I don’t really care about Star Wars
Money enables art only to a certain point. Past that the stakes (money) is so high that all the decisions in making the movie is done by committee.
Committees are incapable of making art.
Committees are incapable of making art.
A t-shirt slogan I would wear.
I think there’s a fine line between collaboration and committee (members of a band can collaborate to make good music). But capitalism definitely works against art.
That is a hot take.
modern movies suck today because Hollywood stopped telling stories and started selling fantasies.
take for example two movies that are somewhat similar, Falling Down (1993) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009).
In FD the audience spends 75% of the movie following a guy around who is clearly not well. he’s the antihero that we all sometimes wish we could be, but we also acknowledge it’s moralistically unjust to just go around blowing shit up and shooting at people. towards the end of the movie you understand the real cause of why he was acting the way he was which made his character even more relatable. it made you question our society and the cruel realities that everyday people survive. it makes you think that maybe that “pocket protecting pencil pusher” has more in common with you than you’d like to admit.
In LAC the audience is immediately jarred by a violent sexual event that charges you with a desire for revenge. The rest of the movie is about a guy taking that revenge and getting some sadistic pleasure from it. you aren’t supposed to relate to the main character, or any character in the entire movie. everyone is shitty except for his dead wife and kid. The premise of the entire movie is to make the audience feel good that “justice” is being administered and sugar coats it in a high fructose action syrup. by the end of the movie you’re filled with rage of the injustices within our own world and feel as if you have been wronged like the main character. you spend the rest of the night imagining your own revenge if you were the main character.
FD tells the story of how far a broken man will go if he has everything taken from him.
LAC sells the fantasy that revenge is action packed and you will always win if your cause is righteous and just.
that said, don’t get me wrong. I liked both movies, but I’m not going to lie to myself and say that LAC isn’t just revenge porn.
modern movies are flat and simple because audiences lack the mental capacity they used to have. this is because we no longer watch them for entertainment, we watch to escape our own realities.
edit: oh yeah and sound engineers can suck fucking dick if they can’t understand how to level out the foreground, background, and vocals for a regular not action movie. I’m tired of reading subtitles.
The Wilhelm scream is not, and never was, a funny inside joke. When you’re watching an intense action scene and suddenly you hear this high pitched and often way to loudly mixed scream it instantly ruins the immersion.
Any movie that adds it is instantly ruined for me. I can somewhat excuse older movies since it wasn’t that wildly used yet but any contemporary director/audio engineer adding it really needs to get the idea out of their head that it’s funny/clever/subtle. Cause it’s not.
I’m mixed on this. If it’s a serious movie, then I agree wholeheartedly. It’s not funny and it breaks my immersion.
But if it’s a more relaxed or even funny movie? Bring it on, the more subtle the better, I love hearing it, always gives me a chuckle when I’m in a chuckling mood.
Completely agree… There is exactly one scene where the Wilhelm scream is appropriate and that’s it.
That’s because the officer falling is Ben Burt, the sound designer for Star Wars and many other movies, who made the scream his signature. (Although he didn’t originate it.)
That doesn’t clock as the traditional Wilhelm scream to me.
I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, I don’t know much about this. I’m just saying if I were watching this with zero context, I wouldn’t recognize it as being the Wilhelm scream. Whereas normally I hear it in every movie it’s in, pretty clearly.
Now that you mention it, the scream in that clip is similar but a bit different. Good catch.
The main point I was trying to make was that the person getting knocked off and falling is the person who made it popular. Personally, I hate the Wilhelm scream. It’s way over used and really doesn’t add anything to the scene it’s in.
Like most inside jokes, it was better before the internet.
Now it’s the The Narwhal Bacons At Midnight of the industry.
With very few exceptions, the “Theatre” is dead to me. Last film I saw in one was Blade Runner 2049- a proper movie. There was nearly nobody else in my theater, but when I left there were tons of people leaving some stupid piece of shit movie down the hall.
I remember Blade Runner being pretty full when I saw it
Glad to hear it.
It’s not for me either. Having only seen episode 4 and the one where bb8 was introduced, I could even tell they were basically the same fucking movie. Fell asleep in the theater.
Rogue one was really awesome though.
More theaters need a rotation of classics. There’s a whole subset of movies I’d love to see in theaters again and having to wait for some small theater half an hour away to show one of those for one weekend a year is a bummer.
Its funny because when I was young bargain theaters would play old stuff they could get cheap regularly. I think its tougher now that people can see something whenever they like.
Sorry, chief. Best we can do is a lousy remake instead. That’s because the licensing rights for oldies are too hard to figure out so we can’t be bothered, and all creativity in Hollywood died in 1999.
Nuh-uh. What about the matrix?
