I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through.
It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)
A couple examples the author gave sounded plausible--though I hadn't seen the movies in question--but then I felt the author was beginning to reach.
It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.
Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.
This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.
No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.
Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.
Yes, you are clearly also very educated. Impressive use of language!
I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.
I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.
Yup. Hence why we went from too much patriotism post-9/11 to too dark after Nolan Batman to too quippy after the Marvel takeover.
I remember first watching The Avengers and finding it refreshing. "This is fun! Why aren't more action movies fun? They're always so gritty and violent and serious, even though the protagonists are functionally superhuman, they're always so mean-spirited and the dialogue is is always so aggressively masculine and primitive and angry." And then that was everything for the next few decades.
Not quite. It’ll first be masticated, digested, and excreted before a simplistic version of it becomes the next mainstream.
Perhaps a more accurate (and less cruel) analogy would be that it will receive some scaffolding to sustain it - the leading edge is always unfinished. By the time it becomes mainstream, it’s closer to a product than an idea.
Yeah, I can see where the author is coming from, but it's kinda effortless to dismiss a ~2hr movie with a five sentence critique of a few scenes or lines of dialog. I'd much rather see the author go deep on one movie than shallowly take on a bunch.
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
>but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field
sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things.
I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and today, and in the past there was a lot of overlap. Today completely divorced. And it's honestly because the audience, not the critics, just can't take anything unconventional. Creators that had mainstream appeal, Kubrick, Tarkovsky were out there by today's standard. You could not put the opening scene of 2001 in front of a modern audience without half of the people playing subway surfers on their phones. Or take Lynch, he wasn't just niche, people made an effort to understand that stuff.
I noticed this in other media too. I saw reviews for Kojima's Death Stranding 2 and every five seconds someone went it's so weird as if that's almost an offense, from the guy who made the Metal Gear universe. You make something like Evangelion today, the biggest mainstream anime franchise at the time, you'd probably have people on social media cancelling it for some of the more Freudian stuff in it, and complain because there's not enough plot in it.
2001 is one of those movies that get better with every rewatch. The only part that doesn’t get much better is the stat gate sequence, which starts to get a bit long after a couple watches. Otherwise, every minute detail is masterfully crafted into the finished movie.
Couple of points in defense of the stargate sequence:
a) It’s meant to be seen and heard on what even today would be a pretty insane cinematic setup. Even moreso than the rest of the film, it loses a lot in the translation to the home theater, or even a typical multiplex. Maybe this is heretical, but I’d love to see a carefully upscaled, remixed 2001 in IMAX.
b) The stargate is perhaps the singular element of the film that was the easiest to imitate, vs. say the incredibly thoughtful and detailed production design. So it was replicated to the point of psychedelic cliché.
Genuinely curious if contemporary audiences found it overlong or just perplexing.
I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.
The art house vs blockbuster dichotomy has existed for a while, but I do think the internet as a medium makes it hard to have truly individual opinions. The whole point of reviews is to surrender a bit of your judgment, but this is more dangerous when the reviewer is an aggregate group. Lots of dogpiling, etc.
>it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible.
The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.
A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".
I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.
Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.
There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it.
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
Part of it is overexposure. The same thing happened to snappy "Joss Whedon" dialogue. This stuff worked really well in Buffy and Firefly, but Whedon was good at writing dialogue like this and he knew when not to use it. We've now had 15+ years of various writers at Disney doing crappy Whedon impersonations and this style of dialogue has worn out its welcome for many.
Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
I actually have less than zero excuse. I was a 13 year old nerd when it came out - PRIME market.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
I've managed to partially short-circuit my allergy to hype by telling myself that if I wait until after something is established, I successfully avoided the downsides of hype (buying into something site-unseen that might not even be that good) and intelligently waited for something to come out and get properly evaluated. Also I'm being unique and independent by getting into things well after everyone else.
This has given me a license to come back and check out beloved works whenever I realize I was just being contrarian and stubborn, which is a delight. Also still lets me say "I knew it!" when super popular things become less than beloved in retrospect.
Plus old stuff is often cheaper. It's often a fun adventure to go "Ok, let's see what all the fuss is about," even if it doesn't become an instant new favorite. Example: Twilight, while I wouldn't call it "good", is very funny and very fun to watch, especially if you get a mixed crowd of people that loved it at the time but recognize it's dumb, people that were allergic at the time but have since watched it and can acknowledge the fun, and new watchers.
That's all really insightful! I agree. I'm also much better now - not willfully disregarding things because just they're popular. I was a punk and indie rocker in the early 00's, so I was able to get that out of my system. (and boy did we) Now, my tastes are just generally extremely non-mainstream. So I avoid it by default.
It's pretty straightforward really - for example I saw Fruitvale Station as a movie fan. I thought it was great and so Coogler was on my radar. I thought the Rocky franchise was ripe for a reboot, so when I heard he was doing it I was in. And the movie was fine. As was Black Panther (considering Marvel flicks for what they are, no judgment either way). So OF COURSE I was downright excited for Sinners. With no assumption that it had to be the best thing ever - and I had a blast.
Another good example is that I'm currently watching the John Wick series for the first time. I didn't know anything about them, but had heard them positively referenced on Kill James Bond. Well, if you meet it where it is and realize it's just "what if you made a comic book into a movie?" and don't expect more of it, you can appreciate it for whether it does that well or not.
Like others have said, go and watch it. It holds up exceptionally well. It's just a plain good movie. The tension, acting, the special effects, quotable moments, the dinosaurs, everything.
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
The special effects on that movie are superb. On the vast majority of big early 90s blockbusters really. Just enough CGI to make the animatronics feel perfect. Nowadays I can't watch any movie, they all look like I'm watching a bunch of PS2 cutscenes spliced together.
I constantly wonder why no one's talking about the fact that almost every movie with cgi visual effects looks awful these days? I was on a plane recently. One person in front of me had Wicked on, another the live-action Snow White, another some recent Marvel movie. Each slid completely into the uncanny valley in their own way. It was really eye opening.
The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
My mid 30s brother in law is obsessed with graphics and framerates in video games. He optimises his games and gaming hardware selections primarily based on graphics fidelity.
He used to get the latest version of the fifa game every year, because the "graphics were so much better in this one", he went into debt for an xbox series X because of the better graphics that it offered, now he's recently built a custom gaming PC, primarily because he could eke better (you guessed it) graphics out of the games he plays.
Every single time I would tell him IDGAF about graphics, and I'll probably keep my XSX until the proverbial wheels come off before I upgrade. For me all I need is acceptable smoothness, decent-ish performance, but most importantly an enjoyable gameplay experience and (primarily for me) a very strong narrative focus.
I stopped trying to dunk on his enthusiasm (I was like that when I was 15), and now I'm just happy he's happy. Although he probably won't be happy, because the next-gen gpus are already just over the horizon, and by the time he's built his next gaming PC the next-next-gen GPUs will be just over the horizon...
Maybe some people are like that with movies? Maybe they select based on flashiness and special effects, and when the effects are obviously visible then it's bad by default? Maybe comments like "wow, this movie is certainly visually striking" in a focus group is seen as a Good Thing which makes the producers optimise for that when they make movies?
The use of color is atrocious in new movies. It's the era of high contrast and contrasting colors. They depend on it to make something look 'expensive' and 'premium' even though to me it looks really bad. And played out. Give me washed out greens like My Neighbor Totoro or yes, Jurassic Park, anyday.
It's a self-reinforcing thing. New movies want to look 'new', no matter if 'new' is bad.
Well, that's people repeating the line for confirmation in a scenario where communications weren't very reliable and the information was extraordinary.
That's close to the way the conversation would happen in real life.
Sure! I would humbly suggest that we don't go to movies to see -real- real life situations re-presented back to us.
I mean, unless you have two comedic geniuses who can really sell yelling down the stairs to ask the partner what they want for dinner, getting met with "HUH???" inching a little closer, and having repeat this three times until you finally just go down and ask in a normal voice. In the right hands that could be comedy gold on screen.
But by in large, we don't consume media because it represents the banal reality of everyday life.
That does not mean some amount of banal reality is an infraction or something bad. It makes movie feel less artificial. The weird thing is when people are so used to artificial, that they reject banal reality as "overdone joke" rather then "scene where people talk normally move on".
One might argue that it is the same thing, but that Jurassic Park comes from an era before that was common. It would be a different, though related, point in favor of the duplicative nature of media today to the one the author mentions.
>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...
I think you're disproving your own point.
If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience.
This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it.
At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.
I would suggest some shades of meaning on the Mencken quote. You're absolutely right that showing contempt for your audience will -absolutely- pave the road to losing money. In contrast if you -pander- to the lowest common denominator of intelligence required for engagement? Money printer go brrrrr.
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.
Nah, I don't buy this. In 2002 your "low quality DVD" was peak quality for us. Same way the blocky renders of PS1 was peak video-gaming for us. It only looks low quality when compared with today. For us at the time, it was magnificent.
At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?
The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002
No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs. The "movie theater experience" wasn't worth the hassle for anything but movies with good action and graphics - things like comedies didn't get uniquely better at the theater.
It didn't need to be about the same or better, it just needed to be good enough to appreciate that you weren't dealing with the downsides. The theaters weren't that good back in the late 90's (in fact, most of the ones I visited in my teens have renovated to be more current sometime around 2010 or something). All people needed was more realistic alternatives. More and more folks were getting cable, DVD players were more affordable, and places like walmart sold DVDs for a cheaper price than you'd pay for a full price movie. Netflix started in the late 90s too.
Yes, I know folks could rent videos before this. I remember walking down to rent NES games when I was young - right next to the movies at the grocery store. This was a far cry from the stores of the late 90s, though. They got better (and worse).
> No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs.
I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. No it wasn't.
Movies on TV weren't glorious at all. They weren't "amazing." They were what you made do with. And when a classic movie played at your local arthouse theater you grabbed a ticket because it was so much better. The image quality. The sound. Seeing the whole image rather than a bunch of it hacked off.
That's why we went to the theater. Not just for action. For comedies too. Which is why comedies made tons of money at the theater!
I’ll chime in as a grey beard. Did we think the DVD was the same as being at the theater? It really depends on who your friends were. Some of us kids had techie parents that had things like VGA projectors for presentations. We would take these and play DVD’s off our full-tower Pentium 3’s at movie theater-like experiences. I fondly remember watching the Matrix bonus content with my friends over a giant 100ft wall.
Are you saying you'd order raw quality differently than:
2002 TV setup < 2022 TV setup < movie theater
Or are you just saying that a home TV setup is still not as good as a movie theater? The point for the latter was the delta between home and theater used to be much larger, not that the delta is now 0, hence a decrease in theater ticket sales would make sense even if people were watching more movies. If the former, what order do you see it and what leads you to order them in the way you do?
No, what I mean is the 2002 experience was awesome for us in our time, like the 2022 is for people of today. But both experiences still pale compared with a movie teather. It's like for us at the time the DVD was a 8, modern TV is maybe a 10, but movie rather in both cases was like a 10000. It was, and it is, in a complete another level.
The big difference maker imo in movie theater experience is size and sound. You still need to drop about the same few thousand dollars you had to drop in 2002 to buy a proper projector and sound system today. 85 inch low pixel density screen and a sound bar ain't it, but if it is it for you, you are probably no discerning audiophile who would have probably have been fine with whatever was sold in a comparable market segment in 2002 (refrigerator width crt displays were in fact all the rage and very desirable at one point).
You can drop about $800 on a great 1080p projector, screen, and a pair of AirPods that will give you better surround sound than most speaker systems will give you.
My projector screen takes up more of my vision than any movie theater screen I've ever seen except IMAX.
Note that most people in 2002 didn't have DVD players. DVD player sales didn't even overtake VCR sales until a year or so afterwards, and there was a huge installed base. Watching on a DVD would not have been the _typical_ experience.
I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be.
So now we just wait for a movie we want to see to become available on Apple TV, and then we rent it.
The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater
Yeah, I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I've found myself wanting earplugs, especially with showings in Imax. Much much too loud, so loud it hurts. Who wants that?
I can make good coffee at home, but I still love going to coffee shops. It's the same for going to the cinema for me. It's an event. Something about being out in public. Also my local cinema serves beer. I haven't been in ages due to having kids. But I really miss it.
It's an event but one to put off for later.. Something good enough for right now where there's not much planning, anticipation or potential buyer's remorse is the kind of thing that is routine to do instead of consider.
> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be
As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.
It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.
> It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I think I understand that, it's just not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike social experiences – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.
Plus I'm lost without subtitles, even if the dialog is crystal clear!
Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun.
These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.
I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I feel like when a movie comes out now that I want to see, I am in a constant tension between dealing with a potentially rowdy or obnoxious public, or a less ideal viewing experience at home.
> the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.
I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.
I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.
The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.
The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.
This is so frustrating for me. By the time the movie actually starts I'm exhausted and ready to leave. It's also the same commercials over and over. The previews are rarely something I want to see too.
Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.
Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.
DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.
Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.
HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.
So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.
Honestly I wish I had put "(or maybe a new fangled DVD)" instead of "or DVD" because people seem to interpret that as "DVD wasn't good enough to have any impact on movie sales" rather than "either VHS or DVD at the time were still shit compared to the options now so does a decrease in ticket sales really guarantee a decrease in movies watched?"
DVD adoption (and later Blu-Ray) was certainly a huge factor in the gradual changes and 2002 was when people really started amassing them at home https://i.imgur.com/OHZ9H69.png. I'm sure piracy has a role as well too, but most of the deltas listed were also gradual changes which had their start prior to 2002, same as piracy. The only thing special about 2003 is it's the year the momentum changed, not that it's the year something brand new was introduced.
And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.
When I was an undergrad ages ago, going to the on-campus movies were a non-trivial part of the weekend experience. My understanding is that they're mostly dead at this point.
> And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.
The first two I agree with, the third one is a stretch. The quality of programming that HBO was putting out in the mid 90s and 00s is far higher than any streaming series that has ever been released.
It's less about whether one considers option A better than option B and more about whether the movie was shot for one option or "edited down" (pan and scan) to TV. If cinemas of the 90s had been 4:3 and TVs of the time 16:9, requiring crops to fill the screen properly, I'd have made the opposite statement.
You might be an outlier. Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match. Furthermore, the 4:3 version of a movie is almost always a crop from the intended ratio, so information and intent is lost.
Well, you've just revealed which kind of “content” you watch (by revealing which kind you don't). A lot of well known films were shot on full frame, and never had any other variant.
Frankly, seeing them in theatres “as intended” would require inventing a time machine, or not missing some special film screening event, as they were made quite some time ago.
Also, back then, when they still had to make film prints for distribution, and had to deal with wide screen theatres and regular screen theatres (you couldn't just ignore the other half, and lose a potentially significant share of income), both filming and editing took that into account. Shots in one aspect ratio were usually composed to look god when cut to the other, and professional cameramen (working with both types) constantly kept that in mind anyway. Same for possible TV screening versions later.
Now compare that to the modern nameless editors working for giant corporations which pretend that it's an impossible task that has never been done, and either crop automatically, or let the “smart computer” toss a coin to shift responsibility.
Edit: By “theatres” I've meant types of film projectors installed in their halls. Some had multiple, switchable lenses, etc., some had only one. Keep in mind that to show a multi-reel movie without pauses you need at least two projectors (or a special feeding system for spliced together film if the number of screenings is worth the work), and a third one is often added for redundancy and required maintenance work, so there's a lot of investment to make already.
I take it you really mean "so why wasn't 2003 the peak year instead of 2002" to which I'd say "I'm not trying to explain one needs a 55" widescreen 4k TV before you'll ever consider going to the movie theater less often, rather that this kind of difference over time is why you can't say movie theatre ticket sales in 2002 were higher so people must therefore have watched more movies then."
Now I'm doubly confused... where did I assert what about 2003? My comment is about why you can't look at movie theater ticket sales between 2022 and 2002 as evidence alone to say people have stopped watching movies as much. I don't think I ever said anything about why ticket sales peaked in 2002 specifically?
If I had to throw a guess at the largest contributors I'd say 2002-2003 is when people really started buying lots of DVDs for the first time as well as the start of the modernization of TV sets. Even though much better versions of these were common 20 years later I feel they very likely helped make the absolute peak of ticket sales be 2002. This is getting more into speculation of what did happen rather than saying ticket sale data is not enough to support the conclusion though, which is what my comment was focused on.
You didn't. You said the peak hit in 2002. Presumably something happened that caused the trend to start in 2003, which could obviously not be the fact that eventually in 2025 it would be more convenient to instead stream movies at home.
>In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
That quote doesn't talk about the peak at all though so why am I said to make such claims? The quote should have the same exact meaning even if you substitute in 2001 or 2003 when reading 2002 - if it doesn't then you're inserting claims not from the quote on my behalf and then asking me to explain these claims I never made.
