The new literalism plaguing today’s movies
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words. They really lose me when it comes to Anora. That's quite possibly the worst take I've heard about that film yet, and I've read some Letterboxd reviews.
> What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically.
Before rushing to judge today's movies, shall we remind ourselves what popular movies 20 years ago were? There were some real stinkers there, too, and they were not more smartly written in this regard. They just weren't.
> The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable.
Has this person forgotten Titanic, one of the best-selling movies of all time? It's extremely formulaic, predictable, and intentionally so. It's basically opera, not really a new genre.
sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things.
I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and today, and in the past there was a lot of overlap. Today completely divorced. And it's honestly because the audience, not the critics, just can't take anything unconventional. Creators that had mainstream appeal, Kubrick, Tarkovsky were out there by today's standard. You could not put the opening scene of 2001 in front of a modern audience without half of the people playing subway surfers on their phones. Or take Lynch, he wasn't just niche, people made an effort to understand that stuff.
I noticed this in other media too. I saw reviews for Kojima's Death Stranding 2 and every five seconds someone went it's so weird as if that's almost an offense, from the guy who made the Metal Gear universe. You make something like Evangelion today, the biggest mainstream anime franchise at the time, you'd probably have people on social media cancelling it for some of the more Freudian stuff in it, and complain because there's not enough plot in it.
Am I willing to hold the idea that a movie might be good in a way that goes over my head? Yes - take books, I'm never going to read James Joyce, I won't study the historic texts it references, I won't learn the Dublin colloquialisms, I won't understand his wordplay, and I accept that the people who do will get a lot more satisfaction from reading it than I would get from the few scraps I might make sense of.
But if you tell me the painting of a blue rectangle is worth millions, and I just don't understand because I'm a simple pleb and you're a true art connoisseur, and that the art house movie just has more sophisticated culture that a low-brow wouldn't understand, I go back to saying that if you stare longer at the clouds you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you are sharper and more imaginative you will see more patterns in the clouds. If you enjoy finding patterns in clouds you will find more of them. That doesn't mean some clouds have more meaning in them.
And if it's you telling me I can join your club of exclusive film afficionados if I pay the member's fee and spend hours watching the film, or that I can read your educated critical thoughts on 2025's Cloud Patterns in your review column in Cinema Monthly magazine, well that's sounding more like a racket.
Two different people recommended Severence to me [it's a streaming series about people who have their brains severed so when they are at work they cannot remember the outside, and outside they cannot remember their workday]; I find it boring. Is that because I'm a simpleton who can't appreciate social commentary and can't follow unusual storylines, or is it because I've read a lot more SciFi and spiritual self-help mumbo-jumbo than either of those people have, so the ideas are less novel and exciting to me? Sure there are objective things like "this lighting and camera technique was pioneered in $FILM" which I can't see and you might get enjoyment and satisfaction from noticing, but is that really different to me commenting that they have CRT/desktop computers harking back to the IBM XT instead of going with a Star Trek LCARS style flat UX, or that the Data Reduction team shouldn't be able to work with encrypted data because good encryption would not give any information about the plaintext content, or that using the computers to show numbers-as-text is really broken because computers are a tool for turning numbers into human-friendly graphs, sounds, pictures, and by showing the computers as dull numbers machines the writers are revealing society's lack of deep computer understanding and we've all missed the point of Jobs' "computer as bicycle for the mind"?
And there are more subjective things to say about media e.g. "this is Plato's Cave" but is it really, or are you seeing Plato's Cave in the clouds because you were hunting for Classic Memes or because you have spent more time studying the Classics so the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon kicks in and you notice more of the things you know about?
Sure, sure, "all art is the same, nobody is any better" says the intellectually sterile internet commentor. Sure, sure, you're just a higher calibre of person and it's not that everything in life is a status game and you're positioning yourself as higher status by self-declaring that the things you spent more time on are the better things. Yes, people are smarter than me, people know more than me, people see more connections in films than me - but the medium through which I learn those things, the way that message gets to me, is very suspect; why am I reading a newspaper column where you take a broadcast position and get paid to tell me that you see more meaning in a film than me? Why are you, the sublime intellect, spending your life watching films and commenting about them on the grubby pig-mud internet while claiming deep meaning, instead of fixing the world or sitting ZaZen on a mountain top? Why am I hearing about this from a Film Professor whose income depends on people believing that film is deeply meaningful, or from a Film Studies graduate whose self-image is partly supported by the idea that their expensive degree is about more than just simple entertainment? The medium is the message, and the mediums are not truth-finding, they are marketing and entertainment.
It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".
And isn't nature wonderful, but is this art?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVmw3ZhdzEs - Steamed Hams, in the style of the banned Soviet film Glass Harmonica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynyv3oHDRg0 - Steamed Hams, but it's French New Wave cinema.
There's no curiosity that Steamed Hams might be more than what you saw it to be. Sad times.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...
Everything you said was baked into my post already, so it's funny to me that your conclusion ends up being the exact phenomenon I was talking about. I don't feel like going point by point but nothing you said was something I haven't considered.
Yes! Sometimes there are experts in higher-up places that do simply just understand something deep and insightful that you don't, and they may not have a peer-reviewed scientific study justifying this. You are allowed to not accept this - it may even be true, although I don't think so - but how are you going to keep thinking about what you might not know yet if you're already convinced you know about as much as the author does?
Like... are you going to keep thinking about the ideals in Star Trek if you think you know more than Gene Roddenbury? Are you going to keep thinking about what Lord of the Rings means if you're absolutely certain no author could really be THAT insightful? I've already come to a conclusion here: no.
This doesn't follow as a piece of logic at all; I often find some computer related comment on the internet by a beginner where I definitely do know more, and the comment is a trigger for me to keep thinking about the details long after the comment is over.
We could list some ideals in Star Trek, e.g. the multicultural bridge crew, and then think "I know more about that than Roddenberry so let's imagine about where Roddenberry could have done better". (I'm not claiming to know more, just spinning a thought experiment). Or you could say "look I've studied a lot of multicultural ideals and I knoww more about it than you, and you could learn something of it by watching more Star Trek and focusing on that point". The important part is that you can list specific ideals in the work, and then we can talk about those ideals.
We could imagine a movie about the killing fields of Cambodia. I don't want to watch it. You are saying "you don't think there is anything in there to understand!". But I am not saying that. This is not "the exact phenomenon" you were talking about because here I am accepting that there are things I don't understand, as I did with my example of James Joyce's writing.
However, what I do reject is the idea that there are films which you claim contain deep meaning that you understand - but you can't say what that meaning is, you can't demonstrate its presence, you can't demonstrate that you have the understanding which you claim to have, or demonstrate that I do not have it, but you are convinced that you understand it more deeply than I do and that elevates you to a higher status than me. That is the realm of every mystic, street corner preacher, megachurch pastor, cult leader, every psychoactive drug taker, every dreamer and philosopher, many artists, con-artists and scammers, and should be rejected under Hitchen's Razor ("What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence").
Am I going to think about what Lord of the Rings means? Probably not. I have read enough songs (one song is enough) about Bilbo Baggins hating it when people are careless while washing up plates. That's not because I claim to know more than Tolkien. But if you say "Tolkien made some deep commentary about the choice to suffer to protect those you love" that's different claim than "Tolkien made some deep commentary and it was like, whoa dude, you just had to be there, it was like - well, it was so profound words can't do it justice - but I understand it and if you don't agree then you must be a base simpleton philistine" and you say it in a magazine with a posh register. Yeah well the clouds were very deep and meaningful too and I saw Man's Inhumanity to Man in them, you'll just have to trust me. Why not spend a few hours contemplating it?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...
a) It’s meant to be seen and heard on what even today would be a pretty insane cinematic setup. Even moreso than the rest of the film, it loses a lot in the translation to the home theater, or even a typical multiplex. Maybe this is heretical, but I’d love to see a carefully upscaled, remixed 2001 in IMAX.
b) The stargate is perhaps the singular element of the film that was the easiest to imitate, vs. say the incredibly thoughtful and detailed production design. So it was replicated to the point of psychedelic cliché.
Genuinely curious if contemporary audiences found it overlong or just perplexing.
I would love to see what Stanley Kubrick (and Douglas Trumbull) could achieve with current technology for the same sequence. I'm not sure audiences would survive the warping of their senses though. Some would come out irreversibly transformed.
