I’m not sure I completely agree. Yes there’s always been silly popcorn movies and genuine, thoughful works of art, but the problem is that the movies that focus less on spectacle and more on story and characters, tend to barely scrape by at the box office.
People pretty much only go to the cinema to see big-budget spectacles nowadays, when back in the day you’d go see lots of different types of movies.
Oppenheimer was the exception to the rule. It was such a breath of fresh air because it was a serious drama with barely any spectacle, but people actually went to see it. I see it as a sign of changing times. Marvel movies are increasingly flopping, and people crave sincerity in cinema again. I have nothing against silly comic book movies, but I don’t want those to be the only type of movie I see.
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
I dunno, man. I don’t think you can say “cinema was better in the fifites when there weren’t all these cheap action movies and creature features and cash-grab sequels” as though On the Waterfront didn’t come out within three weeks of a movie about giant radioactive ants and the fifth remake of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, sure, last year people were double-fisting a sprawling biopic about the man that flung the world irreversibly into the atomic age and a movie about singing plastic dolls, and finishing it off with a talking alien truck fighting a robot monkey… just like how eighty years ago Casablanca came out the same year as The Invisible Man’s Revenge and House of Frankenstein, sixty years ago people were just coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and turning right back around to go watch Charlton Heston punch a guy in a gorilla suit, forty years ago we got Amadeus hot on the heels of Police Academy and The Search for Spock, and nine years ago Spotlight and The Revenant were running trailers at the same time as Minions and Adam Sandler’s Pixels. This is not a new phenomenon, the past only looks better because nobody talks about the mediocre movies from that era anymore.
And even barring that, I really don’t think you get to say “TV is doing cinema better than cinema these days” as though for every Chernobyl or Succession there aren’t eight NCIS spinoffs, three Big Bang Theory prequels, a Celebrity Golden Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and - guess what, bucko - a show with a bunch of superheroes running around punching each other in the dicks, or whatever. The ratio of “high art” to “party time” is damn near identical, the movies just have a bigger ad budget.
So in the end, it seems all you’ve got left here is a guy starting a conversation about a new, topical thing and using that to segue into talking about a thing he made last year and how it’s so much better than new popular thing, and you should watch that instead. Thanks, Brian, super glad we had this talk.
~I guess I’m gonna feel real silly if I ever get around to watching Deadpool & Wolverine and end up agreeing with this guy.~
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 4 months ago
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Well at the same time, I just think that’s more indicative of the progress of technology relative to the progress of the modern cinema. My TV is now very good, and films are released onto home media quite a bit faster than, say, the 40-year gap between the release of Gone with the Wind and the development of the consumer VCR. If I want to watch an expensive piece of audio-visual spectacle while it’s still part of the zeitgeist, that’s a pretty good reason to catch it early on a massive screen with Owlsey Stanley’s Wall of Sound blaring from all four directions. If I’m going to watch a three hour long character-driven, thought-provoking masterpiece that makes me re-evaluate the world and my place in it, I’d like to be able to do that in private on my couch with a bowl of soup and a
thermostatvolume knob I control, and not be wrenched suddenly from the pastoral vistas of St. Radegund by the stranger two rows down ordering a Taco Bell off his phone while I’m trying to process my complex emotions. And the pandemic sure didn’t help much either. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that for however much they’ve declined in recent years (and ignoring Guardians of the Galaxy III, which was far better than it had any right to be), the big-budget superhero blockbusters have been some of the few in recent memory to be able to deliver on both the visual spectacle to justify the day trip, the vice-grip on the public consciousness to demand seeing it right away, and, at least for a time, writing not so offensively dumb as to make it still possible to sit through. I think it’s less a sign of audiences becoming more concerned with spectacle than sincerity, and more a sign that people are being given more flexibility to engage with the medium at their own pace, and as a result the buzz around a given film doesn’t seem quite so pronounced as it isn’t all entirely done in unison. And while that does certainly hurt them at the box office, it’s not necessarily indicative that there isn’t a demand for them, just that people don’t have as much incentive to make a whole day trip out of one movie when they could just wait a few weeks and do it on their own terms. I don’t think it’s cinema that’s in a bad way, I think it’s just the cinema.Of course, this fellow made much my same point quite a bit better and quite a bit sooner and I’d be remiss not to acknowledge it.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch
I’d totally watch this, if it were a comedy series about these crazy creatures navigating normal day to day shit.
5in1k@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Speaking of Amadeus, Mozart wrote a song called Lick my Ass that was covered by Jack White and ICP. we’ve always loved trash.
mipadaitu@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This is a well researched “fuck off old man” post.
SwordInStone@lemmy.world 4 months ago
is Barbie an example of a shitty movie in your post?
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Honestly I’d say probably 80% of the movies I listed as “less-than” are actually super rad and I was kinda just hoping nobody would notice. But it sure seems like this guy would take issue with them, so, sometimes we stretch the truth.
Taleya@aussie.zone 3 months ago
points silently to gidget, herbie and fckn elvis movies
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Yeah, I mean, jeez, Elvis spends the entire middle of the 20th century taking beach vacations and playing cowboy on Paramount’s dime, raking in 3-4 million apiece (which was quite a lot back then) with half a script stapled to either end of an ad for his next record, and somehow that’s the golden era of Hollywood, but Hugh Jackman pretends to have an adamantium skeleton for the first time in seven years and suddenly culture’s being rotted from the inside-out by a new, omnipresent trend of performers wasting their talents goofing off for the frothing masses. Simple fact of the matter is cinema has been prioritizing screwing around with the audience over the illusion of artistic integrity since 1903 and anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
What is the alien truck fighting movie? I think Police academy and co. Are fine movies but comedies and dramas are fewer and farther between now. Especially for cinema release. For example Adam Sandlers movies are the modern equivalent of straight to dvd.
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
What is the alien truck fighting movie?
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, released a couple weeks before Oppenheimer.
BossDj@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Don’t worry, Deadpool & Wolverine is the best superhero movie for comic fans since Logan