The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:
> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."
I put almost $20k into a home theater setup. And with what I bought and how I set it up it punches way above its weight. I only have to wait 3 weeks to 3 months to be able to watch a movie at home now. Why would I go to a theater!?
I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.
Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.
> a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn
A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?
I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
It was a fancier theatre, but I saw Elio a few weeks back and each ticket at a Burbank AMC was $22 (this was on a Wednesday Night). That's just California for you.
the local theatre I normally go to is $12 off-times and $20 on-time. A nice special kick to the head that they need to separately specify a $2 "convinience fee" for saving their time and ordering online.
Pricing greatly depends on location. Full-price tickets are $28.99 in New York for non-IMAX or special showing. Los Angeles is $22-24. My local theater in a small Arizona town is $10 full-price and $5 off peak.
We just saw Superman in a Las Vegas IMAX and it was $85 including fees for three tickets. $75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.
>$75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.
Perhaps it's reasonable for a very occasional and special event, but it's not actually that expensive for anyone that cares about seeing movies in theaters. I'm paying $27/mo for effectively all-I-can-watch[1] movies via a subscription in SF, and includes IMAX. When I travel to LA I can use it there too, and it's available in NYC. I saw Superman for the cost of popcorn because I saw Elio earlier this month, it's a great deal.
If one doesn't go to theaters that often or cares for IMAX, there's other chains that offer 1 2D-only movie for $12/month and the tickets roll over.
[1] 4x movies/week, which is indeed more than I have time for.
Went to see the F1 movie a couple weeks ago in suburban Northern California on a local theater's "LieMax" screen (ie not one of the ~30 real IMAX 15-perf film theaters in the world but just a slightly larger mall theater screen that (probably) has a newer bulb and more recently calibrated speakers). It cost just over $75 for two adults + a large popcorn, soda and bottle of water.
I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).
There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-vi...).
I know there are smarter ways to invest your cinema money, but I checked how much I could spend in a fancy cinema in Munich, Germany for the OPs experience and came up with 19€ per ticket (balcony plus a popular superhero movie), plus 16€ for a (big) popcorn and two drinks, for a total of 54€ or ~USD 63.
I agree that the average experience could easily cost half that, but the point of how expensive cinema can be (imagine adding a second popcorn or, God forbid, nachos!) is a good one.
Each non-imax ticket at my local theater is $20.74. I just punched in the 2 tix, 1 popcorn, and 2x sodas: $61.08 + tax. And that's w/ no candy, and I love sour candy.
^ All of that, and the COST. The last time the wife and I did a movie night for a big new flick we were excited about, we spent almost $80 when all was said and done for tickets and snacks for the TWO OF US!
> Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.
Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).
"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)."
in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...
2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.
Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.
I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.
Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.
There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.
2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.
The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.
Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
Or the bean counters in charge target the largest common denominator, shaving off the long tail of above-average sophistication with every mediocre release.
or the least common denominator is decreasing, as people increasingly will scroll on their phone as they watch a film at home - just like most daily activities.
It's far more this, plus a combo of not only targeting the largest common denominator, but having to do that internationally which obliterates any script's ability to tie into cultural knowledge or norms, or the "vibes" of any given population. Not to mention nothing ever goes to screen that can't be quickly scooped out to appease the Chinese censors, lest they lose the largest audience on earth right out of the gate.
And I don't think you can totally disregard that movies cost more than they ever have to make while also looking worse than they ever have. The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean utterly trounce newer productions that cost far more to make just for everyone to bounce around green screen stages in motion capture pajamas, and to be clear, this is not industry professionals costing too much or being bad at their jobs, it's almost solely down to the studios wanting the ability to hysterically tinker with films until the 11th hour to ensure maximum market reach.
I'm not a fan of horror, but it seems like it's still extremely profitable (low budget -> solid viewership in theaters/streaming) and the one genre where creatives have enough freedom to experiment and do stuff out of the ordinary
Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different lyrics but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.
Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.
I've noticed on outings that some songs I hear on the PA system now will slow themselves down momentarily for what I'm sure is a "tiktok soundbyte". I'd be curious to see how music discovery works via that avenue
All of media, art, and majesty have been an attempt to stave off boredom, be it through glory, or splendor, or sex.
We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.
It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.
Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.
I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.
I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.
Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.
I genuinely without rose colored glasses think the obvious explanations is true which is that movies simply became worse since 2002 vs now. Look at the movies released 1999 vs 2024 and the reason fewer people go out to watch them is obvious
Even if you thought another movie was gonna be as good as City of God right now, do you think you'd be as likely to actually go to the cinema to see it as you were in 2002 or might you simply wait, safe $20 and a trip and watch it at home 3 months later? I think both factors play a role and they have synergy as well. Fewer people go to the cinema -> smaller market and less incentive to take risks -> fewer people go to the cinema -> ...
I think there’s a lot to that. It feels both like the market shrunk in the sense that they’re competing with options which didn’t exist back then but also two other interesting changes: very expensive movies need the international market to be really profitable which limits creativity somewhat (more social norms to stay within, many topics to avoid) and also leads to uncreating safe bets. The other big change was that streaming services sucked up a lot of audience & creativity, but aren’t tracked in box office revenue and also have different goals and weird relationships with their audiences (e.g. Netflix is so quick to cancel that some people never watch an incomplete series).
I won't recommend it for doing any kind of coding. its workable but far from ergonomic. That said, my pair is perfect for streaming shows and playing video games. Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market. I think at that point, Id be willing to use it as a virtual monitor.
Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome.
And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.
Even within the medium there was a whole generation of beloved silent-film stars that didn't make the transition to talkies. Every era has a beginning and an end.
I think within the next 20 years we will see the rise of AI generated movies custom fit for your pleasure that will contain information to educate you, images to astound you, a story that will pluck at your heart strings and that you will be able to personally influence by your words and choices and reactions.
They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.
I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.
So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.
Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.
I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).
But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!
They didn't that was my point. But if people just go to the food court at the mall and complain there's 90% fast food...
Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.
My take is that the movies you see at the arthouse cinema aren't any better than the big movies, they just have a smaller budget. They come out of the same system and would be just as self-indulgent if they had the resources to be.
It shows you don't watch them, you can obviously find Hollywood-without-the-budget cause the people that work in Hollywood come from somewhere, but you also have things that are completely outside. Some documentary about a Georgian truck driver who goes across the country side selling supplies from the city to the villages with long, no dialog shots that go for several minutes, has nothing to do with Hollywood productions and there's a million fractal things like this that would be way too "boring" for mass consumption.
> Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The thing is, when AAA games or movie studios start to focus on that one thing that "sells best at one moment" everyone else checks out.
I did checked out of games when I realized they are just not made for me anymore, that stuff I liked is looked down at in the industry and they focus on stuff I do not care about. It was similar process with major movies, at some point too little appealed to me, so I stopped caring entirely.
> The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories.
Sure. I like to watch those and I do, on Netflix or whatever. I just do not expect realistic human story or something new from a major Hollywood movie. They are not about any of that.
Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves.
And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point where it's safer to sell mediocre and milquetoast movies rather than push an opinionated one and risk blowback.
Look at the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or the Craft 2. Both movies built on a previous proven winner, both original movies had something to say.
Beetlejuice was not only a quirky romp through the afterlife but also a story about aboriginalism vs colonialism and whether it is right for the aboriginals to do horrible things to protect what is theirs, and also a story about how embracing change can help cross generational divides and how accepting people who are different from you can enrich your life.
It was very opinionated and had a lot of great subcontext. Same with the Craft.
The Craft was, on its cover, a story about what teenage girls would do if they got magical powers, which then turned into a series of biopics of the deep emotional damages caused by indifferent and hateful people. The movie dealt with racism, sexual assault, murder, mental illness, self esteem, and self acceptance all in the context of a teenybop horror movie.
Then you look at their sequels.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduced 3 antagonists, Beetlejuice's wife, the boy, and Lydia's boyfriend.
It started three potential plotlines, the soul sucker, the life swapper, and the gold digger, and brought Beetlejuice in to deal with all three of them.
And then, 80% of the way through the movie, it threw all three of the antagonists and plot lines away and then rehashed the climax of the original movie with a slightly different set of clothes on.
What deeper meaning did Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have? None. No one had any value or made any sense. No one in the entire plot was irreplaceable. No one learned any lessons or grew in any measurable way. Nothing actually happened. They all woke up like they had a bad dream after Lydia's father's funeral, the mother died, the gold digger died, and then the story was over. If the movie had not happened nothing would be different for the characters except that maybe the gold digger would have dug more gold or something.
Then, the Craft 2. It's not a horror movie. It's a teenybop movie where girls get magic and do things with it. They have a trans person in it but she doesn't use her magic to address her transness in any way. There's only a tiny drop of racism, and no one has any real deep issues to resolve.
So, instead, they get David Duchovny in to play as some guy who embodies toxic masculinity, but who is also ineffective and purposeless all the way to the very end of the movie, when all of a sudden he goes murder rapey and then gets easily beaten by the power of feminism and witchcraft.
No one learned anything except GIRL POWER. Nothing really changed for anyone. There were no edges in the movie to explore. It was pointless.
Either sequel could have been much more poignant by touching on real issues that people experience. The Craft 2 could have touched on social media and the need to look like you have a perfect life. They could have touched on what a trans woman would do if she could remold her body with magic permanently or semi permanently like the girl did in the first movie. They could have made Nancy a bigger part of the movie and have her deal with David Duchovny instead of it being a girl power movie, and then Nancy could have taught the girls the things she knows being a former vessel of Manon with 25 years to learn and grow from the experience. It could have gone into a demonstration and discussion on how young women have so much to learn from women even 20 years their senior, and how working together and tearing down walls both of age differences but also gender differences can make the world a better place.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have made a really fun story out of any of the three protagonists and plot lines if it had picked and chose one of them to run with and made the others the sub plots. The gold digger plotline could have been about accepting what is different about you and not allowing others to convince you to mask your weirdness. The life swapper plot could have been about learning how to accept that you're a normal person who grew up in a weird household, and how that doesn't make you weird and that it is possible to make both sides work together as long as each side values the other. The soul sucker plotline could have been played for laughs as at the end we could have seen Beetlejuice about to win Lydia only to be thwarted by his actual wife and dragged off into the underworld by the leg by her (and end up happy in the end, maybe seeing him slowly reinflate after she sucked the soul out of him, he he sex joke). All of those options were thrown out of the window and instead we get a meandering pointless movie that would have been fine if it had never existed.
Good movies have an opinion and something to say. Napoleon Dynamite is a perfect example of this. It's a bad movie in every measurable way. It's boring. It's slowly paced. It has no plot. It's like a 2 hour slice of life Jello movie. But then, the point of the movie gets driven in, that everyone has value.
It's a simple message told in a long and occasionally humorous manner, but because they didn't try to piledrive the message into you when it hits it hits hard.
Bad movies ramble even more than I do and never make a point for fear of popping a bubble. And media franchises know this and choose to make them anyway rather than be at risk of any blowback. After all, most movies released by a large franchise are profitable by default. The number of AAA movies that did not make their cost of production back in the last 10 years is vanishingly small, to the point where movies that only make 150% of their production costs are considered box office bombs and franchise killers. (Like the Golden Compass, that made $370+ million and won academy awards on a $180m production cost and was considered enough of a failure to end the entire series)
They know how to make good movies. They know how to tell satisfying stories that keep people wanting more. They know how to make a lot of money doing it.
So why do they keep not doing it?
I believe it's 2 things.
1: Fear of offending people and having massive blowback because of it.
The outrages over stupid things like the Little Mermaid being black is a good example of this. Who cares what color her skin is? She's a fish. If the story is good and told well then what does it matter?
But I get it, you can't convince someone who wants to be upset and outraged as a distraction for their own personal problems to focus on their personal problems instead of screaming about DEI or whatever 4 letter flavor of the day they have to rage about. This much is understandable. But still, that's no excuse for making a bad movie, they could have far more easily found the rage points and dealt with them and left the rest of a good movie alone.
But that brings me to my second point.
2: It's on purpose.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm starting to believe that megaconglomerate media companies are intentionally making unsatisfying movies that are highly titillating for the same reason that Doritos flavors their chips in just such a way that you never get satisfied of eating them, that final burst of zest and flavor that would put you over the edge always just out of reach.
It's like the torture of Tantalus, satisfaction always being just outside of arms reach, but knowing that it's close, and occasionally actually satisfying the itch (like any good skinner box) keeps us diving in, spending money, buying merch, showing our love and support for the franchises that once scratched the itch for us in hopes that it will scratch it again next time.
They're doing it on purpose because they know that if you didn't get what you wanted out of this movie, you'll go watch another, or a TV show, or read a book, or play a game, something, because you came to get satisfaction. And if they blue ball you just right, you'll keep spending money until you can't afford to spend any more in hopes that you'll finally get what you're looking for.
I think it's on purpose and I think it will keep getting worse until it cannot get any worse, and then it will be replaced with something else that will be massively satisfying for a while at least.
I feel the same way about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Napoleon Dynamite, but just wanted to add that Michael Keaton’s portrayal was still brilliant and I’m happy he could still pull it off.
The plot and all the non-Beetlejuice scenes were a waste of time.
> On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Well stillsuits are supposed to collect and preserve moisture and shield from heat in extremely harsh environment. I would sort of expect that 8k years in the future some tech for that would be close to the skin, rather than waving thin layers like bedouins or touaregs use.
Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers
A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
IMO actual quality components are still just as remote as 20 years ago. A proper setup is more or less the same technology as it has been for decades: good speakers, good amplifier, placed appropriately, and none of this has really seen any democratization. People buy sound bars and such but these are a far cry to what an actual sound system is like that you probably need to spend in the 4 figures to achieve. Buy enough sound bars that fall apart in a couple years for a couple hundred dollars and you could have bought a proper amplifier, speakers, in a setup that is actually modular, expandable, upgradeable, and serviceable.
I have never heard of sound bars falling apart after a couple years, is that common? Every piece of sound equipment I've ever bought has lasted at least 15 years, my sound bar is 5 years old.
In general I think the sound bar audience is different from the hi-fi audio audience. I was fine with using the TV's built-in speakers until LCD TVs took over from CRTs and the built-in speakers became much tinnier and quieter because they couldn't fit quality speakers in a flatscreen TV case. I suspect most people who buy sound bars are in a similar situation.
> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11? A discount matinee viewing at my local theaters is from $17 to $20. $20-$23 if you go in the evening. The lowest price ticket, a Tuesday noon showing, is $12.
I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).
In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.
> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture
Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.
In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.
Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.
Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.
People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.
Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")
Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".
I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.
Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.
Anime is going to explode. Just did some google fu and apparently 50% of millenials and gen z watch anime weekly. Boomers probably watch almost zero anime so once the demographics shift in 30-40 years, you might expect half of all americans to watch anime weekly by these trends. And this is just considering present rates not the fact that these rates have been increasing over time.
Yeah, the forecast I saw researching my comment is it is going to get to about $8b by 2033 - which will make it about as big as the movie box office sales industry.
It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.
Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.
> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service
I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.
> They are hampering discoverability.
At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
> At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.
I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.
How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much.
I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?
I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.
Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.
The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.
How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)
That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.
I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.
On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.
What in your mind was the golden age of serious anime? There's tons of trash today (cough 99% of isekai cough), but there was plenty of trash in almost any era of anime. How much god awful "harem anime" came out in the 90s/00s?
The ratio of diamond to coal is the point. Of course you may always find an exception, but like you say there's tons of trash today.
People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s it isn't something I just made up. On average there is an undeniable drop in animation quality and story quality compared to past eras.
Your Name is a title that for me reminded me why I became an anime fan many years ago. In 2016 when it came out, anime as a whole was well into its slop era, but Your Name has near Ghibli tier animation and powerful emotional themes rooted in both traditional and modern Japanese culture. It was the exception that proved the rule about anime slop.
Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.
There's a lot of debate in this thread about the merits of watching movies in the theater vs home, but my overall movie watching is way down, regardless of venue. I'm sure I watch less than one movie per month. I used to watch tons when I was younger.
Unrelated, I wish there were small screening theaters where small groups of people could watch films on-demand, drawing on a massive catalog.
> Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
This looks incorrect, at least according to Wikipedia; its list of films by box office admissions[1] includes a few Chinese movies from the 1980s with higher numbers.
Unless the 80s don’t count as modern times - but I’d say it’s not that far from the 90s.
I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.
It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.
Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.
So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.
That's weird. Where I am, if you buy tickets online you get a QR code. At the theater, there's someone in front who scans your QR code and gives you a physical ticket. That ticket is not really checked, but there is always someone there paying attention to folks walking in.
That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.
Movie studios could care less if a billion people watch a movie or if 1 person sees it.
They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.
If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?
Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM
The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film.
Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.
If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.
Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.
