Modern movies teach us awful lessons [video]
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That's why these characters are good at everything from the start. It's why they never struggle. The overriding point that's trying to be conveyed in every scene is that these women kick ass. That's why the modern Mulan can't be shown as weak and later overcoming her physical weaknesses in other ways. No, she cannot be weak -- full stop. If she encounters a much larger man, then she has to kick his ass.
Addendum that shouldn't be required, but of course it is: I want to make it totally clear here that of course women leads can be interesting and dynamic and multi-dimensional. If you think I'm saying otherwise, then please don't even bother engaging, because you will have totally missed my point, which is that this particular approach to featuring women is ham-fisted and risible and probably counterproductive, in the end.
Captain marvel seems to address this directly and in a more mature way. Her character does start weak. She is shown losing repeated to her officer in physical fights and feeling inferior. Later she becomes the most powerful person the MCU has ever seen and the officer turns out to be evil.
The climax of captain marvel's character arc in her movie is him trying to bait her into fighting him on fair, unpowered terms and she basically says fuck you and blasts him with a laser. It's not explicitly a gender thing, but making a firm statement that she isn't intrinsically better than the guy without her powers but that she won't be defined by those metrics. It felt like a much better way to handle this message.
Being explicit that other people's (traditional male) competencies don't get to define your self worth.
It's a flip on the "Let's Fight Like Gentlemen" movie trope and frankly I thought it was a solid message which helped avoid this narrative pitfall even though captain marvel herself is by far the most overpowered female example of late.
But... that's the opposite of what happens. It is addressing this exact concept and doing something different. He's literally asking to fight like a gentleman.
The dialogue in this scene is literally "can you keep your emotions in check long enough to take me on, or will it get the better of you?" And she rejects his cliche premise entirely as a false dichotomy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KK1Kv0IzUg
male centric story telling often uses combat ability as a metaphor for personal growth. Usually with literal dialogue or reflections on moral lessons used to emphasize this relationship with the tide of battle turning when the lesson is made clear.
I thought it was great to show that, while captain marvel's growth arc is not acquisition of strength but in deriving her self worth from herself rather than from her officer.
I agree it will be hard to make more captain marvel movies because there's very little that can challenge her, unless they're willing to make a movie without a significant violent conflict. Not easy.
Captain america is a great character concept too. I liked the falcon's series dissection of it. He's explicitly not a supremacist, while acknowledging the ease with which his circumstances could allow that- and do create that within other superheroes.
It’s about making money: social media gives young pretty women more power than any other large group of people ever in human history (especially if they give up their morals), and of course many of them want to believe that that power is not going away, and they don’t have to do anything to keep this power.
In the past 30 year old women were very responsible, but nowdays I know people who just optimize their poses on instagram to hide the weight that they gain by partying and getting drunk every night.
Of course it’s just some poeple who this kind of life, it just got much easier to do using internet, so the temptation is much stronger.
She dispels the first, but refuses to accept his premise for the latter. I think it's pretty great. It's a generalizeable message to either gender of course.
You might find it interesting. YouTube is not loading for me, but it's called "The avenging feminine": https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/9jzuci/bringing...
My favorite part is something the essayist points out about the mothers [1] in Fury Road: They help in every fight. They shoot, they reload guns, they operate bolt cutters, they deny guns to enemies, they assist with _any_ light work that the buff action hero and heroine are too busy to do. And if there's nothing to do, they take cover without being asked.
The mothers don't start weak and become strong, the movie isn't about that. In fact I don't think anyone in the movie gains strength. Nux has a heel-face turn, but that's all I remember for character change.
Just because they're _side_ characters doesn't mean they _aren't_ characters. There's no scene (that I recall) where you have to ask, "What are the non-combatants doing right now? Standing and watching?"
And even though they're still physically weak at the end of the movie, their actions still matter. The movie doesn't imply there's anything wrong with weakness. Even if they are like pawns on a chessboard, every pawn still matters. I think that's very empowering.
[1] I think only one of them is pregnant, but they are all escaped slaves, so they're not in shape for direct combat.
1. There are at least two women characters, with names and their own personalities (i.e., they aren't extras)
2. The women talk to each other
3. They talk to each other about something besides men.
(If you aren't familiar, an incredible number of films fail - and yes, the 'reverse Bechdel Test' (substituting men for women) is passed by almost every film.)
https://bechdeltest.com/view/6242/mad_max:_fury_road/
Also, the Bechdel Test is incredibly misleading and distracts from the actual problem IMO, which is simple underrepresentation of women in movies. If only 20% of movie characters are women, probably 4% of dialogue (20% of 20%) would end up being women talking to each other. Solve representation, not content.
And don't hear me wrong. I do love fleshed out bad guys/gals. I do want deep bad characters, but when the backstory can always be summarized with "she went through tough time because of bad men, so now yeah she's kind of bad" it doesn't really count.
A little bit of that can make for a good villain I think. Villains who were truly victims earlier in life, or have a lot of seemingly rational rhetoric to back up their position. But usually there's a point where the audience is told that yes, they really are bad, despite their background or arguments.
Ma-Ma in Dredd or Solidus in MGS2 are examples that come to mind. Ma-Ma is a heavily scarred ex-prostitute and drug addict, but shamelessly has people tortured to death and thinks little of condemning thousands of innocents to death to protect herself. Solidus talks about taking the country back from the censorious AIs that control discourse and rig elections, but he's also a former warlord who trained child soldiers and has no remorse about it.
