding model remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath tho.
Indeed, unfortunately.
> I think potential crowd funding is possible - a movie is crowd funded with no expectation of profit from the funders (they only get a ticket/copy of the movie for their backing dollar).
This is a pipe dream. A few amateur movies managed to get funding this way, but that's about as far as you can go. Movies cost a lot. And even if the cast agrees to work for no money, there's still equipment, and sets, and all the people responsible for those, and editing, and music, and about a million other things.
> I don't like a state-sponsored funding model, mainly due to the ability for the state then to manipulate the movie against the artistic vision.
There's also corruption and lack of transparency. France and Russia both subsidise movies heavily, and the results are ... mixed. In Russia award-winning directors and producers are still looking for sponsors to fund their movies because state money goes to some truly awful shit.
Ahh, to remember the 1970's when a whole new crop of young American filmmakers were given the reigns to create some of the more original but still engaging content.
IIRC Marvel had trouble finding directors for their latest phase (or the one before that) because everyone was tied up doing franchise movies (or series).
So "franchise" is golden.
I suspect all of us can agree that in some alternate universe where the prequels were released before "Star Wars" ... there never would have been a franchise.
Out of curiosity, how much influence do movies/tv shows have in shaping society? Could it be that the seemingly casual link between movies and culture be opposite? Or, in other words:
B (bad movies) = "this sort of thing continues for too long"
S (shtty people) = "produce an entire generation of shtty people"
B -> S is claimed in the video, is !B || S always true? Could it be B <- S instead? B <-> S?
No need to go real deep, with a “follow the money” approach, the amounts that are spent im product placement and effort to shape narratives through work of art speak for themselves.
Advertisement and propaganda have always been the bread and butter of tvs (and to a lesser extent movies). The whole industry grew leaps and bounds during the last century, yet people still dismiss it as low brow, or only care about images/narratives influence when it’s children looking at boobs or games that are supposed to be too violent.
On getting better or worse, I think it got more sophisticated as the reach increased and the market for attention became more competitive. All in all I don’t think the core of it changes much, the army is still heavily supporting war movies and games to the same extent for instance, the landscape just got more diverse making it less prominent.
Certainly, planned media campaigns seem to cause (in some but not all cases) large shifts in mass behavior. (E.g. Bernays getting women to smoke cigarettes[1], or pedestrians being removed from the streets to make way for automobiles by deriding them as "jaywalkers" and then criminalizing the until-then ancient and universal custom[2].)
On the other hand, as much as I don't like to "blame the user" I can't help but feel like we have personal responsibility for our behavior. E.g. on the individual level it feel to me like a "cop out" to say, e.g. advertising made me eat this junk food and get fat (or whatever.)
In any event, if you want to study this sort of thing using formal symbolic systems, you have to use systems that can handle causal loops, i.e. Cybernetics: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
[1] I view Edward Bernays as a mass murderer for his largely successful efforts in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Tobacco
[2] The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
Bombing the viewer with one second sequences of random films for the entire video is really annoying
Using shots like this is much more information-dense than verbally listing a load of titles and scene descriptions and triggers the viewer's memory much more effectively. Keeping the clips very short allows more examples to be packed in and also protects against intellectual property complaints. (The need for the latter is highly regrettable but a daily reality for youtubers.)
Last week I saw "Three colours" from Kieślowski. Absolutely amazing trilogy about liberté, égalité, fraternité.
I think I only saw one of the "color" films. (Was so depressing.)
The first disney mulan is a story about a girl who overcame discrimination and gender roles to come into a position of great honour to the state.
Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.
True, and fair. I didn't mean to cast Disney as some kind of revolutionary force for anti-authoritarianism at any point in its history. But the Joan of Arc myth means different things to different people, and it's inherently dangerous to the status quo even if it's used for the glory of the state. Such a legend could not be told now in China, because there's too much room for subversion in the individual's self-empowerment.
And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase, speech patterns, or novel vocabulary choices when the audience is struggling to understand even the most basic, predictable sentences.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...
Edit: for people mentioning audio mixing and stereo, that's only part of the problem. Even with my (admittedly cheap) 5.1 setup, I sometimes miss most of the dialogue in some scenes. I think the change from theatrical to more realistic enunciation is also to blame.
even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue
trade-offs for everything.
there was a time when stereo was seen as unnecessary faff, too.
edit: movies are mixed for theatres and no longer are the home releases adjusted to suit.