Bit of a tight line to walk. Longer movies mean fewer showings per day. When I saw that Oppenheimer was three hours long -I want to watch that at home so I can take a bathroom break/snacks so a personal pause button is an improvement on the theater.
It used to be fairly common with the big "epic" films. And probably no live theater production is going to go much over 90 minutes without an intermission.
2002 doesn't look like the interesting year to me. It seems like 2020 and the pandemic is where the most significant drop happened. So we're really looking at post pandemic recovery since that time. How much of the lower numbers are due to theater closures and / or high inflation since then?
Somewhere, Cameron admits he rereleased Avatar to theaters ahead of Avatar 2 so it would beat Endgame. He only needed 8 million more to stay on top, he got 134.
Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...
It's still not the same as the cinema experience.
But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.
Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.
I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
Not disagreeing with the economics behind it, but this movie-goer walked away decades ago when the "super hero" genre became Hollywood's focus.
Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.
Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.
Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.
Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.
While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.
Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.
> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down
Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?
From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.
They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.
i CERTAINLY agree that theres tons of new literalism in Oppenheimer. i was mentioning that Oppenheimer is not catering to the lowest common denominator in order to get an Oscar. Oscars trade on belabored basic character drama and many of the things you listed. mostly depends on directors who the academy think are "deserving" at the moment
Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
The creator of The Boys has also said he needs to beat people over the head so he doesn't have a similar situation to Mad Men or Breaking Bad, where people think the main character is a hero to emulate
It was hilarious when the far-right noticed, IIRC on season 3 of The Boys, that they were being mocked.
And just look at all Star Wars fans cosplaying as stormtroopers. It even says “evil empire” in the first movie intro. You can’t get much more obvious than George Lucas.
People have been consciously cosplaying as villains for decades because pretending to be evil can be fun as hell; I'm not sure what that's supposed to illustrate, really.
Yeah, I guess The same problem exists with The Watchmen and Fight Club.
I found it fascinating how the term snowflake was changed because the character that people admired told their proxies that they were not snowflakes. The meaning at the time was that they were homogenous and unremarkable. Snowflakes represented the opposite where each individual snowflake has a unique pattern. That viewpoint was not empowering so they took the metaphor to be about the fragility of snowflakes.
Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
> Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.
The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.
Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
I think what this means is that the movies now care whether the least-common-denominator viewers get their "point."
Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it.
Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The ability to attach multiple meanings, even multiple conflicting meanings, was seen as an inevitable aspect of art that should be embraced and engaged with. It was accepted that people would see a different movie depending on their background, their personal history, and their awareness of cinematic language. Supporting multiple readings was seen as a sign of depth and complexity, not necessarily a weakness.
Now the movies take a pragmatic, engineered approach to delivering a message. Ambiguity must be squashed. Viewer differences must be made irrelevant. The message takes precedence over art.
I think the interesting question is, why does the message now take precedence over everything else? What has changed? I see two possible answers.
First possibility, the audience demands a message. If the least-common-denominator viewer demands a message, and you are in the business of servicing that demand, you have to make sure you avoid any possible mishaps or misunderstandings in the delivery.
Second possibility, the makers of movies derive some personal satisfaction or social gain from broadcasting a message to the masses. They see the movies as propaganda rather than art. (Or perhaps a less active motivation: the makers of movies are afraid that there might be blowback from viewers attaching an unsavory meaning to a movie. They want to make sure that their movie doesn't become like Fight Club, a proudly embraced symbol of what it was meant to critique.)
Either of these would explain why movies are now engineered to deliver a single, unmistakable message at the expense of art and enjoyability. Or maybe there's another explanation. I'm just spitballing. I'd love to read more by somebody close enough to actually know what they're talking about.
One interesting example here is Joker. It seems like the filmmakers did not like the audience they attracted with the first film, nor the messages that this audience took away. So the sequel seems like it was intentionally designed to piss that audience off.
The Matrix is an earlier and I think more impactful example of this. That is a movie made by two trans filmmakers and with hindsight it is clearly an exploration of their own identities. Yet somehow it has been co-opted by people with diametrically opposed political and gender ideologies[1]. That has to be incredibly frustrating as an artist and I bet many people have seen that sort of reaction and go out of their way to make it more difficult for people to be that wrong about their art.
This is an ironic reply as like those fans of the Matrix, you appear to be reading something different in what I said than what I intended.
I'm not saying the trans reading of The Matrix is the only valid reading of that movie. However, anti-trans folks and their ideologically peers reading the movie as supporting their worldview is objectively not the intended reading and therefore is likely incredibly frustrating to the trans creators. It is easy to imagine other authors seeing that and wanting to avoid that type of gross misreading of their work.
Might it be as simple as: before, the LCD viewer who didn't get it had no platform, now they do? Responsiveness to Rotten Tomatoes instead of Roger Ebert?
I am 100% of the opinion that it’s (2), in no small part because the writers themselves say as much frequently and vociferously at every opportunity. This isn’t reading some hidden meaning, this is just listening to what they say when they’re interviewed.
The two most common themes I hear from writers are intense narcissism, feeling deeply their own personal experience is something anyone else should care about, and activism/social justice/messaging, where they’re pushing a particular political narrative. It’s why we’ve seen the death of truly morally ambiguous characters or even antiheroes - they threaten the clear and unambiguous message the writer wants to send. Stories aren’t for the audience to interpret but for the writer to preach.
And again this isn’t inference. This is reading and watching interviews with writers, showrunners, producers, etc.
I have definitely noticed the same occurring in North American cinema, but I do not think this is a new phenomenon. Rather, it's just a symptom of the increased commercialization of indie cinema - commercialization requiring film for all to understand.
If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.
are movies like Evil Does Not Exist as popular in Japan as the examples in the article though? there must be a lot of similar niche movies made in the US
Evil Does Not exist is Ryusuke Hamaguchi's first movie after the internationally successful Drive My Car, so I would hope there would be some domestic support but that might be pure naivety on my part.
If it's about what people want to see, could it be that people cannot deal with insecurity anymore? We cannot deal with not knowing. We have to know for sure, so we can feel secure.
I can't speak for others, but I have a pretty limited tolerance for very explicit, heavy depictions of violence, for bad things happening to animals, or for downer endings.
I fully recognize that these don't make for bad cinema. I also recognize that they're often more effective as surprises. But they are going to dramatically cut into how much I enjoy a movie. And movies aren't like books, where if the tone isn't quite what you're in the mood for you just stop reading, they're more immediately confrontational, and backing out is a bigger deal (and almost a faux pas, walking out of a movie is seen as commentary on its quality). Previews are also going to avoid spoiling twists or dramatic moments, which, again, makes sense, but makes them poor tools for assessing tone. This means I'm often tempted to read the plot summary before watching, which feels silly, but if I want to challenge myself and watch things not quite to my taste and things that aren't just kid's movies without just sometimes paying for the pleasure of having a bad time, I'm not sure how else to approach it.
It also feels like other people have almost the opposite perspective, where of a movie doesn't have something really emotionally heavy or challenging to watch they can't take it seriously. I'm not sure what makes sense here, and maybe my tastes are just the problem, but it feels bad to spend fifteen dollars and two hours of my time to be in a space that's too loud, has only very expensive food, and leave depressed by what feels to be to be an overly cynical or myopic message or an artistic vision obsessively depicting the many ways human beings can be physically harmed, in as much detail as possible. Again, I don't think it's bad or wrong, I certainly don't want it to be banned or require disclosure, I just struggle to decide where I fit in the market, and I worry that my purchasing patterns support a narrative that leads to less of what I want.
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
It wasn't just the ending. Any time a priest casually breaks the seal of the confessional and nobody bats an eye, it creates this weird surreal effect where you can't even tell if the author is aware of what he's doing.
Without spoiling the twist, I question whether it’s “over the top.” The specific kind of anxiety alluded to by Conclave about popes is almost a thousand years old and has resurged several times.
The guy is actually way too unspecific about the details there to make much sense of the canonical relevance, which renders the resulting anxiety rather comical.
This spoiler-dogeing (pun intended) makes this comment too unspecific to respond to unfortunately, as it's not clear what you found unspecific. It's understood enough by the person he's telling it to, and it makes sense to be beating-around-bush about a topic that could get the person who's telling it in trouble.
And called out the second part of Dune as a bad film. It got written off as simply a "sci-fi sequel"; I think for that movie in particular it is more fair to say that doing the book justice couldn't be done in a single film as the source material is extraordinarily dense.
LOTR is a fascinating counter example; each book is quite dense but was able to be made into a single (albeit long) film. Part of that I think is because a lot of the density of those books is exquisite detailing of the animated natural world of the books; a picture is worth a thousand words may be obnoxiously overused but apropos in this case. The movies seemed to understand the animate life force of the visual landscape and so were able to say a lot visually.
I just don't see Dune: Part II as a true sequel in the traditional sense of the term (though perhaps the literal sense of the term, despite literalism being apparently despised by the articles author).
I see few Americans in the credits. Did you mean absurdly following in the Hollywood style, or are the handful of Americans involved in that film enough to make it "Hollywood"? Genuinely asking. Is Hollywood a place, a process, or a result?
Very little of "Hollywood" is about the place today. Movies are often filmed outside of it for tax purposes. Referencing it is almost always about either the style or the clique of people who engender the style.
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
I noticed American shows and movies demographically aimed primarily at kids often slip in cultural references and subtle dirty jokes aimed at keeping older people engaged. Was or is this still a thing in your domain?
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
> Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.
Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.
'Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am'
Some writers are certainly taking cues from the criticisms that tweet was mocking. Or were the same people making those criticisms.
> Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?
Frankly American superhero comics also have(/had) notoriously ex positive dialogue. I feel like it has its DNA in classic pulp books, which, like comics and shonen, are long form stories in a short form format, which can't rely on their readers having read the previous issue(s) (or sometimes just want to refresh memories because it's been a while).
TV these days has recaps, I recently read the third book in a fantasy trilogy that tried a recap, but '"Ok, but what are we going to do about the dark lord?' The dark lord, Jathaniel, had turned out to be the actual murderer of Pomme, Gam's dad, who we had all thought committed suicide. He was seeking the crystals of wonder..." is still very common in modern books. Comics and cartoons are expected to have much less narration, so they tend to put refreshers like this in dialogue. Movies do that to make themselves feel like comics or cartoons. I'm not sure why non comic or cartoon movies do that.
Readers actually enjoy "on the nose" dialogue...depending on the genre.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
> watched in the background while people are doing something else.
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
I doubt it. Though, amusingly, people notoriously put on Netflix with the intention of having sex. Though the general expectation is that they're focusing on the sex to the detriment of the Netflix, not the other way around.
It's a bit odd to declare that there's no point in doing something a lot of people do, especially if it involves entertainment where the only possible point is the enjoyment of the person doing it, and not any sort of objective outcome.
Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
Birdman's ending is atrocious, but the main problem ain't even there. The movie is just a giant pile of pretentious nothingness, I can't even remember what was the point of it. Hollywood movies from the last 2 decades or so are just disposable.
I agree, its for the same reason that trailers now have little trailers in the beginning. I mean really, a trailer for a trailer? Apparently its required to keep retention up because even adults are now children that need to be spoon fed.
That sounds like a different issue. With low quality "information" thrust at people from all sides, you have to immediately prove that you're not just AI slop video #63547, because I'm seeing your video on a platform that mostly delivers AI slop that I will scroll past within 3 seconds.
Why am I on a platform that mostly delivers slop? That's a trillion dollar question. The advertising industry won.
Also because if I was on a non-slop platform, it wouldn't be showing me your ad because ads are slop.
I've spent 20 years working in Hollywood. This is definitely not anything new, but we are in an up-cycle. Ambiguity is hard to tolerate, in life, in general. Ambiguity is also where personal meaning can arise. However in hard times (economically, culturally, politically, existentially... we're currently in all 4), market forces drive things away from ambiguity and toward one-pointedness. This is reflected in the world of trailers even more clearly than in the world of films - the trailers often specifically highlight exactly the kinds of moments this writer is critiquing, as if the purpose of film is to trade in such moments; the underlying conceit is something like "populist memes are a commodity."
This is what is currently driving pop culture; the commodification of the meme. Movies aspire to be memes - the dominant means of expression and the atomic unit of culture in the present moment.
They used to aspire to be themselves (movies, for their own sake). IMO that ended around 2008. The Dark Knight was the end and Iron Man was the beginning of a new Hollywood cycle; defined by the movie's ability to trade in this currency - memes - which stand alone, isolated, traded out of context of an entire narrative.
Further reading for whoever is interested: Society of the Spectacle by Debord (re: the degradation of being into having, having into mere appearing, as a universal and ubiquitous byproduct of the core function of capital which is commodification)... and Man and His Symbols (re: the difference between a symbol, which is universal and carries a wealth of meaning, and a sign, which is contextual/temporary and carries a fixed meaning).
Would the void of physical medium like VHS and DVD be part of the issue?
Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.
With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.
This phenomenon isn't exclusive to film or even fiction.
A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.
A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."
And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.
I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.
That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.
- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.
- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.
- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.
it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.
It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.
I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?
I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?
This. Also, long-form high-budget "tv" on streaming services is a better way to tell longer, more interesting stories. See eg "The Expanse" (based on the phenomenal novels by James SA Corey).
I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.
> Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content. Fashion capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks: we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth. Image generators churn out ersatz versions of da Vinci and van Gogh. And, in every case, banal commentary is slowly occluding the art, seeping into it in boldface titles or explainers that speak over the sound or cover the image.
It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.
Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.
Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.
New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
That's not exactly what is meant by luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs aren't simply beliefs that rich people hold. It more refers to social opinions which would (allegedly) impose high costs on the poor, but from which the wealthy would be insulated from the consequences. Something like "defund the police" is usually pointed to as an example of a luxury belief. The poor, who live in high crime areas, would see crime go up and bear the brunt of the consequences. Whereas the rich, who live in pricey, low crime neighborhoods, wouldn't see much of a change and would be able to afford private security anyhow if they did.
It's a luxury belief in the sense that they're in a position to have an impact on the zeitgeist. People have been complaining about bad movies for a while now but now The New Yorker has an opinion. The rest of us proles can't afford Broadway. We get what we're served.
Or, people who want complex plots dont watch blockbuster films; they watch indie movies.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
It's a shame, because in an era when One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Annie Hall were winning Best Picture the blockbuster film and "indie" film were harder to differentiate.
I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
"Telegraph" is a bit of an unfortunate word because when used metaphorically it has come to have two almost diametrically opposed meanings. I think that's what's tripping you up.
Ok, given that then I think the next thing that is tripping me up is that the author of the New Yorker article is writing in a way that is itself being very literalist.
I read through the whole article looking for something that is insightful, but it feels as if the author is beating a dead horse the way the examples does the same. Maybe experiencing that is the point, but I can't help but thinking it was all a waste of time.
If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
Observe somebody browsing Tiktok/Instagram/YouTube Shorts. People compulsively swipe on to the next reel if the one they're watching doesn't hook them in within the first second.
Right, because the much vaunted Tik-Tok algorithm starts a stopwatch when the clip begins in order to determine whether or not to serve you more content like it.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
I noticed this recently when I decided to watch Hitchcock's 'The Birds.'
It was almost absurd to me not only how bland and drawn out most scenes were, but how absolutely poorly acted it was. If it were not famous(ie didn't exist), and updated to today's vernacular and shot scene for scene, it would absolutely get reamed by critics.
Funny how much changes in just a generation or two.
Old movies are kind of slow but I'm much less frustrated because they are short: an hour, at most two. That's more than enough to tell a story. Modern movies are two hours at minimum with some crossing over three with absolutely nothing to tell (e.g Babylon 2022, completely pissed me off).
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
> If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
I don't think people know about classic movies, or know that they have access to classic movies (hint: libraries).
This people though has been catching up on a century of classic films. There are plenty of lists around on the internet if you wanted to get started. The AFI Top 100 is a gentle introduction to the (American-only) classics. There are deeper cuts when you are ready to saddle up for "1001 Movies" instead. (Warning, you could be starting down a journey that will involve the next eight years of your life.)
Go to a restaurant and watch any "romantic" couple, what they do. Pay attention to each other, talk? Nah, stare at their own screens, and every two minutes or so show each other a cute cat video and go "awww!"; pathetic.
You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
> Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.
Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
Here’s the thing.
For all the movies that have tired tropes and blatant literalism, there’s a new movie watcher that hasn’t experienced it before. They have the same right to watching a new movie with a tired trop — because to them, it’s not yet tired.
There are a lot of things that bother me in recent movies. I feel like there's a "yay, we're making a movie!" attitude, where people are more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture rather than simply doing their job to the best of their ability.
The most egregious example is the amount of Wilhelm Screams I've heard, absolutely crammed into media. It's a proclamation of, "I'm a sound editor, and I'm in on the joke!" but all it does is pull me out of the story completely.
