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Why Have Movies Been So Bad Lately?
mikesd81 asks: "Why have movies and shows been so bad lately? I find myself looking on my Video on Demand service from my cable company or flipping channels and just nothing seems to have any depth any more. But on the other hand, I happened to watch Stargate Atlantis and there was an incredible scene that just caught the emotion and emergency. So is it the directing? The writing? The acting? It seems more and more movies just aren't worth anything. Let alone paying $20 to go to a movie." Let's not forget the recent number of Hollywood remakes and the amount of "reality TV" being pumped out by the networks.
where I asked this exact question.
About Slashdot stories.
Sorry. Someone had to say it.
Seriously, though. I think the constant deluge of remake-after-remake of classic TV series and older movies has killed my interest in going to the movie theater. Why go out, when I can pull 1/2 of the "new" movies off my own DVD rack, or watch the original on late-night TV.
But I guess someone is watching these rehashes, because Hollywood keeps making them.
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"I happened to watch Stargate Atlantis and there was an incredible scene that just caught the emotion and emergency."
After reading that, I must seriously question your ability to judge any film or video work.
It is simple, the art and passion which existed in making movies and entertaining people has been replaced by hunger for making money by thrusting whatever junk they create, called "art and entertainment", into people's throats. That is why some independent movies do well, not all but some, because only some people decide to make a movie because either they want to entertain people or just tell a story for the sake of telling a story and not "selling" a story. That is why sequels suck and will always suck.
Also, Bryan Singer was a total dick to leave the X-Men series to die a painful death and go direct a sub-par Superman movie. What an asshole.
Jherico
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The reason why movies suck is very simple.
In the "golden age" of movies (whenever you consider that to be) movies were made by writers, directors, and actors who considered it an art form. Today, the studios are run by people who consider it a profit-oriented business.
Sure, the studios always wanted to make money. But technology has improved and now it is extremely expensive to produce a movie to modern technological standards, so budgets have skyrocketed. No studio will take risks when they're spending $100 million MINIMUM to make a movie. Unfortunately, art is all about taking risks.
I'm just getting into filmmaking right now. (I've only made one short film, which has been in 11 film festivals so far.) The problem that I see with most films (both Hollywood and indie) is the writing. In general, the technical work in movies is the best it's ever been. Acting is competent, at worst. The problems are in story construction and other aspects of writing. If you have a bad script, it doesn't matter how good your actors or photography or special effects are. Writing has been getting steadily worse for about 40 years. It has to do, IMO, with movie execs who are ignorant and illiterate. They don't know good writing -- as the great producers of the past did.
David
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
I don't think movies are getting worse - they're just as crap as they always have been.
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TV is, by and large, advertiser funded. Advertisers like to aim at youthful people who are thought to be more easily influenced by their messages. Advertisers therefore gravitate towards shows aimed for the 18-34 segment. And mmost movies are aimed at younger audiences who have the spare time and money and freedom to actually go to them.
If you find yourself saying "Gee, TV sure is bad these days" then there's a fair chance you celebrated your 35th birthday recently... TV is the same as it's always been, you've just outgrown a lot of it.
Also see Sturgeon's law.
Perfectly Normal Industries
I don't think I really agree with you about the movies. Yeah, there are a lot of movies with no depth, but there have been several in the past year or so that I've really liked. (The Inside Man, Lord of War, V is for Vendetta, Syriana, and a few others IIRC). I think it might be more of you just not liking the genre's of films that are being put out (not as many sci-fi). That doesn't mean that the quality of movies is necessarily going down.
TV generally sucks, but I don't think that's anything new. I rarely watch TV other than the news (and I get most of that off the Internet anyway), and occasionally a sitcom or two while I'm eating dinner.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
"People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."
Why were things always so much better in my day?
Increasing seasonality.
Summertime 'popcorn' movies are usually the least fulfilling for intellectual people.
The best original stories are increasingly backended towards the time of year when studios and tabloids focus on awards.
Hollywood doesn't squeeze any new decent TV out this time of year when people are taking their kids on vacation and stuff.
In the meantime, start with the IMDB top 250 and see what you haven't.
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It's the actors. You get the same bunch of losers doing all the films. Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Linsey Lohan, etc. It's boring to see them do film after film, especially when they can't act (Tom did, once upon a time).
Oh, and the films. A remake of Dukes of Hazard? Miami Vice? What is next, Married with Children? A Dallas movie? T.J. Hooker? Come on guys, there are great books out there that could be made into films. How about a version of "I, Robot" that actually follows Asimov's book? The last Superman movie. Terrible. They should have waited another year or two and did the film with the cast of Smallville. I mean, seriously, Lex from Smallville vs. the latest Superman's? No comparison.
I can see why great actors like James Spader turn to T.V. now rather than film. Unless you land a Harry Potter film, or are a voice actor in a Pixar film, or are in a Spiderman or Pirates sequel, it probably not going to do well at all.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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--
Trust me, after the third or fourth emotional/dramatic speech from Dr. Weir, you will be taking back those words.
Hollywood has yet to come up with a film including hot grits + Natalie Portman.
it's that there's been greater public attention to documentaries (and hopefully more docs will be funded in the future). For example, I wonder if An Inconvenient Truth would be receiving so much attention if it wasn't for such a dearth of quality Hollywood movies.
That being said, have you been outside lately?!
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I've felt this way a bit myself lately, so I started picking films from the IMDB's Top 250. I'm sure you've seen many of them, as had I, but no doubt there are as many, or more, that you haven't. I've yet to find one that was anything short of outstanding.
Maybe you're just missing them?
There's a lot of good material out there if you're willing to look for it. Since you mentioned shows, let's use TV as an example. It's easy to stumble upon shows like According to Jim, Hope and Faith, The King of Queens, or Joey (which has been cancelled, thank god) and assume that the sitcom has been left to die a slow and painful death.
If you stop looking there, though, then you miss some of the gems that are out there. Arrested Development never seemed to get the push from Fox that other, lesser shows get even before they win the network multiple Emmys. The Office, up until Steve Carell hit it big with The 40 Year Old Virgin, was mostly ignored. Scrubs, which has been getting critical raves and the occasional award nomination for years, isn't even on the fall schedule.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make with the genre of TV sitcom? You might not be hearing about the best material out there because it's not being pushed because of a lack of sex jokes, explosions, or star power.
There are smart, well-written TV shows and movies out there. You're either not looking for them or looking in the wrong places.
Goo goo g'joob.
Usually. An obvious exception being the Matrix. But anyway much of the shit out there is dirt cheap to make, therefore highly profitable. Why spend zillions when you can spend next to nothing knowing that the same old hordes of morons will watch anyway?
Independent Film Channel (IFC) and the Sundance Channel.
You will see movies that put the story first. The big studios are too cautious, too conservative, too often. Ever wonder what happened to Henry Rollins? He's on IFC.
Oh yeah, greg the bunny. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_the_bunny
The sundance has some ass kicking movies too. google the sundance channel and look at the schedule.
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Well ask a subjective question, get a subjective answer. You could say that the state of the movie is as good as its ever been and there's nothing quantitative we could say about it. I wouldn't usually consider my On Demand to be a good cross-section of movies. Most are just the biggest sellers that they can get and classics that haven't either been earmarked by networks or other cable stations (say if TNT decided to get exclusive rights to Shawshank you might not see it on your On Demand). But then it all really comes down to what you get out of movies. Pirates of the Carribean 2 was good, so was Clerks 2. There have already been some stellar movies this year (The Proposition, Wassup Rockers, A Scanner Darkly)... but then there's nothing to support that other than my own opinion. In the same way that I find Stargate Atlantis to be a second run of SG-1 which has gone on for about two or three seasons too long. But that's what floats your boat.
If anything I'd suggest getting away from your television and out into a non-megaplex theater (or at least get Netflix). Most stuff won't make it on there anyway and you won't find anything new just leafing through the few things Sci-Fi and Comcast push to you. You sound bored with the same-ol-same-old. There's only one way to fix that and it is to get out of the rut.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Things were always better in the past. One things about the year that Godfather came out and suddenly all the movies that came out in '77 (or whatever year) were awesome. Plus as we improve at filmmaking, the audience's standards increase. A lot more shit used to get past in..the past...without anyone noticing.
I borrowed DVD sets for all of the SG1 seasons- it's decline in quality was a very, very smooth curve. I tried watching a bit of Stargate Atlantis but it was worse than SG1 Season 9.
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When do you think movies were good? The 90's? The 80's? Look at the top ten list from just about any week from any year. There'll be one classic, maybe two, and one movie that's so bad it's good, and the rest is mediocre and forgettable. Most mainstream movies have always been aimed at the lowest common demoninator and if you think movies from the past were better you're just applying selective memory. Yes, there were times (e.g. in the 70's) when the bar was raised a little higher, but even then most movies were still dreck.
That said, there are great independant movies being made every day and even an occasional a big-budget flick that gets everything right. Some of it's foreign, some of them are documentaries, most will require a little more effort to locate (like browsing new areas of Netflix. It's not like the great movies from the past have disappeared, either-- if you can't find anything new to watch, why not try a classic you've never seen?
By the way, there's one more factor to take into account-- maybe you're just getting old. Look at some movies you used to think were great 10 or 20 years ago (I have no idea how old you are...) and see if they're as good as you remember.
there's always been shitty movies, and moviemaking has ALWAYS been an explicitly for-profit venture. hence the beginnings of hollywood, which was little more than a way to avoid licensing technology developed by Thomas Edision by virtue of being out of his reach.
the reason older movies seem so great, and new movies seem so the suck, is because you're only remembering the Metropolises, the Battleship Potemkins, the Citizen Kanes, the 8 1/2s, the Mon Oncles, the Dr. Strangeloves, the 2001s, the Apocalypse Nows, and so on. you're talking about over a HUNDRED years of filmmaking, and gotta tell you, they certainly wasn't ALL winners. Plenty of chaff in there to pad down the wheat. And seriously, in about 20 years there will definitely be a handful of films that absolutely stand up as classics of the early 21st century.
can't say much about stargate or whatever the fuck, cause that shit's retarded.