Obviously subtlety is good, but choosing to be very literal can be an interesting artistic take. I don't think Kojima was thinking about how to dumb-down his message for audiences. I think its a genuine artistic choice rooted in his style. While I didn't like it for other reasons, I think the same can be said for Megalopolis. I loved the scene were it's just a full screen interview with Catiline, even if it was kinda dumb.
There's probably something interesting about how both the ten thousandth grey-CGI marvel movie and these more experimental artists are drawn to hyper-literalism in the now, probably with some thoughts about the social internet thrown in. I'll have to think about it.
The biggest issue with the movie is that it's boring. I personally think the weirdness wasn't used to it's full potential.
A very similar (and highly underrated) movie is Richard Kelly's Southland Tales which in my opinion is far superior and vastly more entertaining to watch. Which I guess does prove there is some merit to your point, since this movie was also panned by critics and audiences for being "way too weird".
Wait... I've never seen it. Don't tell me the ship sinks!
The opinion that most movies are dumb, and only a few of them respect their audience and are worthy of awards and praise, has been true for as long as movies have existed
It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other commentators disagree), but without providing detail on what movies the author feels avoid this pattern, they make their argument impossible to refute or engage with. (It also insulates the author’s tastes from criticism, which I suspect is part of the motivation)
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/06/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/13/collections-nitpicking-gladiat...
It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.
Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.
This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.
No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.
Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.
I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.
I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.
I remember first watching The Avengers and finding it refreshing. "This is fun! Why aren't more action movies fun? They're always so gritty and violent and serious, even though the protagonists are functionally superhuman, they're always so mean-spirited and the dialogue is is always so aggressively masculine and primitive and angry." And then that was everything for the next few decades.
Perhaps a more accurate (and less cruel) analogy would be that it will receive some scaffolding to sustain it - the leading edge is always unfinished. By the time it becomes mainstream, it’s closer to a product than an idea.
Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"
I think there's a fear of losing attention because you're asking people to think about something other than the eyewash happening right in front of them by inviting them to have to -think- about a movie.
Anyway, to close: "No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people..."
- HL Mencken
And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
But I think even then I was allergic to hype. Same reason I've never seen a vast number of well loved movies. Like Titanic. ... just a contrarian LOL.
We didn't have the money to go to movies. So I think the exposure to entire cohort of my fellow nerds having seen it three times over opening weekend, wearing the t-shirt every day, and talking endlessly about it for weeks made it easy for me to just nope out by the time it came out on video. That and I was really hitting the "girls and rock and roll" part of puberty and probably ran as far and as fast as I could from stuff that reminded me of being younger. Enough biography. LOL
Do it tonight and report back tomorrow please.
I'm not gonna promise that it'll change your life - don't want to over hype it. But I am genuinely curious what an adult's initial reaction to it would be after watching it for the first time.
9min of animatronic dinosaurs
6min of CGI dinosaurs.
The era you're talking about the balance was spot on. I'd say there was a golden age of effects from Star Wars through to Terminator 2. You're already suspending your disbelief and letting the filmmaker take you on a ride. Who cares if it's hyper-realistic? (or, in the case of contemporary movies, trying to be hyper-realistic and failing to the point that it makes it even more obvious.)
He used to get the latest version of the fifa game every year, because the "graphics were so much better in this one", he went into debt for an xbox series X because of the better graphics that it offered, now he's recently built a custom gaming PC, primarily because he could eke better (you guessed it) graphics out of the games he plays.
Every single time I would tell him IDGAF about graphics, and I'll probably keep my XSX until the proverbial wheels come off before I upgrade. For me all I need is acceptable smoothness, decent-ish performance, but most importantly an enjoyable gameplay experience and (primarily for me) a very strong narrative focus.
I stopped trying to dunk on his enthusiasm (I was like that when I was 15), and now I'm just happy he's happy. Although he probably won't be happy, because the next-gen gpus are already just over the horizon, and by the time he's built his next gaming PC the next-next-gen GPUs will be just over the horizon...
Maybe some people are like that with movies? Maybe they select based on flashiness and special effects, and when the effects are obviously visible then it's bad by default? Maybe comments like "wow, this movie is certainly visually striking" in a focus group is seen as a Good Thing which makes the producers optimise for that when they make movies?
It's a self-reinforcing thing. New movies want to look 'new', no matter if 'new' is bad.
This has given me a license to come back and check out beloved works whenever I realize I was just being contrarian and stubborn, which is a delight. Also still lets me say "I knew it!" when super popular things become less than beloved in retrospect.
Plus old stuff is often cheaper. It's often a fun adventure to go "Ok, let's see what all the fuss is about," even if it doesn't become an instant new favorite. Example: Twilight, while I wouldn't call it "good", is very funny and very fun to watch, especially if you get a mixed crowd of people that loved it at the time but recognize it's dumb, people that were allergic at the time but have since watched it and can acknowledge the fun, and new watchers.
It's pretty straightforward really - for example I saw Fruitvale Station as a movie fan. I thought it was great and so Coogler was on my radar. I thought the Rocky franchise was ripe for a reboot, so when I heard he was doing it I was in. And the movie was fine. As was Black Panther (considering Marvel flicks for what they are, no judgment either way). So OF COURSE I was downright excited for Sinners. With no assumption that it had to be the best thing ever - and I had a blast.
Another good example is that I'm currently watching the John Wick series for the first time. I didn't know anything about them, but had heard them positively referenced on Kill James Bond. Well, if you meet it where it is and realize it's just "what if you made a comic book into a movie?" and don't expect more of it, you can appreciate it for whether it does that well or not.
That's close to the way the conversation would happen in real life.
I mean, unless you have two comedic geniuses who can really sell yelling down the stairs to ask the partner what they want for dinner, getting met with "HUH???" inching a little closer, and having repeat this three times until you finally just go down and ask in a normal voice. In the right hands that could be comedy gold on screen.
But by in large, we don't consume media because it represents the banal reality of everyday life.
George Carlin didn't emphasis this enough in retrospect. The idiots in-charge now appear to begging for educational percussive maintenance, albeit in hyperbolic, euphemistic form for legal reasons only.
I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the general public won't pick up on it. At the very least, I would say that for this to be true you need to have a very specific definition of intelligence that would exclude a lot of crowd behaviors.
That phrase is about conning people...
And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.
Still, surprising statistics.
But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.
I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...
The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).
But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!
Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.
The thing is, when AAA games or movie studios start to focus on that one thing that "sells best at one moment" everyone else checks out.
I did checked out of games when I realized they are just not made for me anymore, that stuff I liked is looked down at in the industry and they focus on stuff I do not care about. It was similar process with major movies, at some point too little appealed to me, so I stopped caring entirely.
> The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories.
Sure. I like to watch those and I do, on Netflix or whatever. I just do not expect realistic human story or something new from a major Hollywood movie. They are not about any of that.
Well stillsuits are supposed to collect and preserve moisture and shield from heat in extremely harsh environment. I would sort of expect that 8k years in the future some tech for that would be close to the skin, rather than waving thin layers like bedouins or touaregs use.
Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves.
And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point where it's safer to sell mediocre and milquetoast movies rather than push an opinionated one and risk blowback.
Look at the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or the Craft 2. Both movies built on a previous proven winner, both original movies had something to say.
Beetlejuice was not only a quirky romp through the afterlife but also a story about aboriginalism vs colonialism and whether it is right for the aboriginals to do horrible things to protect what is theirs, and also a story about how embracing change can help cross generational divides and how accepting people who are different from you can enrich your life.
It was very opinionated and had a lot of great subcontext. Same with the Craft.
The Craft was, on its cover, a story about what teenage girls would do if they got magical powers, which then turned into a series of biopics of the deep emotional damages caused by indifferent and hateful people. The movie dealt with racism, sexual assault, murder, mental illness, self esteem, and self acceptance all in the context of a teenybop horror movie.
Then you look at their sequels.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduced 3 antagonists, Beetlejuice's wife, the boy, and Lydia's boyfriend.
It started three potential plotlines, the soul sucker, the life swapper, and the gold digger, and brought Beetlejuice in to deal with all three of them.
And then, 80% of the way through the movie, it threw all three of the antagonists and plot lines away and then rehashed the climax of the original movie with a slightly different set of clothes on.
What deeper meaning did Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have? None. No one had any value or made any sense. No one in the entire plot was irreplaceable. No one learned any lessons or grew in any measurable way. Nothing actually happened. They all woke up like they had a bad dream after Lydia's father's funeral, the mother died, the gold digger died, and then the story was over. If the movie had not happened nothing would be different for the characters except that maybe the gold digger would have dug more gold or something.