Another sound editor example is the amount of ice clinking in glasses and sloshing sounds of drinks, as if the protagonist's long-neck beer bottle is a half-empty jug being jerked around.
Impressive stunts are virtually non-existent now. Instead, they drive a custom-built, tubular-frame car, swerving wildly, while the camera jerks around on a crane. Everything is reskinned using CGI, and the end result is the desired car being driven by an apparent maniac who chooses a profoundly sub-optimal path through traffic.
Writers have to point out their cleverness in order to announce to the audience how clever they're being. It reminds me of eye-rollingly clever newspaper headlines.
Everything has been turned up to 11, but in the lamest way possible.
It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore.
The last time I remember watching a movie and thinking "That was pretty good" was the Dune films. Before that I can't even remember. I watched Thunderbolts and remember I thought it was the first Marvel movie that wasn't just terrible since End Game and that was primarily due to the Russian guy as a comedy source.
So personally I like films that makes me feel something without that feeling being explicitly forced upon me. This is an incredible thing to achieve that only a select few directors can do. Not “baiting” the viewers into emotions but also not being cold at the same time. Just by showing and how do they show it. Like the case of “a picture is worth a thousand words”. It’s a razor thin line but that makes these films I enjoy special and sincere.
(I'll only mentions stuff from the 21st century because otherwise I'd sit here for days)
I love japanese cinema so I'm very biased towards films from there.
- The Taste of Tea (2004) from Katsuhito Ishii
- Nobody Knows (2004) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tony Takitani (2004) from Jun Ichikawa
- Memories of Matsuko (2006) from Tetsuya Nakashima
- Departures (2008) from Yojiro Takita
- Still Walking (2008) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tokyo Sonata (2008) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- One Million Yen Girl (2008) from Yuki Tanada
- Haru’s Journey (2010) from Masahiro Kobayashi
- Story of Yonosuke (2013) from Shuichi Okita
- Shoplifters (2018) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Drive My Car (2021) from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
Two korean film I've really liked
- The Handmaiden (2016) from Park Chan-wook
- Pieta (2012) from Kim Ki-duk
A chinese film I've seen recently and it was pretty good
- Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) from Diao Yi-nan
Iranian films are incredibly good and crazy what they could make despite the situation there
- A Separation (2011) from Asghar Farhadi
- Taxi (2015) from Jafar Panahi
- The Salesman (2016) from Asghar Farhadi
- There Is No Evil (2020) from Mohammad Rasoulof
- My Favourite Cake (2024) from Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha
Some european films I've enjoyed
- Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé
- Leviathan (2014) from Andrey Zvyagintsev
- Alcarràs (2022) from Carla Simón
- Fallen Leaves (2023) from Aki Kaurismäki
And last but not least some actual Hollywood films that I think are pretty good
- The Tree of Life (2011) from Terrence Malick
- Cloud Atlas (2012) from Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)
I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".
I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.
As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice. All good artists know that and intentionally manipulate that. This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.
From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships. As in, they make choice to stay, despite knowing this is bad for them. I did not found sexual assault visuals, only abstract video with words and pink colors. The lyrics do not come across to me as "not putting on any kid gloves", they are gentle. They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
> You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
There are songs that make me feel weird about liking them, but not this one. This one was intentionally made to make me like it.
I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
> The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice.
That could maybe be argued for music which is released as music. This song isn't stand-alone, it's part of a musical. You can't take it out of its context and then complain it doesn't make sense.
> This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.
Maybe it makes you feel good. It makes me feel conflicted.
> From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships.
I mean that's part of the point. Angel thinks they themselves are to blame for the situation they find themselves in. Which isn't true of course, but that's how it goes with abuse.
> I did not found sexual assault visuals
Well look closer then. Angels whole thing is that he puts on an act of liking all the shit happening to him. But it's pretty clearly an act in the video.
> They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
Part of angel DOES want some of those things to happen. There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it. That doesn't make the relationship any less abusive.
> I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
I agree it's a song about why someone would stay in an abusive relationship. That doesn't mean it's glamorizing abusive relationships though. I don't really care if people dislike the song, it's parsing the song as somehow being pro-abuse where I get annoyed, because it clearly isn't. It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
I did not said the song makes no sense. It makes perfect sense. And it is in fact released as a standalone song.
> Well look closer then
As I said, I did not found sexual assault visuals. Only abstract abstract video with words and pink colors.
> There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it.
Sure, but there is nothing about song itself that would make one feel bad about it. Or even be aware it is sexual assault what is going on. You have to bring that out from somewhere else.
> It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
I do not think it is realistic portrayal of such relationship. It is glamorous portrayal. It makes you feel the harmful part feels good and is worth it. Realistic portrayal would had more pain in it, it would had mix of negative emotions in it. It would show dark side and pain, not just rational realization "this is harmful but I want it".
People in abusive relationship do not feel just the addiction and choice part. They do have fair amount of suffering, fear, feeling like they cant mixed in. They do not feel it is sweet. This song feels sweet.
Just look at how often political campaigns use songs that sound like upbeat patriotic anthems, but are the total opposite if you actually listen to the words. Using "Born in the USA" for a "woo America!" rally is rather awkward. And of course it's not a new thing; Reagan used that song four decades ago.
1. People are indeed stupid. I don't understand why there's so much belief in human intelligence while there's so much proof of the contrary
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
Finding media to be not to your liking is fine. Only half engaging with it and then calling out the authors as being in favor of sexual assault because you misread what's going on is absurd. That's the behavior I am complaining about.
The way I read it, the joke is just owning the insult in a good way.
It works here on multiple levels, because first, owning the insult is not expected, so that's already a surprise, which can work as a joke.
Then, by actually admitting to the many bad classes, it signals that the author can actually tell good from bad, implying knowledge about the matter after all, refuting the argument in the insult (that he is bad in philosophy because he had bad philosophy classes).
Third, it's a very short, snappy response, in vein of the insult, making the author look competent.
Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.
First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.
But it is not funny. It is not a joke. It is just not engaging with the implied "you do not know what you talk about here" ... which is entirely valid, but not exactly a joke.
There doesn't have to be a joke. If you're rich enough people feel like they have to laugh at your jokes whether or not they are funny. That's the saddest thing about Elon Musk.
I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.
I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.
Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
It's actually a sort of standing joke that trilogies are sometimes 4-fold. Trivial Pursuit used that answer as one of their copyright test questions (if your game replicates our bad answer, you stole our product).
Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
Yeah, F1 was extremely literal - characters would often describe what's going on in Brad Pitt's head while he's driving. On the other hand, it's a "big, dumb action movie" and at least it took itself seriously and didn't wink at the audience like so many modern blockbusters do.
I didn't expect anything after about half an hour into it. The first half hour or so was pretty good. The kid taking his sick mom into a zombie infested area was dumb. The blockade but not sending them supplies and stuff, dumb. Zombie pregnancy. Alpha male zombie roided out. The doctor character in general.
Ah, a New Yorker article on media. I think I got bingo!
- Identify some problem pervading modern pop media? Check
- Cherry pick examples? Check
- Misrepresent or misunderstand an example that actually supports the opposite claim? Check
- Paint a vague picture of how much better it was before [trend], without making any real statement? Check
- Don't use any actual data or evidence? Check
- Draw a line from dumb blockbuster trends to Trump/Nazis/[insert hot-button political issue]? Check
You either come into the article ready to believe movies are getting worse or you don't. You come away feeling vindicated, or angry. There is nothing of substance here.
Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
I think literal meaning here is misinterpreted as sincerity by OP. Which is a misconception, literal things can be untruthful and abstract things can be truthful as well, being abstract, or going in a roundabout way is not necessarily about being dishonest.
I think the OP is pointing out the lack of depth in the writing. Sincerity isn't about using language at or below 2nd grade, sincerity can be expressed with any level of verbosity. I think the trend of dialog being over-simplified to the point of literal noun-verb-noun with no metaphor just makes everything taste like plain white bread and velveeta. That's great: if your tastes are pedestrian, but there's nothing elitist or insincere about wanting greater depth from art. Ironically the screenwriters that utilize this richness of language are rarely blockbusters or award winners.
https://archive.ph/ZVQvK
I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through.
It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)
A couple examples the author gave sounded plausible--though I hadn't seen the movies in question--but then I felt the author was beginning to reach.
It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.
Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.
This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.
No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.
Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.
Yes, you are clearly also very educated. Impressive use of language!
I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.
I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.
To put it another way, today's avant-garde is tomorrow's mainstream.
Yup. Hence why we went from too much patriotism post-9/11 to too dark after Nolan Batman to too quippy after the Marvel takeover.
I remember first watching The Avengers and finding it refreshing. "This is fun! Why aren't more action movies fun? They're always so gritty and violent and serious, even though the protagonists are functionally superhuman, they're always so mean-spirited and the dialogue is is always so aggressively masculine and primitive and angry." And then that was everything for the next few decades.
Not quite. It’ll first be masticated, digested, and excreted before a simplistic version of it becomes the next mainstream.
Perhaps a more accurate (and less cruel) analogy would be that it will receive some scaffolding to sustain it - the leading edge is always unfinished. By the time it becomes mainstream, it’s closer to a product than an idea.
Yeah, I can see where the author is coming from, but it's kinda effortless to dismiss a ~2hr movie with a five sentence critique of a few scenes or lines of dialog. I'd much rather see the author go deep on one movie than shallowly take on a bunch.
For Gladiator II specifically, you might enjoy this:
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/06/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/13/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...
It ends with one
so true
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend.
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
>but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field
sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things.
I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and today, and in the past there was a lot of overlap. Today completely divorced. And it's honestly because the audience, not the critics, just can't take anything unconventional. Creators that had mainstream appeal, Kubrick, Tarkovsky were out there by today's standard. You could not put the opening scene of 2001 in front of a modern audience without half of the people playing subway surfers on their phones. Or take Lynch, he wasn't just niche, people made an effort to understand that stuff.
I noticed this in other media too. I saw reviews for Kojima's Death Stranding 2 and every five seconds someone went it's so weird as if that's almost an offense, from the guy who made the Metal Gear universe. You make something like Evangelion today, the biggest mainstream anime franchise at the time, you'd probably have people on social media cancelling it for some of the more Freudian stuff in it, and complain because there's not enough plot in it.
Many of Kubrick's movies were panned at release and only received merits upon reexamination. Even 2001 was initially met with a mixed reception.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...
2001 is one of those movies that get better with every rewatch. The only part that doesn’t get much better is the stat gate sequence, which starts to get a bit long after a couple watches. Otherwise, every minute detail is masterfully crafted into the finished movie.
Couple of points in defense of the stargate sequence:
a) It’s meant to be seen and heard on what even today would be a pretty insane cinematic setup. Even moreso than the rest of the film, it loses a lot in the translation to the home theater, or even a typical multiplex. Maybe this is heretical, but I’d love to see a carefully upscaled, remixed 2001 in IMAX.
b) The stargate is perhaps the singular element of the film that was the easiest to imitate, vs. say the incredibly thoughtful and detailed production design. So it was replicated to the point of psychedelic cliché.
Genuinely curious if contemporary audiences found it overlong or just perplexing.
I think people today, in general, would be unwilling to hold the idea in their heads that a movie might be good in a way that goes over their heads, or that they just don't understand. There's no curiosity that it might be more than what they saw it to be. And when everyone sees art as beneath them (or at least, certainly not above them), it loses that transcendent quality.
The art house vs blockbuster dichotomy has existed for a while, but I do think the internet as a medium makes it hard to have truly individual opinions. The whole point of reviews is to surrender a bit of your judgment, but this is more dangerous when the reviewer is an aggregate group. Lots of dogpiling, etc.
>it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible.
The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.
A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".
I'm glad you bring up Kojima, because I think he's a master of this New Literalism. I just watched my partner play Death Stranding 2, and it feels like every other cut-scene has an NPC turn to camera and explain the themes of the game. And I love it! And it doesn't detract from the games ability to express those themes through metaphor and game-play.
Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.
There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.
>Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable,
Wait... I've never seen it. Don't tell me the ship sinks!
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
- HL Mencken
Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it.
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
Part of it is overexposure. The same thing happened to snappy "Joss Whedon" dialogue. This stuff worked really well in Buffy and Firefly, but Whedon was good at writing dialogue like this and he knew when not to use it. We've now had 15+ years of various writers at Disney doing crappy Whedon impersonations and this style of dialogue has worn out its welcome for many.
Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
[0] https://killjamesbond.com/
The T-Rex bit is not a joke, the line is said seriously. Also, watch Jurassic Park. Good movie.
I actually have less than zero excuse. I was a 13 year old nerd when it came out - PRIME market.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
I've managed to partially short-circuit my allergy to hype by telling myself that if I wait until after something is established, I successfully avoided the downsides of hype (buying into something site-unseen that might not even be that good) and intelligently waited for something to come out and get properly evaluated. Also I'm being unique and independent by getting into things well after everyone else.
This has given me a license to come back and check out beloved works whenever I realize I was just being contrarian and stubborn, which is a delight. Also still lets me say "I knew it!" when super popular things become less than beloved in retrospect.
Plus old stuff is often cheaper. It's often a fun adventure to go "Ok, let's see what all the fuss is about," even if it doesn't become an instant new favorite. Example: Twilight, while I wouldn't call it "good", is very funny and very fun to watch, especially if you get a mixed crowd of people that loved it at the time but recognize it's dumb, people that were allergic at the time but have since watched it and can acknowledge the fun, and new watchers.
That's all really insightful! I agree. I'm also much better now - not willfully disregarding things because just they're popular. I was a punk and indie rocker in the early 00's, so I was able to get that out of my system. (and boy did we) Now, my tastes are just generally extremely non-mainstream. So I avoid it by default.
It's pretty straightforward really - for example I saw Fruitvale Station as a movie fan. I thought it was great and so Coogler was on my radar. I thought the Rocky franchise was ripe for a reboot, so when I heard he was doing it I was in. And the movie was fine. As was Black Panther (considering Marvel flicks for what they are, no judgment either way). So OF COURSE I was downright excited for Sinners. With no assumption that it had to be the best thing ever - and I had a blast.
Another good example is that I'm currently watching the John Wick series for the first time. I didn't know anything about them, but had heard them positively referenced on Kill James Bond. Well, if you meet it where it is and realize it's just "what if you made a comic book into a movie?" and don't expect more of it, you can appreciate it for whether it does that well or not.
Like others have said, go and watch it. It holds up exceptionally well. It's just a plain good movie. The tension, acting, the special effects, quotable moments, the dinosaurs, everything.
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
The special effects on that movie are superb. On the vast majority of big early 90s blockbusters really. Just enough CGI to make the animatronics feel perfect. Nowadays I can't watch any movie, they all look like I'm watching a bunch of PS2 cutscenes spliced together.
I constantly wonder why no one's talking about the fact that almost every movie with cgi visual effects looks awful these days? I was on a plane recently. One person in front of me had Wicked on, another the live-action Snow White, another some recent Marvel movie. Each slid completely into the uncanny valley in their own way. It was really eye opening.
The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
My mid 30s brother in law is obsessed with graphics and framerates in video games. He optimises his games and gaming hardware selections primarily based on graphics fidelity.
He used to get the latest version of the fifa game every year, because the "graphics were so much better in this one", he went into debt for an xbox series X because of the better graphics that it offered, now he's recently built a custom gaming PC, primarily because he could eke better (you guessed it) graphics out of the games he plays.
Every single time I would tell him IDGAF about graphics, and I'll probably keep my XSX until the proverbial wheels come off before I upgrade. For me all I need is acceptable smoothness, decent-ish performance, but most importantly an enjoyable gameplay experience and (primarily for me) a very strong narrative focus.
I stopped trying to dunk on his enthusiasm (I was like that when I was 15), and now I'm just happy he's happy. Although he probably won't be happy, because the next-gen gpus are already just over the horizon, and by the time he's built his next gaming PC the next-next-gen GPUs will be just over the horizon...
Maybe some people are like that with movies? Maybe they select based on flashiness and special effects, and when the effects are obviously visible then it's bad by default? Maybe comments like "wow, this movie is certainly visually striking" in a focus group is seen as a Good Thing which makes the producers optimise for that when they make movies?
The use of color is atrocious in new movies. It's the era of high contrast and contrasting colors. They depend on it to make something look 'expensive' and 'premium' even though to me it looks really bad. And played out. Give me washed out greens like My Neighbor Totoro or yes, Jurassic Park, anyday.
It's a self-reinforcing thing. New movies want to look 'new', no matter if 'new' is bad.
Jurassic Park is 2h7min.
9min of animatronic dinosaurs
6min of CGI dinosaurs.
I'd say, if you have a core memory at a zoo or a theme park, then you'll probably like it.
Well, that's people repeating the line for confirmation in a scenario where communications weren't very reliable and the information was extraordinary.
