Hollywood doesn’t make movies like ‘The Fugitive’ anymore (2018)
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The story is insightful, heavy on philosophy, extremely ambiguous, and digs into interesting questions about a very viable future technology. On a superficial level one can take the ending (which does provide closure) at face value, but it was intended to make one think. It's based on a Philip K Dick short story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", and it shows.
It's a grandiose story, but only on the surface and only due to the fact it's set in the future. The plot is something that will affect everybody at some point. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd strongly recommend going in blind.
It had a very definitive ending, and felt shallow.
The original movie and the short story are some of my favorites.
I later read an article or something about the original movie about how when Quaid begins to break the scenes use red lighting. And when the doctor comes into the room and warns that if Quaid kills him that the walls would crumble, etc. All of it happens.
The entire plot is designed by Quaid in the beginning, down to his love interest.
So the end begged the question of whether he really uncovered memories, or if he had an adverse reaction and when the doctor tried to help Quaid shot him and delved into his psychosis.
Apparently the remake had a director's cut that tried to make the ending more ambiguous, but I've never seen that version- once was enough.
That's a pretty strange way of say "an entirely different movie".
The biggest thing: it lacked the depth of the original.
The 'heavy on philosophy' - what do you refer to. The trope about what is reality has history (recently 'inception', going back to the early 70's with 'Night of Delusions' by Keith Laumer and I'm sure it goes back a long way more) and rarely gets answered properly, so nothing much philosophical there. We thought it was just a bad film.
As a Cruise film, it may fall off many people's radars, but it's got some really well worked out trippy stuff in there.
But I'm a sucker for non-completely-dumb time travel stuff. If you are too, be sure to check out Tenet and Predestination, if you haven't watched them already.
Both are well done, evoke consistent atmospheres, and didn't get the attention they deserve. Predestination is more physical in a Cronenbergian sense, while Tenet is pure Nolan administered intravenously.
The special effects of reverse polarity were well executed.
I've even shown it to my 9 years old kid, he was flabbergasted. Might have not understood everything (he doesn't have the context) but overall he said it was the best movie he ever saw (so far).
Based on the short story All You Zombies (which I've read, but haven't seen the adaptation)
Tip: Don't read anything about it, just watch it.
I similarly loved Children of Men, they really nail the dystopian aesthetic.
PKD didn't write "mind games"; according to one's own view of reality, he was either among the most sincere intellectuals since Kant, or a deeply paranoid, mentally ill individual - and everything inbetween. He was truly invested in the questions about perception that he poured over all his work.
But god bless him, he certainly did leave us with some marvelous tales designed to make us question the world around us and ourselves.
Me as a 12 year old: The lady has 3 boobs !
Me watching as an adult. Great sci-fi movie !
Also both movies have Michael Ironside, which is always a plus.
And as far as sci-fi movies which are deeper than one might expect, I'd also recommend the original Planet of the Apes and its early sequels.
Took me a few minutes on DDG, but enjoy: https://agapow.net/misc/humour/starship-troopers-a-review/
Since the reviewer mentioned it, the fact the characters all come from Buenos Aires is one of my favourite things about the movie. I've mentioned this a few times in conversation with people about the move, and they flat out didn't believe me. Their brains just didn't parse it, or what the implications are at all, because it's just there. It's never called out, or explained, or made a point.
There are two sequels and the first is really bad. None of the implied critique, just a straight cheesy SF action C-grade. The third film is actually worth a watch IMHO. It's still nowhere near the level of the original, but it's fun to see Van Dien kicking ass and taking names.
How did that happen? Why? No explanation, no hidden references, no hand-holding to any possible conclusion, no reference to the cost of a social change so complete. Unless you actively engage and critically think through what you are seeing and it's implications, you would never know.
In the hands of any other director it could just be laziness. Oh look, he's set it in Argentina, but they're all just like American kids. He couldn't even be bothered to include any local references. He could have at least hired local talent right? Taken advantage of the setting? But no, the fact the setting is this way is the actual point.
So his goals were libertarian, but I can't help thinking his intended means to achieve them would wind up, er, not doing so at all even slightly.
On that note, Heinlein wrote all sorts of weird, contrarian themes into his books. Many of them pushed against the prevailing social norms and beliefs of the time, from sexual norms to ethics to race relations. Trying to pin down his actual beliefs is difficult because he would often write one book taking one stance on an issue, and another later with a totally contrary stance. Often when I read Heinlein I find myself strongly disagreeing with what he's putting down, but fascinated with the question or angle being posed/presented.
And then, of course, your comment about people being unwilling to even consider the thoughts of those they disagree with steps in.
I think it's unrealistic to suggest Verhoeven had anything subtle in mind. He had a line he wanted to spout, and he did it.