Popular Hollywood female villains, maybe.
My favorite female villains are Granny Goodness and Amanda Waller from DC Comics.
Granny Goodness runs an orphanage for Apokolips. On the surface, she's a sweet old lady who recruits superheroines into Darkseid's machinations. But when the going gets tough, she pulls out her super-powers to punish any orphan who goes against her will.
There's no "terrible backstory" or "not her fault" going on here. Granny Goodness is 100% loyal to the "evil new gods" of Apokolips and is incredibly competent at her role in raising new villains for the evil gods.
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Amanda Waller is gonna plant a bomb in your head and force you to do what she wants. Why? Cause that's what she does. She's the official government's response to counteract the rise of superheroes / metahumans (Superman / Flash / etc. etc.), and feverishly works to blackmail any prisoner into building her super team.
Well, this is about "modern movies".
There are obviously exceptions, but generally action movies don't have very interesting characters.
> it's so important to show that with utter, relentless completeness, that they've created characters that are magical, who don't need to overcome anything, characters who matter mostly as individuals, who have no duties or responsibilities to anyone else (most certainly not to any men). They're just total kick-ass take-no-prisoners empowered women.
But what you've just described is Christopher Nolan's Batman (who loses to Bane physically early in the movie, and beats him by... physically overpowering Bane a bit later).
The modern "superhero" genre is completely devoid of modern responsibilities. This wasn't true before... in the 70s, you had Clark who had to be a responsible person (show up to his job, write articles, etc. etc.). Despite being a magical alien from a futuristic society, Clark Kent had a number of "human" scenes, interacting with his boss, showing off responsible uses of his powers (ex: the Robbery scene, he manages to protect Lois Lane and the Robber, by pretending to be weak. Catching the bullet and pretending to go unconscious from fright).
Today, Christopher Nolan's Batman (who is considered well written), leaves his company to go off on a Ninja-adventure. Leaves all the decision-making to a rival group of executives, and then magically takes back over the company despite his multi-year absence after siphoning funds to a secretive and poorly managed research-and-development corner of the company. And somehow the people who ran the company during his absence are the antagonists who need to be disposed of by the end of the 1st movie.
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Don't get me wrong, Nolan's Batman is really interesting and fun to watch. But he's fun to watch BECAUSE he's an amoral asshole with crap moral lessons.
Iron-man is another movie character who has this effect as well. Assholes who magically get their way are often interesting to watch.
I wouldn't want any children following in the "lessons" of Nolan's Batman or 2008+ era Iron Man. They're awful moral characters.
Ray (Star Wars, episodes 7-9) is positively a saint in comparison.
By the third movie he's literally having anxiety panic attacks. He's fearful that spidey, whom he brought to the big leagues, will get hurt and it'll be on his conscious. He's afraid and guilty of the collateral damage he's spawned into the world but intializing super hero culture.
Execution of those movies aside I thought his character development arc was pretty good.
Male assholes (ex: Rick from Rick and Morty, Nolan's Batman, Downy's Iron Man) are fun and interesting to watch. Female assholes are much, much harder to write (Amanda Waller, Suicide Squad, seems to be the best written one in recent films?)
I guess there's explicitly "female" movies, like "Devil Wears Prada" where that kind of behavior is more acceptable (Miranda Priestly plays the role of asshole boss).
But maybe the "formula" for what audiences accept just hasn't really been figured out yet for female characters. You certainly can't just take male-oriented tropes and try to apply them to female-oriented characters.
> sexualized female body
So? Does it intimidate you? Should they hide or show their bodies based on what you prefer, or on what you think is right? Who the f- are you (or I) to have an opinion on what they should do. Should I have an opinion on what you do?
Meanwhile, women fight wars, run countries and corporations. They don't post much on Hacker News - look at this discussion of men saying what women should do, just like the old days. I wonder why we don't see more women here?
Counterproductive in what way? I agree with you (and the linked video) that the approach is boring. But I also think it's effective.
And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase, speech patterns, or novel vocabulary choices when the audience is struggling to understand even the most basic, predictable sentences.
[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...
Edit: for people mentioning audio mixing and stereo, that's only part of the problem. Even with my (admittedly cheap) 5.1 setup, I sometimes miss most of the dialogue in some scenes. I think the change from theatrical to more realistic enunciation is also to blame.
I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.
English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.
What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.
There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.
There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).
The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en... - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.
LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/
https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normali...
and
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dol...
Give some insight into how this works.
Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.
Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.
Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.
Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.
The silver lining here may be that people stop treating subtitles as torture and see some non-English titles more often. There are some fun movie cultures out there beyond Hollywood, but I've found the "ugh, I've got to read‽" response common.
There’s certainly a need for a ‘context aware’ format that can dynamically change the way sound - particularly speech - is delivered based on the device, volume, or even physical setting. (I suspect that this is about as useful as the ‘loudness’ button on many older amps though.)
These were action scenes with grunting and no dialogue, so the blanket was the only way to follow the plot.
They probably just throw the thing into ffmpeg with the fewest amount of arguments that satisfies a codec and bandwidth cost metric and call it a day.
However, I've never had any problems under the same situations on Netflix using a "blessed" 4K HDR10 set-up (Fire TV Cube and a cheap Hisense TV).
even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue
I think if you want to make widely accessible audio content, you should be taking this into account. Make it intelligible in mono first, then worry about the rest.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-movies-that-are-really-qui...