Shit. You’re right.
Yeah. I’ve had people fight me tooth and nail repeatedly that the Matrix was a “2000s movie.” I think this is another one of those Berenstain Bears things.
(Most likely people watched it on DVD in the year 2000, since for a while there The Matrix was the movie that sold DVD players.)
We have a local theater here that basically only runs classics, it’s pretty great.
This is why I love my local theater, comparatively cheap tickets and the best prints for old classics running all the time.
Sometimes they also bring in the director, or someone else that was involved in the production to talk about the movie. Those are really fun.
Or LOTR. Or sports based films.
I tried watching LOTR ever since it’s out on DVD. I never finished one. It’s so boring, i don’t know what it is. Last time someone tried to show me the enhanced super long edition and it was absolutely painful and we both fell asleep.
Watch in a theater if there’s an event near you or with a bunch of friends. The theatrical cuts are much better paced. It was even criticized for being much faster than the books. If you get to the Mines of Moria (1/2 of the way through the first) and you’re not hooked then it’s not for you. LoTR is movie magic. Not just “wow that was a great movie” but something that transcends the medium, and makes you ask, “HOW did they DO that?” Hope you give it another shot. Cheers
Movies in general aren’t interesting to me. I much prefer video games.
my wife said something akin to this in a discussion we had. I was saying how I mostly use video as background and rarely pay attention to it now.
Mmorpg is like a weekly TV show but you get to control it. It’s very addictive.
So did not have one but after reading through a day of responses I realize my hot take is I am so out of watching things in general that I cannot recognize tons of stuff.
I don’t really care if people are on their phones if it’s on low brightness
If it’s people I don’t know or care about… And it’s not directly in front of my line of sight… Then I guess.
But I’m really sensitive to light in my periphery. I drive with the dash lights as low as they will go without being off, and can’t stand new cars with the LCD equivalent of the sun in place of the radio.
But in my own home? My own family? Especially if it’s a movie I really care about and they haven’t seen? Drives me bonkers, because they are missing the best parts, or will be confused later because they are missing details. Frustrating.
Alternatively, if it IS full brightness everyone in the cinema behind that person is now legally and morally obligated to dump popcorn on their head.
The financial equivalent of showering them with gold at this point.
Mmm, buttery and salty gold
I didn’t think One Battle After Another was very good. Felt like my generation’s Crash, though not nearly as bad
Actual hottake unlike the OP
But…Crash was a pic everyone needed to have seen. Is OBaA the same?
Crash was a hard watch.
Crash was absolutely trash, this movie was at least watchable. It’s admittedly a really unfair comparison.
The reason I make it is because I feel the movie is getting a lot of praise because of what it’s “about” - and I use that word lightly because it’s not really…about anything. It’s just the pretense for the movie.
The movie opens with a revolutionary group raiding an ICE detention center to free people.
The resistance was just entirely too goofy. It felt like 3 scenes from Dumb and Dumber were shoehorned into an action/thriller.
Good bones, though. It was a solid idea. Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor are absolutely unforgettable as Lockjaw and Perfidia.
I agree…what was the resistance fighting for? Why did we spend 45 minutes watching them fuck shit up with no explained goal?
All of the performances were great but Lockjaw was a stupid fuckin character. Hated the twist with him and hated the plot around it which…was apparently the ONLY plot because nothing else really happens.
Which feels weird to say because there was so much going on in the movie. But there’s only so much going on because everything in the movie exists for a single purpose and then it goes away. Every character has a single motivation.
I’m particularly mad because I walked in expecting to love it after several people whose movie opinions I almost always agree with told me they loved it. But I don’t love it, I’m neutral on it at best.
Cinematic universes shouldn’t live forever. At some point, there is just too much of it, both for people making it and for people watching it.
I think it’s more that we turned cinematic universes into a forced content machine to have x number of side character movies per year, with one major tentpole event every few years, with tv shows, video games, and comics all filing in gaps along the way. It’s exhausting. I’m fine with a connected universe that is allowed to live and breathe in it’s own.
Warm Bodies is an homage to the Shakespeare Cinematic Universe. Just, with zombies.
How old is the Shakespeare Cinematic Universe? Does it count if it started out live-action?
I liked The Happening.
Whether it was intentional or not, there’s a really interesting metaphor for the 24/7 news cycle, the need to blame something, and the state of the world. There’s so much in there to think about but most of the audience just thought “plants make people kill themselves? That’s too silly”. In my mind it isn’t the plants; no one knows, but the need to get the first headline, or feel in control is so great that people get frantic, panicky, and dangerous.
That movie would have been better without that dick Marky mark in it
What’d I miss? What did Mr. Marky do, sir?
Say hi to your mother