I've always thought about it like the Giant Spider: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/6/28/18761548/wild-wil...
Director wanted a thing, and the subject matter fit was irrelevant. shrug. I call it "Bug Wars", and as such it's a well animated B movie.
There are alot of people who made the transition from a socialist to a more right wing position. It’s important context that many of the thinkers of that day didn’t have the benefit of seeing the future… the prospect of nuclear conflict was very real and had an outsized impact on people who were aware of what was actually going on.
His isn’t necessarily a worldview I subscribe to, but isn’t worthy of being dismissive about.
It's not totally clear to me what their purpose was. Did they just use Buenos Aires because that's where the book was set, without any deeper motivation?
If you want to read it that all the other cultures were wiped out in the war and only one culture survived, sure.
If you think the one world government imposed a monoculture, maybe.
If you think humans are herd creatures that naturally converge on group-think consensus and globalisation is just going to go that way, fine.
Or maybe it was lazy film making cutting corners for budget and convenience reasons. OK. But in rebuttal to that possibility I submit in evidence the entire back catalogue of Paul Verhoeven movies.
A lot of his movies show you the heroic, seductive face of fascism for most of the movie, but every now and then through the movie he twists the coin just a little bit. You get a glimpse of what's on the other side, hinting at how what you think you're seeing isn't at all the whole story. But he leaves you to figure that out, the same way he did.
He could have picked a different franchise (or created a new one) instead of hitching the movie's title to a book with a totally different message and atmosphere.
I wanted to see something darker, something about a kid growing up into an officer. I wanted to see Jonnie realize how much trouble he was in and feel lucky for only getting a few lashes, and I wanted to see Zim give him a microscopic bit of comfort just before that sentence. I wanted to see a father and son reunite for 45 minutes at the starport, and the proud father bounce off to his new ship. I wanted an exploration of morality in military service as a mirror for how we guide our own lives in the real world. I wanted to see the stupid powered suits, okay?
Instead I got a terrible political commentary with bad acting. He could have done that with his own story (wait, he did).
I don't know why the film was called Starship Troopers. Oh wait, I do; it was a money grab. Verhoeven didn't even finish reading the book.
It was a seriously enlightening moment. A satire subtle enough that I could see both sides of it at different periods of my life.
Movie is cut-down version of book to fill in 90 mins.
Another example of supreme disappointment is "Battlefield Earth" movie. If you're fan of a book - don't watch it!
About as likely as someone watching Hanger Games and not getting lost on the reality show history, instead of being annoyed that the movie's history didn't progress.
Goes to prove that propaganda works. At least for short periods.
They never attempt anything begging for awards, nor the signaling that many modern filmmakers do just to impress, they just put in the things that seemed to work best.
Basil Poledouris is a true genius
Not surprisingly he worked with Milius on many other movies besides "Conan the Barbarian" and Verhoeven, who directed Total Recall.
and all the Verhoeven movies 1985-1997
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Verhoeven
Not based on P.K. Dick works but heavily (and beatifully) inspired by them I'd also mention "Dark City" directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, I Robot)
It's a shame The Thirteenth Floor came out the same year as the Matrix...
The adaptations of his work are big names…
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” -> Blade Runner
“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” -> Total Recall
“Minority Report -> The Minority Report
“Scanner Darkly” -> Scanner Darkly
“The Man in the High Castle” -> The Man in the High Castle
But GOOD NEWS!
This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched "Hustle". Adam Sandler's latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I'm not really into basketball.
But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.
The thing missing from many movies these days with "the message" is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.
And that's the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It's a shame really. It's all about politics these days and making sure there is some race/gender/cultural representation (I'm saying this as a black guy).
I’m not feeling his complaining in general. He’d be easier to love if he would champion some cool underground films like Film Comment or whatever will.
He’s part of an alt right baiting group of youtubers like Nerdroitic who all flirt with this notion of white culture being under siege. Like I don’t believe any of these guys swing that way (as in MAGA) but they like the views on their channels.
It’s weird how hippies have become conservatives if they didn’t go woke.
Except they dont... Conservative has a very specific political meaning, and to consider everyone that is "not woke" either conservative or alt-right shows a massive ignorance of the political landscape
Classic Liberal, or libertarian people still exist, we are here. The 1990's and 00's the battle was against conservatives wanting ti suppress speech, blame violence on video games, and all other manner of BS.
Today it seems the far left has also taken up the mantra of speech suppression, and blame video games for all manner of social ill's,
It is the Horseshoe Theory of politics manifest in reality..
One can be "not woke" and at the same time, not conservative...
the " sizeable niche audience" is actually the sane people, the middle of the road people, the people that think both Extreme Conservatives, and Extreme "Leftists" are crazy....
