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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

I re-watched Star Wars for the first time in a while (I watched it surely more than 100 times as a kid, but hadn't in a long time).

Leia is a straight-up badass the entire movie. She's the only competent one in the main 3 (Obi Wan's a contender if you expand it to 4, but he dies, spoiler alert). The other two are bumbling idiots until the very end, and don't go through half as rough a time as she does.

Then we open Empire and she's perfectly cool under fire while being the #1 person in charge of commanding a fighting retreat against an overwhelming, mechanized force, and has to be dragged away to finally leave her post as the structure is collapsing around her.

The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.

Like... holy shit.

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> The whole thing is played like it's ordinary, no awkward asides to make sure we understand that this is a WOMAN being STRONG. 1977 and 1980 release dates.

This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.

A modern movie can't just have a bank robber kill another bank robber. They need the killer to say "hehehe, this way I get a larger cut of the profit!" Does that really need to be said? Why can't a movie just show it but not have the character explain his motivations outloud to an empty room? Because modern movies are made to spoonfeed disinterested dimwits with short attention spans. Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.

Plenty are still made well... they're just not usually blockbusters that get a ton of advertising.

This is a big problem I have with modern movies; they're unable or unwilling to simply show, they need to show and tell. It doesn't matter the theme, even wholly unpolitical themes are far too often explicitly laid out, multiple times, with blunt dialogue exposition to the audience who are presumed to only be half-watching the movie.

The smart writing (and smart audiences) have all moved to TV. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Better Call Saul. These are the shows that respect their audience's intelligence.

The movie business has turned into Disneyland with guns.

It seems you missed a lot of recent awful shows. What the GP describes is very present in TV.

> Movies are catering to people who aren't even paying attention, because in test audiences there are always a few people who keep muttering questions "what's going on? what did they just say? why is this happening?" And the worst part is, these sort of people are still confused even when the movie explicitly explains everything to them.

I've got a few relatives I simply can't watch movies with because it's like this the whole movie. It's like they can't remember anything that happened over 2-5 minutes ago. "Who's that character?" "Where are they?" "Now who's that?" "Is that the cousin or the uncle?" "What are they doing now?" "I don't understand." OF COURSE you don't understand! You've been on Instagram the whole movie! They come out of a standard brain-off romcom and they don't really know what it was about, except that the ending was sweet and romantic and they liked it. Put something like Inception or Tenet in front of them, and they're going to just sit there totally befuddled.

Also, often times that’s the whole point of the movie that we don’t know yet who is that character! Like, can’t you accept that as an unknown and work the story from there?!

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