Then, the Craft 2. It's not a horror movie. It's a teenybop movie where girls get magic and do things with it. They have a trans person in it but she doesn't use her magic to address her transness in any way. There's only a tiny drop of racism, and no one has any real deep issues to resolve.
So, instead, they get David Duchovny in to play as some guy who embodies toxic masculinity, but who is also ineffective and purposeless all the way to the very end of the movie, when all of a sudden he goes murder rapey and then gets easily beaten by the power of feminism and witchcraft.
No one learned anything except GIRL POWER. Nothing really changed for anyone. There were no edges in the movie to explore. It was pointless.
Either sequel could have been much more poignant by touching on real issues that people experience. The Craft 2 could have touched on social media and the need to look like you have a perfect life. They could have touched on what a trans woman would do if she could remold her body with magic permanently or semi permanently like the girl did in the first movie. They could have made Nancy a bigger part of the movie and have her deal with David Duchovny instead of it being a girl power movie, and then Nancy could have taught the girls the things she knows being a former vessel of Manon with 25 years to learn and grow from the experience. It could have gone into a demonstration and discussion on how young women have so much to learn from women even 20 years their senior, and how working together and tearing down walls both of age differences but also gender differences can make the world a better place.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have made a really fun story out of any of the three protagonists and plot lines if it had picked and chose one of them to run with and made the others the sub plots. The gold digger plotline could have been about accepting what is different about you and not allowing others to convince you to mask your weirdness. The life swapper plot could have been about learning how to accept that you're a normal person who grew up in a weird household, and how that doesn't make you weird and that it is possible to make both sides work together as long as each side values the other. The soul sucker plotline could have been played for laughs as at the end we could have seen Beetlejuice about to win Lydia only to be thwarted by his actual wife and dragged off into the underworld by the leg by her (and end up happy in the end, maybe seeing him slowly reinflate after she sucked the soul out of him, he he sex joke). All of those options were thrown out of the window and instead we get a meandering pointless movie that would have been fine if it had never existed.
Good movies have an opinion and something to say. Napoleon Dynamite is a perfect example of this. It's a bad movie in every measurable way. It's boring. It's slowly paced. It has no plot. It's like a 2 hour slice of life Jello movie. But then, the point of the movie gets driven in, that everyone has value.
It's a simple message told in a long and occasionally humorous manner, but because they didn't try to piledrive the message into you when it hits it hits hard.
Bad movies ramble even more than I do and never make a point for fear of popping a bubble. And media franchises know this and choose to make them anyway rather than be at risk of any blowback. After all, most movies released by a large franchise are profitable by default. The number of AAA movies that did not make their cost of production back in the last 10 years is vanishingly small, to the point where movies that only make 150% of their production costs are considered box office bombs and franchise killers. (Like the Golden Compass, that made $370+ million and won academy awards on a $180m production cost and was considered enough of a failure to end the entire series)
They know how to make good movies. They know how to tell satisfying stories that keep people wanting more. They know how to make a lot of money doing it.
So why do they keep not doing it?
I believe it's 2 things.
1: Fear of offending people and having massive blowback because of it.
The outrages over stupid things like the Little Mermaid being black is a good example of this. Who cares what color her skin is? She's a fish. If the story is good and told well then what does it matter?
But I get it, you can't convince someone who wants to be upset and outraged as a distraction for their own personal problems to focus on their personal problems instead of screaming about DEI or whatever 4 letter flavor of the day they have to rage about. This much is understandable. But still, that's no excuse for making a bad movie, they could have far more easily found the rage points and dealt with them and left the rest of a good movie alone.
But that brings me to my second point.
2: It's on purpose.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm starting to believe that megaconglomerate media companies are intentionally making unsatisfying movies that are highly titillating for the same reason that Doritos flavors their chips in just such a way that you never get satisfied of eating them, that final burst of zest and flavor that would put you over the edge always just out of reach.
It's like the torture of Tantalus, satisfaction always being just outside of arms reach, but knowing that it's close, and occasionally actually satisfying the itch (like any good skinner box) keeps us diving in, spending money, buying merch, showing our love and support for the franchises that once scratched the itch for us in hopes that it will scratch it again next time.
They're doing it on purpose because they know that if you didn't get what you wanted out of this movie, you'll go watch another, or a TV show, or read a book, or play a game, something, because you came to get satisfaction. And if they blue ball you just right, you'll keep spending money until you can't afford to spend any more in hopes that you'll finally get what you're looking for.
I think it's on purpose and I think it will keep getting worse until it cannot get any worse, and then it will be replaced with something else that will be massively satisfying for a while at least.
The plot and all the non-Beetlejuice scenes were a waste of time.
The original was an ensemble cast movie where each person put something into the movie all to support each other, which pushed Michael Keaton's performance far above what it could have been all on its own.
I mean, Michael Keaton was a great Batman in the 1989 movie. Putting him up against Jack Nicholson was a great move, and I think that as Batman he worked really well to both make Batman cool but also to make the villains look properly villainous. His only downfall was that he didn't make a great Bruce Wayne, his energy was too chaotic and over the top for a composed stoic billionaire.
That aside, I think Michael Keaton needs an ensemble to shine his brightest, and they did not give him a strong ensemble in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Don't get me wrong, there are great actors and actresses in the movie, but there was not a lot of time spent with them, reacting off of each other. Each person was on their own solo quest and Beetlejuice mostly either worked alone or so quickly and efficiently dispatched his enemies that they barely had a paragraph of interaction with each other.
It missed out on the synthesis and charm of the original in my opinion, even though each person was good to great on their own.
I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/14kznfv/movie_ti...
I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).
Places where real estate is cheaper than wherever you live.
On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.
People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s it isn't something I just made up. On average there is an undeniable drop in animation quality and story quality compared to past eras.
Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.
In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.
Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.
Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")
Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".
It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.
Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.
They are hampering discoverability.
I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.
> They are hampering discoverability.
At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.
I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.
I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?
If I scroll down far enough I’ll loop around and if I scroll through the categories given they’ll overlap. But if I go to someone with different enough taste I’ll see there are things I’d like to be aware of which I don’t k ow how to engage without already knowing about them. We expect this for languages foreign to us but why is it also true for anything the least bit challenging to one’s usual taste?
The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.
How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)
That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.
I’m really looking forward to the Space Balls sequel. I have hopes that one will be good.
Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.
Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...
Often during a three hour film I've ran out of refreshments and would like to buy a drink or something for the last hour.
So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.
Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.
I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.
Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.
2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.
The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.
Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.
Or the bean counters in charge target the largest common denominator, shaving off the long tail of above-average sophistication with every mediocre release.
And I don't think you can totally disregard that movies cost more than they ever have to make while also looking worse than they ever have. The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean utterly trounce newer productions that cost far more to make just for everyone to bounce around green screen stages in motion capture pajamas, and to be clear, this is not industry professionals costing too much or being bad at their jobs, it's almost solely down to the studios wanting the ability to hysterically tinker with films until the 11th hour to ensure maximum market reach.
The industry should be ashamed of itself.
Beatles songs are around 164 seconds long on average.
https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/uploads/6/5/4/3/6543054/durat...
An 2005 compilation of Johnny Cash’s greatest songs averages just a little over three minutes per song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Johnny_Cash
Gerry and The Pacemakers did not have long songs either.
https://www.discogs.com/master/369149-Gerry-And-The-Pacemake...
Neither did the Kingston Trio.
https://www.discogs.com/release/666498-Kingston-Trio-The-Kin...
Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different lyrics but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.
Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.
We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.
It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.
I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.
I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.
Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.
I recently got a a pair of XR glasses (ray neo 3). Pretty much replicates the full cinema experience. Only downside is it isn't a shared experience.
> Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market.
On that day, I'm taking my iPhone, a keyboard, and those future glasses and will work from under a tree.
IMAX broadened the licensing about 10-15 years ago. I'm not an IMAX person, but people who are complained a lot about it at the time.
Catch Me If You Can
Gangs of New York
The Pianist
City of God
Yes, yes they were lol. It is almost hard to believe those all came out in the same year.
Imagine in 2025 having to pick if you want to see The Pianist or City of God? It is just so unthinkable
Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.
When I was an undergrad ages ago, going to the on-campus movies were a non-trivial part of the weekend experience. My understanding is that they're mostly dead at this point.
The first two I agree with, the third one is a stretch. The quality of programming that HBO was putting out in the mid 90s and 00s is far higher than any streaming series that has ever been released.