That's close to the way the conversation would happen in real life.
Sure! I would humbly suggest that we don't go to movies to see -real- real life situations re-presented back to us.
I mean, unless you have two comedic geniuses who can really sell yelling down the stairs to ask the partner what they want for dinner, getting met with "HUH???" inching a little closer, and having repeat this three times until you finally just go down and ask in a normal voice. In the right hands that could be comedy gold on screen.
But by in large, we don't consume media because it represents the banal reality of everyday life.
That does not mean some amount of banal reality is an infraction or something bad. It makes movie feel less artificial. The weird thing is when people are so used to artificial, that they reject banal reality as "overdone joke" rather then "scene where people talk normally move on".
One might argue that it is the same thing, but that Jurassic Park comes from an era before that was common. It would be a different, though related, point in favor of the duplicative nature of media today to the one the author mentions.
One one level I really enjoy Steven Spielberg, but boy is he heavy handed.
Yeah, maybe the poster-boy even.
That's not a punch line, it is Dr Grant babbling in disbelief that they actually created a T-rex
>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people...
I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it. At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.
I would suggest some shades of meaning on the Mencken quote. You're absolutely right that showing contempt for your audience will -absolutely- pave the road to losing money. In contrast if you -pander- to the lowest common denominator of intelligence required for engagement? Money printer go brrrrr.
> I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence
That phrase is about conning people...
> the intelligence of the [..] masses
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.
Nah, I don't buy this. In 2002 your "low quality DVD" was peak quality for us. Same way the blocky renders of PS1 was peak video-gaming for us. It only looks low quality when compared with today. For us at the time, it was magnificent.
> For us at the time, it was magnificent.
At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?
The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002
No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs. The "movie theater experience" wasn't worth the hassle for anything but movies with good action and graphics - things like comedies didn't get uniquely better at the theater.
It didn't need to be about the same or better, it just needed to be good enough to appreciate that you weren't dealing with the downsides. The theaters weren't that good back in the late 90's (in fact, most of the ones I visited in my teens have renovated to be more current sometime around 2010 or something). All people needed was more realistic alternatives. More and more folks were getting cable, DVD players were more affordable, and places like walmart sold DVDs for a cheaper price than you'd pay for a full price movie. Netflix started in the late 90s too.
Yes, I know folks could rent videos before this. I remember walking down to rent NES games when I was young - right next to the movies at the grocery store. This was a far cry from the stores of the late 90s, though. They got better (and worse).
> No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs.
I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. No it wasn't.
Movies on TV weren't glorious at all. They weren't "amazing." They were what you made do with. And when a classic movie played at your local arthouse theater you grabbed a ticket because it was so much better. The image quality. The sound. Seeing the whole image rather than a bunch of it hacked off.
That's why we went to the theater. Not just for action. For comedies too. Which is why comedies made tons of money at the theater!
I’ll chime in as a grey beard. Did we think the DVD was the same as being at the theater? It really depends on who your friends were. Some of us kids had techie parents that had things like VGA projectors for presentations. We would take these and play DVD’s off our full-tower Pentium 3’s at movie theater-like experiences. I fondly remember watching the Matrix bonus content with my friends over a giant 100ft wall.
Fight Club as well.
It was no IMAX but at 1024x1024 we didn’t care.
> At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?
No, I didn't. I don't think it either today, with my pretty big TV. The experience still pales in comparison.
Are you saying you'd order raw quality differently than:
Or are you just saying that a home TV setup is still not as good as a movie theater? The point for the latter was the delta between home and theater used to be much larger, not that the delta is now 0, hence a decrease in theater ticket sales would make sense even if people were watching more movies. If the former, what order do you see it and what leads you to order them in the way you do?No, what I mean is the 2002 experience was awesome for us in our time, like the 2022 is for people of today. But both experiences still pale compared with a movie teather. It's like for us at the time the DVD was a 8, modern TV is maybe a 10, but movie rather in both cases was like a 10000. It was, and it is, in a complete another level.
The big difference maker imo in movie theater experience is size and sound. You still need to drop about the same few thousand dollars you had to drop in 2002 to buy a proper projector and sound system today. 85 inch low pixel density screen and a sound bar ain't it, but if it is it for you, you are probably no discerning audiophile who would have probably have been fine with whatever was sold in a comparable market segment in 2002 (refrigerator width crt displays were in fact all the rage and very desirable at one point).
You can drop about $800 on a great 1080p projector, screen, and a pair of AirPods that will give you better surround sound than most speaker systems will give you.
My projector screen takes up more of my vision than any movie theater screen I've ever seen except IMAX.
Note that most people in 2002 didn't have DVD players. DVD player sales didn't even overtake VCR sales until a year or so afterwards, and there was a huge installed base. Watching on a DVD would not have been the _typical_ experience.
I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be.
So now we just wait for a movie we want to see to become available on Apple TV, and then we rent it.
The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater
Ask to turn it down. I've done this, I was with my daughter, it was hurting both of us. The cinema staff were totally fine with it, and not surprised.
Yeah, I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I've found myself wanting earplugs, especially with showings in Imax. Much much too loud, so loud it hurts. Who wants that?
I can make good coffee at home, but I still love going to coffee shops. It's the same for going to the cinema for me. It's an event. Something about being out in public. Also my local cinema serves beer. I haven't been in ages due to having kids. But I really miss it.
It's an event but one to put off for later.. Something good enough for right now where there's not much planning, anticipation or potential buyer's remorse is the kind of thing that is routine to do instead of consider.
> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be
As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.
It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.
> It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I think I understand that, it's just not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike social experiences – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.
Plus I'm lost without subtitles, even if the dialog is crystal clear!
Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun.
These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.
I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.
I much prefer going to the museum with an IMAX to see that content vs the next superhero tights wearing flick in IMAX
> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I feel like when a movie comes out now that I want to see, I am in a constant tension between dealing with a potentially rowdy or obnoxious public, or a less ideal viewing experience at home.
> the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.
I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.
I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.
The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.
The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.
Plus the 30 minutes of previews and messages from the theater.
That's now part of "the movie theater experience".
I miss the days of the slideshows that would play while people where getting seated for the film. I loved the occasional trivia slides.
This is so frustrating for me. By the time the movie actually starts I'm exhausted and ready to leave. It's also the same commercials over and over. The previews are rarely something I want to see too.
A local non chain theater has no commercials before movies. Just the trailers.
Makes me want to only go to that theater.
Also it doesn't take skipping many movies now to be able to put a decent sound system with your 50"+ TV.
There are still some fun things to do at particular theaters, like Twisters in 4dx. But there is little compelling reason to otherwise.
This doesn't account for the decline starting in 2002. I'd like to see piracy numbers though- particularly the "official" mppa and riaa numbers
Back in the year 2002...
Internet access was widely available.
Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.
Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.
DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.
Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.
HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.
So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.
DVD player sales were also just starting to boom; they overtook VCR sales the next year.
Honestly I wish I had put "(or maybe a new fangled DVD)" instead of "or DVD" because people seem to interpret that as "DVD wasn't good enough to have any impact on movie sales" rather than "either VHS or DVD at the time were still shit compared to the options now so does a decrease in ticket sales really guarantee a decrease in movies watched?"
DVD adoption (and later Blu-Ray) was certainly a huge factor in the gradual changes and 2002 was when people really started amassing them at home https://i.imgur.com/OHZ9H69.png. I'm sure piracy has a role as well too, but most of the deltas listed were also gradual changes which had their start prior to 2002, same as piracy. The only thing special about 2003 is it's the year the momentum changed, not that it's the year something brand new was introduced.
And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.
When I was an undergrad ages ago, going to the on-campus movies were a non-trivial part of the weekend experience. My understanding is that they're mostly dead at this point.
> And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.
The first two I agree with, the third one is a stretch. The quality of programming that HBO was putting out in the mid 90s and 00s is far higher than any streaming series that has ever been released.
I don't have an HBO sub at the moment. But I do find quite a few mostly serialized TV shows on streaming.
Why do you bring up 4:3 as a bad property? Honestly I find watching 4:3 easier on the eyes and mind since you know where to look.
The TV might have been 4:3, but most DVD movie releases were widescreen by 2002. So you lost upto 40% of that 27" CRT to letterboxing.
The pan-and-scan DVDs seemed to die out long before everyone had 16:9 TVs. Consumers seemed to decide they preferred letterboxing over cropping.
It's less about whether one considers option A better than option B and more about whether the movie was shot for one option or "edited down" (pan and scan) to TV. If cinemas of the 90s had been 4:3 and TVs of the time 16:9, requiring crops to fill the screen properly, I'd have made the opposite statement.
You might be an outlier. Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match. Furthermore, the 4:3 version of a movie is almost always a crop from the intended ratio, so information and intent is lost.
> Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match.
It's pretty big vertically as well. IMAX is close to 4:3
I've wondered why they haven't done an anamorphic IMAX to use the full screen instead of cutting back and forth from wide to square.
Ye I think my FOV is fine I did tests for my driving license. I feel it has more to do with me being distracted by things in the peripherals.
And ye cropped is bad. Think STNG.
> almost always
Well, you've just revealed which kind of “content” you watch (by revealing which kind you don't). A lot of well known films were shot on full frame, and never had any other variant.
Frankly, seeing them in theatres “as intended” would require inventing a time machine, or not missing some special film screening event, as they were made quite some time ago.
Also, back then, when they still had to make film prints for distribution, and had to deal with wide screen theatres and regular screen theatres (you couldn't just ignore the other half, and lose a potentially significant share of income), both filming and editing took that into account. Shots in one aspect ratio were usually composed to look god when cut to the other, and professional cameramen (working with both types) constantly kept that in mind anyway. Same for possible TV screening versions later.
Now compare that to the modern nameless editors working for giant corporations which pretend that it's an impossible task that has never been done, and either crop automatically, or let the “smart computer” toss a coin to shift responsibility.
Edit: By “theatres” I've meant types of film projectors installed in their halls. Some had multiple, switchable lenses, etc., some had only one. Keep in mind that to show a multi-reel movie without pauses you need at least two projectors (or a special feeding system for spliced together film if the number of screenings is worth the work), and a third one is often added for redundancy and required maintenance work, so there's a lot of investment to make already.
Okay, what happened in 2003 then?
There was a ~3% delta in absolute ticket sales.
I take it you really mean "so why wasn't 2003 the peak year instead of 2002" to which I'd say "I'm not trying to explain one needs a 55" widescreen 4k TV before you'll ever consider going to the movie theater less often, rather that this kind of difference over time is why you can't say movie theatre ticket sales in 2002 were higher so people must therefore have watched more movies then."
No, my question is why did it start going down in 2003 for the reasons you cited, which seem to be contemporary
That's about when DVD players started becoming common; it's the first year that their sales exceeded those of VCR players.
Not sure I follow, why should there be a single year people started e.g. buying bigger TVs?
I didn't say there was, but what do you think changed that year that they went down? It's your assertion, not mine...
Now I'm doubly confused... where did I assert what about 2003? My comment is about why you can't look at movie theater ticket sales between 2022 and 2002 as evidence alone to say people have stopped watching movies as much. I don't think I ever said anything about why ticket sales peaked in 2002 specifically?
If I had to throw a guess at the largest contributors I'd say 2002-2003 is when people really started buying lots of DVDs for the first time as well as the start of the modernization of TV sets. Even though much better versions of these were common 20 years later I feel they very likely helped make the absolute peak of ticket sales be 2002. This is getting more into speculation of what did happen rather than saying ticket sale data is not enough to support the conclusion though, which is what my comment was focused on.
You didn't. You said the peak hit in 2002. Presumably something happened that caused the trend to start in 2003, which could obviously not be the fact that eventually in 2025 it would be more convenient to instead stream movies at home.
>In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
Is what I was responding to.
That quote doesn't talk about the peak at all though so why am I said to make such claims? The quote should have the same exact meaning even if you substitute in 2001 or 2003 when reading 2002 - if it doesn't then you're inserting claims not from the quote on my behalf and then asking me to explain these claims I never made.
The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:
> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."
I put almost $20k into a home theater setup. And with what I bought and how I set it up it punches way above its weight. I only have to wait 3 weeks to 3 months to be able to watch a movie at home now. Why would I go to a theater!?
I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.
Now you should sell tickets to people to come watch movies at your house.
Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.
I watch about 3 movies a week with my wife. The cheap ticket is 6.50€ (Mondays), the normal is 8.50€.
Dresden, Germany
We don't watch streams, as my wife constantly talks over it. Which she cannot in the movies
> a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn
A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?
I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
It was a fancier theatre, but I saw Elio a few weeks back and each ticket at a Burbank AMC was $22 (this was on a Wednesday Night). That's just California for you.
the local theatre I normally go to is $12 off-times and $20 on-time. A nice special kick to the head that they need to separately specify a $2 "convinience fee" for saving their time and ordering online.
Pricing greatly depends on location. Full-price tickets are $28.99 in New York for non-IMAX or special showing. Los Angeles is $22-24. My local theater in a small Arizona town is $10 full-price and $5 off peak.
We just saw Superman in a Las Vegas IMAX and it was $85 including fees for three tickets. $75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.
>$75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.
Perhaps it's reasonable for a very occasional and special event, but it's not actually that expensive for anyone that cares about seeing movies in theaters. I'm paying $27/mo for effectively all-I-can-watch[1] movies via a subscription in SF, and includes IMAX. When I travel to LA I can use it there too, and it's available in NYC. I saw Superman for the cost of popcorn because I saw Elio earlier this month, it's a great deal.
If one doesn't go to theaters that often or cares for IMAX, there's other chains that offer 1 2D-only movie for $12/month and the tickets roll over.
[1] 4x movies/week, which is indeed more than I have time for.
Went to see the F1 movie a couple weeks ago in suburban Northern California on a local theater's "LieMax" screen (ie not one of the ~30 real IMAX 15-perf film theaters in the world but just a slightly larger mall theater screen that (probably) has a newer bulb and more recently calibrated speakers). It cost just over $75 for two adults + a large popcorn, soda and bottle of water.
I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).
There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-vi...).
I know there are smarter ways to invest your cinema money, but I checked how much I could spend in a fancy cinema in Munich, Germany for the OPs experience and came up with 19€ per ticket (balcony plus a popular superhero movie), plus 16€ for a (big) popcorn and two drinks, for a total of 54€ or ~USD 63.
I agree that the average experience could easily cost half that, but the point of how expensive cinema can be (imagine adding a second popcorn or, God forbid, nachos!) is a good one.
Each non-imax ticket at my local theater is $20.74. I just punched in the 2 tix, 1 popcorn, and 2x sodas: $61.08 + tax. And that's w/ no candy, and I love sour candy.
$40 for popcorn.
^ All of that, and the COST. The last time the wife and I did a movie night for a big new flick we were excited about, we spent almost $80 when all was said and done for tickets and snacks for the TWO OF US!
Fucking absurd.
> Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.
Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).
"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...
2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.
Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.
I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.
Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.
There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.
2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.
The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.
Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
> People don’t want to think anymore.
Or the bean counters in charge target the largest common denominator, shaving off the long tail of above-average sophistication with every mediocre release.
or the least common denominator is decreasing, as people increasingly will scroll on their phone as they watch a film at home - just like most daily activities.
It's far more this, plus a combo of not only targeting the largest common denominator, but having to do that internationally which obliterates any script's ability to tie into cultural knowledge or norms, or the "vibes" of any given population. Not to mention nothing ever goes to screen that can't be quickly scooped out to appease the Chinese censors, lest they lose the largest audience on earth right out of the gate.
And I don't think you can totally disregard that movies cost more than they ever have to make while also looking worse than they ever have. The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean utterly trounce newer productions that cost far more to make just for everyone to bounce around green screen stages in motion capture pajamas, and to be clear, this is not industry professionals costing too much or being bad at their jobs, it's almost solely down to the studios wanting the ability to hysterically tinker with films until the 11th hour to ensure maximum market reach.
The industry should be ashamed of itself.
I'm not a fan of horror, but it seems like it's still extremely profitable (low budget -> solid viewership in theaters/streaming) and the one genre where creatives have enough freedom to experiment and do stuff out of the ordinary
> Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
Beatles songs are around 164 seconds long on average.
https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/uploads/6/5/4/3/6543054/durat...
An 2005 compilation of Johnny Cash’s greatest songs averages just a little over three minutes per song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Johnny_Cash
Gerry and The Pacemakers did not have long songs either.
https://www.discogs.com/master/369149-Gerry-And-The-Pacemake...
Neither did the Kingston Trio.
https://www.discogs.com/release/666498-Kingston-Trio-The-Kin...
Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different lyrics but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.
Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.
I've noticed on outings that some songs I hear on the PA system now will slow themselves down momentarily for what I'm sure is a "tiktok soundbyte". I'd be curious to see how music discovery works via that avenue
All of media, art, and majesty have been an attempt to stave off boredom, be it through glory, or splendor, or sex.