Movie productions are actually investor-led enterprises, despite the fact that they are also an art form. While there are a lot of movies whose directors and actors really care about communicating an important vision or message, there are also a lot of movies that are designed solely to appeal to as many people as possible. They fill the movie with cliches and implications designed to please as many people as possible, but in appealing to everybody enough to get them to see the movie, they appeal to very few people enough to get them to actually like it.
Superman Returns is a case in point. Did you notice how that was simultaneously marketed to evangelicals with "Superman as Jesus figure" and gays with that article "Is Superman Gay?" and liberals with Lex Luthor's "bring it on" statement in the trailers? In reality the movie was none of these things, they just wanted to intrigue as many people as possible to bring them to the theaters.
Bottom line: For people trying to make the "summer blockbuster," it doesn't matter if the movie is good, as long as it sells. You make more money increasing expectations than delivering on those expectations.
This is why niche and indie movies are often better, because the primary goal of the writers, directors and actors is to present their vision. Now, I actually like a fair number of mainstream movies, but certainly not most of them.
A: Because it's a tired, cliched question/statement.
This year, like every year, has had some great movies and some bad ones. In the past year, we've had Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribean 2, United 93, Munich, Millions, Crash, Capote, Match Point, Hustle & Flow, Batman Begins, Sin City, Walk the Line, Murderball, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, March of the Penguins, Wallace & Grommit...
And that's just to name a few. Is this any better than other year? No, not really. It's just that every year, there's always a lot more trashy art than good art. Any nostalgia for "back then" being better than now is just smoke and mirrors. For every Schindler's List, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Godfather Part II, you got Police Academy 6, Halloween 3, and Monster a Go-Go in those years (or shortly around it, that was just off the top of my head).
I'm sick of all these "movies/books/music/crime rates/teenagers were all better back then" arguments. Baloney. We only remember the best, and today, when every friday we get 3 new mediocre movies and every few weeks a decent one, we forget that there were also new movies every week in the 90s and 80s, and countless 8-track trash music from the 70s, and romance novels have been around since the 40s.
It's not fair to compare each movie that comes out to the "classic" movies - there are thousands of terrible old movies, they just don't get remembered. I think that there are still some excellent movies and shows being produced (United 93, 24, etc.) - these are the ones that people will remember. Good movies have always been surrounded by their era's versions of "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties."
For as long as people have told stories, storytellers have had the tendency to put their own touch on the stories they received from those before them. I see the rash of remakes as a manifestation of this, as reinterpretations.
Now, the suckage is a completely different matter.
Right. Eric Starnes quoted The American President. Unless I'm wrong, which I know I'm not. Good movie. Anywho, movies in general don't suck. They're a reprieve from the demands of daily life and allow us to do something we as a society, nay, as a human race have done since the beginning of time, which is to listen to a story. I suppose it matters if the stories sucks or not, but at the same time, that's completely on the listener. If you don't like the story then leave, or tell your own if you think you can do better. Personally I love the movies, even if I'm just watching Clerks for the thousandth time, or a movie in theater with friends. As for TV, well, that's why they call it the boob tube. And hey, not to be contrite, but if you don't like movies, why not read a book?
"I know most people don't like me, I don't like most people" "Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarance Thoma
Have you ever heard someone say the following: "Look at this really old [thing]! It's still in great condition, whereas my new [thing] broke already! They sure don't make things like they used to..."
When you look at all the old things you have that have lasted 30 years and work great, compared to the things that break easily, you're comparing the worksmanship of the set {things that were built 30+ years ago and are still working} to {things that were built a few years ago}... of course all the older things you see around you are better-made, even if the worksmanship standards haven't actually changed over the years, because of the natural filter that they're still working, or else they wouldn't be around for you to compare.
Similarly, the set {movies I remember from more than a few years ago} will clearly be better than {movies from this year}, simply by virtue of the fact that you remember the better ones and forget the worse. Comparing today's Hollywood crap to yesterday's cream of the crop is unintentional, but it's exactly what's going on everytime someone rehashes this "story" every few months.
I don't know what season they're on now (24-ish?), but SG1 sucked hugely for the last couple of Richard Dean Anderson years, and they stumble every once in a while since then, but the writing quality has greatly improved lately. It's sometimes even funny again.
Atlantis has its ups and downs. If I didn't have 23 hours of unemployment to fill every day, I probably wouldn't bother with it either.
There's also other reasons, however they lie in the major theaters that show the movies:
The simple point is, not only can you trust most movies to be the worst out there, you can trust the theaters to treat the good ones so badly it's no wonder they do better on DVDs. It makes me glad half the time I save the trouble and rent it through a RedBox system at my local McDonalds.
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It has occurer to me there's a problem with sequels. They are difficult to do well. For instance the Matrix was awesome but its two sequels were crap. Why? The tension was all resolved in the first film. Few loose ends were left. When the sequel came it had to invent all new tension but constrained by the bounds of the original plot. When the Wachowski finally finished raking in big bags of money form those, they produced the excellect V for Vendetta. What could they have written if they had left the Matrix alone? Something better? What if Lucas hadn't written the star wars prequels? We'd have something better. Storylines have to be written with sequels of prequels in mind.
Please... resist the temptation to milk perfectly good existing stories to death. Write something cool.
In the movie theather market for major motion picture releases, there is very little competition. Here in the very large central region of california - an area encompassing a few large counties, there are dozens of movie theaters - but they are all owned by one company - Regal Cinemas (Regal bought out many chains, including United Artist and Edwards). When one chain has a monopoly over regional markets like this, they can afford to take a major hit in revenue and still remain very profitable. Also, major theater chains have exclusive deals with the major studios.
Since there are less than ten major studios like Sony, Paramount, etc. (which is VERY FEW when you consider the overall demand for movies) with massive marketing power, there is plenty of consumer money to be divvy'd up between the studios. Indie film producers and studios have a hard time getting their films into these major chains due to the fact that the (few) major studios have good relationships with the few major chains and effectively shut them out.
These factors along with the fact that big companies do not like to take "creative risks", leave the major studios with little incentive to change from "tried & true" formulas in film creation. This leads to less overall creativity in the long run, and although ticket numbers are down, these companies are still VERY profitable.
Of course, the Internet can change this and one can argue that the Internet has in fact contributed to the growing popularity of Indie films, which can be quite a refreshing change from the formulaic, predictable Major Releases.
This can also be tied to Net neutrality... one of the reasons the major Telcos oppose net neutrality is because they see the potential for lucrative relationships with the Few Big Motion Picture Distributors to deliver their movies at high speed to their customers, while the speed of other content is capped (i.e. really good, creative, cutting-edge Indie Films that have the potential to be hits and compete with the major studios, but obviously lack the $$$ to share with the Telcos).
Sounds like a day in the life of an MC Escher.
Unless its a quote I didn't reference.
When I was unemployed recently thats when I watched all the SG1 seasons!
Must have something to do with the "that job would rock" mentality..
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First of all, video on demand is not the place to begin your search, oh I know its convenient, but chances are you'll only find last years crap that couldn't make back production costs. Best of luck finding something good.
Check out some movie review sites before judging whether a movie is worth your time or not http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ has a pretty good track record with me.
Also, you don't necessarily need to watch something thats come out in the past few years, hundreds of good films have come come out over the past 80 years. I'd be willing to bet that you could easily dig up something good with a quick google search. I personally would much rather sit down with a good film noir than the 99% crap track record hollywood has going on. Start on the IMDB 250 http://www.imdb.com/chart/top and I guarantee you'll never be short of something good to watch.
"Aliens"
Because you touch yourself at night.
First off, there have ALWAYS been bad movies.
Secondly, I ran a simple python script on the IMDB's top 250 movies database and then sorted the titles by year, and then by decade.
below is a table showing the number of movies from a decade that made the IMDB's top 250 movies list.
1920s 5
1930s 15
1940s 23
1950s 39
1960s 31
1970s 25
1980s 29
1990s 41
2000s 41
As you can see, there are plenty of good movies out there. The submitter just needs to get a life.
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
Did you just turn 35? It seems like movies are pitched at the demographic from teenagers to mid-thirties. By 35, you've seen every trick in the Hollywood book, so nothing seems fresh. Everything strikes you as a copy of something you've already seen.
I submit it's not that the movies have been so bad lately, but rather that your sensibilities have changed.
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You neglected to mention the actors' salaries, which for a superstar are now over $30 million (probably much more, since I don't really keep track of these things). Part of the problem is cult-worhip that is created around some actors, as if no movie could be made without them.
Other than that, I would like you explain how technology has made the movies much more expensive. If anything, I would imagine that it made it easier in the editing phase, but you are probably are thinking of the 3D effects. However, I would argue that in lots of movies the super-duper 3D is merely an overkill, and a way to cover up for the MIA story.
If I remember correctly, the movie Serenity didn't have extraordinary 3D effects, but it had a very intriguing story: I couldn't figure out what was going on until the very end (for the record, I've never watched Firefly). Furthermore, even though the TV ads were relatively lame -- and that seems to be the norm as they try to cram a whole lot in 30 seconds -- after I watched the first 6 minutes of the film at their website, I was 100% determined to watch it at the theater since they succeeded in making me curious what happens next (beyond those first 6 minutes).
I think that post highlights part of the problem.
To me
Inside Man - Great,
Lord of War - Good,
V for Vendetta - Sucked,
Syriana - OK
which only goes to show the subjectiveness of rating movies.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
>> "Why have movies and shows been so bad lately? ... nothing seems to have any depth any more. OTOH, ... Stargate Atlantis ... incredible scene that just caught the emotion and emergency.