When you say “except they don’t” and I am part of that group that has, my existence proves you wrong. But perhaps it was just my poor use of language
You didn't compare conservative activists with progressive activists, or conservative activists with progressives.
If you're comparing the mainstream views of one side with the extremes of the other, (or worse: a caricature of the other side that you've been told about) then of course you're going to find the other more extreme.
Stop trying to reframe my experiences.
What is an example of something that the mainstream left supports now that is extreme in your view?
Also: do you not see the mainstream right being pulled to the right by its activists?
So while they "Cultural Marxists" or Identity Marxists as they call themselves, may be different from your preferred economic marxism, they are still IMO part of the "far left Authoritarian" quadrant of say the political compass
This is a problem with this whole line of thinking. We should be able to criticize identity politics as it is, for its excess and harmful effects. (Likewise, we should be able to praise it, for any praiseworthy qualities it might be observed to have.) Shoehorning in an association with Marxism is either a rhetorical crutch or a baseless slur. Marxism isn't a synonym for "bad"; it is a particular school of criticism.
I might be able to live with the term "Identity Stalinists"...
Others may disagree. The last straw for me was his review of "Captain Marvel". Granted, that is not a great movie. I watched it after seeing one or more of his five reviews of the film (at this point I'm not sure which it was?), however, and his complaints didn't really seem to apply. Or maybe they applied, but not really in the emphatically gendered way he seems to think? Annoying male characters are just annoying, but somehow annoying female characters are the downfall of society? Really? You do realize that typically the same writer is writing characters of both sexes?
Like his whole thing about “the message” misses the forest for the trees. Yeah, Hollywood, in particular the gatekeepers controlling content for Science Fiction and Fantasy, are obnoxious and breaking many beloved franchises but the real problem is that mainstream entertainment could never become the hero we need to advance culture because the industry is inherently corrupt and greedy anyways and, in the main, disinterested in high art and culture. How could the engineers of disposable, crowdpleasing entertainment ever with a straight face pretend to be educators and philosophers? Anyone who finds hollywood lacking should consider moving on to art house cinema and literature. The endless whining peppered with unaware sexism is pretty lame. If the critical drinker really cared he’d use whatever cultural cache he has to steer his audience towards good things.
Terry Pratchett's work is a good example of progressive ideas told so well that the story is all that anyone cares about.
I'm actually a bit sad about Doctor Who, I've not watched it since the Capaldi era which really wound me up because he's a fantastic actor who was dealt a crap hand with crappy scripts that have crawled entirely up their own arse.
I am pretty sure to most fans the current era is the "reboot", and they would prefer them to go back to just before Capaldi era, start from their and pretend Capaldi/Whitiker era shows where another universe.
And then Clara came along. It's kind of like how Capaldi and Whittaker went; Jenna Coleman seems like a pretty good actress given a vacuous role. Even the character started out as an interesting twist with lots of potential for good story telling, but it seemed like Moffat couldn't quite figure out what he wanted to do with her but couldn't let her go, either. I don't remember exactly how long she was the primary companion, but it felt like an eternity (and I guess in canon, it sort of was).
Political plays are basically the lowest form of writing -- they just attack straw-men for an ideologically friendly audience.
I stopped watching early into his run but came back when I heard about some of those great episodes. They really are good.
The lack of obstacles to overcome and the general saint-like presence of protagonists these days is miserable. It's the same thing you see in political discourse these days; if you're not COMPLETELY with us on every issue, you are a fascist devil. Can't have that in your movies so you end up with perfect moral beings with no flaws.
No no, that's all wrong. A typical Hollywood woke Top Gun Maverick would have looked very different. The movie would be oriented around a female hero who is constantly being harassed or undermined by jealous men, who then get told they're dinosaurs and a relic of a previous non-woke era. At some point a frustrated white man would attack one of the women who would inexplicably turn out to be a black belt in karate (never previously mentioned), and the much larger and stronger man would thus end up on his back within three seconds. The commanders would all have been black (instead of just one in a relatively minor supporting role), and Maverick himself would either have been Chief Dinosaur, relegated to a loser's watching position at the end for his white male crimes, or - just as likely these days - replaced by a black actor without comment.
Top Gun Maverick is being more or less universally described as a non woke film. The fact that it has women and black people in it doesn't change that, because - and this is really important - anti-woke people are not racist nor sexist. That's the core reason for the whole culture war! The racism and sexism comes from woke people who are really open that they hate "white men", yet who claim it's everyone else animated by racial/gender hatred. That's why you're struggling to understand why a film can be hailed as non-woke yet still feature a mixed cast.