We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.
It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.
Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.
I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.
I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.
Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.
I genuinely without rose colored glasses think the obvious explanations is true which is that movies simply became worse since 2002 vs now. Look at the movies released 1999 vs 2024 and the reason fewer people go out to watch them is obvious
I was going to say, were movies really that good in 2002?
Catch Me If You Can
Gangs of New York
The Pianist
City of God
Yes, yes they were lol. It is almost hard to believe those all came out in the same year.
Imagine in 2025 having to pick if you want to see The Pianist or City of God? It is just so unthinkable
Even if you thought another movie was gonna be as good as City of God right now, do you think you'd be as likely to actually go to the cinema to see it as you were in 2002 or might you simply wait, safe $20 and a trip and watch it at home 3 months later? I think both factors play a role and they have synergy as well. Fewer people go to the cinema -> smaller market and less incentive to take risks -> fewer people go to the cinema -> ...
I think there’s a lot to that. It feels both like the market shrunk in the sense that they’re competing with options which didn’t exist back then but also two other interesting changes: very expensive movies need the international market to be really profitable which limits creativity somewhat (more social norms to stay within, many topics to avoid) and also leads to uncreating safe bets. The other big change was that streaming services sucked up a lot of audience & creativity, but aren’t tracked in box office revenue and also have different goals and weird relationships with their audiences (e.g. Netflix is so quick to cancel that some people never watch an incomplete series).
> Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
IMAX broadened the licensing about 10-15 years ago. I'm not an IMAX person, but people who are complained a lot about it at the time.
> Yes the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema
I recently got a a pair of XR glasses (ray neo 3). Pretty much replicates the full cinema experience. Only downside is it isn't a shared experience.
Can you read text for long periods on those?
I won't recommend it for doing any kind of coding. its workable but far from ergonomic. That said, my pair is perfect for streaming shows and playing video games. Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market. I think at that point, Id be willing to use it as a virtual monitor.
Noted.
> Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market.
On that day, I'm taking my iPhone, a keyboard, and those future glasses and will work from under a tree.
Movies had a century as one of the main stages for global culture.
That era is ending, and other things are replacing them, mostly based on computers and internet.
If you love movies this is sad, but movies once replaced other beloved things.
The world spins on and nothing is forever. Enjoy the ride!
Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome.
And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.
I for one want new giant stone pyramids. :)
Even within the medium there was a whole generation of beloved silent-film stars that didn't make the transition to talkies. Every era has a beginning and an end.
I think within the next 20 years we will see the rise of AI generated movies custom fit for your pleasure that will contain information to educate you, images to astound you, a story that will pluck at your heart strings and that you will be able to personally influence by your words and choices and reactions.
They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.
I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.
So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.
Yes, and "prestige tv" took off, shifting a lot of viewing to 100 hour TV series.
What was the short?
Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.
I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).
But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!
They didn't that was my point. But if people just go to the food court at the mall and complain there's 90% fast food...
Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.
My take is that the movies you see at the arthouse cinema aren't any better than the big movies, they just have a smaller budget. They come out of the same system and would be just as self-indulgent if they had the resources to be.
It shows you don't watch them, you can obviously find Hollywood-without-the-budget cause the people that work in Hollywood come from somewhere, but you also have things that are completely outside. Some documentary about a Georgian truck driver who goes across the country side selling supplies from the city to the villages with long, no dialog shots that go for several minutes, has nothing to do with Hollywood productions and there's a million fractal things like this that would be way too "boring" for mass consumption.
They don't come out of the same system. A nice chunk of them are self-funded and driven by a passion to tell the story.
What on earth??
> Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.
The thing is, when AAA games or movie studios start to focus on that one thing that "sells best at one moment" everyone else checks out.
I did checked out of games when I realized they are just not made for me anymore, that stuff I liked is looked down at in the industry and they focus on stuff I do not care about. It was similar process with major movies, at some point too little appealed to me, so I stopped caring entirely.
> The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories.
Sure. I like to watch those and I do, on Netflix or whatever. I just do not expect realistic human story or something new from a major Hollywood movie. They are not about any of that.
The mentality of “content creation” plus A/B testing is how we got to Spandex Man #500
This is a good point.
Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves.
And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point where it's safer to sell mediocre and milquetoast movies rather than push an opinionated one and risk blowback.
Look at the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or the Craft 2. Both movies built on a previous proven winner, both original movies had something to say.
Beetlejuice was not only a quirky romp through the afterlife but also a story about aboriginalism vs colonialism and whether it is right for the aboriginals to do horrible things to protect what is theirs, and also a story about how embracing change can help cross generational divides and how accepting people who are different from you can enrich your life.
It was very opinionated and had a lot of great subcontext. Same with the Craft.
The Craft was, on its cover, a story about what teenage girls would do if they got magical powers, which then turned into a series of biopics of the deep emotional damages caused by indifferent and hateful people. The movie dealt with racism, sexual assault, murder, mental illness, self esteem, and self acceptance all in the context of a teenybop horror movie.
Then you look at their sequels.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduced 3 antagonists, Beetlejuice's wife, the boy, and Lydia's boyfriend.
It started three potential plotlines, the soul sucker, the life swapper, and the gold digger, and brought Beetlejuice in to deal with all three of them.
And then, 80% of the way through the movie, it threw all three of the antagonists and plot lines away and then rehashed the climax of the original movie with a slightly different set of clothes on.
What deeper meaning did Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have? None. No one had any value or made any sense. No one in the entire plot was irreplaceable. No one learned any lessons or grew in any measurable way. Nothing actually happened. They all woke up like they had a bad dream after Lydia's father's funeral, the mother died, the gold digger died, and then the story was over. If the movie had not happened nothing would be different for the characters except that maybe the gold digger would have dug more gold or something.
Then, the Craft 2. It's not a horror movie. It's a teenybop movie where girls get magic and do things with it. They have a trans person in it but she doesn't use her magic to address her transness in any way. There's only a tiny drop of racism, and no one has any real deep issues to resolve.
So, instead, they get David Duchovny in to play as some guy who embodies toxic masculinity, but who is also ineffective and purposeless all the way to the very end of the movie, when all of a sudden he goes murder rapey and then gets easily beaten by the power of feminism and witchcraft.
No one learned anything except GIRL POWER. Nothing really changed for anyone. There were no edges in the movie to explore. It was pointless.
Either sequel could have been much more poignant by touching on real issues that people experience. The Craft 2 could have touched on social media and the need to look like you have a perfect life. They could have touched on what a trans woman would do if she could remold her body with magic permanently or semi permanently like the girl did in the first movie. They could have made Nancy a bigger part of the movie and have her deal with David Duchovny instead of it being a girl power movie, and then Nancy could have taught the girls the things she knows being a former vessel of Manon with 25 years to learn and grow from the experience. It could have gone into a demonstration and discussion on how young women have so much to learn from women even 20 years their senior, and how working together and tearing down walls both of age differences but also gender differences can make the world a better place.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have made a really fun story out of any of the three protagonists and plot lines if it had picked and chose one of them to run with and made the others the sub plots. The gold digger plotline could have been about accepting what is different about you and not allowing others to convince you to mask your weirdness. The life swapper plot could have been about learning how to accept that you're a normal person who grew up in a weird household, and how that doesn't make you weird and that it is possible to make both sides work together as long as each side values the other. The soul sucker plotline could have been played for laughs as at the end we could have seen Beetlejuice about to win Lydia only to be thwarted by his actual wife and dragged off into the underworld by the leg by her (and end up happy in the end, maybe seeing him slowly reinflate after she sucked the soul out of him, he he sex joke). All of those options were thrown out of the window and instead we get a meandering pointless movie that would have been fine if it had never existed.
Good movies have an opinion and something to say. Napoleon Dynamite is a perfect example of this. It's a bad movie in every measurable way. It's boring. It's slowly paced. It has no plot. It's like a 2 hour slice of life Jello movie. But then, the point of the movie gets driven in, that everyone has value.
It's a simple message told in a long and occasionally humorous manner, but because they didn't try to piledrive the message into you when it hits it hits hard.
Bad movies ramble even more than I do and never make a point for fear of popping a bubble. And media franchises know this and choose to make them anyway rather than be at risk of any blowback. After all, most movies released by a large franchise are profitable by default. The number of AAA movies that did not make their cost of production back in the last 10 years is vanishingly small, to the point where movies that only make 150% of their production costs are considered box office bombs and franchise killers. (Like the Golden Compass, that made $370+ million and won academy awards on a $180m production cost and was considered enough of a failure to end the entire series)
They know how to make good movies. They know how to tell satisfying stories that keep people wanting more. They know how to make a lot of money doing it.
So why do they keep not doing it?
I believe it's 2 things.
1: Fear of offending people and having massive blowback because of it.
The outrages over stupid things like the Little Mermaid being black is a good example of this. Who cares what color her skin is? She's a fish. If the story is good and told well then what does it matter?
But I get it, you can't convince someone who wants to be upset and outraged as a distraction for their own personal problems to focus on their personal problems instead of screaming about DEI or whatever 4 letter flavor of the day they have to rage about. This much is understandable. But still, that's no excuse for making a bad movie, they could have far more easily found the rage points and dealt with them and left the rest of a good movie alone.
But that brings me to my second point.
2: It's on purpose.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm starting to believe that megaconglomerate media companies are intentionally making unsatisfying movies that are highly titillating for the same reason that Doritos flavors their chips in just such a way that you never get satisfied of eating them, that final burst of zest and flavor that would put you over the edge always just out of reach.
It's like the torture of Tantalus, satisfaction always being just outside of arms reach, but knowing that it's close, and occasionally actually satisfying the itch (like any good skinner box) keeps us diving in, spending money, buying merch, showing our love and support for the franchises that once scratched the itch for us in hopes that it will scratch it again next time.
They're doing it on purpose because they know that if you didn't get what you wanted out of this movie, you'll go watch another, or a TV show, or read a book, or play a game, something, because you came to get satisfaction. And if they blue ball you just right, you'll keep spending money until you can't afford to spend any more in hopes that you'll finally get what you're looking for.
I think it's on purpose and I think it will keep getting worse until it cannot get any worse, and then it will be replaced with something else that will be massively satisfying for a while at least.
I feel the same way about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Napoleon Dynamite, but just wanted to add that Michael Keaton’s portrayal was still brilliant and I’m happy he could still pull it off.
The plot and all the non-Beetlejuice scenes were a waste of time.
> On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
Well stillsuits are supposed to collect and preserve moisture and shield from heat in extremely harsh environment. I would sort of expect that 8k years in the future some tech for that would be close to the skin, rather than waving thin layers like bedouins or touaregs use.
Drive-ins are nice in smaller towns
The Drive-in will never die.
Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers
I assumed those box office records were also dependent upon global ticket sales vs domestic.
Still, surprising statistics.
A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
IMO actual quality components are still just as remote as 20 years ago. A proper setup is more or less the same technology as it has been for decades: good speakers, good amplifier, placed appropriately, and none of this has really seen any democratization. People buy sound bars and such but these are a far cry to what an actual sound system is like that you probably need to spend in the 4 figures to achieve. Buy enough sound bars that fall apart in a couple years for a couple hundred dollars and you could have bought a proper amplifier, speakers, in a setup that is actually modular, expandable, upgradeable, and serviceable.
I have never heard of sound bars falling apart after a couple years, is that common? Every piece of sound equipment I've ever bought has lasted at least 15 years, my sound bar is 5 years old.
In general I think the sound bar audience is different from the hi-fi audio audience. I was fine with using the TV's built-in speakers until LCD TVs took over from CRTs and the built-in speakers became much tinnier and quieter because they couldn't fit quality speakers in a flatscreen TV case. I suspect most people who buy sound bars are in a similar situation.
> it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?
Right, there are only so many walls to paint in a cave…
> because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm.
> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
In fact... it looks like they've slightly dropped.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/14kznfv/movie_ti...
Dropped? You've produced a graph showing they've been on the increase for the past 30 years.
And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11? A discount matinee viewing at my local theaters is from $17 to $20. $20-$23 if you go in the evening. The lowest price ticket, a Tuesday noon showing, is $12.
I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).
> And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11?
Places where real estate is cheaper than wherever you live.
My local Cinemark has tickets for $5.50, $8.50... you're probably in a premium market.
$11 sounds about right to me. It's an average so some areas will be higher and others lower but $23 sounds awful.
In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.
> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture
Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.
In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.
Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.
Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.
I don't tend to like generational analysis because it obscures the Diffusion of innovations analysis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.
Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")
Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".
I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.
Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.
Anime is going to explode. Just did some google fu and apparently 50% of millenials and gen z watch anime weekly. Boomers probably watch almost zero anime so once the demographics shift in 30-40 years, you might expect half of all americans to watch anime weekly by these trends. And this is just considering present rates not the fact that these rates have been increasing over time.
Yeah, the forecast I saw researching my comment is it is going to get to about $8b by 2033 - which will make it about as big as the movie box office sales industry.
Riffing on your SpongeBob comments.
It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.
Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.
They are hampering discoverability.
> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service
I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.
> They are hampering discoverability.
At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
> At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.
I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.
How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much.
I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?
My complaint is that the repeat the same titles in multiple rows on the same screen.
Oh right, that’s bad.
I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.
is it true that anime is more literalist than cinema? assuming we're looking at anime with an older target market than kids
Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.
Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.
The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.
How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)
That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.
I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.
On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.
Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.
Anime is more a medium than a genre; it's like saying one does not like claymation or live-action movies.
Please, anime today is purely for children and teenagers. The golden age of serious anime is long over.
What in your mind was the golden age of serious anime? There's tons of trash today (cough 99% of isekai cough), but there was plenty of trash in almost any era of anime. How much god awful "harem anime" came out in the 90s/00s?
The ratio of diamond to coal is the point. Of course you may always find an exception, but like you say there's tons of trash today.
People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s it isn't something I just made up. On average there is an undeniable drop in animation quality and story quality compared to past eras.
Even then, the adult stuff was still appealing to me as a kid. Take me back to Cowboy Bebop on Toonami..
Your Name is a title that for me reminded me why I became an anime fan many years ago. In 2016 when it came out, anime as a whole was well into its slop era, but Your Name has near Ghibli tier animation and powerful emotional themes rooted in both traditional and modern Japanese culture. It was the exception that proved the rule about anime slop.
My social circle is into afrobeats and amapiano and, to a much lesser extent, american film. I think people just gravitate towards their niche.
Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.
There's a lot of debate in this thread about the merits of watching movies in the theater vs home, but my overall movie watching is way down, regardless of venue. I'm sure I watch less than one movie per month. I used to watch tons when I was younger.
Unrelated, I wish there were small screening theaters where small groups of people could watch films on-demand, drawing on a massive catalog.
> Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
This looks incorrect, at least according to Wikipedia; its list of films by box office admissions[1] includes a few Chinese movies from the 1980s with higher numbers.
Unless the 80s don’t count as modern times - but I’d say it’s not that far from the 90s.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_by_box_office_...
I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.
It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.
Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.
So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.
That's weird. Where I am, if you buy tickets online you get a QR code. At the theater, there's someone in front who scans your QR code and gives you a physical ticket. That ticket is not really checked, but there is always someone there paying attention to folks walking in.
Most still do cursorily check tickets (sometimes at the concession stand itself) but they’d probably almost prefer you buy popcorn and no ticket.
That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.
Movie studios could care less if a billion people watch a movie or if 1 person sees it.
They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.
If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?
Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM
The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film. Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.
I'd be fine with the length if they actually used the time for something good.
If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.
Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.
Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...
Bit of a tight line to walk. Longer movies mean fewer showings per day. When I saw that Oppenheimer was three hours long -I want to watch that at home so I can take a bathroom break/snacks so a personal pause button is an improvement on the theater.
If movies are regularly going to be 3 hours long, movie theatres need to bring back intermission breaks.
I've always thought this would make sense.
Often during a three hour film I've ran out of refreshments and would like to buy a drink or something for the last hour.
It used to be fairly common with the big "epic" films. And probably no live theater production is going to go much over 90 minutes without an intermission.
What about all the lower budget 1-5M contemporary films from the 90s? There's no new directors like Kevin Smith / Quinten Tarantino anymore.
2002 doesn't look like the interesting year to me. It seems like 2020 and the pandemic is where the most significant drop happened. So we're really looking at post pandemic recovery since that time. How much of the lower numbers are due to theater closures and / or high inflation since then?
Somewhere, Cameron admits he rereleased Avatar to theaters ahead of Avatar 2 so it would beat Endgame. He only needed 8 million more to stay on top, he got 134.
oh wow, Covid really spell the death of movie theaters, and it's never going to recover.
ONLY because of streaming services. The industry exploded after the 1918 flu.
Was it because of the flu of because of the war?
It's an even worse curve if you'd account for the huge population growth since 2002.