;-P
;^)
The Stargate saga is very good, but it's a flower in the desert. Not only the shows are good, but one can see excellence in other aspects, like the music themes -- the best IMHO (yes, even surpassing those of Star Trek, which is not cited here for movie quality...).
But, yes, I agree: the landscape is terrible. Most things suck. Badly. So much, I don't go for it anymore: I just turn the TV and skim through the onscreen guide. If there's something of worth in the next hours, ok, otherwise it's the internet... like now
Long gone are the days of waiting for a show. Star Trek killed it with many reruns or cable channels did worse by doing full-day Lost marathons on my Star Trek Saturday. And don't get me started on Lost, possibly the most appropriate name for a show ever imagined.
>> So is it the directing? The writing? The acting?
The writing. Directors have actually improved IMHO on average, though real geniuses like Hitchcock don't come up all the time, and we have to put up with some woes (pun intended). Acting has been excellent for many years now; I won't bother everyone with examples easy to cite.
The writing has been very poor since long. Authors:
a) know not much, work on a hurry and lack talent;
b) must regularly spit out sitcom scripts and that lowers standards;
c) write scripts made to order, much like music composers, and the result has the quality of jingles;
d) have agendas and make films less tasteful (to be euphemic) as if hoping to please a tyrant;
e) are immersed in American culture, now in a fragile moment, not only because of war, but because true hacker/hippie spirit has been dead for years.
>> It seems more and more movies just aren't worth anything. Let alone paying $20 to go to a movie.
100% agreed.
>> Let's not forget the recent number of Hollywood remakes and the amount of "reality TV" being pumped out by the networks.
Remakes are good in that they show Hollywood recognizes the crisis... "reality TV" is surprisingly not real, but construed, faked instead. So, why bother?
My hopes are on Bollywood, if they can market their product...
Passion does not scale well. The greatest restaurants are all one-offs where the staff is passionate about serving good food and giving the customer a quality experience. Programs that we love to use (Linux, say) are put together by people who are passionate about what they do to the point of evangelism. Art house movies are made by people who are passionate about using cinematic techniques to tell stories that are compelling both visually and in terms of their plotlines. But passion takes time, is monetarilly intensive, and, let's face it, is a crapshoot; there are many folks who are passionate about their beer can collections or what have you (I knew a woman who was fascinated by bricks or all things), but they aren't ever going to make money from it.
Enter the financial folks. They are absolutely necessary any time a business moves beyond being an expensive hobby, but they will strive for efficieny. Efficiency is best gained by homogenizing operations, but that also weeds out the things that tended to make the enterprise truly great in the first place. On top of that, some things (movies in this case) are enormously expensive to make (someone has to pay Industrial Light and Magic for all those special effects), and once the expense goes up, the natural tendency is to minimize risk. But again, minimizing risk keeps you from taking that fresh view and going out on a limb.
Sometimes this isn't really all that bad. If I swing by the supermarket to pick up a gallon of milk I want commodity pricing, and the bean counters excell at building the sort of enterprise that can deliver those commodity prices. You want really good creative stuff? Stay far away from the big guys and shell out extra for the starving artists who live for this sort of thing.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Okay, Hollywood movies cost an arm and a leg to produce. So when a studio has a winner, it, and other studios, are going to try to replicate the formula that made that first one successful. They are afraid to take big risks and expand into a new genre if they are uncertain of the market. So what happens are a bunch of half-cocked ideas that just suck. Or when one film has been a hit, try turning it into a series. Sometimes this works (like Rocky, up until Rocky V anyway, which sucked so bad I prefer to forget it was ever made), and sometimes it is nothing but a waste of time (such as the Scary Movie sequels, or, worse, the sequels to Bloodsport I just found out were made). Very little is different, and it gets boring. But it seems like a safe bet to the execs. Better to make just a few million in profit that to bring in less than production costs.
A solution to the Hollywood crap is to try indie films. With their smaller budgets and little, if anything, set aside for advertising, the makers must use more creativity, do something different, to make their films the ones that stand out, and they much be good enough to get people talking. Word-of-mouth. Yes, you're going to come by some that are so off-the-wall as to be worthy of Hollywood, but you're more likely to find true artistic gems.
It's a girl!
I was at a friend's house last night, and for whatever reason, that show seemed to be playing for hours. (I'm not sure if that's typical Sci-Fi, of if he had it on his DVR.) I'm going to be honest here... after watching what I did of it, you couldn't pay me to watch that show.
I know it's cool and hip to bash on Hollywood movies and network TV, but there IS quite a bit of worthwhile content out there if you actually take the time to look. I think the problem is some people just expect too much from EVERYTHING, and don't know when to just relax and have fun with something.
Americans are, on average, complete fucking morons. You can remake the same movie over and over and they will go see it. As long as it has sex or violence or some trite love story or fart jokes or in some creates a spectacle they will pay $10 to sit through it. Hollywood makes shit because Americans like to consume shit.
"Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap."
So basically piratebay is hosting the 10% quality stuff. We should have just oddles of fun testing that hypothesis.
As a forty-ish father I loved "Around the Bend" (2004). I only saw it a few times recently because I stumbled upon it on one of the commercial-free movie channels.
It's almost as if marketers have no clue and default to explosions and similar distractions in order to attract the *real* market: kids that are easily manipulated.
Actually, as someone just turned 34, I think it is a bit of both outgrowing and Film/TV getting boring.
However, I LOVE HBO & Showtime "TV-shows." The stories may not always be what interests me, but they shows are always done in a mature and assuming the viewer has a brain!
Normal TV assumes we are morons at best and tries to cater to the right and the left politics depending on time of day and/or show.
Why do you think the crap/good ratio has changed? Do you have any idea of the sheer number of bad B-type movies that were created in the previous decades that noone remembers or cares about?
The reason that it just seems like there is a high ratio of crap is because you only remember the GREAT movies of yesteryear. You don't remember the 1000+ cowboy/indian westerns or melodramatic romances because you most likely have never heard of them. You just remember Casablanca/Citizen Kane/etc.
You're getting older man.
-- Cheers!
REALITY TV is euphemism for JUNK TV
Well, I'm not a big fan of the Stargate franchise, but I think you've sort of answered your own question by mentioning them. You like a good story, and Stargate relies mostly on stories to hold its audience. They have to, because, by entertainment industry standards, they're a shoestring operation. Yeah, they do have some fancy special effects. But its cheap stuff. I can't be bothered to look up the figures, but I know that Stargate and Battlestar spend less for a whole season's SFX than a lot of movies (including some non-SF movies!) spend for a couple of hours.
Movies, by contrast, have huge budgets. Even so-called Indies cost tens of millions. And the kind of movie most people go to see costs at least $100 million to make. When you're risking that much money, you don't take chances. You put those millions into name stars, fancy effects, epic scenes — things people can see. You're so busy with that stuff, and with all the politics and ego-soothing, you don't worry about coming up with a good script. And you don't need to — a script doesn't sell a movie. Except, of course, to a tiny few like you and me.
I recently attended a few films at the Stony Brook Film Festival.
These were:
Mojave Phone Booth
Coffee Date
Mario's War
uCarmen
The Second Wedding Night
They were all excellent.
To put it simply, yes, good movies are being made, but you have to look for them.
Film Festivals are a good bet.
If you think that ever, every movie was good, you're an idiot, sorry.
The problem here isnt so much the lack of available scripts, no its really the studios being averse to taking risks to the point were everything they produce is now "beige". I don't blame the studios fully for this situation, its also an investor side problem too. Ive often seen financial commentary letting loose a salvo on how risky a set production is, then the studio will can the project rather than lose investor confidence. This wont be easy to fix and were not helping by sitting there complaining. Lets be honest would you put your hard earned money on a a high risk win or bust movie, no of course not, so why ask the studios to do the same.
I view TLC as a microcosm of the problem.
I remember a handful of years ago when it was full of great programs like James Burke's Connections. Hell, they even had the Hyperspace documentary not all that long ago. It was truly The Learning Channel.
But now it's just TLC. Three letters that don't mean anything. And it's full of reality shows.
Seriously, does it even have any programs that aren't reality TV?
Soylens viridis homines es
I've been watching a LOT of movies in the past year (I've been setting up a DVD player while I work out at the gym). I've been catching up on a lot of "classics", as well as more recent movies. You know what? This is heresy, but...
Movies are WAY WAY better now than they were in the past.
I mean everything. Writing, directing, acting -- especially acting -- is all far better. When you really start watching a lot of movies, and really comparing them, you just can't help but notice how much overacting, mooning at the camera, making speeches, all this CRAPOLA that movies stars were "expected" to do. Actors actually ACT these days -- by that, I mean they try and genuinely act like a real person in whatever the scene is.
I think the reason we think movies are so bad is higher expectations. Today's movie that we think is crap would be HUGE in the old days.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Inside Man had quite possibly the worst ending of any film I've ever seen. Denzel Washington could have suddenly found himself to be a Kryptonian, used newly discovered X-Ray Vision powers to find the bad guy, and then put on a pair of glasses and have a newly borne secret identity -- and it still would have been more plausable than the crap they threw on the ass end of this film.
(Superman has its own awful coincidences -- but then, it's Superman, I'm not expecting even mild plausibility.)
if that is his idea of 'riveting' entertainment, then it's no wonder this guy is jaded.
Let me guess... Filesharing and pirates to blaim for this too?
