"Challenging" is such a bullshit term. It implies there's something meaty for your brain to chew on, but 9/10 times it's a pretentious way to write off people who don't like hamfisted righteousness that fits squarely into run-of-the-mill positions and ideas that are Hollywood-safe.
Those movies are pablum just as much as marvel franchises or 90 minutes of fart and dick jokes.
You're not getting the direct filmgoer experience of that culture, just the best fruits, and that's perfectly fine because if you like their best you may find more in their second-best that you will also absolutely enjoy, just like in Westernized media.
Just like books, I guess. :)
This is really not true from what I can see. European films are routinely subtitled for other languages. (They used to be dubbed instead).
And even cheap and cheerful Bollywood and Chinese movies find a distributor and a bad translation.
Perhaps this is more of a problem on US streaming services. You do have to want to find these things, to some extent. But almost all cinema is produced with a global audience in mind.
Like all the Taken movies, or A Boy And His Dog, or anything Steven Seagal made after he discovered Russian money.
This in particular. I don't mind the odd superhero movie, but they seem wildly overrepresented in big budget movies.
It feels it's also frequently a retelling of Spiderman or Batman. I don't think I can stand another Spidey or Batman origin story, or another "...and the next villain is hinted at to be the Joker!". Occasionally there's a "superhero team" (usually the Avengers, but sometimes a more obscure team) or some other lone hero. Even with less known superheroes, the story beats and plot structure is always a familiar one.
I'm sure there are exceptions, and I'm sure my mind is playing tricks on me (as I get older, I tend to consider a "recent reboot" something that actually happened 10 years ago!), but still...
For example there was an article making rounds about how of the Top40 most sold DC comics recently, Batman is in 37 of them.
Basically, Batman sells, other DC properties, not so much. Even Superman is struggling.
I have no idea why is that, but I suspect that is because most DC characters require too much skill to write well (for example superman is literally invincible and indestructible, the only conflict you can have in his stories are psychological, ethical, etc... ones. But instead crappier writers kept relying on the stupid kryptonite, because that is the only way to force Superman to have a not-boring action sequence if there are no psychological, ethical, sociological, etc... restraints).
I liked Watchmen's take on a Superman-like character. Morally gray stuff like Dr. Manhattan being used to win the Vietnam War (as an analogue of nuclear weapons) and him becoming so powerful he becomes detached from mankind. Why would Superman care about us, when we are like ants to him?
There's also Red Son, a truly interesting take on... commie Superman.
But there's so many times you can tell those stories, I guess. Superman is a really boring character.
At least in the 90's, most movies were around 90 minutes. Nowadays, if it's less than 2.5 hours, it's a minor miracle.
All that said, I'm still a sucker for mindless entertainment. Even if movie night has become a bladder endurance contest.
Fo example, what are the'10s equivalents of "A Few Good Men", "Seven", "Dark City" and "The 13th Floor"?
There is _some_ stuff, but less than before, replaced by a massive amount of super hero movies or long-running franchises.
As a support clue, I invite you to consider the winners of the MTV Movie Awards, which are more "popular" than other Awards:
92 Terminator 2: Judgment Day
93 A Few Good Men
94 Menace II Society
95 Pulp Fiction
96 Seven
97 Scream
98 Titanic
99 There's Something About Mary
00 The Matrix (bonus: not 90s)
10 The Twilight Saga: New Moon
11 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
12 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
13 Marvel's The Avengers
14 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
15 The Fault In Our Stars
16 Star Wars: The Force Awakens
17 Beauty and the Beast
18 Black Panther
19 Avengers: Endgame
You could have a first run movie in a movie theater that cost less than a few millions to make, and it had a shot of finding an audience. Movies could hang around for more than a couple of weeks because it didn't cost three digits to take a family to the theater and have a box of popcorn.
Now, if the movie doesn't make $900 billion by the end of the opening credits, it's yanked. Movie makers can't compete with major studios with tent pole IP for screen space, so they've taken their talents to streaming services like Neflix, or even YouTube.
There's also a communal aspect of movies in the US that's gone. Cultural touchstones aren't made in the movie theater anymore. It's all divided and subdivided by algorithms so the geeks and jocks (or greasers and socs, or Jets and Sharks) never have to mingle unless they make an effort. These days you can mix in a constant stream of ethnic and racial grievances about who is represented or not, or how much, or all the other social justice palaver that makes our current world so very lovely and livable.
I didn't even notice this inflation in movie length until I went back to try to watch older 90 minute movies. They feel short now, almost unfulfilling. Gladiator (2000) at 2h35m feels like the right pace.
I think after Game of Thrones (ex the last 2 seasons), I'm used to more drawn out scenes and development
Hence why I feel that the most interesting things are those which are polarizing.
I feel like there is something pretty blah about most big-budget movies today, but I don't think that it can be explained by saying that filmmakers are progressively removing polarizing elements. Now that I consider it, most big-budget action movies in the past were blah too. The action movies that first come to mind are the ones that I have enjoyed enough to re-watch, but the 1990s had plenty of blah action movies. Maybe the problem is just too many big-budget action movies.
I strongly agree with this. To me it's impossible for something characterful and powerful not to generate equally strong dislikes. The only way absolutely everyone will like a movie is if it's so bland and inoffensive it cannot motivate anyone enough to dislike it.
What has happened recently? Is that "popular" movies/shows ARE much better and in MORE quantity than before.
Just tackling the usual suspect (Marvel), it pretty clear that the bar is raised from the past.
And then, the "artsy" movie/show has a greater problem to be above the median, because the median is higher.