If that's commonly the case then whatever is doing the downmix isn't fit for purpose.
I found on Kodi you can boost the centre channel when downmixing, this helped quite a bit for me but I still watch with subtitles.
VLC should have a setting such as “flatten sound to 70dB all the time and luminosity to 50% the ability of the display in average”. Even pirated packs are becoming unwatchable.
Pitch Meeting recently gave up the game there.
(in the latest video, Ryan jokes that they're making the screen darker and darker until they don't even have to project a video and can just play an audiobook over the speakers)
An audio compressor would also help here on consumer devices, as that would allow a variable degree and ratio of dynamic range flattening. Basically, it can form a band of volume and ensure that quiet sounds and loud sounds both fit into that. Sadly, most consumer gear, although already equipped with all the DSP they need to implement this in software, thinks consumers are absolute morons and/or that this wouldn’t be a selling point, so we get watered-down poorly-implemented dialogue boost features or largely no option at all except for the consumer to “ride the fader” and constantly adjust the volume. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/soundbar-can-help-he... has some info on what’s out there today to address this, but yeah: it’s mostly fixable if consumers had control of the center channel mix + a configurable compressor + configurable EQ. There are ways to do this in consumer-friendly ways for folks who don’t know of care to learn about mastering audio for film, but the current situation is pretty bad and it really makes me wonder why so much mixing targets home theater setups vs built-in crap TV speakers. At very least, streaming companies could provide an alternate audio track [algorithmically] mixed specifically for built-in audio devices that has more clear dialogue.
I personally watch with subtitles because I don’t want to miss a word.
...and still hasn't been fixed.
And from personal experience, from the last movie I watched: https://youtu.be/AJ0uqAr8Q4E?t=106 . I'm not a native speaker, but (1) I've been communicating exclusively in English for years, (2) my hearing is quite good, (3) I'm wearing headphones, (4) there's nothing else happening in the scene apart from dialogue and music. But I still cannot understand Anne Hathaway's two sentences following the time I linked.
This movie also had a lot of another pet peeve of mine, which is shoulder dialogue where the foreground character is clearly not speaking, or saying something different.
But the imbalance of dynamics makes it problematic.
Me, too… but my kids say they can hear everything just fine and please turn off the subtitles. It’s possible we’re just getting old.
Why Modern Movies Suck - Setup And Payoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOZgSyQjtA
Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Destroying Our Heroes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY-GLeHS0Ik
Why Modern Movies Suck - The Soft Reboot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyU63LJV3AE
Why Modern Movies Suck - They Teach Us Awful Lessons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnuqp4_K7ik
You can probably include earlier videos along the same theme, such as:
What Happened To Our Villains? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnRP7SKzOgk&t=22s
While I agree with some of his points about modern movies I feel like he has a huge issue with cherry picking old classic movies and comparing them against new movies with generally bad reviews. If you ignore good movies just to make a point then you’re not being genuine.
If that was my only gripe with his content then I’d probably watch it some more but I’m blocking his channel instead.
He tries to come off as an objective reviewer but he’s actually a sexist, antiSJW asshole. He’s basically thunderf00t if al he did was talk about movies. Not every video of his is biased against women and “woke” people but when he does mention the topic you quickly see his real colours. Some of his videos are completely mask off but in most of them it’s just a sentence or two, which is why at first I kept watching just in case.
But at this point I can’t tolerate him tbh.
I recommend anyone who is a legit fan of his to take a step back and analyze what this guy is saying on his videos and why. If he aligns with your political views that is fine but I can legit see a regular person being sucked into the alt right side of Youtube using this channel as a gateway for it. It starts with a few comments on how woke feminists are ruining movies and you slowly desensitize yourself and start agreeing with this bs.
I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).
It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.
Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."
How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.
with character-oriented plot, we have character first, and let them play drama. It is like having initial condition and seeing how things evolve in Ordinary Differential Equation. Everything seems natural. I don't think screen play is not that simple, but good plot makes people think in that way.
On the other hand, with plot for the sake of plot, there is a predetermined plot at the outset, and as the show progresses, the actions and personalities of the characters are adjusted accordingly. There is no real personality there, just a cog in the wheel.
That was a pointless filler episode that only got made because they ran out of money.
Breaking Bad is my usual example of bad plot building. I'm sure I haven't given it a fair chance as it's universally so highly liked, but the plot events were very much built up so that you could see what's coming. You are already anticipating some events, or they feel predictable and made up, as if precisely to serve the show. They don't come through as authentic.
I stopped watching Breaking Bad in the first or second season due to this poor plot building, and Better Call Saul after a couple of episodes when I realized it's just more of that very same style of bad plotting. The difference to well written shows such as Sopranos is like night and day.
Negative comments about Breaking Bad and pointing out its flaws seems to often receive controversial reactions. I suppose it's because it's the favourite show for so many.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.
Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.
So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.
People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.
Its only over time that you get the "I know this situation", "I've been here before" possibly reaching the point of not wanting it again because you're oversaturated with said trope/cliche and now recognise them as such.
But the first ones stick with you and you remember them differently to the others.
Once you go past a certain level of tropey-ness (tropiness?) you're unavoidably telegraphing a message to genre fans because everyone else rejects your work as derivative.
