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Comment by sdsd | Hacker News Reader

I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever.

Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.

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Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do.

Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.

The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.

I didn't really think of the family as a PC addition but I can see that angle as well. I kind of just switch off any kind of higher analysis on films like this. I didn't mind the family but that is mostly because they didn't dwell on them for long periods. If the entire film was them... yeah I probably wouldn't be so happy with this one.

But this one was following such cliche on who survives and who doesn't, they were always going to live. ;)

"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm.

Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.

If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.

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