I think if you want to make widely accessible audio content, you should be taking this into account. Make it intelligible in mono first, then worry about the rest.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#acompressor
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#dynaudnorm
To use them with mpv you'd do something like `mpv --af=lavfi="[dynaudnorm=param1=value1:param2=value2:param3=value3]" ...`
(make sure the first parameter is preceded by a '=', not a ':' because reasons)
If that's commonly the case then whatever is doing the downmix isn't fit for purpose.
I found on Kodi you can boost the centre channel when downmixing, this helped quite a bit for me but I still watch with subtitles.
VLC should have a setting such as “flatten sound to 70dB all the time and luminosity to 50% the ability of the display in average”. Even pirated packs are becoming unwatchable.
Pitch Meeting recently gave up the game there.
(in the latest video, Ryan jokes that they're making the screen darker and darker until they don't even have to project a video and can just play an audiobook over the speakers)
The silver lining here may be that people stop treating subtitles as torture and see some non-English titles more often. There are some fun movie cultures out there beyond Hollywood, but I've found the "ugh, I've got to read‽" response common.
Also, though with less frequency, sometimes when the subtitles are in the same language as the speech, which I agree is distracting. (I am monolingual, so do not experience it otherwise.) But I had rather experience that dislocation than dubbing, which to me reliably ruins even a beautiful movie. Of course à chacun son goût!
I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.
https://youtu.be/VrVZHxH2O1I
"They mostly come at night. Mostly."
"It would be extremely painful"
"You're a big guy!"
"For you."
hmm, you're probably right.
When the whole thing is clearly exaggerate comedy, then it don't bother me. But, if I am supposed to immerse myself in the story, it does not work.
Instead, actors are often chatting in front of green screens without any of the appropriate ambient sounds or emotional context.
I am not saying intense emotions universally result in yelling, but people very rarely whisper when say calling 9/11. Even just kids playing tag get lauder.
They don't whisper to the phone, they will put more conscious effort to talk into 911 call ... or the shaken mute person won't be the one making call.
You seriously never had to ask people to talk louder in noise environment? The "people yell" assumption is artifact of movies, not reality.
As to going mute, some people do completely shut down in an stressful situation, but that’s associated with for more than their voice. I have no issue with an actor in a war movie endlessly stacking ammo from point A to B. But if their having a coherent conversation, activity and productively responding to stimulation, that’s very different.
English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.
What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.
Sorry but this sounds like nonsense. Vowel distinctions absolutely matter in English. Think of how many words would be indistinguishable otherwise: bout, bought, bet, bat, bit, beet, boot, boat, bite, but, and bait are all distinguished from each other only by a vowel.
(And, yes, these all sound quite different to me, an American, though non-native speakers often have trouble making or recognizing some of the distinctions. Some native speakers further distinguish “bot” from “bought”, but I don’t.)
No. Have you tried understanding someone who can only pronounce consonants but also whose dialect is foreign? It's unintelligible. Vowels absolutely serve a purpose. You're just used to hearing your own words spoken back to you in the same way you've always expected them.
Generally this is in English's favor, I pronounce button differently than my NZ friends, but they still understand me.
English has 5, and no real consensus on how they are used, let alone the tone of voice that you need to use to indicate a specific word.
In tonal languages a rising vowel note is different than a falling, rising and then falling, falling then rising, flat or tumbling tone. The closest English has is the rising tone one makes when asking a question, but that doesn't change the meaning of the words entirely, just the context.
Again, we are not talking about “letters” or the writing system here. Yes, there are many distinct vowels that are written the same, and conversely many different ways of writing the same vowel, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of spoken language.
And, yes, I know what a tonal language is, and you’re right that English isn’t one. It’s hardly unique or special in that. Most languages aren’t tonal.
My previous example of how to pronounce 'button' varies depending upon where you're from...but is still recognized by the most English speakers. Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.
Water can be pronounce in a variety of ways. Actually the list is endless...I'm surprised you're arguing the opposite. Compared to Spanish, or any number of languages where the vowels are very specific (disregarding the Castilian ascent), English is very forgiving. Bringing up Khmer's letters was to show that the vowel sounds have been formalized in that language, where English allows for much more variance.
Listen to any non-native English speaker, they can be all over the place and still understood.