But giving it a name -- fan service -- is kind of a new version where all parties are aware of it and actively engaged with it.
And it gives rise to a new way for directors to have all the fun of breaking the fourth wall without breaking the fourth wall -- to have the characters also aware of the tropes of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's so much of this in TV in particular and a lot of it is because of the influence of Joss Whedon, but Rocke S. O'Bannon did some of this in Farscape (and then much more explicitly as I understand it in Cult, which I haven't seen yet).
You could argue that a certain strand of films of the late 80s and early 90s really kicked it off, not least the original, quite underrated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which is all about trope awareness.
Tropes are nothing more than patterns we can observe in multiple stories. Clichés are tropes used extremely frequently. There's nothing inherently wrong about either of those things, it's only the way they're being used, the execution, that can be good or bad.
The James Bond one manages to add a touch of comedy, gives more information to the viewer about the characters who the characters are and how well they know each other, and makes the viewer remain attentive in what would otherwise be a fairly boring exposition scene. It has become used over and over again in various precisely because of how effective it is.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesA...
A more recent character-driven film that reminds me of the 70's was "About Schmidt" with, of course, that veteran of 70's films and filmmaking, Jack Nicholson.
Oh, "Frances Ha" comes to mind as well. You'll probably have to pick through the indie films to find character these days.
Modern movies (and TV for that matter) have become so commercialized and expensive that the series they are now rehashing (Star Wars for instance) wouldn't be possible to create today. George Lucas definitely didn't have the name or history necessary when Alan Ladd gave the go ahead to make Star Wars that you would need these days for a comparably ambitious film.
It's weird because I feel like some other forms of media, namely games and music have gone in the opposite direction because of the availability and power of tools for independent production. However movies just need so much more resources the same indie competition hasn't been able to come in and shake things up sadly.
I don't know if that's entirely true. George Lucas had come off the back of American Graffiti, which was an incredible commercial success. It had made 50x its budget, and in 1977 was the 13th highest grossing film of all time.
The question was really whether Lucas could turn his hand to a completely different genre. It's down to American Graffiti's success that Lucas was able to re-negotiate a deal for Star Wars that gave him merchandising rights.
I mean just one aging star (sorry, Alec) in the film's credits.... That doesn't sound like a AAA studio effort.
Of course then "American Graffiti" caught fire and I suspect that (and the urgings of Francis Ford Coppola) is when Ladd gave the green light.
Absolutely. He seems to be consistently spot-on with his analysis of TV and Movies and the wider industry. I also enjoy Red Letter Media:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia
Both channels use a humours approach to their reviews and analysis.
You still need an entire film and sound crew. You still need a cast of actors and a director and a screenwriter and a composer. You still need to raise money, producers, etc.
Sure, video & sound editing have had a lot of automation improvements via software - but that's pretty much it.
One person can make a game with a bunch of cheap pre-made assets and make something really interesting and cool.
You just can't do that with film.
On the other hand to all the expensive stuff - you can just not do those. I'd take Primer as an example. I believe it was shot for the cost of a Toyota Corolla and became a fairly significant film. I've also seen "low budget" movies (meaning $3-5 million or so) in the last decade or so that probably would not have been possible 20 years or more ago, so I feel like there has been some progress.
Yeah, but take a look at the massive number of VFX people listed in the end-credits of CGI-heavy films. Often several different companies (e.g. DNEG) each with its own array of artists, modellers, riggers, tech, pipeline engineers, asset developers, IT support, etc etc.
You can make a compelling story via flip book.
You're not going to have multiple locations, good actors, good writing, good composition, quality cinematography, etc - unless you're incredibly talented and not counting how much your time is actually worth.
Films for a wide audience these days basically require - at a minimum - 6 specialists working for a month of shooting. Plus 5+ actors.
The absolute minimum that costs in labor - if you actually counted the value of your time - is ~$200k+.
A good script itself is worth well over $100k...
Realistically - it's almost impossible to make something with wide appeal for less than $2m in the US - or $1m internationally.
I feared the Hollywoodization of the game industry.
But it never happened in the mindless extend of movies and music.
Indie games are still going strong.
I mean, some sports games are definitely hollywoodized with "let's just swap some colours, change 2021 to 2022 and charge another $70". On the other hand Bill Wurtz still releases new tunes on YouTube and Ben Levin continues doing... Ben stuff. In movies you can still get quality indie productions like Joel Haver's full movies. My random selection of course, but the point is, there's definitely indie stuff available if you want it.
His reasoning for why movies are more boring was simple: money.
A production team is looking to distribute their movie in as many channels as possible, and with the broadest appeal possible. As a result, you see a film made with the broad strokes but lacking in subtlety. If a film might be challenging because of the subject matter, the complexity of the dialogue, the character development, or the plot then it gets dialled back.
You lose the specific cultural references that give a film it's charm and it ends up not really being a true reflection of any people anywhere - just easy Friday night cinema fodder that maximises return on investment.
A movie sucks because it isn't art any more.
Everything else you're describing is not in fact "art", it's a product.
I'm not saying "money is wrong, make all films for free".
When a production team makes a movie, they take a risk. I think the problem is that the people making the artistic decisions are also the ones trying to minimise risk and maximise revenue.
I appreciate a film needs to be a commercial success to make it worthwhile to the creators, but there comes a point where the artistic integrity has been utterly sacrificed and you get a dull, anemic, forgettable film.