So now we just wait for a movie we want to see to become available on Apple TV, and then we rent it.
As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.
It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.
Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.
I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.
I feel like when a movie comes out now that I want to see, I am in a constant tension between dealing with a potentially rowdy or obnoxious public, or a less ideal viewing experience at home.
I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.
These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.
I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.
I think I understand that, it's just not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike social experiences – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.
Plus I'm lost without subtitles, even if the dialog is crystal clear!
I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.
The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.
The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.
To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.
Fucking absurd.
A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?
I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
I agree that the average experience could easily cost half that, but the point of how expensive cinema can be (imagine adding a second popcorn or, God forbid, nachos!) is a good one.
We just saw Superman in a Las Vegas IMAX and it was $85 including fees for three tickets. $75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.
Perhaps it's reasonable for a very occasional and special event, but it's not actually that expensive for anyone that cares about seeing movies in theaters. I'm paying $27/mo for effectively all-I-can-watch[1] movies via a subscription in SF, and includes IMAX. When I travel to LA I can use it there too, and it's available in NYC. I saw Superman for the cost of popcorn because I saw Elio earlier this month, it's a great deal.
If one doesn't go to theaters that often or cares for IMAX, there's other chains that offer 1 2D-only movie for $12/month and the tickets roll over.
[1] 4x movies/week, which is indeed more than I have time for.
the local theatre I normally go to is $12 off-times and $20 on-time. A nice special kick to the head that they need to separately specify a $2 "convinience fee" for saving their time and ordering online.
I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).
There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-vi...).
Dresden, Germany
We don't watch streams, as my wife constantly talks over it. Which she cannot in the movies
Well, you've just revealed which kind of “content” you watch (by revealing which kind you don't). A lot of well known films were shot on full frame, and never had any other variant.
Frankly, seeing them in theatres “as intended” would require inventing a time machine, or not missing some special film screening event, as they were made quite some time ago.
Also, back then, when they still had to make film prints for distribution, and had to deal with wide screen theatres and regular screen theatres (you couldn't just ignore the other half, and lose a potentially significant share of income), both filming and editing took that into account. Shots in one aspect ratio were usually composed to look god when cut to the other, and professional cameramen (working with both types) constantly kept that in mind anyway. Same for possible TV screening versions later.
Now compare that to the modern nameless editors working for giant corporations which pretend that it's an impossible task that has never been done, and either crop automatically, or let the “smart computer” toss a coin to shift responsibility.
Edit: By “theatres” I've meant types of film projectors installed in their halls. Some had multiple, switchable lenses, etc., some had only one. Keep in mind that to show a multi-reel movie without pauses you need at least two projectors (or a special feeding system for spliced together film if the number of screenings is worth the work), and a third one is often added for redundancy and required maintenance work, so there's a lot of investment to make already.
It's pretty big vertically as well. IMAX is close to 4:3
And ye cropped is bad. Think STNG.
The pan-and-scan DVDs seemed to die out long before everyone had 16:9 TVs. Consumers seemed to decide they preferred letterboxing over cropping.
I miss the days of the slideshows that would play while people where getting seated for the film. I loved the occasional trivia slides.
Makes me want to only go to that theater.
There are still some fun things to do at particular theaters, like Twisters in 4dx. But there is little compelling reason to otherwise.
Internet access was widely available.
Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.
Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.
DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.
Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.
HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.
So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.
DVD adoption (and later Blu-Ray) was certainly a huge factor in the gradual changes and 2002 was when people really started amassing them at home https://i.imgur.com/OHZ9H69.png. I'm sure piracy has a role as well too, but most of the deltas listed were also gradual changes which had their start prior to 2002, same as piracy. The only thing special about 2003 is it's the year the momentum changed, not that it's the year something brand new was introduced.
At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?
The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002
It didn't need to be about the same or better, it just needed to be good enough to appreciate that you weren't dealing with the downsides. The theaters weren't that good back in the late 90's (in fact, most of the ones I visited in my teens have renovated to be more current sometime around 2010 or something). All people needed was more realistic alternatives. More and more folks were getting cable, DVD players were more affordable, and places like walmart sold DVDs for a cheaper price than you'd pay for a full price movie. Netflix started in the late 90s too.
Yes, I know folks could rent videos before this. I remember walking down to rent NES games when I was young - right next to the movies at the grocery store. This was a far cry from the stores of the late 90s, though. They got better (and worse).
I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. No it wasn't.
Movies on TV weren't glorious at all. They weren't "amazing." They were what you made do with. And when a classic movie played at your local arthouse theater you grabbed a ticket because it was so much better. The image quality. The sound. Seeing the whole image rather than a bunch of it hacked off.
That's why we went to the theater. Not just for action. For comedies too. Which is why comedies made tons of money at the theater!
And while maybe not amazing, they were wonderful at the time. Do you remember folks being amazed at the graphics on the PS1 or heck, even the N64? Those weren't good, really, but at the time? Yeah, it was good enough. Late 90's started seeing bigger tvs and sound systems. DVDs brought options to see all that stuff on the sides if you wanted. You didn't "make do" if you are out there buying modern tech - maybe you made do with whatever brands they sold at walmart - but then again, they sold game systems so it really wasn't "store brands only" or anything like that.
I'm not sure where you lived, but absolutely no theaters around me showed classics, save for something like Star Wars or Disney movies. One played second run movies - the ones in the space between theater release and home video release. So no, no one went to things like that. I graduated high school in the mid 90s, and both local theaters were pretty run down places that treated employees badly. The ones in smaller surrounding towns, if they had it, usually only played a handful of movies and were old places. And this seemed pretty normal for Indiana, outside of perhaps Indianapolis or a few richer areas.
No, I didn't. I don't think it either today, with my pretty big TV. The experience still pales in comparison.
2002 TV setup < 2022 TV setup < movie theater
My projector screen takes up more of my vision than any movie theater screen I've ever seen except IMAX.
Whereas it used to be very much about image and audio quality.
Fight Club as well.
It was no IMAX but at 1024x1024 we didn’t care.
I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.
I take it you really mean "so why wasn't 2003 the peak year instead of 2002" to which I'd say "I'm not trying to explain one needs a 55" widescreen 4k TV before you'll ever consider going to the movie theater less often, rather that this kind of difference over time is why you can't say movie theatre ticket sales in 2002 were higher so people must therefore have watched more movies then."
If I had to throw a guess at the largest contributors I'd say 2002-2003 is when people really started buying lots of DVDs for the first time as well as the start of the modernization of TV sets. Even though much better versions of these were common 20 years later I feel they very likely helped make the absolute peak of ticket sales be 2002. This is getting more into speculation of what did happen rather than saying ticket sale data is not enough to support the conclusion though, which is what my comment was focused on.
>In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.
Is what I was responding to.
The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:
> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!
Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."
That era is ending, and other things are replacing them, mostly based on computers and internet.
If you love movies this is sad, but movies once replaced other beloved things.
The world spins on and nothing is forever. Enjoy the ride!
And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.
No thanks.
They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.
There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.
Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
In general I think the sound bar audience is different from the hi-fi audio audience. I was fine with using the TV's built-in speakers until LCD TVs took over from CRTs and the built-in speakers became much tinnier and quieter because they couldn't fit quality speakers in a flatscreen TV case. I suspect most people who buy sound bars are in a similar situation.
Right, there are only so many walls to paint in a cave…
I can't tell if this is sarcasm.
Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).
"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...
It's still not the same as the cinema experience.
But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.
Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.
It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.
Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.
So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.
They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.
If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?
Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM
This looks incorrect, at least according to Wikipedia; its list of films by box office admissions[1] includes a few Chinese movies from the 1980s with higher numbers.
Unless the 80s don’t count as modern times - but I’d say it’s not that far from the 90s.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_by_box_office_...
Unrelated, I wish there were small screening theaters where small groups of people could watch films on-demand, drawing on a massive catalog.
Also, you graph is way too short-sighted to say it “peaked in 2002”, as in reality it peaked in the 50s (before TV went ubiquitous) when almost ten times as many tickets were sold.
Pretty much everything was telegraphed, and that’s ok — the story resonated with millions of moviegoers and made a lot of money.
Other movies of the era (e.g. Being John Malkovich) didn’t telegraph stuff. That movie didn't win any Oscars and sold roughly 10x fewer tickets.