This is a distinction in consonants! Different realizations of the /t/ phoneme. The whole claim that started this thread was that English expresses information almost exclusively in consonants, not vowels. Your example directly contradicts that very claim.
Anyway, English is _far_ from the only language where different dialects have a different set of vowels. Quebec French for example has completely different ones from French French.
Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.
There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.
There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).
The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en... - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.
LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/
https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normali...
and
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dol...
Give some insight into how this works.
Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.
Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.
Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.
There’s certainly a need for a ‘context aware’ format that can dynamically change the way sound - particularly speech - is delivered based on the device, volume, or even physical setting. (I suspect that this is about as useful as the ‘loudness’ button on many older amps though.)
I will go to my deathbed attesting that Tenet was the absolutely worst sound mixed movie of all time!
And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 . I'm not a native speaker, but (1) I've been communicating exclusively in English for years, (2) my hearing is quite good, (3) I'm wearing headphones, (4) there's nothing else happening in the scene apart from dialogue and music. But I still cannot understand Anne Hathaway's two sentences following the time I linked.
This movie also had a lot of another pet peeve of mine, which is shoulder dialogue where the foreground character is clearly not speaking, or saying something different.
These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.
They probably just throw the thing into ffmpeg with the fewest amount of arguments that satisfies a codec and bandwidth cost metric and call it a day.
However, I've never had any problems under the same situations on Netflix using a "blessed" 4K HDR10 set-up (Fire TV Cube and a cheap Hisense TV).
...and still hasn't been fixed.
An audio compressor would also help here on consumer devices, as that would allow a variable degree and ratio of dynamic range flattening. Basically, it can form a band of volume and ensure that quiet sounds and loud sounds both fit into that. Sadly, most consumer gear, although already equipped with all the DSP they need to implement this in software, thinks consumers are absolute morons and/or that this wouldn’t be a selling point, so we get watered-down poorly-implemented dialogue boost features or largely no option at all except for the consumer to “ride the fader” and constantly adjust the volume. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-he... has some info on what’s out there today to address this, but yeah: it’s mostly fixable if consumers had control of the center channel mix + a configurable compressor + configurable EQ. There are ways to do this in consumer-friendly ways for folks who don’t know of care to learn about mastering audio for film, but the current situation is pretty bad and it really makes me wonder why so much mixing targets home theater setups vs built-in crap TV speakers. At very least, streaming companies could provide an alternate audio track [algorithmically] mixed specifically for built-in audio devices that has more clear dialogue.
I personally watch with subtitles because I don’t want to miss a word.
Me, too… but my kids say they can hear everything just fine and please turn off the subtitles. It’s possible we’re just getting old.
But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.
If this is the case, what enables us to break out of the loop?
PS I really like The Drinker.
Also, romantic scenes all look the same, completely generic. They're basically copy-pasted between movies. They're so flat and devoid of any genuine feeling I end up hitting the right arrow to skip them entirely.
Usually I don't have those issues with older movies (and movies of a couple selected directors still making good movies to this day).
Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The biggest film in history was "Birth of a Nation" until it was replaced by "Gone with the Wind", "Star Wars" may have been a rebellion against a vaguely Nazi empire, but it was still about hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars.
Overall, the trajectory seems fairly positive. The good old days were pretty crappy and that was reflected in their books, films and songs. Though I suppose if you're young enough that Mulan 1998 is a classic film from the good old days you might simply be ignorant of a lot of the crazy shit that went on.
Look up parents re-watching films from their youth with their children, to realise, horrified, what passed as entertainment in their youth that is now shocking to them and stuff they don't want their kids to emulate or look up to.
These are all 'natural things', doesn't mean we should rush to embrace them and the people who use them to manipulate us.
Would love for you to define it, and explain how it applies to American nostalgia for older classic movies that are a foundation of our pop culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art
It is seeing decadence in contrast to past heavenly era, because you want it to be like that.
He said, youtube algorithm is giving him vaguely fascist content.Bringing up "Birth of Nation" in literally second paragraph.
And I did not said anything about glorifying past, I said the narrative lies about the past.
In OP's post:
> Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days"
So yeah, no. The OP here used the word fascist in reference to the idea of "bring back the good old days".
If the video was titled 'Why I love these old films', then your reply makes sense.