Maverick is non-woke for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, the cast is realistic. The US military is primarily made up of American men, and most American men are white with a large minority of Latino and African-Americans. Maverick depicts this reality accurately, or at least, accurately enough for film goers to accept it as such. Most of the pilots and Navy staff are white men, with a minority who aren't. They are usually married and if they aren't, they'd quite like to be married. Likewise, although women are now allowed in historically that wasn't the case and so it seems realistic that there's only one. None of them are inexplicably better than the others for identity reasons.
Secondly, the script lacks ideology. The characters don't make speeches about how the world should be. They don't try to remake the own world in a 'better' image, mutiny for moral reasons or any other of the stock clichés of woke storytelling. The characters are just professionals who focus on training, and ultimately just soldiers, so they complete the assigned mission without asking too many questions.
This lack of ideology is not merely replacing woke ideology with another. It is a genuine lack. Although the military in question is without a doubt the American military, there is almost no USA! USA! rah-rah. Baseball talk is kept to an absolute minimum. It's not a woke leftist film, but it's also not a Republican dream movie either. The pilots just ... train and fight. It's thus very interesting that you picked the unnamed enemy as a woke script aspect because it didn't seem that way to me at all. Woke people are never shy about naming the groups they hate! It's a slightly jarring stylistic choice, at least at first, but I don't think the script could have worked any other way. For the story to make sense you have to believe they're (a) not in the middle of WW3 (b) they're fighting an enemy that doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't start WW3 if their airspace is violated and yet also (c) has more advanced fighter jet tech than the USA. There are no countries that match this set of criteria. The best match for the unnamed enemy is IMHO clearly Iran: the extreme tactics used to prevent uranium enrichment, the mountainous terrain etc. But it's unbelievable that they'd have military tech than the USA. Someone else I talked to who saw the movie thought it was clearly meant to be China. The enemy ends up being a blank slate because filling it with details would have reduced the movie's focus on the action and created irreconcilable plot holes, not because woke people are so caring and reluctant to pick a fight!
I agree that most action movies today have a pretty seen-it-before grandiose plot. But movies with down-to-earth original plots still come out (occasionally).
Jesus, have some pacing.
Should have been a much more down to earth story about him adjusting to modern day, getting his groove back and taking on some minor baddie.
Comic book movies are also "ur fascism." They feature utterly paper thin heroes who are just good and paper thin villains that are either just bad or have caricatured motives. Thanos with his genocidal malthusianism is about as high-brow as this stuff gets.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the generation raised on these has been softened up for puerile political zealotry (of various stripes) in adulthood.
Go back and watch an action flick like Die Hard. Such movies were considered lowbrow when they were made but that film contains some extremely complex characterization and nuance compared to 90% of comic book films.
I think we tend to view the major artistic mediums that we are born into as something eternal when in reality they get stale.
Whatever can be said about movies I am sure people were saying 50-100 years ago about paintings.
Or think about the last great sculpture?
The same thing with movies has happened with music. The LP was nothing until the 1950s but it feels like something eternal. Creative people move on to newer mediums that are a blank canvas so to speak. Youtube, Tiktok, podcasts, long series TV.
I think as you age obviously it becomes harder to impress just from having consumed so many masterpieces of artistic expression. You have a much higher tolerance for amazement.
I think superhero movies are totally unwatchable but I am sure this would be different if I was starting closer to a blank slate when it comes to movie expectations. I love mob movies but there is no grand comment on society that caused all these mob movies to have been made outside a type of fashion trend.
Maybe music and movies are just on a downswing for a while, having been thoroughly explored by previous artists.
This creates an interesting phenomena where you are either more creative with your screenplay (and restrictive with your budget) or you cave in to censorship. I feel like most of the time Hollywood picks the latter.
That said, Hollywood is still making good original action movies (the most recent being The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), they are just really scarce among a plethora of military propaganda and/or superhero sequels (e.g. Top Gun: Maverick).
Authenticity and 'the genuine' were discussed obsessively by (all?) early 20th Century thinkers in response to the first signs of the beginning of our modern social experience.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381440.The_Society_of_th...
And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”
J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.
“I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
"Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”
From a 1968 interview with Jannick Storm
Ran across this observation with regards to Die Hard: the first two movies had McClain as basically a beat cop who gets in over his head. The latter movies he's almost a superhero.
- Black Coal, Thin Ice
- Ash Is Purest White
You know that dream most people have had, where they're running down the hallway that never ends, or running away from something they can't escape, or swimming up through endless water, or any of a dozen variations on the theme of reality no longer being composed of length and distance and height but instead being just a geometrically featureless abstraction of whatever experiential idea is currently stuck in your head?