When movies are made for entertainments sake, they can still do well. ( Top Gun 2, for example ).
I’m really looking forward to the Space Balls sequel. I have hopes that one will be good.
If movie needs number to be distinguishable then it is probably not good.
Good thing it was called Top Gun: Maverick, then! No number necessary. :-)
I don't know that I agree "Does the sequel dramatically change the naming convention" is a particularly powerful marker of quality.
Unfortunately, Top Gun 2 was not "for entertainment's sake" it was another round of US military advertising/propaganda, just like the first one.
If it wasn't sufficiently entertaining, it would be ineffective as propaganda.
Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...
It's still not the same as the cinema experience.
But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.
Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.
I think some films, especially movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator. Movies are made for USA and Chinese audiences first, but they are also made to be easily sold in Europe.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
Not disagreeing with the economics behind it, but this movie-goer walked away decades ago when the "super hero" genre became Hollywood's focus.
Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.
Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.
Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.
Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.
While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.
Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.
> movies that aspire to win academy awards, are meant to be played to the world wide lowest common denominator
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
we made darn near the same comment. interesting Serpell called out Anora specifically
Anora, Oppenheimer, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies. the academy has many issues but i dont think its catering to mass appeal and dumbing down
Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
What was complicated at all about Oppenheimer?
Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?
From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.
They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.
i CERTAINLY agree that theres tons of new literalism in Oppenheimer. i was mentioning that Oppenheimer is not catering to the lowest common denominator in order to get an Oscar. Oscars trade on belabored basic character drama and many of the things you listed. mostly depends on directors who the academy think are "deserving" at the moment
Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
The Wachowski's once commented that the Red Pill movement was a message to them telling them to never be subtle again.
Another data point. Most people seem to think that replicants are detected because they are unemotional.
I would prefer filmmakers not assume the least of their audiences, but I would also rather that audiences not give them reason to.
The creator of The Boys has also said he needs to beat people over the head so he doesn't have a similar situation to Mad Men or Breaking Bad, where people think the main character is a hero to emulate
It was hilarious when the far-right noticed, IIRC on season 3 of The Boys, that they were being mocked.
And just look at all Star Wars fans cosplaying as stormtroopers. It even says “evil empire” in the first movie intro. You can’t get much more obvious than George Lucas.
The Star Wars fans aren't missing that they're dressing up as the bad guys. People dress up as evil characters all the time.
People have been consciously cosplaying as villains for decades because pretending to be evil can be fun as hell; I'm not sure what that's supposed to illustrate, really.
Are you saying people are mistakenly thinking that the stormtroopers are “good guys” and wouldn’t play them if they’d realized they are “bad guys”?
Yeah, I guess The same problem exists with The Watchmen and Fight Club.
I found it fascinating how the term snowflake was changed because the character that people admired told their proxies that they were not snowflakes. The meaning at the time was that they were homogenous and unremarkable. Snowflakes represented the opposite where each individual snowflake has a unique pattern. That viewpoint was not empowering so they took the metaphor to be about the fragility of snowflakes.
Calling the literalism "new" implies it wasn't present in older pics. You can go back to 1997 when Good Will Hunting won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
> Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich
Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich!
Being John Malkovich is film for film people.
The only thing I remember from Good Will Hunting was Elliot Smith's soundtrack, ha ha.
I'm convinced it has to do with the increased importance of the overseas markets, these movies now must make it past Chinese censors and make sense for people that don't natively speak English or understands its nuances. Showing a flashback scene and swapping in the government approved voice over is a better business decision than not releasing the movie in insert country here.
Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
How are language/nuances relevant to the sword/trump tower label examples?
And the second example makes it harder by referencing a bell and an exchange
The bean counters ruin everything with product placement, taking out bits that "offend" certain censors, and explaining jokes. Let them have their own edited versions that suck.
Hard agree. In what other art forms are people expected to produce for "global appeal"? A lot of my enjoyment of books and music IS the fact that I "don't get it", and slowly learning the cultural references is fun and good for personal development
Part of it is that modern mainstream movies are so expensive to make. They need to be global to recoup their expenses.
Much like videogames, the answer seems to be to look for indie and foreign works with less pressure on them to be easily consumable.
If they were good they wouldn't have to be so expensive.
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
Well I think that movie is great for reasons other than being abstract.
I think what this means is that the movies now care whether the least-common-denominator viewers get their "point."
Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it.
Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The ability to attach multiple meanings, even multiple conflicting meanings, was seen as an inevitable aspect of art that should be embraced and engaged with. It was accepted that people would see a different movie depending on their background, their personal history, and their awareness of cinematic language. Supporting multiple readings was seen as a sign of depth and complexity, not necessarily a weakness.
Now the movies take a pragmatic, engineered approach to delivering a message. Ambiguity must be squashed. Viewer differences must be made irrelevant. The message takes precedence over art.
I think the interesting question is, why does the message now take precedence over everything else? What has changed? I see two possible answers.
First possibility, the audience demands a message. If the least-common-denominator viewer demands a message, and you are in the business of servicing that demand, you have to make sure you avoid any possible mishaps or misunderstandings in the delivery.
Second possibility, the makers of movies derive some personal satisfaction or social gain from broadcasting a message to the masses. They see the movies as propaganda rather than art. (Or perhaps a less active motivation: the makers of movies are afraid that there might be blowback from viewers attaching an unsavory meaning to a movie. They want to make sure that their movie doesn't become like Fight Club, a proudly embraced symbol of what it was meant to critique.)
Either of these would explain why movies are now engineered to deliver a single, unmistakable message at the expense of art and enjoyability. Or maybe there's another explanation. I'm just spitballing. I'd love to read more by somebody close enough to actually know what they're talking about.
One interesting example here is Joker. It seems like the filmmakers did not like the audience they attracted with the first film, nor the messages that this audience took away. So the sequel seems like it was intentionally designed to piss that audience off.
The Matrix is an earlier and I think more impactful example of this. That is a movie made by two trans filmmakers and with hindsight it is clearly an exploration of their own identities. Yet somehow it has been co-opted by people with diametrically opposed political and gender ideologies[1]. That has to be incredibly frustrating as an artist and I bet many people have seen that sort of reaction and go out of their way to make it more difficult for people to be that wrong about their art.
[1] - https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...
The idea of living in a simulation was well imagined separate from trans identity.
The people in the Matrix aren't trans -- they are the same people in the same bodies whether they are in or out of simulation.
It's OK for a trans person to make a movie with no trans content that doesn't only make sense from a trans perspective.
This is an ironic reply as like those fans of the Matrix, you appear to be reading something different in what I said than what I intended.
I'm not saying the trans reading of The Matrix is the only valid reading of that movie. However, anti-trans folks and their ideologically peers reading the movie as supporting their worldview is objectively not the intended reading and therefore is likely incredibly frustrating to the trans creators. It is easy to imagine other authors seeing that and wanting to avoid that type of gross misreading of their work.
Might it be as simple as: before, the LCD viewer who didn't get it had no platform, now they do? Responsiveness to Rotten Tomatoes instead of Roger Ebert?
I am 100% of the opinion that it’s (2), in no small part because the writers themselves say as much frequently and vociferously at every opportunity. This isn’t reading some hidden meaning, this is just listening to what they say when they’re interviewed.
The two most common themes I hear from writers are intense narcissism, feeling deeply their own personal experience is something anyone else should care about, and activism/social justice/messaging, where they’re pushing a particular political narrative. It’s why we’ve seen the death of truly morally ambiguous characters or even antiheroes - they threaten the clear and unambiguous message the writer wants to send. Stories aren’t for the audience to interpret but for the writer to preach.
And again this isn’t inference. This is reading and watching interviews with writers, showrunners, producers, etc.
Audiences are intensely more political nowadays. They want that.
I have definitely noticed the same occurring in North American cinema, but I do not think this is a new phenomenon. Rather, it's just a symptom of the increased commercialization of indie cinema - commercialization requiring film for all to understand.
If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.
For other relatively recent movies I'd add:
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18469872/[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26440619/
are movies like Evil Does Not Exist as popular in Japan as the examples in the article though? there must be a lot of similar niche movies made in the US
Evil Does Not exist is Ryusuke Hamaguchi's first movie after the internationally successful Drive My Car, so I would hope there would be some domestic support but that might be pure naivety on my part.
I thought Banshees of Inisherin was quite literal. Two Irish friends are screaming at each other while a literal civil war is going on around them.
I found it pretty disappointing for that reason compared to McDonagh’s other movies which are much less literal.
> a symptom of the increased commercialization
If it's about what people want to see, could it be that people cannot deal with insecurity anymore? We cannot deal with not knowing. We have to know for sure, so we can feel secure.
I can't speak for others, but I have a pretty limited tolerance for very explicit, heavy depictions of violence, for bad things happening to animals, or for downer endings.
I fully recognize that these don't make for bad cinema. I also recognize that they're often more effective as surprises. But they are going to dramatically cut into how much I enjoy a movie. And movies aren't like books, where if the tone isn't quite what you're in the mood for you just stop reading, they're more immediately confrontational, and backing out is a bigger deal (and almost a faux pas, walking out of a movie is seen as commentary on its quality). Previews are also going to avoid spoiling twists or dramatic moments, which, again, makes sense, but makes them poor tools for assessing tone. This means I'm often tempted to read the plot summary before watching, which feels silly, but if I want to challenge myself and watch things not quite to my taste and things that aren't just kid's movies without just sometimes paying for the pleasure of having a bad time, I'm not sure how else to approach it.
It also feels like other people have almost the opposite perspective, where of a movie doesn't have something really emotionally heavy or challenging to watch they can't take it seriously. I'm not sure what makes sense here, and maybe my tastes are just the problem, but it feels bad to spend fifteen dollars and two hours of my time to be in a space that's too loud, has only very expensive food, and leave depressed by what feels to be to be an overly cynical or myopic message or an artistic vision obsessively depicting the many ways human beings can be physically harmed, in as much detail as possible. Again, I don't think it's bad or wrong, I certainly don't want it to be banned or require disclosure, I just struggle to decide where I fit in the market, and I worry that my purchasing patterns support a narrative that leads to less of what I want.
I'm surprised they call out the Conclave as an example of a good movie. It's not a bad movie, but the final twist (I'm not going to spoil it) is way over the top and almost absurdly Hollywood.
It wasn't just the ending. Any time a priest casually breaks the seal of the confessional and nobody bats an eye, it creates this weird surreal effect where you can't even tell if the author is aware of what he's doing.
Without spoiling the twist, I question whether it’s “over the top.” The specific kind of anxiety alluded to by Conclave about popes is almost a thousand years old and has resurged several times.
The guy is actually way too unspecific about the details there to make much sense of the canonical relevance, which renders the resulting anxiety rather comical.
This spoiler-dogeing (pun intended) makes this comment too unspecific to respond to unfortunately, as it's not clear what you found unspecific. It's understood enough by the person he's telling it to, and it makes sense to be beating-around-bush about a topic that could get the person who's telling it in trouble.
Fine, Caesar 7 then for spoilers.
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And called out the second part of Dune as a bad film. It got written off as simply a "sci-fi sequel"; I think for that movie in particular it is more fair to say that doing the book justice couldn't be done in a single film as the source material is extraordinarily dense.
LOTR is a fascinating counter example; each book is quite dense but was able to be made into a single (albeit long) film. Part of that I think is because a lot of the density of those books is exquisite detailing of the animated natural world of the books; a picture is worth a thousand words may be obnoxiously overused but apropos in this case. The movies seemed to understand the animate life force of the visual landscape and so were able to say a lot visually.
I just don't see Dune: Part II as a true sequel in the traditional sense of the term (though perhaps the literal sense of the term, despite literalism being apparently despised by the articles author).
Great acting, great filming, awful ending.
> absurdly Hollywood
Happy-end with sequel hook?
I see few Americans in the credits. Did you mean absurdly following in the Hollywood style, or are the handful of Americans involved in that film enough to make it "Hollywood"? Genuinely asking. Is Hollywood a place, a process, or a result?
Very little of "Hollywood" is about the place today. Movies are often filmed outside of it for tax purposes. Referencing it is almost always about either the style or the clique of people who engender the style.
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igz7TmsE1Mk
I noticed American shows and movies demographically aimed primarily at kids often slip in cultural references and subtle dirty jokes aimed at keeping older people engaged. Was or is this still a thing in your domain?
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
> Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.
Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.
Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.
It reminds me of the classic tweet:
'Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am'
Some writers are certainly taking cues from the criticisms that tweet was mocking. Or were the same people making those criticisms.
> Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?
Frankly American superhero comics also have(/had) notoriously ex positive dialogue. I feel like it has its DNA in classic pulp books, which, like comics and shonen, are long form stories in a short form format, which can't rely on their readers having read the previous issue(s) (or sometimes just want to refresh memories because it's been a while).
TV these days has recaps, I recently read the third book in a fantasy trilogy that tried a recap, but '"Ok, but what are we going to do about the dark lord?' The dark lord, Jathaniel, had turned out to be the actual murderer of Pomme, Gam's dad, who we had all thought committed suicide. He was seeking the crystals of wonder..." is still very common in modern books. Comics and cartoons are expected to have much less narration, so they tend to put refreshers like this in dialogue. Movies do that to make themselves feel like comics or cartoons. I'm not sure why non comic or cartoon movies do that.
Readers actually enjoy "on the nose" dialogue...depending on the genre.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
> watched in the background while people are doing something else.
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
> people who have intercourse while staring at their phones
This can’t be real. Surely no one does this. Do people do this?
I doubt it. Though, amusingly, people notoriously put on Netflix with the intention of having sex. Though the general expectation is that they're focusing on the sex to the detriment of the Netflix, not the other way around.
It's a bit odd to declare that there's no point in doing something a lot of people do, especially if it involves entertainment where the only possible point is the enjoyment of the person doing it, and not any sort of objective outcome.
Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
Birdman's ending is atrocious, but the main problem ain't even there. The movie is just a giant pile of pretentious nothingness, I can't even remember what was the point of it. Hollywood movies from the last 2 decades or so are just disposable.
Hey, I kinda enjoyed Birdman!
I agree, its for the same reason that trailers now have little trailers in the beginning. I mean really, a trailer for a trailer? Apparently its required to keep retention up because even adults are now children that need to be spoon fed.
That sounds like a different issue. With low quality "information" thrust at people from all sides, you have to immediately prove that you're not just AI slop video #63547, because I'm seeing your video on a platform that mostly delivers AI slop that I will scroll past within 3 seconds.
Why am I on a platform that mostly delivers slop? That's a trillion dollar question. The advertising industry won.
Also because if I was on a non-slop platform, it wouldn't be showing me your ad because ads are slop.
I've spent 20 years working in Hollywood. This is definitely not anything new, but we are in an up-cycle. Ambiguity is hard to tolerate, in life, in general. Ambiguity is also where personal meaning can arise. However in hard times (economically, culturally, politically, existentially... we're currently in all 4), market forces drive things away from ambiguity and toward one-pointedness. This is reflected in the world of trailers even more clearly than in the world of films - the trailers often specifically highlight exactly the kinds of moments this writer is critiquing, as if the purpose of film is to trade in such moments; the underlying conceit is something like "populist memes are a commodity."
This is what is currently driving pop culture; the commodification of the meme. Movies aspire to be memes - the dominant means of expression and the atomic unit of culture in the present moment.
They used to aspire to be themselves (movies, for their own sake). IMO that ended around 2008. The Dark Knight was the end and Iron Man was the beginning of a new Hollywood cycle; defined by the movie's ability to trade in this currency - memes - which stand alone, isolated, traded out of context of an entire narrative.
Further reading for whoever is interested: Society of the Spectacle by Debord (re: the degradation of being into having, having into mere appearing, as a universal and ubiquitous byproduct of the core function of capital which is commodification)... and Man and His Symbols (re: the difference between a symbol, which is universal and carries a wealth of meaning, and a sign, which is contextual/temporary and carries a fixed meaning).
Would the void of physical medium like VHS and DVD be part of the issue?
Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.
With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.
This phenomenon isn't exclusive to film or even fiction.
A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.
A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."
And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.
I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.
That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.
Given these three things:
- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.
- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.
- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.
it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.
It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.
I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?
I found the thesis of this article difficult to nail down, the examples were all over the place.
It's a NewYorker article, what did you expect? I personally find anything writen there basically unreadable.
I wonder how much of the problem is the massive influx of streaming platform money to occupy talented directors, writers, and other people who make films. Why risk a Hollywood release when you can get prepaid for your work?
This. Also, long-form high-budget "tv" on streaming services is a better way to tell longer, more interesting stories. See eg "The Expanse" (based on the phenomenal novels by James SA Corey).
Are the streaming films without "Literalism"?