Why is this person 'shit'? I have no idea. Why is this whole generation 'shit'? Especially compared with a slightly older male Youtuber talking about Mulan, which many impartial observers would place in broadly the same class of pointless internet celeb.
If I wanted to briefly indicate the problems of this (or any other) generation, I could think of better things to flash up than a girl talking on TikTok, but apparently this wholesome nostalgia for the movies of his youth requires him to do this and say those things. And you didn't even notice this?
Fascism uses the nostalgic feeling specifically around national mythos and the character of its citizens but it is the nostalgia that comes first and the demogogs latch onto that feeling. And I fail to see how the The Critical Drinker would constitute a fascist demagogue although he is not wholesome in anyway.
> Was a sub until recently, kind of got tired of his "woman or POC did bad thing in X" takes. Not a bad reviewer per se, just not for me anymore.
So, yeah.
> Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The Youtube algorithm only cares about you watching as many videos as possible. You are not watching it optimize for complex ideology like fascism but to the nostalgic feelings. It drives conspiracy rabbit holes like flat-earthers because the algorithm doesn't care that the earth is round it cares that you watch as many minutes as possible so they can continue presenting ads. If you are curious about Modern Monetary Theory it doesn't care that it recommends after a bunch of next videos an anti-semitic conspiracy theory about the Rotschild banker family a straight up neo-nazi. Just so they can keep you watching and getting ads along the line. And you can't teach the algorithm to avoid complex mechanism like how people succumb to conspiracies or fascism... and in some cases both...
Star Wars (New Hope) is nothing of the sort. The universe just got progressively smaller as they retconned every character into being related to every other character.
Star Wars is basically old War Movies, Flash Gordon serials and Errol Flynn swashbuckling movies spliced together, as such it draws on the long history of storytelling that, in turn reflecting their own 'good old days', often revolves around the beautiful and genetically superior children of heriditary dictators who murdererd their way into power and how they deserve to be the rightful ruler and basically owner of the populace.
This is not a good lesson and is exactly the kind of thing Terry Pratchett satirizes with Lance Constable Carrot Ironfoundersson in Discworld, or George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
I do think blockbuster movies are (perhaps) increasingly just glorified cartoons, though, and Marvel/Disney are probably significantly to blame. Is fighting _really_ that interesting? Does the wire pull _have_ to be used in every fight? Why are big dumb CGI animals so popular? Why does every small CGI animal make the same wuk wuk wuk noise? Why does every large CGI animal snort like a buffalo?
On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series.
Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision.
The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a fairly unique reason. Back when I lived in LA I basically went out with this girl who knew she was a model and I wasted a ton of time and money on her.
When I moved to Chicago, I met a dorky awkward girl, who became my first real girlfriend. This is priceless dating advice, go for that dorky awkward girl that actually likes you.
Of course this really pissed a lot of people off, so they basically got rid of that story arc for the last movie. Looking at the entire series, I really think someone at Disney got uncomfortable with interracial dating, and thus Finn ends up making no sense as his two previous love arcs need to be eliminated by the last movie. This is understandable because even in America I've met people who are very uncomfortable with it, and Disney needs to distribute these movies to a global audience.
That might actually be the root of the problem, you have to make a movie that goes out of its way to keep everybody comfortable. In various countries showing LGBT plotlines are a big no-no, so you have reports coming out of Disney that they've cut these at the last moment from various movies.
The moment you have to make a movie that's okay for every single person, you end up creating these devoid visual spectacles. As in, most action movies are just a bunch of explosions and music. You can replace all the dialogue with gibberish and still get the idea of what happened.
I was trying to watch Free Guy and had to turn it off 10 minutes in. Stop with the freaking music for a second and let people speak.
However, other countries are still making real movies. I think a big part of the Korean wave is you don't have as much pandering to every single possible audience in K-pop dramas. Even then, I've had friends post that the subtitles are often toned down. Edit: Language Reactor is a great Chrome plugin which offers alternative subtitles as well as context. It's a great tool for language learning as well
I can't imagine ever going to a movie theater again, congratulations Disney You've ruined cinema.
Maybe I'll put one of these mediocre movies on in the background while I do other things, but they're not worthy of my undivided attention.
8 abandons pretty much everything from 7 and then tries to make a large sub plot about how the real evil is the oligarchical weapon vendors funding both sides. Ffs, the star wars universe has a faction self identifying as the evil dark side. It's not the place for his kind of thing.