Modern Hollywood action feels like that to me. There's no geography. Nothing changes because no matter how hard you punch the superheros (whether or not this is formally a superhero movie) they don't even so much as get their hair mussed. Things break and fall down, people get flung into concrete walls and break the concrete walls and pop back up so often it has lost all impact, you can't get your bearings on anything, you can't figure out where things are, nobody's winning or losing, it's not in any particular place, it's just never ending inescapable abstraction of fighting ideation, until the director or writer just decides it's over for basically no reason and we go on to the next thing, no different than a nightmare finally breaking not because you got away from the thing (you can't, it's in your head with you) but just because it is later.
Modern Hollywood action feels like that sort of nightmare you can't escape from for me... not the one that has you waking up drenched in sweat and terror, not the night terror nightmare, but the nightmare that drones on and on and doesn't let you go and makes no particular sense and you just can't get out of, with no real place or concrete events or anything else to hook your attention on to and break out of the loop.
Needless to say, I'm not particularly excited about throwing my money at them to produce this feeling in me.
(The last fight I really remember was the last on in Serenity. It sure isn't an action extravaganza like a Marvel movie, but that fight impacts everything and everybody. As Malcolm Reynolds hobbles away from that confrontation, there is no question. Something has happened. It happened in a place, and there was a sequence of events, that followed logic and biology. Events logically led up to it and consequences radiated out from it. Serenity isn't the greatest action movie in history or anything, the fight in the bar of the same movie also feels like the nightmare I describe above, it's just the last scene is the last fight I remember that impacted me.)
And trying to recycle what makes money is not something Hollywood stopped doing. It just keeps doing it over and over. New ideas are risky, how about another Batman reboot?
Well c'mon man, it's been four whole months since we've had one, we're overdue by now...
Art produced for massive audiences typically requires a massive investment, so it’s produced with the same concerns as other massive investments.
Arthouse films still exist, but you know, there does seem to be something unique about an action movie that wraps itself up. I wonder if they’re out there.
People who enjoyed movies such as The Fugitive do not go to cinemas anymore as much. Cinema going audiences shrunk severly. The only reliable market is kids movies, superhero movies and established franchises.
A) not all movies break even, most lose money, so the "hits" are needed to keep the lights on. It's not unlike VC investing.
Ironically small movies tend to lose money because they're small, telling small stories, with small ambitions. Ultimately these don't attract much of a cinema audience, and even those who enjoy them won't necessarily encourage others because (B). Streaming is a new, and perfect market for these with a very wide global audience - but making it for streaming takes out all the upside, even further constraining the budget.
There is no "community" (aka audience) already in place for some random new action movie. It costs a fortune to make, and returns are highly variable.
Contrast this with star-*, marvel, James bond, Tolkien etc. There's a pre-established market for these. If your gonna spend North of 100 million (or a billion for LOTR) there better be some expectation there.
Which brings us to (B). B) - why go watch it in a cinema? Growing up my TV was tiny, sound was rubbish, quality was bad. And cinema was cheap. It really was "better on the big screen". Now my TV is huge, sound is amazing, I can pause to go yo the loo. And a month on streaming costs less than a single movie ticket.
Sure there are still movies made for the big screen - Top Gun Maverick is grand in scope and beautifully filmed, and imax worthy. And Tom worked hard for 3 years convincing people to go see it (spoiler: worth the wait.) it's a sequel, barely, not a franchise - but we very much know the movie we are going to see.
The point being that that is the first time I've been to a cinema in 3 years. Before that I've seen maybe one a year, much less an average. I figure 99% of the movies I watch now are at home.
To those complaining about all movies being Marvel, well clearly they aren't. But if you want variety in movies then the cinema is not the place to look. The variety is now on streaming where small movies with modest budgets can better reach a wider shallower audience.
This does work better in art-house cinemas with quiet and invested audience. And people are different, audiences are different and peoples home watching experiences are different. But I can see clearly how the longer I work in cinema the more I prefer watching a movie in big screen instead at home. Even if I just watch it alone in big auditorium. Both for the ritual of taking the time out from other activities and completely focusing on the movie and enjoyment that good camerawork, acting, set-design and sound come better our on the big screen.
Obviously every viewing experience is different. In the end movie watching is experience between the viewer, film and co-audience. I have had many unforgettable evenings with very run down equipment or small screens. But I do feel that in our more and more distracted times cinemas carry a good function to present a film in distraction free setting, with good quality and mood supporting environment.
In addition to the technical quality I have learned to enjoy more and more how much enjoyment it is if someone knowable has made a choices and put together a film program. Like any good curator it brings out options I would never know to look for myself or would not really investigate because of my biases. Sadly it is finically more easy to sustain this kind of program in film festivals not in everyday cinemas.
Tickets are expensive enough to keep me at home, and while watching in a cinema can be fun there are also times it's less so. Some theaters have better seats, others are worse and so on. Ultimately distributing movies via cinema's adds a very high cost to me seeing it. And in 99% of cases I consider that cost untenable.