... but you have to go back, what?... 20 years to find a good sequel! Coming back to the "not interested in more of the same" point made above, one reason that Aliens was so good was that it was completely different from Alien. Alien was a great suspense/horror flick, Aliens was action. If only the morons making the Matrix movies understood that.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Huh. Most people I know who saw V for Vendetta loved it, including myself. I can't wait until the DVD is released Tuesday. It's certainly one of the better movies I've seen in the past few years.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
SG-1 is on Season 10 right now (this weekend was the second ep of the season). I agree completely that the sunset of RDA's tenure was painful - he simply didn't take his character seriously enough most of the time, which is unfortunate because even during the start of his decline (season six), he had some stellar performances in episodes like Abyss (where he was captured by Baal) and The Changeling (although Chris Judge was really the star of that episode). RDA achieved balance during the earlier seasons, combining a great sense of humor with a knack for powerful performance, and it was a shame to see him tarnish that legacy with so many mediocre appearances just before he left.
Michael Shanks is their anchor now, and he still has the balance between humor and drama that he honed working with RDA in the earlier seasons. Of course, now he's stuck playing that balance off of Claudia Black, who, while she can give a great performance, often doesn't get the chance because her character is two steps away from comic relief. Amanda Tapping and Chris Judge are also very talented, but for some reason they don't get nearly enough chances these days to go beyond their caricatured roles of nerdy physicist and stoic warrior.
Atlantis, on the other hand, lacks plot direction. It amounts to "flail blindly against the ravages of the Wraith", without any sort of clue as to what the team's plan is or where they're going. I think this is partly due to the Wraith being a faceless horde of nobodies, while the enemies with real personality never seem to pose more than a transient threat. The acting is good (David Hewlett shows the most potential, in my opinion, but any growth his character shows always seems to disappear by the next episode), the directing is good, and the design and effects are top-notch. The writers just need to figure out where this boat is going and clue us in the tiniest bit.
Oops! This weekend was the third episode of the season in the US, not the second. Sorry :/
Somewhere in last month's Wired magazine is an article about how the internet (as a distribution medium) is changing this very issue.
Studios who produce a movie take a risk, and as someone else here pointed out that risk needs to yield a high return for the studio. Thus, the piece is generic and aimed for a wide audience. Wider audience = lower risk.
Because of the lower cost of production and distribution associated with the internet, talented people can create movies (and music) without having to go to a studio. Independant movies like Kevin Smith's "Clerks" can be made with very low budgets (I believe Clerks cost $50,000).
The new medium, which we're really about to see explode with new content, is going to allow future Kevin Smiths to make movies aimed at very small audiences with little risk.
-David
Having just watched Serenity and all the episodes of Firefly I've come to the conclusion that nobody cares about entertainment that's meaningful, because if the opposite were true then Firefly would still be on TV and nobody would give a shit about American Idol.
Heh, funny that you mention Bryan Singer ditching the X-Men series & going to direct Superman.
Brett Ratner (the director of X3) had originally been onboard for Superman, but he jumped ship because casting the man of steel was a bitch.
IIRC, Ratner said he is glad he bailed on Superman.
Curiously, on IMDB, Superman Returns is rated slightly higher than X3 (7.2 vs 7.0)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If everything always gets worse then by now something must be truly goddamn awfull. Sure TV hasn't been around long enough but how about theatre? If every generation theatre, wich has been around for hundreds of years in the current form, must by now be truly nasty. /me looks at some "art" productions. Hmmm, maybe those oldies are right after all.
When you are young anything you experience is still new and fresh and original. That funny "christmas on 42nd street" episode in your favorite sitcom is hilarious. When you get older and you see the 100th sitcom do the same old routine you are probably not nearly as amused.
As a kid I read some of my mothers harlequin novels. Yeah yeah, I know. But were they really that bad compared to the sci-fi and fantasy trash I was reading? Sure I can also claim to have read the classics at the time but so can my mother, just that both of us topped them off with a nice layer of fluff. I just read them because I was curious and because I was bored and because, well lets be honest here, some of them were rather steamy.
They weren't all bad but after I read my mom's favorites, the pre-selected ones, I found out that the majority of them were just bleh. The same old stuff recycled and rewarmed, names and places changed but the same old story.
Exactly the same as all those paint by numbers sitcoms that share all the same episodes. "Christmas on 42nd street wich a lead character that they are special to the others in a heartwarming episode", "the three ghosts of christmas that get a lead character to behave better for the split second left at the end of the episode", "the estranged parent who left the lead character and now comes back and makes up", etc etc.
The first time you see it, it is original, the 100th time it is not.
The same is true for movies. Was the Doom movie really that bad or was it just bad to us old people because we had seen it all before. I at time felt like I was watching a remake of Southern Comfort and in general every "ten little indians" horror movie.
I think it is one of the reasons so many geeks like anime/manga. Always on the look out for something fresh japense entertainment at least for while does offer that. Granted they got the exact same staple episodes but at least for a while it will all seem fresh and new and exciting.
Entertainment ain't anyworse now then it has ever been. There has always been bad stuff around, just examine your own favorites of your youth, but as you get older you will notice more and more how much of entertainment is the same old crap in a new wrapper. You might then make the mistake of looking at stuff from before your time and think that things were so much better but that is just because the old stuff is still new to you. If you really went to look at all the movies from say the 1940's you would quickly notice that an awfull lot of it is just as steaming a pile of crap as the majority of today's movies.
Movies ain't getting worse, you are getting more critical. It is just the disease of getting old, but don't worry a cure is around. It is called death. Something new and exciting to look forward to eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.criterionco.com/ Maybe you are just in need of something more substantial now...
Movies used to inspire. They were about characters who you admired or wanted to emulate, and there wasn't any ambiguity about right and wrong.
Bring back the heroic guy - we've had enough wishy-washy characters who always have a major personal flaw. Bring back the fantastic dame who hangs off his arm -- she can be superhuman too, but that doesn't mean she has to take him down a peg at every chance. Bring back the strident and brave adventure, be it action, discovery, business, or voyage -- let the hero make the movie happen instead of being passively bounced about by heavy-handed plot devices. Bring back the unquestionably evil villain and don't fret about whether we understand his horrible childhood. Bring back the black-and-white morality - we like to see bad squashed and good heralded. If the film's going to go deep, don't go deep into the thousandth iteration of Hollywood feel-good stay-between-the-lines PC pop psych preaching... we go to the theater for a momentary escape from that. And for the love of christ, quit talking down to the audience.. It's okay to challenge the viewer once in a while.
Bah. Movies have always been bad, and television has always been worse.
Back in the day, we had Jaws, around the same time as Kolchak, the Nigh Stalker. Both were good, but Kolchak was cheesy as hell. It didn't get good until they changed the name to X-Files, and then it only lasted a couple of seasons before it jumped the shark.
Watch Barton Fink. Movies were just as terribly derivative and sucky back in whatever "Golden Age" you might wish to conjure. We still get good movies-- just check out "Good Night, And Good Luck," or "Capote," or "Syriana," or "Slither." All good movies, in their own right. (Slither reminded my very much of "Tremors.") Just because we have to balance that against any of the dreck you've seen recently shouldn't count against them.
(For the record, I didn't like "Dead Man's Chest" the first time I watched it, but really and truly loved it the second time through. So my taste in movies is suspect.)
Movies generally suck. Try to pick a great movie from every year since you were born. It'd be a tough assignment. Some years would have many great movies, and other years would have nothing. Nada.
If you want to watch a great movie, go watch "Psychomania." Go on. I dare you.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Because hunger for money only came into existence in 2005 and before then everyone everyone did everything for a higher motive. Riiight.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The problem with all the answers I see above is that they are all looking too narrowly at the situation. What this slashdotter has witnessed is a part of the recent death in creativity in all arts. Why do you think music sales have sucked it up in the past 8 or 10 years? It's not the mp3's, it's just that all the music is a fake imitation of real creativity. Think about it for a few minutes...what has been the last musical renaissance? Metal. When? Early 80's. It's been 20+ years when (if you do a tiny bit of research) you will find that new genres of music have been appearing every 10-20 years. Literature is the same, as is Hollywood.
I went to see a film a year ago, and I counted 10 previews for movies that were remakes of older movies. Insane. And not only are they remakes, they are remakes who bank on special effects and the "ah" factor to carry the power of the film. This is weak. This is analogous to the Backstreet Boys in music who rely on their looks and harmony rather than the actual musical content.
There you have it: cultural slump. Go see indie films and be a part of a movement. That is the only way to break it.
I certainly don't blame Anderson for the problems. The writing was just really lazy-esque for his last couple of seasons, like the writers were just going through the motions while simultaneously taking themselves more seriously than they did before they stopped caring. I'm sure neither of those was actually the case, I'm sure they tried their asses off and it just wasn't quite working, but that was the vibe they were giving off.
Completely agree about Atlantis.
watch anime instead :)
I'd like to see "Godzilla versus Myspace"; "The Day the Earth Stood Still-The Microsoft Story"; "Twenty Thousand Leagues under Paper-How Your Government Works".