1999 was a bumper year for film in general. There were too many good picks that many had to be passed over. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out in 2004 to acclaim, and covered similar themes, so it can be done. The casting of Being John Malkovich also made it a long shot for awards, as all of the actors in it are fantastic, but there aren’t any standout roles because everyone in it is so good already, and none of the characters are redeeming in any way, so it’s a hard watch for most folks.
Spike Jonze did get an Oscar nomination for Being John Malkovich, and it was his feature film directing debut. The writer, also in his respective feature film debut (for writing), Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ticket sales are the wrong metric for artsy stuff like that, imo.
Ebert said it best:
> Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four stars, writing: "What an endlessly inventive movie this is! Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, supplies a dazzling stream of inventions, twists, and wicked paradoxes. And the director, Spike Jonze, doesn't pounce on each one like fresh prey, but unveils it slyly, as if there's more where that came from... The movie has ideas enough for half a dozen films, but Jonze and his cast handle them so surely that we never feel hard-pressed; we're enchanted by one development after the next". He concluded: "Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is unlike any other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. Forrest Gump was a movie like that, and so in different ways were M*A*S*H, This Is Spinal Tap, After Hours, Babe and There's Something About Mary. What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either Being John Malkovich gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains."
Unrelated movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
And the second example makes it harder by referencing a bell and an exchange
Much like videogames, the answer seems to be to look for indie and foreign works with less pressure on them to be easily consumable.
The problem with movies is they're worse bets than startups and so big productions are the primary ones that get distribution and marketing. Kind of a self-reinforcing power law distribution that leads to a few getting most of the money.
The tiny ones need to find cleverer ways to get free marketing Richard Branson-style and try to include at least one celebrity.
Examples of shoestring budget success stories:
- Napoleon Dynamite 400k USD (2004) (680k USD today)
- Mad Max $200k AUD (1979) (760k USD today)
- Fruitvale Station 900k USD (2013) (1.24M USD today)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail £ 175k (1975) (2.5M USD today)
- Easy Rider 400k USD (1969) (3.5M USD today)
- Mean Streets 500k USD (1973) (3.6M USD today)
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
This isn't to say that Hollywood thinks everyone is dumb, but they recognize that all these different people who grew up in different places aren't going to understand the same idioms, or may miss subtle, cultural clues. The director has to spell things out. This explains a lot of what the author coins New Literalism.
Even before that though otherwise decent movies were starting to play heavy handed and treating their audiences for children that need lecturing — need "The Moral of the Story" spelled out for them. I disliked the "book-ending" that was popular when Titanic, Saving Private Ryan (and even Schindler's List) were released.
Music in film too has, for some time now, been telling us how to feel much too often. In romps or swashbuckling films it's probably an expected part of the genre. I just wish there were more quiet films where we are left to feel for ourselves.
Billy's death in The Last Picture Show (and as metaphor for the death of the town) is an excellent example of old-school film making where you just let the film do the talking. And then it is us, the viewers, who are left talking about it, thinking about it afterward.
Maybe the biggest tragedy of heavy-handed film making is it leaves nothing to really even ponder afterward. I kind of like films that leave you thinking about them much, much later.
While I remember seeing great films like Cool Hand Luke, Summer of '42 and The Last Picture Show, working through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" has been a real eye-opener to how much film can be art and how far we fallen from anything close to that.
Perhaps we'll get another "New Wave" of young filmmakers to break the corporate log-jam.
That's not the kind of films that tend to win the major Oscar awards. Those tend to be either a bit artsy (e.g. Anora this year) or "serious" biopics/history movies (e.g. Oppenheimer last year).
Serpell's interpretation of Anora is dismissive and shallow. the point is Disney infects the American mind and Baker's made that point across half his movies and in some cases incredibly blatantly. its implied and Serpell categorizing it under New Literalism goes to show they're probably right in many cases, but also use it as a convenient excuse to avoid analysis
Would a "common denominator" person really watch that movie and afterwards be confused about anything that happened? What aspect would they remotely be confused about? What aspect would be "deep" to them?
From what I saw, it was nothing but the most basic character drama combined with some "suspenseful" races against time thrown in here and there. For the second half it turns into just one of those movies where the political/social message is effectively just beaten into your face, there's no subtlety at all.
They took no risk that the viewer wouldn't get their message, they make it plainly obvious. In my mind it's a perfect example of "the new literalism". It's almost up there with stuff like Don't Look Up, Snowpiercer, The Big Short, Parasite, etc. These movies mostly solely exist as a conduit through which a political/social message can be force fed to you, in the form of a movie, rather than existing as an actual movie.
Oppy did incredibly well because of it's memed Barbenheimer marketing wave. i dont think the 3 hour great man movie was lowest common denominator movie. sure, you and i might think it was basic and laughed when Einstein showed up, but my bar for lowest common denominator is a Happy Madison production
Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality deep sci-fi. It's a comedy but not full of jokes or skilled physical humor, mostly 'random' silliness. It's a drama but the characters are shallow 2D people with one attribute each, all done in a Disneyfied "bagel with everything!" style.
In the way that Bella in Twilight is a placeholder for the everywoman reader[2]. Compare The Substance which is beating you over the head with "Society treats ageing women badly" but is not a movie for everyone - the topic is of interest to fewer people, the nudity and the physical body horror and gore will turn away a large section of potential audience. There's not much action or chase scenes like Everything Everywhere tries to throw in, and there's no happy ending like EEAAO either.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-so-random-lol-so-random-so...
last year i thought Hundreds of Beavers was a lowest common denominator movie but it turns out to be cult and im 0/5 on any of my family members liking it at all. a few movie nerd friends love it like i do. after that i decided normys must only like watching families hug on screen. i guess EEAAO has that, i just see the Swiss Army Man inside of EEAAO and think of the whole thing differently
most likely i have no grasp on what normys like
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Aol hbkplujl pz zbwwvzlk av mlls opz zavyf ohz obnl ptwspjhapvuz, dolu pa'z ylhssf uv tvyl ylslchua aohu opt ohcpun h aopyk rpkulf.
Happy-end with sequel hook?
LOTR is a fascinating counter example; each book is quite dense but was able to be made into a single (albeit long) film. Part of that I think is because a lot of the density of those books is exquisite detailing of the animated natural world of the books; a picture is worth a thousand words may be obnoxiously overused but apropos in this case. The movies seemed to understand the animate life force of the visual landscape and so were able to say a lot visually.
I just don't see Dune: Part II as a true sequel in the traditional sense of the term (though perhaps the literal sense of the term, despite literalism being apparently despised by the articles author).
Because of this, they have to have a single easily articulated point, and they have to beat the audience over the head with it.
Prior to this, I doubt whether directors, writers, or studios much cared if an unsophisticated viewer walked out of a movie with the "wrong" idea of what it "meant." The ability to attach multiple meanings, even multiple conflicting meanings, was seen as an inevitable aspect of art that should be embraced and engaged with. It was accepted that people would see a different movie depending on their background, their personal history, and their awareness of cinematic language. Supporting multiple readings was seen as a sign of depth and complexity, not necessarily a weakness.
Now the movies take a pragmatic, engineered approach to delivering a message. Ambiguity must be squashed. Viewer differences must be made irrelevant. The message takes precedence over art.
I think the interesting question is, why does the message now take precedence over everything else? What has changed? I see two possible answers.
First possibility, the audience demands a message. If the least-common-denominator viewer demands a message, and you are in the business of servicing that demand, you have to make sure you avoid any possible mishaps or misunderstandings in the delivery.
Second possibility, the makers of movies derive some personal satisfaction or social gain from broadcasting a message to the masses. They see the movies as propaganda rather than art. (Or perhaps a less active motivation: the makers of movies are afraid that there might be blowback from viewers attaching an unsavory meaning to a movie. They want to make sure that their movie doesn't become like Fight Club, a proudly embraced symbol of what it was meant to critique.)
Either of these would explain why movies are now engineered to deliver a single, unmistakable message at the expense of art and enjoyability. Or maybe there's another explanation. I'm just spitballing. I'd love to read more by somebody close enough to actually know what they're talking about.
[1] - https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...
The people in the Matrix aren't trans -- they are the same people in the same bodies whether they are in or out of simulation.
It's OK for a trans person to make a movie with no trans content that doesn't only make sense from a trans perspective.
I'm not saying the trans reading of The Matrix is the only valid reading of that movie. However, anti-trans folks and their ideologically peers reading the movie as supporting their worldview is objectively not the intended reading and therefore is likely incredibly frustrating to the trans creators. It is easy to imagine other authors seeing that and wanting to avoid that type of gross misreading of their work.