So, I'm not saying the cinema approach is bad, just that outside of some very narrow places there just isn't the demand enough to keep a cinema open, much less make any kind of dent in the profitability of the movie itself.
Hollywood accounting, which surely inspired The Producers, can obscure a film's real profitability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
but I am too jaded, corporate hollywood banks on safe movies, remakes/prequels/sequels. Its because its guaranteed profit that makes accountants happy.
That's why we hardly get anything interesting movies to see, nobody is allowed to risk or have their vision.
Also cinemas have been largely monopolized and deal with big producers mainly. Tarantino gave an interview about how (i think) hateful 8 was push out of schedule because disney demanded from multiplex only disney releases in given time frame.
And lastly I personally HATE average movie goer, talking, phones, eating snacks like pigs. I'd rather watch it home
China.
Foreign markets are now a significant chunk of the big studios' movie profits. If the story isn't super direct and generic, it won't work in translation, and that will cost money.
If it's true, the implications for art are pretty worrisome in a globalized marketplace.
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/gbjt9t/mad_max_in_f...
That said, I dont have a ready source for this but I definitely have read it before somewhere.
Definitely not at this point. There was a point it looked likely five years ago, but US box office is holding up better than expected, and the Chinese government increasingly block release of the vast majority of US films.
Hollywood doesn't make film for Americans any more than the baubles at tourist traps give insight into local life.
[0]: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/foreign-titles-squeezed-i...
Additionally, the Chinese censors will cut off all movies from a studio if that studio produces anything that goes against the party. Disney was blocked between 1996 and 1998 for producing a movie about Tibet. A movie that was never intended for the Chinese market at all, but one that went against the party narrative.
So, studios have decided not to risk it.
Foreign movies are generally much less formulaic than American ones. It doesn't make sense to say that good American movies are not translatable.
Money
There are still plenty of these stories. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a recent example.
I'm hoping that we will see people get bored of these films and the international audience will start demanding more story and character development. Until then, well....
So any complex dialogue or nuance is off the table.
The average Marvel movie can have it's voice acting replaced by cat noises and you'll still get the gist.
I am very happy to see the cost of filmmaking drop so much though, I will lightly never see a big budget movie in a a cinema again. But there are tons of small movies I love to see.
I'd rather support a movie with a budget of a few million, then support a blockbuster which is censored to fit the political needs of various countries around the world
> So any complex dialogue or nuance is off the table.
What a bad take! Do you seriously think complex thoughts can only be expressed in English and cannot be translated?
1. English is an unusually compact language. If you watch dubbed movies you will notice that the characters often have to talk extremely fast compared to the original and much dialogue is rephrased to be simpler. They can't refilm the sequences so in languages that take more words, the dialogue must be simplified.
2. A lot of people won't get dubbed versions anyway, so they'll be watching it as a foreign language.
Nonetheless, you seem to be fluent. Lots of people around the world speak some English but aren't fluent, don't get dubbing or subtitles into their own language for every film (or do but way late and they don't want to wait), and some of those people could in fact struggle to follow complex dialogue or might misunderstand idioms.
Or that the dubbing was horribly inaccurate ?
Of course not. We came to see amazing fight scenes.
Likewise, with Marvel movies the plot is barely serviceable non-sense. We came for Sci Fi special effects, jokes and fan service.
iow, don't discuss because the goalposts will be moved aggressively.
That said, “ No Country for Old Men” and “Hell or High Water” are significantly better movies than “Taken” and “The Equalizer”.
It's similar for books too - so few down-to-Earth action books like that like The Day Of The Jackal or maybe The Bourne Identity and Red Storm Rising.
The actual difference is these types of movies are no longer tentpoles.
Two examples: Queen’s Gambit an Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos). Both wonderful stories. The sex scenes are utterly unnecessary. There’s even an oral sex scene in one of Galactica’s episodes.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Also, for all their purported values they sure have no problem at all exploiting women in such ways.
This isn’t about being a prude at all. I am not. The sex and objectification of women in movies adds nothing valuable to the story and is a net negative for society. If you don’t agree, just wait until you have a daughter to view the world they are exposed to with a different perspective.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
For now. They've been trying to get an Edge of Tomorrow sequel movie going since about a year after the original, and earlier this year announced a TV series spinoff.
Maybe I'm overthinking it. I saw the first one as a kid and spent a lot of time doing dogfights with my toy planes since. The nostalgia hit me quite hard and it genuinely felt like a nice sequel which retained the macho 80s spirit of the original. I've never felt that with other modern movies.
That was the marketing line. There's CGI in almost every shot there are aircraft on screen.
Low-CGI / practical effects is part of the Tom Cruise formula though. You go to his movies to see him do crazy things (with a requisite running scene). Kind of like OG Jackie Chan movies: you watch them for his stunts.