I mean I think actual existentialist philosophers would laugh if you tried to tell them that Lost in Translation is an existentialist movie. Also I think you mean ennui not anomie.
1) When anybody dunks on "modern movies", they mean "modern movies with $>100m marketing budgets". Which is actually a small minority of modern movies.
2) The messaging has changed, but movies have always had terrible messaging in them.
Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.
I think this is a bit of selective memory ala: https://xkcd.com/385/
Did you have particular movies in mind with this? The whole Marvel universe is riddled with male protagonists who are simply better than other people. That's the whole schtick that the Watchmen criticises.
Like you say, maybe I'm remembering selectively but I think that's less the case for Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman than it is for Iron Man, Superman or Batman.
Can you imagine Marvel greenlighting a female-led equivalent of Logan?
For what it's worth, I now regret saying anything, and will try to restrain myself from saying anything else.
Do you watch many superhero movies? Because I feel like you must not.
Many of the characters are literal gods, and many more are just uncannily good at everything because of some hand wavey backstory.
Even the characters that start off "normal" tend to become awesome by simply being in the right place at the right time and being exposed to some external force (rather than through overcoming flaws or weaknesses on their own).
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
Whatever the villain is into, golf, fencing, gambling, etc. James Bond will challenge the villain at his hobby and beat him before the action even begins.
Edited to add: But the biggest example is probably Superman, just born super at everything.
It's admittedly a while since I've followed anything to do with Superman. I'm imagining he's undergone a similar reinvention, but I admit I'm guessing.
As a side note, I strongly recommend checking out Drinker's books - published under his real name Will Jordan. While I was skeptical at first, I have to say I really enjoyed them.
I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).
It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.
Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."
How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.
Its only over time that you get the "I know this situation", "I've been here before" possibly reaching the point of not wanting it again because you're oversaturated with said trope/cliche and now recognise them as such.
But the first ones stick with you and you remember them differently to the others.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.
Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.
So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.
People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.
People also forget that fantasy tropes were "evil and satanic" up through about the 1980s.
Tropes are nothing more than patterns we can observe in multiple stories. Clichés are tropes used extremely frequently. There's nothing inherently wrong about either of those things, it's only the way they're being used, the execution, that can be good or bad.
The James Bond one manages to add a touch of comedy, gives more information to the viewer about the characters who the characters are and how well they know each other, and makes the viewer remain attentive in what would otherwise be a fairly boring exposition scene. It has become used over and over again in various precisely because of how effective it is.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesA...
with character-oriented plot, we have character first, and let them play drama. It is like having initial condition and seeing how things evolve in Ordinary Differential Equation. Everything seems natural. I don't think screen play is not that simple, but good plot makes people think in that way.
On the other hand, with plot for the sake of plot, there is a predetermined plot at the outset, and as the show progresses, the actions and personalities of the characters are adjusted accordingly. There is no real personality there, just a cog in the wheel.
That was a pointless filler episode that only got made because they ran out of money.
Breaking Bad is my usual example of bad plot building. I'm sure I haven't given it a fair chance as it's universally so highly liked, but the plot events were very much built up so that you could see what's coming. You are already anticipating some events, or they feel predictable and made up, as if precisely to serve the show. They don't come through as authentic.
I stopped watching Breaking Bad in the first or second season due to this poor plot building, and Better Call Saul after a couple of episodes when I realized it's just more of that very same style of bad plotting. The difference to well written shows such as Sopranos is like night and day.
Negative comments about Breaking Bad and pointing out its flaws seems to often receive controversial reactions. I suppose it's because it's the favourite show for so many.
I'm not claiming I got the overarching plot or character development of the series. It was the small plot hooks during the episodes that I found poor enough to make the show unwatchable. I've stopped watching a bunch of other shows for the same reason so it's not exclusive to Breaking Bad, it's just the most popular show to suffer from this style of writing.
A more recent character-driven film that reminds me of the 70's was "About Schmidt" with, of course, that veteran of 70's films and filmmaking, Jack Nicholson.
Oh, "Frances Ha" comes to mind as well. You'll probably have to pick through the indie films to find character these days.
People lamenting the death of movies don't get this. The good stuff is still out there, it's just in a different format.
Movies are now more occasions to go out to the theatre. They have to be mass appeal, family friendly, nothing too complex.