Admittedly, these movies are hard to come by, Drive (2011) would be one of them for me, although there must be a more recent one I can't think of now.
If you look back at the best movies throughout history, a lot of them were made outside the Hollywood system. It's easy to think that movies today are worse than Apocalypse Now or Star Wars, while forgetting that those movies also couldn't get made in their day.
That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there. There are lots of good movies out there, but most people aren't watching them.
If you have the chance, I suggest everyone spend a couple weeks going to a "mystery movie night". Sure, sometimes you may end up watching "Blackhat" (or even worse, "Tracers"), but the good movies you'll end up also watching will make up for it.
They kinda are. Franchises have sucked all the air out of the room, and movies are given money on the premise that they will make money. Edit: not just money. But shit-tons of money that can be milked from multiple angles for many years.
Already 10 years ago filmmakers were struggling to find funding for their projects. Birdman and Gravity were very close to not being made even they had Oscar-winning directors and stellar casts. It's significantly worse today.
Ahh, to remember the 1970's when a whole new crop of young American filmmakers were given the reigns to create some of the more original but still engaging content.
so what would be an alternative funding model?
A patreon or kickstarter like model where directors and stars are pre-paid via crowd funding?
A state sponsored funding model?
Non-profit model?
So "franchise" is golden.
I suspect all of us can agree that in some alternate universe where the prequels were released before "Star Wars" ... there never would have been a franchise.
1) When anybody dunks on "modern movies", they mean "modern movies with $>100m marketing budgets". Which is actually a small minority of modern movies.
2) The messaging has changed, but movies have always had terrible messaging in them.
Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally awesome", they're generally female, right? I'm not sure the same trend applies for male protagonists.
Do you watch many superhero movies? Because I feel like you must not.
Many of the characters are literal gods, and many more are just uncannily good at everything because of some hand wavey backstory.
Even the characters that start off "normal" tend to become awesome by simply being in the right place at the right time and being exposed to some external force (rather than through overcoming flaws or weaknesses on their own).
Spider-man lets his uncle die because he's busy showing off. Batman in The Dark Knight "has no cartilage in his knees, scar tissue on his kidneys, concussive damage to his brain, and a host of other issues". Bruce Banner is subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. Logan is dying and in constant pain. Doctor Strange's hands are mutilated due to a car crash caused by his own arrogance.
IIRC Wonder Woman has a naivity due to growing up on a remote island populated by women, but she's basically confident and hypercompetent throughout. Captain Marvel's big issue is she's forgotten she has galactically important superpowers. Black Widow's character has a bit more going on, and I liked the film better than the other two. But, I think there is a difference between the amount of freedom big budget movie screenwriters have with male and female characters.
At lower budgetary levels, you're more likely to see women with less straightforwardly heroic characters, facing more interesting or engaging stakes.
Before Captain Marvel Brie Larson was doing great indie flicks like Room and Free Fire. She's said she was quite conflicted about taking the role, and I can't blame her for taking the money but I think I understand her hesitation.
Whatever the villain is into, golf, fencing, gambling, etc. James Bond will challenge the villain at his hobby and beat him before the action even begins.
Edited to add: But the biggest example is probably Superman, just born super at everything.
It's admittedly a while since I've followed anything to do with Superman. I'm imagining he's undergone a similar reinvention, but I admit I'm guessing.
I think this is a bit of selective memory ala: https://xkcd.com/385/
Did you have particular movies in mind with this? The whole Marvel universe is riddled with male protagonists who are simply better than other people. That's the whole schtick that the Watchmen criticises.
Like you say, maybe I'm remembering selectively but I think that's less the case for Black Widow, Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman than it is for Iron Man, Superman or Batman.
Can you imagine Marvel greenlighting a female-led equivalent of Logan?
For what it's worth, I now regret saying anything, and will try to restrain myself from saying anything else.
Also, romantic scenes all look the same, completely generic. They're basically copy-pasted between movies. They're so flat and devoid of any genuine feeling I end up hitting the right arrow to skip them entirely.
Usually I don't have those issues with older movies (and movies of a couple selected directors still making good movies to this day).
Last week I saw "Three colours" from Kieślowski. Absolutely amazing trilogy about liberté, égalité, fraternité.
I think I only saw one of the "color" films. (Was so depressing.)
While I agree that this trope can make kids think they're special without trying in life (and that they will be a hero in the future), I think there have been similar tropes in the past.
Just take basic story writing of many old movies: There is always a hero that is living a boring or even sad life, often unsuccessful and unhappy. Suddenly, a "mentor" appears who takes our hero into this new magical world and teaches him the most amazing things in no time. Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, basically all Disney movies, even Sailor Moon.
That doesn't teach kids very positive things either: just wait for a mentor to come along and show you the way to become a hero, don't worry, you will be a hero because someone shows you the way.
So I don't see the development described in the YouTube video as dramatically, it has existed forever.
Or to use another example - gandalf might mentor frodo, but yet it always seems like frodo's accomplishments are his own and gandalf didn't really do all that much for him when all is said and done. Frodo is a hero and an interesting character, but i wouldn't want to be him.
Anyways i don't think the problem is lack of life lessons (even if they are lacking) its static characters and lack of stakes. Characters that were born ready are boring to watch. We like watching characters that change and adapt to circumstances whose choices are meaningful and consequential. The protagonist who was basically born with super powers, does not face a challenge and doesn't have to adapt their personality, is a boring character.