There was an essay I can't find about how non-US, European audiences appreciate that kind of thing much more.
Mann's movies don't have endless thrills and they end on a slightly positive to neutral note, not like romances or action movies where the end is supremely positive. Instead, some problem has been averted, but nobody's saved the world. Any positive elements (couple living happily ever after, wounded cop surviving) are tempered by a strong sense of malaise that nothing's keeping the same thing from happening again tomorrow.
And also because I'm done with the stereotype spread by countless weekend tourists that Japan is perfect, everyone is nice and nothing bad ever happens. The representation of the casual racism gaijin experience without making it a political movie was masterful in my opinion. Also, the corruption, the dysfunctional police, the seedy hostess clubs and having the courage of making it a bilingual show.
Underrated and recommended.
Exactly this. That was my hope when I saw trailers for the show and it added so much more depth and realism, having the actors speak Japanese.
That was one of the things I liked about Pour Elle. It took the time to show you emotions on peoples faces and the spaces they were in.
I would reccomend having a look at them.
e: NYT in 1986 agrees with me. - https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/09/books/chopping-down-a-for...
Oh, and it's more recent, so you can see how it works with modern day technology rearing its head.
He keeps things more legible than most who try, but yea… I’m glad that style has mostly died out.
I didn't see the later movies, but their reception made me think the format had changed.
You'd see some glimpses of a new project via live televisionm which was the only way to stay connected to everyone.
Then you'd maybe watch it in the theater.
and here's the important part, there was a 9+ month delay from a release in a theater to being able to watch it free of charge on television. So you'd go to blockbuster and you'd open the door and look above the employees.
And there'd be a marquee with all the new movie titles you'd probably recognize from the movie theater advertising onslaught you watched.
Now there is no live television. everyone pays for streamers so we don't watch movie commercials anymore.
And I don't go to blockbuster and there's no list of new releases.
Now a huge star will be in a film that no ones ever heard of, that used to never happen.
When I was younger, I practically couldn't avoid knowing what movies were coming.
Now I have no idea.
But I have been hearing about Top Gun and Elvis. So that's a good start.
But after all that, I have to say the Fugitive is one of my favorite movies.
Tommy Lee Jones is the VIP of the film.
If you spent a lot of time going through YouTube you might know what all the coming attractions were?
> Now I have no idea.
Indeed: A sequel I knew was coming and was looking forward to, I had no idea was in theatres two months ago. Just found out sometime last week it had been released.
This description of brutal cuts to a film in order to keep it tight and cohesive reminds me of one of the themes from Pompo: The Cinéphile, where the director struggles with cutting out massive swaths of footage from his film to keep it under 90 minutes. Or is this how all films are made?
And here we are in world dominated by superhero movies, all based on Save the Cat.
https://savethecat.com/?msclkid=651ddcca02731a69d331be73a824...
Edit: And yet later in the article we have this quote:
>> The Fugitive’s success relies as much on plausibility as it does on velocity. Despite the soaring set pieces, the film somehow manages to remain grounded in a kind of palpable reality. “It is just so nice to watch a movie about normal smart people instead of insane super geniuses,”
Not sure this piece is coherent...
And it could have been a lot worse. If John Wick were a 70s revenge movie, I think it would have started with criminals killing John Wick's wife or daughter instead.
Also, John Wick is such a badass of a character that they sort of need to overdo the part that makes him sympathetic to the audience or else he would just be terrifying. The movie actually plays on a lot of villain tropes for John Wick, like in all the scenes where the gangsters are terrified of him and telling stories about him. If you take out the part about the wife and dog, John Wick is basically a slasher movie where John is the vicious serial killer.
There's absolutely no story. Zilch. Nil. Why is this movie praised?
It's not my cup of tea, but I certainly respect it for knowing exactly what it is.
I didn't feel invested in the main character at all, let alone any of the other characters. Was it the camera work, or the editing, or the acting, or the way the story was told? I don't know. In any case as a result I found the whole movie extremely boring.
Someone here mentioned Kill Bill which in a way has a similar story and over-the-top fighting scenes. But I do love Kill Bill (even though I think the fight with the Crazy 88 would have been better if it were not as long). I also found movies like The Transporter or Taken entertaining (which I think are more or less in the same genre as John Wick).
Then what exactly is it that makes me like some of these movies but not John Wick? I'm afraid I don't have the answer to that.
Overall the plot doesn't really make any sense, but it also doesn't need to, it's just a hook on which to hang some spectacular set pieces.
I think it's praised because the kind of "down to earth" action movies like the first John Wick are pretty rare these days. Superhero movie fights are generally about the spectacle of superhumans shooting various lasers at each other. They are also often entirely CG. This makes John Wick fee more much more "real" by comparison. More Die Hard and less Man of Steel.