The two most common themes I hear from writers are intense narcissism, feeling deeply their own personal experience is something anyone else should care about, and activism/social justice/messaging, where they’re pushing a particular political narrative. It’s why we’ve seen the death of truly morally ambiguous characters or even antiheroes - they threaten the clear and unambiguous message the writer wants to send. Stories aren’t for the audience to interpret but for the writer to preach.
And again this isn’t inference. This is reading and watching interviews with writers, showrunners, producers, etc.
Another data point. Most people seem to think that replicants are detected because they are unemotional.
I would prefer filmmakers not assume the least of their audiences, but I would also rather that audiences not give them reason to.
I found it fascinating how the term snowflake was changed because the character that people admired told their proxies that they were not snowflakes. The meaning at the time was that they were homogenous and unremarkable. Snowflakes represented the opposite where each individual snowflake has a unique pattern. That viewpoint was not empowering so they took the metaphor to be about the fragility of snowflakes.
And just look at all Star Wars fans cosplaying as stormtroopers. It even says “evil empire” in the first movie intro. You can’t get much more obvious than George Lucas.
If one is to broaden their horizons, overseas cinema is still devoid of this literalism. European cinema, Korean cinema, and the famously show not tell Japanese cinema still produce ambiguous stories that compete for awards - just look at recent pictures in Anatomy of a Fall, Zone of Interest, Drive my Car, Decision to Leave.
If it's about what people want to see, could it be that people cannot deal with insecurity anymore? We cannot deal with not knowing. We have to know for sure, so we can feel secure.
I fully recognize that these don't make for bad cinema. I also recognize that they're often more effective as surprises. But they are going to dramatically cut into how much I enjoy a movie. And movies aren't like books, where if the tone isn't quite what you're in the mood for you just stop reading, they're more immediately confrontational, and backing out is a bigger deal (and almost a faux pas, walking out of a movie is seen as commentary on its quality). Previews are also going to avoid spoiling twists or dramatic moments, which, again, makes sense, but makes them poor tools for assessing tone. This means I'm often tempted to read the plot summary before watching, which feels silly, but if I want to challenge myself and watch things not quite to my taste and things that aren't just kid's movies without just sometimes paying for the pleasure of having a bad time, I'm not sure how else to approach it.
It also feels like other people have almost the opposite perspective, where of a movie doesn't have something really emotionally heavy or challenging to watch they can't take it seriously. I'm not sure what makes sense here, and maybe my tastes are just the problem, but it feels bad to spend fifteen dollars and two hours of my time to be in a space that's too loud, has only very expensive food, and leave depressed by what feels to be to be an overly cynical or myopic message or an artistic vision obsessively depicting the many ways human beings can be physically harmed, in as much detail as possible. Again, I don't think it's bad or wrong, I certainly don't want it to be banned or require disclosure, I just struggle to decide where I fit in the market, and I worry that my purchasing patterns support a narrative that leads to less of what I want.
> Evil Does Not Exist
> Godland
> The Beast
> The Worst Person in the World
> Misericordia
> The Banshees of Inisherin
> Amanda [0]
> Afire [1]
I found it pretty disappointing for that reason compared to McDonagh’s other movies which are much less literal.
My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.
The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.
A drama? Biography? Subtlety is desired.
Action? Comedy? Streaming? On the nose dialog is not only enjoyed, but in many cases required. (For non-prestige shows and movies, Netflix strongly encourages the character dialog state the actions/emotions the actors are visually portraying on screen, with the understanding that much of their lower-tier content is watched in the background while people are doing something else.)
There are these devices called "radios"* and this stuff called "music."
There's no point to "watching" a show if it's not being watched, it sort of ruins the whole purpose of it. Dividing attention lessens almost everything. It's like "reading" a book while moving your eyes over the words faster than you can read them. SMH. It's kind of like the cliché of the Banksy couple staring into their screens across from each other, or people who have intercourse while staring at their phones.
* That have been replaced with apps like Spotify and Tidal.
This can’t be real. Surely no one does this. Do people do this?
"Congress" is another vintage word for it. It's apropos given how the COTUS fucks around (in the present), and probably also did so 249 years ago being an inadvertent double entendre then given the making laws was and is also a contentious dance.
The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.
The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.
Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.
Unfortunately this is a real problem even if you agree with the message. People won't let a pro-diversity story speak for itself, they have to fit in a PSA like the ones stuck on the end of He-Man episodes.
Mind you, they feel they have to do that because of all the "wait, Superman is woke now?" commentary idiots.
'Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am'
Some writers are certainly taking cues from the criticisms that tweet was mocking. Or were the same people making those criticisms.
I think this is going to need unpacking; anime has its sub-genres, many of which are marketed at children, hence the simpler writing. When is it useful to be on the nose? How much speaking like a shonen protagonist do we really need?
TV these days has recaps, I recently read the third book in a fantasy trilogy that tried a recap, but '"Ok, but what are we going to do about the dark lord?' The dark lord, Jathaniel, had turned out to be the actual murderer of Pomme, Gam's dad, who we had all thought committed suicide. He was seeking the crystals of wonder..." is still very common in modern books. Comics and cartoons are expected to have much less narration, so they tend to put refreshers like this in dialogue. Movies do that to make themselves feel like comics or cartoons. I'm not sure why non comic or cartoon movies do that.
This is what is currently driving pop culture; the commodification of the meme. Movies aspire to be memes - the dominant means of expression and the atomic unit of culture in the present moment.
They used to aspire to be themselves (movies, for their own sake). IMO that ended around 2008. The Dark Knight was the end and Iron Man was the beginning of a new Hollywood cycle; defined by the movie's ability to trade in this currency - memes - which stand alone, isolated, traded out of context of an entire narrative.
Further reading for whoever is interested: Society of the Spectacle by Debord (re: the degradation of being into having, having into mere appearing, as a universal and ubiquitous byproduct of the core function of capital which is commodification)... and Man and His Symbols (re: the difference between a symbol, which is universal and carries a wealth of meaning, and a sign, which is contextual/temporary and carries a fixed meaning).
A year or two ago, YouTube flicked a short at me where a Gen-Z fan of some personality shared their feelings of heartbreak after he announced his departure from the platform.
A montage of the channel's videos had the fan's voiceover (I'm paraphrasing): "This YouTube channel has been a part of my life, my childhood, since I was like a little kid, and I never imagined one day it would end."
And then, jarringly: "This is me right now." And a still photo of their tear-streaked face. "This is me right now," not in the emotional or confused tone of someone navigating a personal tragedy, but the straight conveyance of a sentiment that has social currency. A sentence they knew others would know how to digest. Because they've seen others use it enough times to be literate in whatever transaction it represents.
I understand their choice to include their emotional reaction, and that shows some real vulnerability that I truly appreciate, but what is "This is me right now"? Maybe it springs from the social media they grew up in— where the vast majority of posts and comments are either a status or a reaction, and discourse has been strained and reduced into signals of acknowledgement.
That's what I think this "literalism" is. It's the misshapen MICR-font metadata stamped in cultural things, so that they can be parsed by a machine— and the machine is the set of heuristics younger generations have adopted to sift through mountains of low signal-to-noise content that platforms are pushing on them.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
Why am I on a platform that mostly delivers slop? That's a trillion dollar question. The advertising industry won.
Also because if I was on a non-slop platform, it wouldn't be showing me your ad because ads are slop.
"There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past and the future..."
Not even an hour passes, and the same exact voiceover repeats word for word that music can conjure spirits from the past and the future, while the scene on screen literally shows music conjuring spirits from the past and the future. It threw me off a little.
Many commenters in this thread point out that on-the-nose-ness in Hollywood movies isn’t new. Personally, I can’t recall a voiceover being repeated verbatim, especially not during the very scene it originally seemed to foreshadow.
The most egregious example is the amount of Wilhelm Screams I've heard, absolutely crammed into media. It's a proclamation of, "I'm a sound editor, and I'm in on the joke!" but all it does is pull me out of the story completely.
Another sound editor example is the amount of ice clinking in glasses and sloshing sounds of drinks, as if the protagonist's long-neck beer bottle is a half-empty jug being jerked around.
Impressive stunts are virtually non-existent now. Instead, they drive a custom-built, tubular-frame car, swerving wildly, while the camera jerks around on a crane. Everything is reskinned using CGI, and the end result is the desired car being driven by an apparent maniac who chooses a profoundly sub-optimal path through traffic.