And in most cases they accept blindly, otherwise there's no story. Madoka Magica is one of the few stories that I know where this trope is broken by the characters questioning the decision.
And not just American movies. Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill were super famous and did basically nothing but that. They don't train, never ever, they are lazy as cool factor and are strongest guys most sharpest shooters around. Franch movies, fairly often the same thing. Random middle aged man thrown in situation and suddenly climbing and jumping roofs.
And series targetted at kids still show plenty of training. Lego ninja go, winx club, all show training or classroom scenes often.
The point of his training is that the moves have completely become muscle memory/second nature. I have no clue how long that would take, but it would be significantly more than "low time investment".
Note also that (1) he claimed to have had karate training before; (2) after hebuilds up the needed muscle memory, training continues to teach him when to use what muscle memory.
And half the plot is typically devoted to if they want to accept their new found powers or ignore them to live a normal life. So its still quite devoted to a choice with life changing consequences.
And people are sort of sick of it. It's why Watchmen or Guardians of the Galaxy stand out against so many boring superhero movies. Because a hero needs to be unwilling, unable, and unbelieving... and possibly not even a very good candidate for heroism. Hollywood shortened the journey with the classic stupid "karate montage to music" thing in the 80s. But now it's just like, oh jeez wow I have a superpower! Cool! So ultimately, who cares? Who can relate to that?
Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable. Man related to demigods who carried our emotions and message as envoys. Or, take Star Trek. Spock is half-human. He serves as a bridge between the alien logic and the emotional, rational part of our nature. We know we should eventually evolve to be like Vulcans, but we value our dirty humanity. So Spock, by occasionally regressing to his human side, is our proof that our humanity itself has value.
There's no humanity in a superhero who's just born with superpowers. That's Zeus. A great hero is like Spock, or Luke Skywalker, someone fighting their inner nature. Otherwise all conflicts are just eye candy, external, and ultimately CGI bullshit.
> Look at Greek mythology. No one could understand why Zeus got all pissed off, but he was Zeus. He was kind of inscrutable.
I think he is just powerful rather then impossible to understand. Not that I am expert, but Greek gods don't come across to me as something alien. They are fairly human, emotional at times rational at others, political among themselves, but definitely too strong for actual humans to handle.
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
Movies and fiction are about moral lessons packaged into fantasies and escapism. If movies were relentlessly realistic no one would go to see them, because there would be nothing to see.
Even "gritty realism" isn't realistic. It's usually just the same trope populated with shady underworld characters and a flawed or outcast anti-hero instead of inspirational mentors.
1. Every movie is basically the "Mattel-Mars Bar quick energy chocobot hour" at this point, basically just an empty ad
2. Studios are currently falling all over themselves to show how ideologically correct they are
Out of curiosity, how much influence do movies/tv shows have in shaping society? Could it be that the seemingly casual link between movies and culture be opposite? Or, in other words:
B (bad movies) = "this sort of thing continues for too long"
S (shtty people) = "produce an entire generation of shtty people"
B -> S is claimed in the video, is !B || S always true? Could it be B <- S instead? B <-> S?
Certainly, planned media campaigns seem to cause (in some but not all cases) large shifts in mass behavior. (E.g. Bernays getting women to smoke cigarettes[1], or pedestrians being removed from the streets to make way for automobiles by deriding them as "jaywalkers" and then criminalizing the until-then ancient and universal custom[2].)
On the other hand, as much as I don't like to "blame the user" I can't help but feel like we have personal responsibility for our behavior. E.g. on the individual level it feel to me like a "cop out" to say, e.g. advertising made me eat this junk food and get fat (or whatever.)
In any event, if you want to study this sort of thing using formal symbolic systems, you have to use systems that can handle causal loops, i.e. Cybernetics: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
[1] I view Edward Bernays as a mass murderer for his largely successful efforts in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Tobacco
[2] The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
No need to go real deep, with a “follow the money” approach, the amounts that are spent im product placement and effort to shape narratives through work of art speak for themselves.
With that said, there are lot of fantastic movies getting made, they’re just not big budget. You could watch nothing but stuff Pattinson (to name a single example) has been in over the last 10 years and have a, uh, good time.
I personally think that these days the most effective way to watch great films is to pick actors that are only in stuff you like. Some actors are extremely picky about what they’ll work on, and that’s great.
My biggest issue these days is that there isn't actual development within the world created. Superman falls for Lois lane, not because of some sort of event or circumstance that we experience on screen, but because they're 'supposed to get together'. Or it's also bad when movies rely on a wider generalized context rather than actually developing something within the world.
The Drinker’s review is a pretty good place to get a sense of whether or not it’s your cup of tea.
I have at least one or two friends who had to kind of power through the first 4-6 episodes before abruptly becoming fanatics. It grabbed me on episode 4 and pretty much never let up. It’s got soft episodes like anything, but I don’t think there’s a soft season.
On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series.
Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision.
The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a fairly unique reason. Back when I lived in LA I basically went out with this girl who knew she was a model and I wasted a ton of time and money on her.
When I moved to Chicago, I met a dorky awkward girl, who became my first real girlfriend. This is priceless dating advice, go for that dorky awkward girl that actually likes you.