A sibling comment compared it to "The Raid", which I think is a fair comparaison. Both series are very action oriented, both have action scenes that are better than other action movies.
You can see it as a rejection of the idea that you need a bit of everything to create a good movie. Those movies are not balanced at all, but by focusing on their strengths instead of their weaknesses, they end up being good.
1. The action sequences. While we are mostly past the era of "shaky" cam fight scenes, we still have a lot of bad action choreographing. I'm thinking of "The Dark Knight Rises" style fighting where bad guys with guns kind of just fumble around and wait for Batman to get close and pummel them. John Wick is over the top, but it still feels grounded in reality, as it feels like the characters are fighting in a way in which they realistically could be killed by a single gunshot. That's relatively unique in action movies today.
2. The world building. The series is very good about "show, don't tell". It doesn't come right out and explain everything about the structure of this underground society of assassins and criminals, their codes of conduct, their relationships, etc. It slowly reveals them over the course of the movie, and often not through exposition but simply through the character's living and interacting in the world that's been created. I think most people find this kind of storytelling more satisfying.
3. The simplicity of the story. The premise is absurdly simple. A former assassin is wronged at the lowest point of his life. He decides to get revenge. Literally all 3 movies take place over the course of like a week and the entirety of the plot is just the continuation and fallout of that initial premise. People aren't saving the world. There are no large governments involved, no super-powers, no MacGuffins, no overly convoluted plans. I think that gives the movies a grounded feeling that isn't common in big budget action movies.
I mean if one wants to write an article about the good action movies of the time maybe write about Heat?
And while I agree with the observation that we are seeing way too many entirely predictable movies made by the same patterns, I would argue The Fugitive was one of them at the time.
Still from time to time something very different comes along. I just watched "Everything, everywhere, all at Once". That is definitely not your typical Holywood fare, and was extremely surprising and enjoyable.
The Fugitive has very bad guys, which may be a little cliché too, but there is this ambiguous central character of the Marshal who has a great arc. At the beginning he's just doing his job and isn't interested in the least in the details of the case. He only digs into them because he thinks they may help with the chase. And as the movie progresses he warms up to the protagonist, until he saves him at the end. That's great.
One way to entirely ruin the movie would have been to insert scenes with the Marshal's wife where she would ask why he's never home, and scold him for missing his son's football game, etc.
Heat was specifically about their personal relationships, so in that context it made sense.
I would say, when compared to most action/suspense/thriller movies, Heat is one of the all-time greatest mostly because it defies most of the genre conventions. When I saw Heat, it amazed me because even 20 years later, it still seems incredibly fresh and original and unlike 99% of other movies of the same genre.
Heat is incredibly realistic, there are no out and out "pure" good guys or "pure" bad guys, very much like reality, everything is shades of grey. There is no winner in the story nor solely happy or bad ending, and the mechanics of the story both on the cops and robbers side is strongly grounded in reality and indeed based on real life stories from the police. The cast was extremely well trained by people experienced on both the "bad guy" side and the "good guy" side. The gunplay and heists are also extremely realistic, to the point that many elite armed forces use the gunplay and tactics in heat as training tools!
Yeah, sure, "normal", therefore cliché. Soccer moms are the bane of the movies. Just because you place a soccer mom in a gangster flick doesn't make it original, or courageous, or anything. It's boring and ridiculous.
Also, as a moviegoer, I really don't care how long the actors trained, how well, or by whom they were trained. I care about the result.
The result is a bunch of loud fighting, with boring and predictable domestic scenes in between. It glorifies violence and doesn't even do it well.
Also, movie critics highly disagree with you and consider Heat to be one of the best crime/thrillers ever made, original, fresh, not clichéd, and the movie which every crime thriller which came after aspired to be.
As for movie critics, I'd rather form my own opinion than follow those of people who's profession is to sit in cinemas without even paying for their own tickets. But, while you're right that most reviews of Heat are very positive, there are plenty of critics who thought that movie was boring and cliché. Here's one for instance: https://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/heat
"all the character-building information is cliched and uninteresting"
"About forty minutes of Heat is involving. The rest varies from humdrum to tedious. That's not a very good success rate."
"the long stretches of banal dialogue and formula plotting mute the impact of the staccato, bullet-laden bursts of energy"
None of this matters much, of course. I would feel the same if there were zero negative reviews.
I think we should agree to disagree.
I really can't stand Tarantino's stilted, artificial "dialogue" (read: tiresome monologues) for example, but people love the movies and love hearing about what the french call a quarter pounder. So they're good movies and it's good dialogue, despite my curmudgeon old ass muttering about how nobody speaks like that.