Writers have to point out their cleverness in order to announce to the audience how clever they're being. It reminds me of eye-rollingly clever newspaper headlines.
Everything has been turned up to 11, but in the lamest way possible.
So true! This feeling is everywhere in movies now.
- There really isn't anything like a united "popular culture" anymore except in the very ephemeral sense of the latest memes on social networks. The cycle here is faster than anything before. Strong meme fads can coalesce and dissipate within weeks or days.
- Media production of all types continues to become cheaper, as far as the actual process of production. Visual effects, photography, and editing are all easier with modern tech and I would say cheaper as well.
- Economic factors: The disposable income of average people continues to become less over time, and property rents where theaters and such exist continue to increase over time.
it's not surprising that new movies and other corporate entertainment have to follow a quicker cycle, including making things easier to consume. Entertainment media is more disposable than it has ever been at any point.
It will be interesting to see if social media bans for minors will have an impact on this and maybe slow it down a bit, but I don't think it'll alter the underlying economic factors mentioned above, so it'll be interesting.
I don't know if theaters still receive hard drives of the movies they are playing, but it seems like something that could probably be replaced by a local storage solution and an Internet connection by now, so maybe in the next 10 years we'll see theaters show movies produced and released on quicker but lower-quality schedules. Something like TV shows - a new one each week for a low price. But at that point why even leave your house?
Well, that’s funny in a classic pub humour way. Except the guy didn’t get it (and neither did many others) who went on to say “Many bad philosophy classes you mean”
Like, dudes, what did you think that was? Except the whole internet is full of this. Even the slightest of puns needs a second character arriving afterwards who repeats the punch line but with some obviousness baked in.
It’s just that people aren’t literate. And I’ve got to be honest, a lot of such casual wordplay is just beyond Americans (who are generally superior to the British in every other way). They kind of need to be looking at a guy with a microphone to pick up on the joke. Probably the Germanic influence.
A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:
> 'Cause I know you're poison
> You're feedin' me poison
> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow
> Up your poison
The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
2. Sometimes intelligent people don't want to engage with the media. Attention is a finite resource, and when I'm tired after 8 hours of work, 30 minutes of recommended daily exercise, two hours of house chores and one hour of depressive thoughts, I just don't have the energy to engage with your song about a topic that's completely irrelevant to my daily life.
3. Quite often media that's supposed to be good is actually quite shitty. Good media should have layers: surface-level literal fun catches your attention, then you discover there's some depth to it, and then you start digging and you realize it's actually very complex and interesting. The problem is that lots of media either just grab my attention for nothing, or start right from the beginning with difficult topics, and then it's "woo the audience is stupid because they won't engage with my media" no bro, I just think your media is boring.
From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships. As in, they make choice to stay, despite knowing this is bad for them. I did not found sexual assault visuals, only abstract video with words and pink colors. The lyrics do not come across to me as "not putting on any kid gloves", they are gentle. They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
> You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.
There are songs that make me feel weird about liking them, but not this one. This one was intentionally made to make me like it.
I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
That could maybe be argued for music which is released as music. This song isn't stand-alone, it's part of a musical. You can't take it out of its context and then complain it doesn't make sense.
> This song makes you, unambiguously, feel good.
Maybe it makes you feel good. It makes me feel conflicted.
> From lyrics alone, I would assume the protagonist is voluntarily part of abusive relationships.
I mean that's part of the point. Angel thinks they themselves are to blame for the situation they find themselves in. Which isn't true of course, but that's how it goes with abuse.
> I did not found sexual assault visuals
Well look closer then. Angels whole thing is that he puts on an act of liking all the shit happening to him. But it's pretty clearly an act in the video.
> They are about wanting this bad thing to happen, despite it being bad thing.
Part of angel DOES want some of those things to happen. There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it. That doesn't make the relationship any less abusive.
> I do not mean it as kind of major criticism or the song ... but it is kids gloves song about abuse and feelings that make someone stay in such relationship.
I agree it's a song about why someone would stay in an abusive relationship. That doesn't mean it's glamorizing abusive relationships though. I don't really care if people dislike the song, it's parsing the song as somehow being pro-abuse where I get annoyed, because it clearly isn't. It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
> Well look closer then
As I said, I did not found sexual assault visuals. Only abstract abstract video with words and pink colors.
> There's clearly an element of glamour he likes about it.
Sure, but there is nothing about song itself that would make one feel bad about it. Or even be aware it is sexual assault what is going on. You have to bring that out from somewhere else.
> It's a realistic portrayal of how some abusive relationships work. Obviously people in them feel like they want or need to stay in them or... they wouldn't.
I do not think it is realistic portrayal of such relationship. It is glamorous portrayal. It makes you feel the harmful part feels good and is worth it. Realistic portrayal would had more pain in it, it would had mix of negative emotions in it. It would show dark side and pain, not just rational realization "this is harmful but I want it".
People in abusive relationship do not feel just the addiction and choice part. They do have fair amount of suffering, fear, feeling like they cant mixed in. They do not feel it is sweet. This song feels sweet.
I could never explain to NFT fanatics that I wouldn't make NFT art because I couldn't stand producing a product for people who had no taste and would like my worst output as much as my best.
It works here on multiple levels, because first, owning the insult is not expected, so that's already a surprise, which can work as a joke.
Then, by actually admitting to the many bad classes, it signals that the author can actually tell good from bad, implying knowledge about the matter after all, refuting the argument in the insult (that he is bad in philosophy because he had bad philosophy classes).
Third, it's a very short, snappy response, in vein of the insult, making the author look competent.
Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.
First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.
Then, as a non English native speaker, I thought it was a word play ("you have had a bad Phil o Sophie ass" + "I had too many" or something).
Then, reading the responses to your comment, found it was the witty canned response I originally thought all along...
Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
> An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”
I cannot see any common denominator in the multiple examples that the author gives and cannot relate to them (what point is there to put on an equal footing a micro analysis of a dialogue in Megalopolis -voluntarily grotesque- and the choice of film format in The Architect?).
Maybe there’s an intuition here, but I feel it is not well illustrated. The author probably hopes that she will be remembered for coining this wishy washy concept.
By the sounds of it, the author would be okay with that!
man never thought I'd see that meme continue to live on, or get cited in the New Yorker
I still silently and slowly read novels, but as of now, that's a different media experience. Its slow pace is also enjoyable in a different way.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-sec...
I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.
As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
Younger me would go to Blockbuster Video and search the new release section for non-blockbuster movies. "Ghost World" was found this way with other cult films.
With the decline of purchasing physical media it makes it hard to bring in revenue to produce obscure art. Even big blockbuster movies that failed in theatres would often be uplifted from media sales.
There are plenty of good films out there. Ignore Hollyood, broaden your horizon
(I'll only mentions stuff from the 21st century because otherwise I'd sit here for days)
I love japanese cinema so I'm very biased towards films from there.
- The Taste of Tea (2004) from Katsuhito Ishii
- Nobody Knows (2004) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tony Takitani (2004) from Jun Ichikawa
- Memories of Matsuko (2006) from Tetsuya Nakashima
- Departures (2008) from Yojiro Takita
- Still Walking (2008) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Tokyo Sonata (2008) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa
- One Million Yen Girl (2008) from Yuki Tanada
- Haru’s Journey (2010) from Masahiro Kobayashi
- Story of Yonosuke (2013) from Shuichi Okita
- Shoplifters (2018) from Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Drive My Car (2021) from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
Two korean film I've really liked
- The Handmaiden (2016) from Park Chan-wook
- Pieta (2012) from Kim Ki-duk
A chinese film I've seen recently and it was pretty good
- Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) from Diao Yi-nan
Iranian films are incredibly good and crazy what they could make despite the situation there
- A Separation (2011) from Asghar Farhadi
- Taxi (2015) from Jafar Panahi
- The Salesman (2016) from Asghar Farhadi
- There Is No Evil (2020) from Mohammad Rasoulof
- My Favourite Cake (2024) from Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha
Some european films I've enjoyed
- Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé
- Leviathan (2014) from Andrey Zvyagintsev
- Alcarràs (2022) from Carla Simón
- Fallen Leaves (2023) from Aki Kaurismäki
And last but not least some actual Hollywood films that I think are pretty good
- The Tree of Life (2011) from Terrence Malick
- Cloud Atlas (2012) from Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
- First Reformed (2017) from Paul Schrader
- Nickel Boys (2024) from RaMell Ross
Imho it's the best of the movie of the year, and one big reason is because it is NOT this.
Bizarre.