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
They were always bad. Your taste has just improved.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Basically Hollywood is suffering from the from the need to make money on every film they produce to appease the experience that the average movie goer gets when they watch a film at the local multiplex. As a result, scripts have been watered down (so that the average person "gets it"), costs have gone up for CGI/effects/actors (so it pulls the viewers in), number of theatres and film prints (so you can't miss it). Originality and taking chances is not what making a blockbuster is about, it's about making simple scripts, amping it up with what's popular and blasting it out to the audience to make some cash and then get some major bucks on DVD rentals and cable later on. Movies aren't the only thing that's suffering - games have been flopping badly lately (again, high costs to make nice 3D effects, competition to make your FPS stand out) as well as anime (generic scripting, the usual angst ridden characters, harem style animes, or whatever... definitely a downstep from the 1990's with a few exceptions). Consider this like the evolution of a specialised virus that hits hard initially, gets popular and then becomes watered down like the common cold (the idea is to infect as much as you can in order to propagate). The more people you infect, the more cash you get, if that's the aim. If you really want to see the real deal you need to hit the indie circuit or International film festivals to see what is really out there and be willing to admit that it won't have all your average preconditioned movie mental laxatives thrown in. For example off the top of my head, Primer was quite popular at local indie films (despite having a nearly incomprehensible script). Other movies like Hard Candy (can't remember others so far) and documentaries like an Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car are picking up as well. (Having said that, documentaries may get big, then devolve again so you get documentaries about trivial popularist nonsense... I hope not for a while, though). On the other hand, since I got fairly bored with the stuff from USA I switched to watching foreign films, mostly Japanese, Korean and Chinese with a bit of European and others tossed in. Half the stuff USA has been recycling is from Japan (ala Ringu, Ju-On, Kairo) or Korea (Il Mare, some others I can't remember). Myself and a few of my friends now get regularly together for movie nights where English is primarily only used to order pizza or exclaim WTF!? loudly (especially if you're watching something like Zebraman, Survive Style 5+ or other wierd Japanese films, particularly by Miike. Might have to move onto Oh! My Zombie Mermaid and Nice Forest soon). If you're conditioned to whinge about how subs "are hard to read" just remember that in the world stage, English is not the primary language (it's Chinese, followed by Hindi, Spanish then English) so you really have no excuses about being self-righteous that everything has to be dubbed for your convenience. (Usually badly. You lose bucketloads of nuances in the process, and I consider it a bastardisation of a film). My advice - start hitting IMDB and good indie film sites like Twitch Film to find the real deal and get used to BitTorrent (as you won't find most of them in USA... for a long long time). Once you start, you'll find other people and web sites to keep you going.
I used to wonder just what you are asking. Then I saw MST3K. Once you realize the sheer number of abysmally bad movies from the past, you begin to understand that movies haven't gotten worse at all. If anything, they have gotten far better. Name one major movie released this year that has bad audio, bad camerawork, or incompetent editing? You can't do it. No matter how awful today's movies are, they still look and sound amazingly better than movies of the past.
Today's movies fail in terms of writing, acting, directing, or, in some cases, all of the above. Implausible plots, paper acting, horrible cinematography - none of this is new. But we don't remember "Monster a Go Go" or "Manos: The Hands of Fate". We do remember "Back to the Future".
That said, this year has been particularly weak. There's no Matrix, no Star Wars, no Harry Potter, and no Lord of the Rings. This year seems weak because 2001-2004 were so astoundingly strong. Whether or not you liked "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", seeing the franchise come to the big screen was a huge deal for many, many people. The "Lord of the Rings" series was one of the most anticipated film adaptations ever. And although the "Star Wars" prequels were generally regarded as weak, the special effects were amazing.
I can name tons of movies that I enjoyed over the past 10 years, from Pixar's films (Incredibles / Nemo / Monsters / Toy Story) to the superhero films that worked (X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman Begins) to the unique and bizzare films (GATTACA, Fight Club, Memento) to great action/suspense films (The Matrix, Collateral) and a lot more.
Movies haven't been bad lately. With Art School Confidential, Clerks 2, The 2nd Pirates Movie, X-men 3 (which wasn't as good as it could have been, but was still enjoyable), coming out lately, it's a wonder you even ask such a stupid question. Quality of movies hasn't decreased, it's just that the amount of movies being put out has increased. They make a ton of movies every year and not all of them can be fantastic.
In any case, they are probably putting out roughly the same amount, or possibly even more good movies every year then they have been since the begining of Hollywood.
Hollywood has figured out that the quality of a movie has a small effect on how well the movie sells compared to the advertising used to promote a movie. So the logical strategy, from a marketing perspective, is to reduce the quality and increase the advertising; this is exactly what Hollywood is doing. People watch bad movies just as much (if not more) as they watch good movies. In the end it pays off more to make a bad movie.
Pirates of the Caribbean II is a perfect example of what's wrong with American entertainment: It was storyboarded as a cartoon and produced as cgi jive. And only Disney could drag up the squid from 24,000 Leagues Under The Sea and (tsk ... so gratuitously) "do it right." The simple answer is, Japan has deflowered the cultural soul of America with Zelda, GITS and Miyazaki, so all those Mary Tyler Moore joke writers left over from the 20th Century have nowhere to peddle their 300-baudville.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
exactly .. lazy writing..
for instance: the history on the pegasus arc of the sg1 panoply indicates atlantis was both the first and last inabited city in that galaxy, but it has no zpm factory?.. what they made them with sticks and rocks? Oo..
other stupid tactical blunders abound starting at season 8 and moving forward from there in both series.
Now adays it's just a showcase for some awesome special effects and mechanical designs.. but that's more than can be said about every other show save those including john stewart, carlos mancia, and colbert.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
...Seriously. I'm not trying to be funny. I feel the same way about television and movies (have been for years, now), so I started watching more anime a couple of years ago. It seems to me that manga and anime is an 'anything goes' medium, where, for the most part, there's no telling what you'll witness next. I've seen a whole lot of very compelling stories that would satisfy anyone, no matter what their tastes are in entertainment. I try not to listen to the English dubs, though.
When you pick up an anime DVD, you really have NO IDEA what you might be getting into. Pick up any American movie, TV show, or animation, and you practically know exactly what's going to happen in the end; you're just getting the DVD to find out how they'll get there. That gets tiresome.
Basically, I'm saying that my expectations are a bit higher, so I no longer watch TV, except for the news. I don't listen to popular music, because it's all trash. I definitely don't go to the movies all too often, except to get out of the house with my girlfriend once in a while (she no longer enjoys movie theatres that much anymore, either). I basically just watch anime, and hum various pieces of anime theme music all day (because most of it's beautiful - you aniime-lovers know what I'm talking about).
I don't know, movies seem to be getting a lot better lately. At least there are a handful films each year that I want to see and end up enjoying now, as opposed to a few years back when there were maybe one or two the whole year that I wound up seeing that were worth my time, not even counting the money.
On the other hand, stargate sg-1 and atlantas are some of the weakest shows on television. All those SciFi channel original series seem like they've got a random plot generator that includes scripting and lame acting choice notes. I know that'll get me modded troll or flamebait, but stargate isn't any better than all the lame reality TV.
The Farewell Tour II
we went the other way, there was more money there, actually it was this little guy with a pitchfork but...nevermind
anyway
its not like movie's have a choice a lot of the time
had a teacher who had a friend (etc...) who did the proofreading for scripts. heard a story where they argued to change the apple pie to some other pie just so that another writer could get credits for "writing"
on the other hand, good old regular tv has some good stuff, sci-fi channel: sg-1, sg-atlantis, battlestar galatica... eureka and who wants to be a superhero don't look to bad either. tv shows have to be good becuase they are generally dependent on repeat performance and get more chances before they get canceled. movies are one shot, once its out the door its like waving goodbye to a blind bird.
And:
Batman Begins was a good movie.
Bush. Depressing news around us makes for dull movies and shows.
Well, yeah. I mean, the people you know are friends of yours. That, right there, establishes their level of taste and critical thinking -- low to nonexistent. No wonder they liked V for Vendetta!
(Of course, I don't know you from Adam, nor do I know your friends, and for the record, I liked that movie. But, look, I saw the opportunity for the slam and I took it. Don't hate me for doin' what I gotta do.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
..that people always ask this question. History remembers good movies (and exceptionally bad movies, ala Manos: Hands of Fate), and tends to forget the mediocre ones. Looking back, things always look more appealing.
(forgot to log in first)
Anime...seriously. I'm not trying to be funny. I feel the same way about television and movies (have been for years, now), so I started watching more anime a couple of years ago. It seems to me that manga and anime is an 'anything goes' medium, where, for the most part, there's no telling what you'll witness next. I've seen a whole lot of very compelling stories that would satisfy anyone, no matter what their tastes are in entertainment. I try not to listen to the English dubs, though.
When you pick up an anime DVD, you really have NO IDEA what you might be getting into. Pick up any American movie, TV show, or animation, and you practically know exactly what's going to happen in the end; you're just getting the DVD to find out how they'll get there. That gets tiresome.
Basically, I'm saying that my expectations are a bit higher, so I no longer watch TV, except for the news. I don't listen to popular music, because it's all trash. I definitely don't go to the movies all too often, except to get out of the house with my girlfriend once in a while (she no longer enjoys movie theatres that much anymore, either). I basically just watch anime, and hum various pieces of anime theme music all day (because most of it's beautiful - you anime-lovers know what I'm talking about).
"Oh, yes, you did, Brett...yes, you did!"
* Over-reliance on CGI and special effects
* Cliched fight and/or chase scenes
* Rehashed stories
* Pointless remakes and/or revivals of retro TV series
* "Never mind the quality, feel the quantity!" - two+ hour movies that only have 90 minutes of story. Leave me wanting more not less!
* Poor marketing of indie flicks that may not suffer from the above faults, such that I don't hear about them until they're on DVD or on TV
The reasons as I see them are:
- Formulaic Hollywood tripe. If it isn't a sequel or a rip-off of another movie, it's "movie A meets movie B".
- Movies that don't make a squillion dollars in the opening week are considered failures - probably because only reasonable movies survive beyond the first week (i.e. once the marketing hype was worn off, and word gets out from audiences unfortunate enough to see it.)
- Hollywood executives aren't prepared to stick their necks out and try something original. See above.
The mainstream film industry sucks for the same reason that mainstream music sucks - they've lost the plot (pun intended.)In these new cookie cutter movies, special effects are no longer special.
In order for an effect to be special, it has to be used once in awhile. Instead, it's quite the opposite.
People are complaining about all of the remakes coming out as if stories haven't been retold through out mankind's existance.
Hollywood seems to be going through an idea shortage period. Too many remakes this summer. "Pirates of the Caribbean" (a sequel to a movie version of a ride at Disneyland). "Clerks II" (a sequel to a very low budget movie, now with a bigger budget.) "Superman Returns" ("Up in the sky! That guy with a cape again!") "Miami Vice" (Probably not going to bring back pastels.) "Underworld Evolution" (Kate Beckinsale does a great job making a stupid concept work.) "Tokyo Drift" (Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom ... yawn).