And to bot: the blockbusters of today is ALSO more fun!
Many movies you can see there is a grain of some great idea for something new or interesting, but you can almost see exactly where studio execs said "no that's too complicated dumb it down for the audience"
And the weird indie auteur stuff is almost universally horror films these days it seems. Which means I personally am super not interested.
I don't know who needs to hear this
X is fine until it's not
kick the can down the road
in the tank for
let's normalize Y
Is it just me or
Anyone with an opinion other than mine about trans is transphobic
I'm calling you out
> They don't like being challenged by anything
I got in trouble yesterday on Twitter after making a simple suggestion about video techniques, got called a douche, all their friends jumped on me and I got blocked. It was bizarre. Afterwards I came up with this:
Ignorant people will attack and ignore you if you try to give them information they lack. That's why they're ignorant. From Latin ignorantia "want of knowledge". Ignoration (1832) has been used in the sense "act of ignoring."
I'm abandoning social media more and more these days because so few people have the ability to think critically. It's mostly emotional reasoning and it's the same old tropes over and over again, endlessly.
There's probably already some movement in film that is new and different that most people don't know about, but 20 years ago everybody will claim to have already been into "back in '22."
A few examples of recent movies that I would have never thought watching but came my way thanks to imbd ratings:
Donny's Bar Mitzvah (too vulgar for its own sake, but very funny)
Last Night in Soho (nice british movie about London of the 60s)
Never look away (biopic of some german painter I never heard of)
Mining high ratings <1K votes yields a lot of gems as long as you don’t hate subtitles.
Someone else mentioning my favorite director and best movie of 2021?
Sir you have just made my day.
From this, I think it's safe to assume that the lowest common denominator is growing fastest. Why put in original thought when you can use an internal plot-point checklist or AI/ML to guess at what the focus groups would say anyways?
It's not like the big production companies wouldn't move towards that model on their own.
Look at Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, a show that was made by reusing old animations. If someone writes a script (use humans for now), then the AI/ML can stitch together the animation.
Once there's a corpus of material, start letting the AI determine plot points, and have humans vet and write it. Over time, let the AI take more and more control over the direction of the show, making sure to introduce new characters or events as needed.
What beauty, thank you
Being truly excellent does not mean maximizing popularity. It’s a trap. But it also means a lot of smart people learn this early and can’t deal with modern self-marketing. I think this dynamic negatively affects culture. The solution, I think, is smaller communities.
Add more and people start seeing each other as strangers instead of neighbors (IMO).
Weird, why would mass of people try to escape reality instead of watching more documentaries and getting inspired to change the world for better? This truly is a conundrum.
What could be the common denominator, causing the mental health crisis, mishandled epidemic, ecological crisis, political crisis and economical crisis all at the same time? Shouldn't we be all like seeing it like every day?
It surely wouldn't be something trivial. Like a constant stress from universal competition. /irony
it’s more that this shit gets shoved down people’s throats intentionally because it’s a way to prevent people from organizing to improve their lives and stop being exploited. if all anyone has ever seen is capeshit, they’re going to be less mentally capable to deal with the complexity of real life. same reason why china bans blood in video games: so you don’t have a language to even express what is happening to you, so you can’t even start to do anything about it. think about why the movie idiocracy got shat on. they didn’t market the movie bc they wanted it to fail bc they don’t want people to see it bc they don’t want them to be self aware bc they want them to be stupid because it’s easier to control people that way. it’s the same reason why the NPC meme was banned from twitter: because it’s too accurate and too problematic for the people who know all to well how accurate it is and whose full time job is manipulating braindead npc-like morons that use twitter.
1: This is treated as fact in many places, but was very hard for me to source. The most definitive statement I could find was contemporary with the MGM/Sony dispute being resolved:
> The Marvel-Sony contract requires the studio to begin production of a Spider-Man feature quickly; the actual deadline could not be obtained. It also places Columbia on a short leash in scheduling sequels, requiring in some cases that financing for a sequel be arranged within months of the release of the previous feature[2].
2: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-02-fi-13115...
You’ve already read the “fifty or so jokes.” And, you’ve already had your fill of big-budget special effects. It now seems tiresome and dull…
In short, perhaps you are just becoming a grumpy old man. ;)
Can I TL;DR this into "shhhh.... Let people have fun."?
Movies, the internet, television, video games, and then whatever technological terror we can conceive of next will also subsume to the same fate.
Personally I believe it’s because that Intelligence at extremes leads to a fixed or absolute worldview, where ideas are somewhat crystallized and remain fixed, changed only by the most drastic personal occurrences. Intelligence in the middle of the bell curve is more related to shared experience rather than personal experience, and as such, having a collective experience of the unknown actually does and can change both the personality and mind state of the persons consuming the media. (They’ll watch James Bond and feel like a secret agent) because merely having the sensory experience is intellectually the same as being the other person. I suppose it’s an inability to filter or perceive which experiences come from the self vs. the world, which either one would need to be stupid and not care about the world (left side of the bell curve) or considers the world from a perspective of being in relationship to the self.
People like re-watching the same stuff that they've already watched, they're comfortable these days watching reboots of the same superhero movies. They like big budgets and flashy special effects. They don't like being challenged by anything.
Even when it comes to something like online forums, something like reddit is mostly a wasteland of the same 50 or so jokes endlessly recycled, with people desperately trying to be clever, but not too clever, to hit that sweet spot of mediocrity that gains piles of "updoots".
I don't know if its always been this way and I'm just more annoyed with it lately.