A few movies we watched are not worth the money. To stay afloat they have to raise ticket prices, but if we’re paying so much, the movie better be absolutely outstanding, and the are just not usually, so we stopped going.
What are you paying when you go to the cinema? Just went to the cinema today to see Hoppers, and was slightly surprised that the tickets were only 8 EUR per person, then we spent maybe 5-10 EUR per person on snacks too, so ended up paying maybe ~15 EUR per person overall. This was outside a metropolitan city in South-Western Europe, maybe that's why, or I've just lost track of what's expensive/cheap.
You don’t have to pay the app “convenience fee” but they added assigned seats to pressure you to do so. If you wait till the day of and buy on the big kiosk in the lobby, what if all the good seats are gone? (Hint: they won’t be, the theaters are always mostly empty)
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
* The Dark Night
* The Lord of the Rings (3x)
* City of God
* The Departed
* Donny Darko
* Memento
* WALL-E
* The Prestige
* Road to Perdition
* Kill Bill
* O Brother, Where Art Thou?
* Hotel Rwanda
* 28 Days Later
* Snatch
* The Pianist
* There Will Be Blood
* Children of Men
* Gangs of New York
* The Aviator
* Minority Report
* Gladiator
* Catch Me If You can
- Frankenstein
- Dune and Dune Part Two
- Star Trek: Section 31 (just kidding)
Movie theatres hardly make any money from ticket sales with 80% of the ticket price going to the studio during the first two weeks and then declining. They make money off of concessions
Is this true, or you just can’t discover them anymore because everything else competes for your attention? Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever, it’s just so much, that it’s hard to choose.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles.
That's the problem with nostalgia, you don't remember all the bad movies you had to watch just to get those two gems. Someone probably suggested those movies rather than you stumbling onto them. That's pretty much the job of a critic. Siskel and Ebert in the 1980s would often talk about the pain of having to sit through hours of awful movies every week just so that they could find one or two worth recommending.
I tried to provide specific examples and contrast with something in the current zeitgest. I'm open to counter-arguments. I liked Barbie and Oppenheimer, both were well-done, but I don't think they'll stand up with the greats. I admit that I don't watch as many movies now but what stands out in the past 10 years? What has captured the zeitgeist like The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings?
Those great directors you just named were nobodies at the time those films were made. You need to find movies made by the current nobodies. Those are indie films. Go find more indie films. Those are the ones you will enjoy. My favorite movie of all time is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022). I just now had to look up the director and did not recognize the names.
Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were better or not but I think it's pretty well agreed that (some set of) the big name directors and actors and blockbusters were pushing the art form. And it required those kinds of budgets to pull off, and it was seen as legitimately elite status to be given the chance to do it. The crazy complicated shit they did with practical effects and elaborate set building, for example. Teams of visionaries coming together to build deeply immersive worlds. It was a bleeding edge of art, and it attracted those types.
Read about the making of Die Hard. They're legitimately blowing up and ramming SWAT vehicles into a huge office tower in Los Angeles. Alan Rickman of all people is doing crazy stuntwork with flying cameras and real explosions and everything needs to be timed to the millisecond and executed by the whole team. There is no "do it in post", there is no CGI. And you can feel it.
Some in this thread have made the point that it was wasteful and excessive, and dangerous, and exploited labor, and that is all true, but...it was art.
It's hard to argue Sinners wasn't taking risks, or One Battle After Another (not my favorite this year, but it was a wild ride). Even Marty Supreme was a very weird and strange film that was very high budget (the CGI was in the background, but there's a lot).
Sometimes, cultural decline actually does happen, usually eventually followed by some kind of renaissance. Anyone who has studied the cinema, literature, etc. of a certain country in the past knows that there are "hot" periods and "cool" ones. When we see this phenomenon in the past, it doesn't tend to trigger the same defensive reaction, I guess because it doesn't feel as personal.
There is an element of that perhaps: from the past we already have a great number of movies. The more time passes the more great movies will accumulate, so newer movies will be judges compared to that whole set.
However, at the same thinking how many times I was exciting about a movie and how much I liked it. There are lot of fewer of them in the recent times.
> Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever,
I could see the quantity but not the quality. Netflix produced a lot of shows and movies, Hollywood did, but I don't think as many good ones in there as say in the decades of 1990-2000 or 2000-2010. Tastes of course are subjective, you may just like newer movies they make that's fine, too.