This tends to happen when studios are losing money and opt for the sure thing.
The original ideas aren't that good, either. "Nacho Libre?" "Snakes on a Plane?" "The Lake House?" Even Pixar blew it this year, with "Cars".
There's some good stuff. "The Devil Wears Prada" is very funny.
The average quality for this year isn't that awful. But there's no great movie this year. Nothing this year will make the top 50 movies of all time. That's what creates the feeling it's a bad movie year.
Note that the problem is writing and story, and to a lesser extent, acting. Effects, backgrounds, locations, and action are being done perfectly. Hollywood really does have the mechanics of the business nailed. CG integration is now seamless. Practical effects are better than ever. Because of this, audiences now expect so much of that stuff that story and dialogue are overwhelmed. This makes the story look weak. And you leave the theater feeling you just watched a video game.
I have mod points, how do I mod this article
-1 Flamebait
-1 Redundant
We remember the past fondly, and tend to forget the stinkers.
Think of all the great movies from the past, now think of how many BAD movies you don't remember. You remember the good ones. You see this is only 1 year and in ANY 1 year you won't have more than maybe 1 truly good movie, but looking in the "past" there's decades of movies to draw from, decades vs 1 year, or just a few years, so it seems like movies aren't good anymore, when in reality there never were that many good movies made. If you listed all the "good" movies would you even have a movie for each year? Probably not.
In 30 years we'll look back and wonder "why aren't movies now as good as back 90's and early 2K's?".
Ahh the good old days.
--- www.f-theocean.com
It's crap. Everyone knows it's crap. It makes $30M.
As long as you keep watching/buying crap, they'll keep making more.
Be more choosy in what you see and they'll be a bit more careful in what they make.
Don't just go see a poor movie like Pirates of the Carribean 2 just because it's #1 and you can't think of anything else to see.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
And that's the bottom line.
No more stupid fucking remakes already!
THAT's what makes films so much worse now than in previous decades! There were never this number of remakes churned out then - correct me if I'm wrong, someone much older please..?
I despise remakes so much mainly because a lot of kids and teenagers seeing them will never even realise that the original (and sometimes better) film existed. Worst of all - if you refer to the film by name, how the fuck do people know you mean the original one and not the remake? I'm sorry but for a great film like The Italian Job, you just shouldn't have to say "The original Italian Job film" just to refer to it! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!
In just the last few months, I've been dazzled by cool stuff by Michael Haneke (*the* coolest end-of-the-world movie ever made, "Hour of the Wolf," the creepy "Hidden," and the revoltingly subversive "Funny Games") and Takashi Miike (the icy "Black Society" trilogy), the awesome 1976 black comedy "Network," and a pair of superb recent documentaries, "New York Doll" (70s glam rock) and "Why We Fight" (Eisenhower's warning against the military industrial complex). I can't also forget "The Servant," a sinister 60s-era British flick (made by Joseph Losey, the immensely talented film industry outcast from Wisconsin) about a manservant slowly taking over his master's life which has the additional gift of having been adapted by our recent Nobel Laureate in literature, Harold Pinter. Oh, yeah, and two really different, fantastic dramas about the boxing life: "Fat City" (1972) and "The Set-Up" (1949). Hell, I'd watch more, but the week's only so long and I have to make room for possibly the best serial drama ever made, Deadwood--a masterpiece in our time!
See, it's too late in the day to complain about Hollywood. Disappointment and boredom will await you if you depend on the idiot factory. Happily, the rest of the planet hasn't lost its touch. The library of international film is so full of good and even astonishing work that you need a lifetime to watch it all.
Like any subject, you won't get very far without some guidance. The little paragraph in the On Demand section? That isn't going to cut it. Get hold of a good film companion like Halliwell's, and read some of the great movie critics like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael. Or if you want to start this instant, then peruse the reliable Roger Ebert's short odes to great films. Start at random, you can hardly go wrong with anything here:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/secti on?category=REVIEWS08
Don't look now, but I think there might be some kids on your lawn.
I am 19, and I have watched a lots of films in my life. Espesially with friends. And I have to say that most Hollywood films are just boring, stypid, they're not funny when they supposed to be so. And it's overall very bad. Now, when films are this bad, less and less people go to watch them. And then Hollywood can easily talk about how piracy is causing them to loss more and more money when in fact hollywood is making big mistake not trying to fix their own problems with big productions. At least some small productions with a lot of less money are occasionally making o.k films. But usually Asian productions are much better. Japanese action and horror films are great. At the moment I know only one American film director who has made some good movies lately, and he is Quentin Tarantino. Can you agree with me?
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
Running Scared. Sure, I might have a small crush on Vera Farmiga, but it was acutually a very good movie, I thought.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You might want to watch fewer movies, and spend more time reading instead. Books take more time, but ultimately they stand up better to repeated readings than movies do to repeated viewings. I have many DVDs, but when it comes to what is near and dear to my heart, they are as straw compared to my library. I'm an introspective person, and I like Ingmar Bergman, but even his most profound movies fail to even hint at the depths of introspection of books by Dostoevsky or Proust. I know that wasn't the original question, but if you're at a loss as to what to do with your time...
Someone is paying for this crap (watching it) because it's still being funded and shoved in our faces all over the television sets and banner ad space on the web. Hollywood hasn't crumbled yet due to lack of patrons. I think they are pushers and the mindless public are sitcom junkies looking for an escape. Hollywood could make a feature length movie out of Friends and it would probably get rave reviews like "the funniest film of the summer," "the best comedy of the year," and (my one of my favorites) "a roller-coaster ride of laughs and guffaws that will leave you breathless and in tears." The Filthy Critic loves to quote the "quote whores" that just spout off meaningless drivel because it makes them sound like movie critics worthy of getting paid for their "professional" reviews. By the way, I didn't see anyone else paying homage to old Filthy, so make sure you check out his page. http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/ He's had a string of one finger movies lately. No surprise there. Overall, movie theatre attendance is on the decline and has been for years. I remember a few years back hearing a lengthy report on NPR talking about this. I learned a lot from the report, including things like how theatres are renting movies from distrubutors and the majority of ticket prices for the first few months go straight to distributors. This is why theatres charge so bloody much for concessions, it's the main place they make their revenue. I swear they'd sell three times as much if they'd cut the prices by two-thirds, but that would be too logical. It's no different than what Hollywood is doing with declining movies. Movie attendance is down, so they jack up prices to compensate on the revenues. Again, someone is paying, so they have incentive to keep up the status quo. (Why does the image of beating an aged and nearly dead, overburdened cart horse come to mind?)
As someone who has worked in the fan based science-fiction convention scene now for many years, I see the written word on the decline. No, I don't think books will die, but it simply reflects out society. Most of the people I see attending reading panels (where the author reads their own works), or writing panels, or anything else to do with actual written science/fantasy fiction, are an older crowd. This simply correlates to the rest of society. We are a media oriented society now. X-boxes, mindless movies, flashy cartoons on television that move at warp speed and don't even give a chance for the audience to revel in a good laugh (think Bugs Bunny and compare to Power Puff Girls), and MTV. Oh lords of Hollywood, let us not forget MTV, which has completed it's de-evolution into the "Shiny Things Network." Hey kids, try some books. Go slow at first, your brain needs to come up to speed. On yet another side note, as my post is full of them, I love Harry Potter stories. It's gotten so many teens and young adults to actually read and not even be phased at the thought of 500 pages or more.
It's a safe bet that the majority of Slashdot readers are going to be fans of Science Fiction. I myself enjoy the Stargates on Sci-Fi channel. I watch them because there's not a lot else to watch and it's a fun, affordable, relaxing and safe way to spend a Friday evening. I also watch them because they preceed Battlestar Galactica and like any good headliner band, your are going to sit through the opening act to watch what you really came to see. (More on this in a moment.) This Atlantis scene that captured the "emotion and emergency" I just don't get. I find the Stargates to be a franchise that Sci-Fi channel is milking and the writing to be lacking. I find the characters to be exceptionally two dimensional with zero depth and development in the last many seasons. Yes, I realize that Atlantis isn't that old. I stand by my statement. I think the writers are too comfortable in their characters. Perhaps they think we wish to see David Hewitt become the most supreme smart ass of all times. I'm j
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
the history on the pegasus arc of the sg1 panoply indicates atlantis was both the first and last inabited city in that galaxy, but it has no zpm factory?
I don't call that a stupid tactical blunder, I call that a stupid viewer. I'm sorry, but a little bit needs to be left to the imagination so that you can "what if" the story a little bit, opening your mind to a new possibility. Asking for every single thing to be written out for you is the mark of complete mental laziness.
All of the cities similar to Atlantis are actually starships--they have hyperdrives and other systems for interstellar and intergalactic travel--so maybe the "ZPM factory" left Pegasus to some other galaxy which will be brought in on another plot arc? Maybe communications were cut off between Atlantis and the factory and its departure was not recorded in the ancient database? Maybe the factory was obliterated during the many centuries of war with the Wraith, but that section of the ancient database hasn't yet been decoded? Or, maybe you'll just have to keep watching to find out, lazy viewer!
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
You know, other countries make movies too... having just finished watching _The Longest Engagement_ I can't say I really care that hollywood makes shite these days.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I'd argue that the market is proving you right, as we speak. I think the new format of choice is not the two-hour movie, but the 45-minute serial. In the past few years we've seen the demise of the "story arc" sitcom (where each episode was basically self-contained and usually returned the situation to wherever it began, for the next episode), long a staple of American television, and replaced it with plot-driven series TV shows. I think the epitome of the genre is "24," just because it's really the antithesis of the sitcom format, but there are many other shows that have popped up that are basically the same thing.