Of course this really pissed a lot of people off, so they basically got rid of that story arc for the last movie. Looking at the entire series, I really think someone at Disney got uncomfortable with interracial dating, and thus Finn ends up making no sense as his two previous love arcs need to be eliminated by the last movie. This is understandable because even in America I've met people who are very uncomfortable with it, and Disney needs to distribute these movies to a global audience.
That might actually be the root of the problem, you have to make a movie that goes out of its way to keep everybody comfortable. In various countries showing LGBT plotlines are a big no-no, so you have reports coming out of Disney that they've cut these at the last moment from various movies.
The moment you have to make a movie that's okay for every single person, you end up creating these devoid visual spectacles. As in, most action movies are just a bunch of explosions and music. You can replace all the dialogue with gibberish and still get the idea of what happened.
I was trying to watch Free Guy and had to turn it off 10 minutes in. Stop with the freaking music for a second and let people speak.
However, other countries are still making real movies. I think a big part of the Korean wave is you don't have as much pandering to every single possible audience in K-pop dramas. Even then, I've had friends post that the subtitles are often toned down. Edit: Language Reactor is a great Chrome plugin which offers alternative subtitles as well as context. It's a great tool for language learning as well
I can't imagine ever going to a movie theater again, congratulations Disney You've ruined cinema.
Maybe I'll put one of these mediocre movies on in the background while I do other things, but they're not worthy of my undivided attention.
8 abandons pretty much everything from 7 and then tries to make a large sub plot about how the real evil is the oligarchical weapon vendors funding both sides. Ffs, the star wars universe has a faction self identifying as the evil dark side. It's not the place for his kind of thing.
I know I grow older and my brain probably has some issues with that too but my god, there are too many cuts. Even in (US made) documentaries they introduce this artificially creating fast pace where there is none.
I got a headache from watching Star Trek Discovery which pretty much was peak madness.
Movies bore us not because of lack of novelty, but because they're just tropes stitched together to fit a formula rather than representing a real creative endeavor.
I made a short film and even the people who didn't get/like the jokes said: "At least it was different and not boring."
BTW, you can watch the film in https://youtu.be/LkclVXofHbU
It also helps to switch away from Hollywood, lot of great Iranian movies for instance.
Birdman still stands out to me as an amazing film. It's messages are so specific and consumable, and it had something to say that felt somewhat novel.
Character driven movies require good writing, which is in short supply. Plot driven movies - you just need a cool plot idea, and then throw in some actors to service the plot. The characters personalities morph to suit whatever the plot demands.
With the rise of woke, a different category has experienced a resurgence: ideology driven. It's kind of like plot driven, but instead of characters being malleable in service to some plot, they are malleable in service to woke ideology. This makes the characters unrelatable and inhuman.
There's basically a talent shortage and the modern culture in Hollywood no longer boosts the innovators to the top as they did in previous decades.
I do think blockbuster movies are (perhaps) increasingly just glorified cartoons, though, and Marvel/Disney are probably significantly to blame. Is fighting _really_ that interesting? Does the wire pull _have_ to be used in every fight? Why are big dumb CGI animals so popular? Why does every small CGI animal make the same wuk wuk wuk noise? Why does every large CGI animal snort like a buffalo?
IMO, much of what The Drinker describes is just plain old bad writing, but currently it's a lame writing in the style or George RR Martin or whatever is modern. It's not the style that sucks, it's the writing.
GRRM makes for an easy example. He wrote the novels for GoT's wonderful early seasons. Other people wrote the later seasons. We can compare. Both told morally ambiguous stories that played with fantasy motifs, but with the confusing twist. The handsome knight is a villain. The good lord gets killed. etc. This is the style of both early and late seasons, the late seasons just suck.
In GRRM's writing, you follow characters make fucked up, horrible and evil decisions... but motivations make sense. You understand why." In late seasons, that breaks down.
I believe a good writer could have hit all the "Rey Skywalker" identity waypoints and tied it into a story that doesn't* suck. The sucky writers could have written a simple, New Hope style hero's journey where Rey overcomes internal and external obstacles... and that story could have still sucked.
Fiction writing can have almost any moral take. Confusion, nihilism, certainty. The world can be just, the characters immoral. The world can be cruel, the heros can be moral.
In short, it's totally possible to take the lamest of moral positions and write a great story around it. Possible, but not guaranteed. Look at Ayn Rand.
We need movies like this because a lot of people have enough drama and action in real life, and need audiovisual media to wind down and stop thinking
If I wanted to take a lesson, I could read the plot summary - it's the same information. For a 3 hour movie, I could resume all of Dostoevsky's works.
One of the best and strangest TV shows I have watched is The Leftovers. If you want something different check it out. Season 3 is sublime.
But art is not in the business of selling didactic moral lessons, enforcing Protestant work ethics or what else have you. Art should primarily stand on artistic merits. Most of the movies in the video fail on that front as well but not because they don't engage in teaching folk morality.
Paraphrasing the end of the video: "movies teach sketchy life lessons, like prioritizing one's own happiness over other people's freedom[...]"
From an artistic standpoint there is nothing at all wrong with this, in fact putting a character like this into a framing of a hero makes for a significantly more interesting premise than much else I've seen in the cinema.
As a side note, I strongly recommend checking out Drinker's books - published under his real name Will Jordan. While I was skeptical at first, I have to say I really enjoyed them.
