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.
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.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 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.