On one hand, people seem to like the shorter plotlines of series shows: you can get your 'dose' of entertainment in 45 minutes if you skip the commercials, rather than in two hours; but on the other hand the sales of DVD sets and my personal experience watching them indicates that people aren't adverse to watching two or three hours of serial episodes in a sitting.
In some ways the whole thing reminds me of another change, which went in the opposite direction: the transition in the 19th century from serial fiction literature, to bound novels. It seems as though today we're going from movies, to series shows where each season has a basically 'cinematic' plot (pretty much any one season of most new dramas could have been a movie, although whether a good or bad one I won't say), and then where that one plot is broken into hourlong sub-plots that are delivered to the viewer in chunks.
If I was cynical I'd say that this is further evidence of the ADD-ization of this country and of our society in general, but I won't pass judgement. I think I'll go watch another episode of Nip/Tuck, instead.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you throw crap out the door and it makes a profit why bother with trying to make a good movie.
You do what works, and crap has been making a profit for them.
Like any other product in a capitalist society, it exists because there is a market for it. If people stopped paying for bad movies, bad movies would cease to plague us.
Unfortunately for most of us here, we are not the only people on the planet who pay for movies, and thus do not ourselves dictate what is and is not a movie worthy of viewing. Your only choice is to place your vote by supporting those films you do like, and not supporting those you do not.
Movie makers are doing what movie makers have always done and will always do - try to find a story which they believe people want to pay money to watch. Oh, sometimes there will be people who are making a film because they feel compelled to tell the story, but someone has to pay for the film, actors, catering (even if it's just pizza,) etc. The fact that people want to pay to see Dumb and Dumber[er] does not reflect on their inability/unwillingness to provide compelling matinee material so much as on our desire to see such drivel.
You're using Stargate as an example of *good* TV? That formulaic, badly acted series based on a film that was even worse? Wow, I think the problem might be your taste and not the movies.
What the hell planet are you living on? :-)
The AMC on 3rd and Santa Monica charges $10. I think that's pretty standard...
Kayamon
I recently went to a film festival of young european directors, and what I saw there blew lots of professional stuff easily away. One of the movies which gave me one of the biggest impressions was Zamedi/13, one of the best movies I have seen in the recent past (partially thriller/horror themed), you really have to look outside of the box, there is lots of talent there probably never to be discovered blowing most of the plastic garbage from hollywood away easily.
http://www.ifi.ie/ . That is the Irish film centre in Dublin. One of my weekly rituals is to go and catch an alternative film there. Even the chop-socky films shown there have a credible edge to them. If you are unwilling to see another Hulk/Spiderman/Superman/13 going on 30/was_a_good_now_on_followup_part_22 , you should find and go to one of these alternative movie houses. Example of a film playing in the IFI today.
http://www.ifi.ie/cinema/dispfilm.asp?filmID=5120
Atlantis?
You can't be serious. Just like SG-1 I think Atlantis has very mediocre acting at best.
People question the plot direction of Atlantis now? I would hate to see how bad it is in its 10th season. I'm sure it will make it that far.
Miami Vice was good, even though its made after the TV show, it was good.
BTTF was a single movie, shot and released in 1985. The flying car sequence at the end was meant as a joke. When BTTF turned out to be the biggest movie of the year, Universal commissioned two more films to make a trilogy, which were filmed back-to-back between 1989 and 1990 and released in 1990. If you look at the end of the first film and the start of the second (or look it up on IMDB) you'll see that the actor who played Jennifer changed and the flying car sequence was re-shot with the new actor for the start of BTTF 2. The original actor was unavailable during the filming of the two sequels.
It's the wide-releases that have sucked, not all movies. I am lucky to live in an area that has a couple of independent movie-houses-- (you know the ones where people turn their cell-phones off, and sit through the end-credits.) In that venue, I have seen some entertaining movies -- (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Capote, Shopgirl.)
So why are the studios failing to produce good movies?
1. Because the average consumer doesn't want a masterpiece. Joe Six-pack wants just enough plausibility in the story to allow him to escape his reality for a couple of hours. I think that the audience is savvy to the tricks of the movie makers. Fantastic visual effects are no longer a substitute for a good plot (War of the Worlds comes to mind. Isn't the whole movie just one long chase?). Cool wardrobe and sharp language are no substitute for good acting.
2. Names sell tickets. Spielberg, Hanks, and Cruise all sell tickets. Some of thier work is fantastic and some of it sucks eggs. Either way, chances are that the film will make $20 million before the word gets out.
3. Risk. The average movie costs four to six million. With that kind of money on the line the pressure is on to recoup your investment. A movie version of a semi-memorable TV show from your target audience's collective childhood will always sell. (Dukes of Hazzard, Miami Vice, Star Wars EP I, II, III)
Television has largely ruined the audience. Eight to ten minutes of commercials for every half-hour of programming. Crawling text, channel promotions w/sound playing over the show are very distracting. I have personally forgotten what I was watching while channel surfing during commercials. My point is that there are good films available, you just have to sift though a lot of schlock to get to them.
Come on, enlarge your horizons : there are thousands of movies that come from elsewhere in the world that you have not seen and are far better.
Really the problem lies with the cost of making a film. With the skyrocketing cost of just making the film studios tend not to take chances. That's most likly why we are seeing sequels and clone movies so regularly. It also accounts for the influx of licensed comic movies. From their perspective they are leveraging their investment on the previous sales of a franchise. Not to mention if they are making a movie off a licensed property there is already a fan base. Less risk more chance for reward that is how you can describe the movie industries current business model. Tv on the other hand is plugging away as it always has channel A makes a show. That show has high ratings so channel B and C figures out how to tell the same story in a different way. A classic example is sitcoms with the exception of Sienfeld and a few others they all tell the same story based off the same ideas with a very small twist. So you can see how this spiralled in to the Reality Tv explosion we see today same premise diffrent show type. Just to touch on it the music industry is stuck in the same Tv like business model. Alot of the time a hit song can spawn a huge group of cloned artist signed to a label because they sound, look or in someway resemble that hit artist. They are selling a image not the music itself. To take this full circle it all comes back to risk vs. reward all mediums of enetertainment are becoming more expensive to produce. That fact stiffles creativity and leaves us the consumer with this garbage they call enertainment. However, it's also effecting the industries profit margins. Which in turn forces us to watch or listen to more of the same old cloned unoriginal crap that is selling at that given time.
All the movie remakes are what is getting my goat. I've seen all the original movies while growing up in the 70s, so why would I want to see the remakes at today's inflated movie prices? Of all the remade movies that have been released in the last ten or fifteen years, I can't count on but one hand the number that impressed me as being better than the original.
Bewitched: Dumb. The Flintstones movie: Shoulda left it as a cartoon, the live-action remake sucked goat nuts. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Ain't seen it, but damn, it looks like a piece of ass and friends say it doesn't compare to the Gene Wilder classic. About the only fare I've been able to tolerate that seem like remakes are the latest creations by Stan Lee and Marvel Comics like Xmen and Spiderman. Those films rocked.
I blame this lack of creativity as stemming from a generation of people who had all their stories created for them then spoonfed via television for the past four decades. Before then, people had to actually make up new stories to entertain themselves. Maybe we need some cataclysm that would take away television and other entertainment to get people back into the creative groove, or we need to douche Hollywood as there seems to be a bit of constipation in that festering anus of a town.
YouTube has a simple form of colaborative filtering, in the form of ratings, view counts, and favourite counts. It'd be nice to see a video site that used a more sophisticated form, getting recommendations from users having a similar taste, such as the Last.fm music site.
Movies have "been so bad lately" because you've been exposed to higher quality entertainment elsewhere... in the form of the modern mini-series. The mini-series has more time and therefore has a greater opportunity for character and plot development. The result is that you've been spoilt; you'll watch a great series like Lost or Babylon 5 and suddenly a 90 minute movie seems "bad" by comparison. Movies feel rushed because they're trying to cram in too much content: the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 movie is a perfect example.
This isn't my idea, although I do wish I'd thought of it. Clive James recently expressed the idea on National Radio. His example was Saving Private Ryan - admittedly a good movie but it pales into insignificance compared to Band of Brothers. I thought "Clive's gone crazy" but then I reflected and realised that I watch mini-series far more often than I watch movies. I enjoy them more. There is simply more content in a mini-series; a greater number of plot twists and side stories, more interaction between the characters, and each week I'm left with a cliff hanger. It's far more enjoyable than a movie.
I don't think it's a coincidence that several famous movie directors have experimented with high-budget mini-series, and some have already made the transition from movies to television.
There was a slump in the seventies. Then some weirdy beardy released a low budget studio flick called Star Wars. There was a slump in the eighties. Then some washed out producer got behind Die Hard. There was a slump in the nineties. Then a couple of unknown directors let loose with The Matrix. There's a slump in the naughties. I'm doing my best
In a nutshell, because people pay to see bad movies. Too many are coaxed into seeing a crummy flick by heavy advertising, and by the time word gets out that the work is bad, the producers have recouped a large amount of their costs in the first week of release. If it's a smidgeon above truly awful, they can keep it running for weeks.
There are a few things you can do to avoid seeing bad movies:
1. Don't rely on advertising. The most talented people working in Hollywood, it seems, are producing commercials for films. It's reached the point where it's near impossible to tell if a movie is any good (or bad) just by seeing the previews. Remember, just because you see a commercial on TV for the same movie 5 times an hour doesn't mean it's good (and usually, it's a fair indicator that it's bad)
2. Don't watch a movie the weekend it's released. Let other poor saps spend their money and ask them.
3. Place trust in critics, especially in advertisements. Glossing over the movie section of your local paper, you'll note that every film out has raving quotes from critics. Take note of which critics they're quoting. As a general rule, the more credible the news source the better. If the Washington Post or Rolling Stone (Travis is not always right, but he does a pretty good job) publishes a favorable review, there's a good chance it'll be quoted in the movie's advertisements, and there's a good chance the movie will be pretty good. On the other hand, if you read "Best Movie of the Year!", and under the quote you find some guy from AM 530 in Toledo, Ohio, chances are the movie sucks, because every credible critic found it unwatchable.