I read the first three paragraphs and thought it was an homage to McSweeny's Internet Tendency. But apparently those are real scenes. While writing this reply I kept coming up with examples from decades past, but realized I was confusing obvious subtext with literalism. Hard to avoid. I'm willing to embrace this as a new art form challenge: how LITTLE metaphor can a writer use until the final composition it inverts itself and becomes something completely new? Like Dogme95 but for the text: no tense, no adjectives, no indirect objetcts. I mean, the writing is the equivalent of first-grade reading texts (See Jane Run), but can that many artists really avoid generating something meaningful behind the text? I'm drunkenly optimistic this evening.
Gonna take this opportunity to recommend Sovereign.
Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.
I just wish they'd cease using the two-strip Technicolor orange-and-blue.
> Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content. Fashion capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks: we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth. Image generators churn out ersatz versions of da Vinci and van Gogh. And, in every case, banal commentary is slowly occluding the art, seeping into it in boldface titles or explainers that speak over the sound or cover the image.
It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.
Somewhat related, there have been cases where Netflix executives chastised their movie and show writers for "not being second screen enough [0]; that is, since many people put on a show as essentially white noise in the background while they scroll on their phones, the content cannot be too cerebral and require dedicated attention.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
Audiences are increasingly distracted when watching movies and TV shows: the scripts have to be literal.
Is this "new" literalism, or just storytelling as it has always been in movies? I've been on a Billy Wilder kick lately, and there are still a lot of scenes in these 70 year old movies where the subtext gets spoken out loud.
New Yorker is plagued by shallow snobbery. A kind of assumed elitism based on geographic location and a specific demographic. What makes their opinions so correct? Rich people agree with them.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
"I don't have to read or argue with this, it's automatically bad because uh elitism"
Now that's what I call a luxury belief!
That's not exactly what is meant by luxury beliefs. Luxury beliefs aren't simply beliefs that rich people hold. It more refers to social opinions which would (allegedly) impose high costs on the poor, but from which the wealthy would be insulated from the consequences. Something like "defund the police" is usually pointed to as an example of a luxury belief. The poor, who live in high crime areas, would see crime go up and bear the brunt of the consequences. Whereas the rich, who live in pricey, low crime neighborhoods, wouldn't see much of a change and would be able to afford private security anyhow if they did.
It's a luxury belief in the sense that they're in a position to have an impact on the zeitgeist. People have been complaining about bad movies for a while now but now The New Yorker has an opinion. The rest of us proles can't afford Broadway. We get what we're served.
That article felt eerily like AI writing. Lots of words and few ideas, and the ideas they had were poorly explained...
Bizarre.
The most fascinating achievement of AI is that so many people became convinced that humans were flawless creators just 3 years ago.
Eh, People on their phones can’t be bothered with following plot lines everything has to be telegraphed
> everything has to be telegraphed
Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.
Not that I was lacking reasons to nit resubscribe to Netflix but wow...
Or, people who want complex plots dont watch blockbuster films; they watch indie movies.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
Fry: Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.
Futurama nailed it.
It's a shame, because in an era when One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Annie Hall were winning Best Picture the blockbuster film and "indie" film were harder to differentiate.
I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
"Telegraph" is a bit of an unfortunate word because when used metaphorically it has come to have two almost diametrically opposed meanings. I think that's what's tripping you up.
Ok, given that then I think the next thing that is tripping me up is that the author of the New Yorker article is writing in a way that is itself being very literalist.
I read through the whole article looking for something that is insightful, but it feels as if the author is beating a dead horse the way the examples does the same. Maybe experiencing that is the point, but I can't help but thinking it was all a waste of time.
I think it is just as likely the other way around
People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it
If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
Observe somebody browsing Tiktok/Instagram/YouTube Shorts. People compulsively swipe on to the next reel if the one they're watching doesn't hook them in within the first second.
Right, because the much vaunted Tik-Tok algorithm starts a stopwatch when the clip begins in order to determine whether or not to serve you more content like it.
> attention span.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
I noticed this recently when I decided to watch Hitchcock's 'The Birds.'
It was almost absurd to me not only how bland and drawn out most scenes were, but how absolutely poorly acted it was. If it were not famous(ie didn't exist), and updated to today's vernacular and shot scene for scene, it would absolutely get reamed by critics.
Funny how much changes in just a generation or two.
Old movies are kind of slow but I'm much less frustrated because they are short: an hour, at most two. That's more than enough to tell a story. Modern movies are two hours at minimum with some crossing over three with absolutely nothing to tell (e.g Babylon 2022, completely pissed me off).
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
> If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Average movie length is increasing every year.
I don't think people know about classic movies, or know that they have access to classic movies (hint: libraries).
This people though has been catching up on a century of classic films. There are plenty of lists around on the internet if you wanted to get started. The AFI Top 100 is a gentle introduction to the (American-only) classics. There are deeper cuts when you are ready to saddle up for "1001 Movies" instead. (Warning, you could be starting down a journey that will involve the next eight years of your life.)
Go to a restaurant and watch any "romantic" couple, what they do. Pay attention to each other, talk? Nah, stare at their own screens, and every two minutes or so show each other a cute cat video and go "awww!"; pathetic.
You don't really need a critic to see that it has spread everywhere. People not just adore, they demand to be given a three paragraph summary and a moral of the story for everything, no matter which era, which genre, or how much magnificent embroidery was presented to them. So-called Web 2.0 review platforms have succumbed under the weight of people complaining about not being given clear instructions by the authors, and people trying to invent those clear instructions on “understanding” the work themselves. It seems that the simple truth that the whole point of work of art is how it starts processes in your very own head is a secret which is well hidden from those who expect that others can do thinking in their stead, and just state the “results”.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
This article is not professionally written. Somebody get this writer an editor
There are movie critics that go on a rollercoaster ride and then complain about a lack of subtext
Somewhere in the 2000s a lot was lost, after all the best selling movies at the time were literally children's tales.
I would put the downward trend beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark.
> Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.
Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
It’s kind of disingenuous to lead with an example from Megalopolis like it represents something about the culture.
This is nothing new. Critics wanna be challenged. Audiences don’t.
Here’s the thing. For all the movies that have tired tropes and blatant literalism, there’s a new movie watcher that hasn’t experienced it before. They have the same right to watching a new movie with a tired trop — because to them, it’s not yet tired.
There are a lot of things that bother me in recent movies. I feel like there's a "yay, we're making a movie!" attitude, where people are more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture rather than simply doing their job to the best of their ability.
The most egregious example is the amount of Wilhelm Screams I've heard, absolutely crammed into media. It's a proclamation of, "I'm a sound editor, and I'm in on the joke!" but all it does is pull me out of the story completely.
Another sound editor example is the amount of ice clinking in glasses and sloshing sounds of drinks, as if the protagonist's long-neck beer bottle is a half-empty jug being jerked around.
Impressive stunts are virtually non-existent now. Instead, they drive a custom-built, tubular-frame car, swerving wildly, while the camera jerks around on a crane. Everything is reskinned using CGI, and the end result is the desired car being driven by an apparent maniac who chooses a profoundly sub-optimal path through traffic.
Writers have to point out their cleverness in order to announce to the audience how clever they're being. It reminds me of eye-rollingly clever newspaper headlines.
Everything has been turned up to 11, but in the lamest way possible.
> more concerned with proving that they're part of a culture
So true! This feeling is everywhere in movies now.
It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore. The last time I remember watching a movie and thinking "That was pretty good" was the Dune films. Before that I can't even remember. I watched Thunderbolts and remember I thought it was the first Marvel movie that wasn't just terrible since End Game and that was primarily due to the Russian guy as a comedy source.
>It seems at least to me that they don't really make very good movies anymore
There are plenty of good films out there. Ignore Hollyood, broaden your horizon
I'm open to suggestions...
So personally I like films that makes me feel something without that feeling being explicitly forced upon me. This is an incredible thing to achieve that only a select few directors can do. Not “baiting” the viewers into emotions but also not being cold at the same time. Just by showing and how do they show it. Like the case of “a picture is worth a thousand words”. It’s a razor thin line but that makes these films I enjoy special and sincere.
(I'll only mentions stuff from the 21st century because otherwise I'd sit here for days)
I love japanese cinema so I'm very biased towards films from there.
- The Taste of Tea (2004) from Katsuhito Ishii
- Nobody Knows (2004) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tony Takitani (2004) from Jun Ichikawa
- Memories of Matsuko (2006) from Tetsuya Nakashima
- Departures (2008) from Yojiro Takita
- Still Walking (2008) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tokyo Sonata (2008) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- One Million Yen Girl (2008) from Yuki Tanada
- Haru’s Journey (2010) from Masahiro Kobayashi
- Story of Yonosuke (2013) from Shuichi Okita
- Shoplifters (2018) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Drive My Car (2021) from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
Two korean film I've really liked
- The Handmaiden (2016) from Park Chan-wook
- Pieta (2012) from Kim Ki-duk
A chinese film I've seen recently and it was pretty good
- Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) from Diao Yi-nan
Iranian films are incredibly good and crazy what they could make despite the situation there
- A Separation (2011) from Asghar Farhadi
- Taxi (2015) from Jafar Panahi
- The Salesman (2016) from Asghar Farhadi
- There Is No Evil (2020) from Mohammad Rasoulof
- My Favourite Cake (2024) from Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha
Some european films I've enjoyed
- Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé
- Leviathan (2014) from Andrey Zvyagintsev
- Alcarràs (2022) from Carla Simón
- Fallen Leaves (2023) from Aki Kaurismäki
And last but not least some actual Hollywood films that I think are pretty good
- The Tree of Life (2011) from Terrence Malick
- Cloud Atlas (2012) from Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
- First Reformed (2017) from Paul Schrader
- Nickel Boys (2024) from RaMell Ross
Not sure Ive ever watched a foreign film. Ill take a look. Appreciate you taking the time to write this out
I think there's a combination of causes for this: People looking at their phones and only half-watching most of the movie, "streamlining" the English in movies to make translator's lives easier, a big smile from Mr. 10tril AUM for making it accessible, and of course good-old "enshittification" (if everyone becomes accustomed to lazy plots, they won't notice as they get even lazier)
I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".
I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.
As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
The kind of criticism this author is imposing, I honestly feel like it could be applied to every movie ever if you were nitpicky enough.
The industry should be so lucky as to be plagued with something as well-defined as "literalism". Right now the industry is plagued with writers who would fail Writing 101. Which I mean fully literally. Failing grade, please retake the class, no credit.
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
Haha, the real reason is that people can’t get a joke. One classic I saw is that pg made some comment about philosophy and some other guy went “Looks like you had a bad philosophy class” to which pg replied “I’ve had many”.
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice. All good artists know that and intentionally manipulate that. This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.
From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships. As in, they make choice to stay, despite knowing this is bad for them. I did not found sexual assault visuals, only abstract video with words and pink colors. The lyrics do not come across to me as "not putting on any kid gloves", they are gentle. They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
> You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
There are songs that make me feel weird about liking them, but not this one. This one was intentionally made to make me like it.
I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
> The majority of music communication is not in lyrics, but in sound and tone of voice.
That could maybe be argued for music which is released as music. This song isn't stand-alone, it's part of a musical. You can't take it out of its context and then complain it doesn't make sense.
> This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.
Maybe it makes you feel good. It makes me feel conflicted.
> From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships.
I mean that's part of the point. Angel thinks they themselves are to blame for the situation they find themselves in. Which isn't true of course, but that's how it goes with abuse.
> I did not found sexual assault visuals
Well look closer then. Angels whole thing is that he puts on an act of liking all the shit happening to him. But it's pretty clearly an act in the video.
> They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
Part of angel DOES want some of those things to happen. There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it. That doesn't make the relationship any less abusive.
> I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
I agree it's a song about why someone would stay in an abusive relationship. That doesn't mean it's glamorizing abusive relationships though. I don't really care if people dislike the song, it's parsing the song as somehow being pro-abuse where I get annoyed, because it clearly isn't. It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
I did not said the song makes no sense. It makes perfect sense. And it is in fact released as a standalone song.
> Well look closer then
As I said, I did not found sexual assault visuals. Only abstract abstract video with words and pink colors.
> There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it.
Sure, but there is nothing about song itself that would make one feel bad about it. Or even be aware it is sexual assault what is going on. You have to bring that out from somewhere else.
> It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
I do not think it is realistic portrayal of such relationship. It is glamorous portrayal. It makes you feel the harmful part feels good and is worth it. Realistic portrayal would had more pain in it, it would had mix of negative emotions in it. It would show dark side and pain, not just rational realization "this is harmful but I want it".
People in abusive relationship do not feel just the addiction and choice part. They do have fair amount of suffering, fear, feeling like they cant mixed in. They do not feel it is sweet. This song feels sweet.
If you can't see the negatives and the dark sides in that music video I dunno what to tell you. To me they are clearly and obviously there.
Just look at how often political campaigns use songs that sound like upbeat patriotic anthems, but are the total opposite if you actually listen to the words. Using "Born in the USA" for a "woo America!" rally is rather awkward. And of course it's not a new thing; Reagan used that song four decades ago.
Ye it is strange how few seem to listen to the lyrics. But then again it means you can get a way with listen to really radical music in plain sight.
1. People are indeed stupid. I don't understand why there's so much belief in human intelligence while there's so much proof of the contrary
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
Finding media to be not to your liking is fine. Only half engaging with it and then calling out the authors as being in favor of sexual assault because you misread what's going on is absurd. That's the behavior I am complaining about.
For the less enlightened of us, what is the joke?
The way I read it, the joke is just owning the insult in a good way.
It works here on multiple levels, because first, owning the insult is not expected, so that's already a surprise, which can work as a joke.
Then, by actually admitting to the many bad classes, it signals that the author can actually tell good from bad, implying knowledge about the matter after all, refuting the argument in the insult (that he is bad in philosophy because he had bad philosophy classes).
Third, it's a very short, snappy response, in vein of the insult, making the author look competent.
First guy says something about philosophy.
Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.
First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.
But it is not funny. It is not a joke. It is just not engaging with the implied "you do not know what you talk about here" ... which is entirely valid, but not exactly a joke.
We can't know if it was a joke or not, but comes across as someone trying to be funny.
There doesn't have to be a joke. If you're rich enough people feel like they have to laugh at your jokes whether or not they are funny. That's the saddest thing about Elon Musk.
I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.
I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.
Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
Most movies are pretty bad. Always have been. I feel like I got scammed for paying to see 28 Years Later.
The threequel zombie movie lacked too much subtlety for you?
Quadquel?
There is another (and supposedly final) in January 2026.
It's actually a sort of standing joke that trilogies are sometimes 4-fold. Trivial Pursuit used that answer as one of their copyright test questions (if your game replicates our bad answer, you stole our product).
Weird, I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in the last few years. Wasn't at all what I expected to see, but was incredibly memorable and impactful.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
> F1
Let me guess, an old man Brad Pitt enters the movie screen and says something like: “I’m gonna, I’m gonna… I’m gonna WROOOM! I’m WROOMING!!”?
Yeah, F1 was extremely literal - characters would often describe what's going on in Brad Pitt's head while he's driving. On the other hand, it's a "big, dumb action movie" and at least it took itself seriously and didn't wink at the audience like so many modern blockbusters do.
What did you expect from 28 Years Later, and what have you got?
I didn't expect anything after about half an hour into it. The first half hour or so was pretty good. The kid taking his sick mom into a zombie infested area was dumb. The blockade but not sending them supplies and stuff, dumb. Zombie pregnancy. Alpha male zombie roided out. The doctor character in general.
Ah, a New Yorker article on media. I think I got bingo!
You either come into the article ready to believe movies are getting worse or you don't. You come away feeling vindicated, or angry. There is nothing of substance here.Special case of bad writing, which is what really plagues today's movies. I often blame comic book films but I'm not sure that's the explanation. I don't know what the explanation is.
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
I suspect the writers are doing exactly what they're being paid to do.
Pretentious nonsense is plaguing the newyorker.
Oh nooooooo sincerity bad. Got it.
(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)
What do you mean by "sincerity"?
I think literal meaning here is misinterpreted as sincerity by OP. Which is a misconception, literal things can be untruthful and abstract things can be truthful as well, being abstract, or going in a roundabout way is not necessarily about being dishonest.
I think the OP is pointing out the lack of depth in the writing. Sincerity isn't about using language at or below 2nd grade, sincerity can be expressed with any level of verbosity. I think the trend of dialog being over-simplified to the point of literal noun-verb-noun with no metaphor just makes everything taste like plain white bread and velveeta. That's great: if your tastes are pedestrian, but there's nothing elitist or insincere about wanting greater depth from art. Ironically the screenwriters that utilize this richness of language are rarely blockbusters or award winners.
Most of this writers points are ideas recently circulating around twitter.
It's almost as if when one person is reacting to a trend, other people are also reacting to it!
Then one would hope they have a new point to make. I don’t need them to read twitter for me