People are on their phones because the slop they are being served is so shallow and meaningless that they can't be bothered to pay attention to it
No, I’m pretty sure social media has seriously hurt the average person’s attention span.
The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Whenever I watch a modern Netflix/Hulu/etc show: I'm on my phone 2 minutes into the show. Half paying attention to both.
Whenever I watch a modern BBC-ish (anything British really) show: I literally can't look away for more than 10 seconds because I will miss something crucial. If someone distracts me, I rewind the show and rewatch the last few minutes.
What's different? The Brits (at least the stuff that makes it into syndication) focus on content you're going to watch. The Americans focus on filling air between commercials.
Product placement counts as commercials for the purpose of this comparison.
This gets repeated ad nauseum, but IMHO people are short on patience, not attention.
Parents probably understand this the most: try to find an 80s movie to show to your kids, you'll have a pass at it first to properly remember what it's about, and it will painfully slow.
Not peaceful or measured, just slow. Scenes that don't need much explanation will be exposed for about for 10 min, dialogues that you digest in 2s get 2 min of lingering on.
Most movies were targeted at a public that would need a lot of time to process info, and we're not that public anymore (despite this very TFA about how writers make their dialogues dumber)
I don't think the reason is "public needed time to process info", more likely both the length and the intensity (of changing sights, not of meaning) were ultimately determined by production costs. Filming two hours is more expensive than one hour. Filling an hour with 60 one-minute cuts is more expensive then 30 two-minute cuts because of all the setup and decorations.
Production is now cheaper thanks to CGI, box offices are larger thanks to higher prices and the global market. You no longer have to be frugal when filming, the protection against sloppy overextended movies is now taste and not money. And taste is scarce.
It was almost absurd to me not only how bland and drawn out most scenes were, but how absolutely poorly acted it was. If it were not famous(ie didn't exist), and updated to today's vernacular and shot scene for scene, it would absolutely get reamed by critics.
Funny how much changes in just a generation or two.
They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?
> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.
Average movie length is increasing every year.
This people though has been catching up on a century of classic films. There are plenty of lists around on the internet if you wanted to get started. The AFI Top 100 is a gentle introduction to the (American-only) classics. There are deeper cuts when you are ready to saddle up for "1001 Movies" instead. (Warning, you could be starting down a journey that will involve the next eight years of your life.)
Or, in the case of recent Netflix executive missives, everything happening must be literally spoken and explained aloud, moment to moment.
The same way that if you want a literary novel, you aren't reading the latest YA best seller.
The super mainstream stuff is always going to go for broad appeal. There is nothing wrong with that, but the people who want something different are going to have to step outside the bestseller box the way they always had to.
Futurama nailed it.
Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
I read through the whole article looking for something that is insightful, but it feels as if the author is beating a dead horse the way the examples does the same. Maybe experiencing that is the point, but I can't help but thinking it was all a waste of time.
Of course, we have a term for this, luxury beliefs.
Now that's what I call a luxury belief!
It's the degradation of our media, in the sense that it's factory-produced, which is in stark contrast to the media folks were consuming 40 years ago. I'm not dogmatic that it's fundamentally worse (despite my framing), but it does lack the depth of older media, IMO.
Of course, from that perspective, modern society hasn't changed much for centuries, they just had different excuses back in the days. However, it doesn't happen by itself; the construct of the presumed movie-goer (or reader, or listener) affects the public. When author has high expectations of a recipient, many of them can find themselves growing to that level, when the lowest common denominator is targeted, everyone's average drops. Writing by committee and directing by committee inevitably results in watching by committee, when no one cares because there is enough ways to find out which opinion you “should” have about the movie, and the only thing left is to check the box for visiting the cinema (the obvious democratisation of an old cliche of rich nobles being bored at the opera).
A lot of auxiliary apologetic nonsense is written about “pop culture” today — its “consumers” need to be told how to look at themselves. A vaccine against that would be finding something so bright and delicate that it can't be stuffed into one of predefined expected reactions. A lot of much stronger criticism have already been written, too. One might point to such “hits” as Vladimir Nabokov's “Strong Opinions” and lectures on literature, although the suit of renowned writer and lecturer was perhaps a bit too bronzy, while in reviews read by a small circle of Russian-speaking emigrants in Europe (collected in “Think, Write, Speak...”) or in satirical passages in fictional works he was a bit more open.
There is another (and supposedly final) in January 2026.
F1 on the other hand was maybe the worst offender as far as literalism is concerned.
Let me guess, an old man Brad Pitt enters the movie screen and says something like: “I’m gonna, I’m gonna… I’m gonna WROOOM! I’m WROOMING!!”?
Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
Literalism is bad writing. A movie that feels like it's punching you in the face with its moral themes is bad writing. "Ruined by woke" where it feels like minority characters are shoehorned in is actually just bad writing. Plots that don't make sense or are full of holes are bad writing. And so on.
I've been reading more books for the past several years. Of course books have the opposite problem to movies: oversupply. Writing a book is, like software or music, not capital-intensive, though doing it well is time-intensive. There's a lot of good books but they can be hard to find in the sea of mediocrity and now often AI-generated slop.
- Identify some problem pervading modern pop media? Check
- Cherry pick examples? Check
- Misrepresent or misunderstand an example that actually supports the opposite claim? Check
- Paint a vague picture of how much better it was before [trend], without making any real statement? Check
- Don't use any actual data or evidence? Check
- Draw a line from dumb blockbuster trends to Trump/Nazis/[insert hot-button political issue]? Check
And don't give me "oh, they know their craft so completely that they're breaking the rules they deeply understand". No. Hollywood is not putting out a whole bunch of Memento-caliber movies. They're putting out movies written by writers who would instantly experience a jump in quality if someone gave them an all-expenses paid trip to Los Angeles Community College for them to take Writing 101.
That said, I don't entirely blame the writers. I do blame them, because they really are terrible. But the real blame lies at the executive level. For decades Hollywood executives have used the terrible metrics we all made fun of them for, like thinking all we care about is which actor is in a movie or thinking that we like a legitimately good film because it was full of explosions or something. But the executives tended to get away with it, because sitting under them, however uncomfortably, was a studio system that still respected talent, and good talent could get good movies out even so. The executives could say "Give us lots of explosions and use Will Smith!" and the talent could at least sometimes make good movies under those constraints.
But the executives despised that system, failed to understand it, have now successfully disassembled that system, and what's left is disintegrating rapidly. It boggles my mind to see them pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into movies with catastrophically broken scripts, then pouring hundreds of millions more into reshoots, when any halfway decent TA grader from the aforementioned Writing 101 could have given a decent set of notes about the deficiencies of the original script. The execs seem to give no attention to the scripts, when they are by any measure one of the most foundational elements of a movie.
It's not literalism. The writers aren't good enough to be pursuing "literalism". It's just terrible writing, and executives too out-of-touch and ignorant to realize that's the problem, and if they did, too out-of-touch and ignorant to have any clue how to fix it.
The Gladiator II example is just lampshading. If you just wrote "the prisoner grabbed the weapon the guard brought in to the cell, and then killed the guard with it" the very first thing someone's going to ask is "well why did the guard bring a weapon in?" and then the writer says "oh well he didn't consider it a usable weapon" and then "but clearly it is, so that doesn't really solve anything" and rather than coming up with a better escape method the writer just leans into the absurdity of it - the on the nose dispensing of folksy wisdom establishes that the guard is just an idiot rather than leaving the audience to contemplate the contrived situation.
For Megalopolis, “What do you think of this boner I got?” [he shoots her] isn't exactly a compelling scene when reading it. It makes a lot of sense to punctuate the scene with some emotion to make it make some sort of sense. Can this emotion be shown on film without dialogue? Possibly, but the writer can't be sure how it'll actually look, and they need to convey to both the actor and director what emotion needs to be conveyed. It sounds like placeholder dialogue which could be cut or changed as needed.
For the Apprentice, again the writer likely doesn't know exactly how the scene is going to turn out. Is "Trump Tower" going to be clearly legible on the model as the scene is shot? Do you even want to spoil it by showing the name on the model? The point is this is supposed to be a reveal.
In all three cases, these lines very well could be great with proper setup and delivery, or perhaps could have been reworked into great lines. The issue is just these are mediocre films. None made any serious attempt to polish their scripts. It's not a deliberate tactic to dumb down movies or deal with poor attention spans, it's just the makers of the movie saying "eh, good enough."
(Counterexample: "Sorry, Baby", which literally just came out.)