Bombing the viewer with one second sequences of random films for the entire video is really annoying
Using shots like this is much more information-dense than verbally listing a load of titles and scene descriptions and triggers the viewer's memory much more effectively. Keeping the clips very short allows more examples to be packed in and also protects against intellectual property complaints. (The need for the latter is highly regrettable but a daily reality for youtubers.)
https://variety.com/2020/film/asia/why-china-hates-disney-mu...
> The most fundamental flaw, most felt, was that Disney’s new heroine starts out from childhood already equipped with superhero-like abilities, thanks to her extraordinary reserves of “qi,” the force that she cultivates and controls to excel as a fighter.
> Turning her into a superhero removes Mulan’s everywoman appeal, and leaves her with no room to grow as a character, huge swathes of Chinese viewers said.
Basically the exact criticism of the youtube video interestingly enough
The odd thing is, quality video production has become much more affordable with the end of film and rise of mirrorless video cameras and NLE consoles running on commodity PCs. SFX has gone up in price but is not required for every movie, so you would expect an explosion of creativity, not the industry hunkering down around a limited number of franchises and sequels.
People lamenting the death of movies don't get this. The good stuff is still out there, it's just in a different format.
Movies are now more occasions to go out to the theatre. They have to be mass appeal, family friendly, nothing too complex.
I mean I think actual existentialist philosophers would laugh if you tried to tell them that Lost in Translation is an existentialist movie. Also I think you mean ennui not anomie.
Superhero movies used to be about growth. Yet now it's more often than not the case that the hero was simply born awesome. Completely uninteresting.
Politics also creeps into movies in a disconcerted way. Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny, but about some strange mix of feminism and animal rights. I think. Batman has to see Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys. And of course Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men" when they get horribly assassinated in gruesome ways by a psychopath - as if murdering the mayor such that his now fatherless son finds him should receive equal attention to some drug deal gone wrong.
The latest Bond movie of course had to kill Bond. Something that should just never happen. And then we have to watch this extremely annoying supposed new 007 get an insane amount of screen time even though she is a transparent, vapid character.
It's a massive universe and there's been six movies about this theme already. Why retread old themes instead of trying something new? By the way, I am NOT defending the new trilogy - it is absolutely awful, but it's not awful BECAUSE it's about feminism and animal rights (also, it isn't, it's still about totalitarianism and tyranny).
> Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys.
Again, there have been anywhere between 9-10 batman movies depending on how you count of him beating up bad guys. Why do you need more? Why not try something new and really interrogate the psychopathy of the character, and the realization he might go through which is that beating up bad guys isn't the best use of time for a billionaire.
> Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men"
Did you miss the part where her mother and her best friend were both essentially sex slaves that got choked to death by the italian mafia? If anyone has a case and a grudge against "rich white men", it's probably her.
Also, the whole movie, is about how rich corrupt people let the whole city down.
I haven't seen the new Bond movie, but if they actually had the balls to kill him, that's tremendous progress.
Why are you so resistant to any change?
If this is the case, what enables us to break out of the loop?
PS I really like The Drinker.
So he, too, is "born that way".
I'm struggling to recall the last time I watched a 'modern' movie. I have even downloaded some but I always seem to have something better to do with my time.
Oh. Come to think of it, it might have been "Star Trek II: The Type Casting of Benedict Cumberbatch".
I skimmed through the video which it seems to use as example 4-5 crap movies
I'd like to see this video using Falling down, American beauty, Fight club, Se7en as examples, the first three among the movies which formed me the most and taught me valuable lessons.
"Yeah, I enjoyed this so much when I was 6 and I can see why a kid me would love this... but I am 36 now and while the actual content does remind me the great carefree time when I was 6, it no longer appeals to me as a person I am today... because it is so far removed from the things I know and care about that I can't really relate".
When a grown ass man excitedly talks about a new kids movie that came out, I really don't know how to react without cringing. It's way too common and I've had to join to not look like an outcast at times and sit through terrible forgettable overdone movies. Please stop.
Stop trying to be the arbiter of what other people enjoy. I'm sure you have some tastes in media others would find cringeworthy, but we're all better if we recognize that taste in media is highly personal and we should let people enjoy things.
https://comicsgate.org/2021/10/30/ethan-van-sciver-is-right-...
“So, it’s all just government money?”
“Always has been.”
Click.
Postmodernism scuttles truth, prepending a grade of 'F' to the word 'art'.
The first disney mulan is a story about a girl who overcame discrimination and gender roles to come into a position of great honour to the state.
Propping up the state is basically the opposite of a peasent uprising.
Is the Youtube algorithm directing people to make vaguely fascist feeling, "bring back the good old days", 'kids today', 'civilization is doomed' content aimed at young males? Or is that just a natural cycle that repeats throughout history?
The biggest film in history was "Birth of a Nation" until it was replaced by "Gone with the Wind", "Star Wars" may have been a rebellion against a vaguely Nazi empire, but it was still about hereditary rulers that are related to each other starting wars.
Overall, the trajectory seems fairly positive. The good old days were pretty crappy and that was reflected in their books, films and songs. Though I suppose if you're young enough that Mulan 1998 is a classic film from the good old days you might simply be ignorant of a lot of the crazy shit that went on.
Look up parents re-watching films from their youth with their children, to realise, horrified, what passed as entertainment in their youth that is now shocking to them and stuff they don't want their kids to emulate or look up to.
Star Wars (New Hope) is nothing of the sort. The universe just got progressively smaller as they retconned every character into being related to every other character.