But I'd have to agree with you that with few exceptions, most movies put out these days just aren't that good. There seems to be a lack of craftsmanship in filmmaking that was common three decades ago. The good news, especially if you're under 30, is that there is a wealth of fine films out there that you probably haven't seen. These films can typically be owned on DVD for less then the cost of two tickets to the multiplex.
The Internet is generally stupid
hollywood have a generic script for each genre, with 5 interchangable twists. whenever they want a new movie for a new genre, they randomize 3 of the twists, place them into generic scripts, randomise the names in the script... and then production begins of "Yet Another Hollywood Movie"
portfolio
There are a lot's of factors in this.
1) Your distorted perception. There's an increasing abundance of movies. Their percieved overall value decreases. Still there are good movies around. Appleseed and Advent Children are even an entirely new type of movie that wasn't possible before. Matrix and LoTR are once-in-a-decade opus magni and there're not to far back.
2) George Lucas pointed out another factor that could actually be causing a decrease in quality. He say's that in 10 years from now the maximum budget for a movie will be ca. 15 million $, because everybody will be able to get the required infrastructure with free software, two household PCs and a handfull of tech from best buy. The movie industry is next in experiencing an entire change of how it works. Photografy is ditching 35mm faster than you can watch. Film is next.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Movies have been bad longer than "lately".
My karma is not a Chameleon.
A lot of movies are like pinball games where a story sort of bangs around with a lot of lights and noises going off. It's all well and good to blame execs who focus on the bottom line and focus on making safe profits for their 100 million investment. I just don't think that 100 million is even needed to start with. I think Hollywood and it's audiences are way too impressed with technological wizbang. Even the amount of superfluous noise in movies is becoming a burden.
Some people say "oh well there have always been bad movies and each year there are still the good ones and it's not accurate to focus on the failures". I can't agree if that "failure" cost 100 or 200 million. "Donnie Darko" cost around 4 million and was written and made by a kid basically. If the movie has been given the "safe" blockbuster treatment it would have been a pile of soul less noise and technological gimmicks -all very expensive - and unnecessary. Even a successful movie like "Titanic" had another 15-20 minutes of fancy crap that could have been cut to no bad effect.
I swear the more "realistic" they try to make these movies look and sound the phonier they seem. It all more heat than light and the sound pollution in films keeps me o
put of the theatres
I don't call that a stupid tactical blunder, I call that a stupid viewer. I'm sorry, but a little bit needs to be left to the imagination so that you can "what if" the story a little bit, opening your mind to a new possibility. Asking for every single thing to be written out for you is the mark of complete mental laziness.
That's the stupidest attempt at insult i've ever seen.
"what if?".. is that the best you can come up with.. the city was used to colonize a whole galaxy, the idea that there would not be a facility to build replacement power cells of all things is the most boneheadedly stupid examples of bad writing i've ever seen.
I mean it's obvious from the fact that the city was abandoned that the technology would not save them even when fully functional, this is confirmed in the episode "the siege pt 3" where they estimate how many days a single one of those zpms would last them, so once again, stupid writers.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I paid $5.75 to see A Scanner Darkly and got my money's worth out of it, and then some. But movies like that are the exception...
Yes, 90% of movies are crap, and always have been. But the older crap doesn't pile up in the video store like the new crap - they have to stock Garfield 2 and The Dukes Of Hazzard, but they don't have to get the DVDs of Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, or (to go back further) the 1925 Wizard Of Oz. Therefore, the oldies section and the foreign section tend to have the crap pre-weeded out of them already, or at least a lesser ratio than the 90%. That doesn't mean all old movies were great - just that the bad ones don't make it into the modern video store, improving your odds.
I mean, come on. Would the author please be so kind to inform us what he thinks are good movies then? I happen to think there have been tons of good movies lately. But for me, not an awful lot of them have been coming out of Hollywood.
/. article to appear.
To all you US-centric readers, who happen to think "the rest of the world" is a small island off the coast of Australia: a lot of more than just decent movies are actually coming out of Europe and Asia. Also, closer to home, you'll find that Canadian, South American and even independant US movie makers still know the meaning of the word 'quality', instead of confusing it with 'budget' or 'star count'.
So, after this bout of feeding the troll, I'll just crawl back under my rock and wait for a worthwhile
The baby boomer generation of management controls Hollywood. They pick what gets made and who does it. This generation is more concerned about milking exisiting ideas to line their pockets for retirement than taking risks and doing something original. They've run out of new ideas and always want to play it safe. Things aren't going to get better until they are gone. When the next generation starts to get control innovation will begin anew.
It wasn't an insult, it was a commentary on your mental agility; a mere observation.
And in The Siege (Part 3), they do say that the mostly-depleted ZPM which they received from earth would last for days, yes, but that was a depleted ZPM, not a fully charged one. Further, we don't know if ZPMs deplete linearly or not. A conventional chemical battery, for instance, will have a higher voltage when it is fresh than when it is at 10% capacity. It's possible that the first 20% of a ZPM's power would last for decades when powering the shields, and then it would deplete more rapidly over time. Sci-fi requires a little suspension of disbelief, that's what the "fi" part is all about.
Perhaps the city was abandoned was because they were cut off from their ZPM supply lines. Also, perhaps the ZPM factory was destroyed to prevent it from falling into wraith hands. Use your imagination.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Now if you hadn't stole that joke from Sabrina Mathews, it would have been much funnier. You've just tried to say it in a way that makes you sound smarter than you actually are.
"Isn't it ironic? no Alanis its unfortunate. You have listed shit for three and a half minutes, and everything you mentioned is unfortunate. Now that you have a billion dollars perhaps you'd like to buy yourself a dictionary. Because irony is not a black fly in your chardonay. Irony is a scottsman cloning a sheep. Irony is renaming the national airport after the president that fired all of the air traffic controllers."
"Some men just want to watch the world burn..."
Perhaps the city was abandoned was because they were cut off from their ZPM supply lines. Also, perhaps the ZPM factory was destroyed to prevent it from falling into wraith hands.
in which case they should have annihilated the database and the star drive, which is "intergalactic", something the wraith dont have either. no, a scorched earth policy does not adequately explain it.
Don't defend these people, their writing just blows.
Nice pretty special effects with things blowing up in space, its fun to watch because of that, but the writing is just god aweful, and they should be glad nobody is doing anything better, and by better I mean anything a 3 year old with a golf pencil and 5 minutes could come up with.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There's so much "crap" because they are trying to make movies for much narrower audiences.
So what you see is one or two movies that you love, and everything else looks much worse compared to them. Compared to the past, where for the most part the movie-making landscape was fairly bland.
I go to the theatre fairly often and see a lot of movies. The last bad movie I've seen was War of the Worlds, and even that wasn't that bad.
In the last month I've seen Clerks II and Superman Returns. Both movies were much better than I expected.
"The Three burials of Melqiads Estrada"
"An Unfinished Life"
"A Love Song for Bobby Long"
"Kingdom of Heaven"
"The Ballad of Jack and Rose"
"Serenity"
and a few others, although I agree for the most part movies are trash and not worth the rental fee. As far as TV goes, I've enjoyed "Eureka" on the SCI FI channel, Deadwood and Closer. Some would argue I have wierd taste in entertainment, though. For instance, I liked the movie "Rob Roy" and can't stand "Braveheart". Both have similar themes and were produced and released at the same time. I like just about every movie Liam Neison has ever been in and think Mel Gibson is a poor actor and huge hypocrite, with no range of expression. Watching any Gibson movie is like watching Mad Max over and over and over.
I always imagine a load of stupid fat old men smoking big cigars in a studio office, reading an interesting, intelligent and thought provoking script, shaking their heads and saying "I don't get it."
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Global markets exceed US domestic movie demand. Therefore movies have less complicated plots and dialogue so they translate across cultures better. It is a delibate move by movie execs and it has succeeded in boosting international demand for Hollywood movies and creating increased revenues.
Money is the reason eveything goes bad - if not at first, then eventually.
I use NetFlix to compensate for the bad state of cinema - at the very least I can better pick out the less bad movies through sheer selection.
We're heading towards a culture where films cost so much and where it is so hard to get a film into a cinema due to the large films.
Distributers do dodgy deals, so to get the big blockbuster you have to take all their other films. It's just not an open market.
What is different is your cinematographic sophistication. This happens to every one... as we are exposed to more and more movies, our appreciation of the quality improves, and we start to notice the lack when we see poor movies. This is a natural part of growing older. The memories you have of movies experiences in the past do not adjust for this... if you saw some of your favorite movies from the past all over again as if it was the first, you'd feel less impressed than your younger self did. This is of course most easily visible when watching childhood television favorites where the contrast between enjoyment and quality are stark, but it is true generally, if less shocking.
Because the industry is trying to make blockbusters instead of good movies
What you call bad movie, doesn't mean that others also call it a bad movie..
A lot of people think 'Saving private ryan' is a great movie, I think it's a bad movie..
So it's just a matter of taste.. If you look at movie history you see that there have been remakes all the time.. Americans are even too lazy too see great foreign movies unless they are remade by hollywood..
Star Wars, which I happen to love (EP 4 I mean), changed movies forever.
It was a low budget picture that made a lot of money.
Now, one kind of logic says you can make lots of low budget pictures with driven by guys who are struggling to get their vision out there; most will be flops, quite a few will be marginally successful, and a few will be mega hits on the Star Wars level. Statistically, you spread your risk out.
But nobody likes to be associated with lot and lots of failures, and you statistically need to endure a lot of them to make this approach work.
So, there's another kind of logic that says, we'll take what people liked about past hit movies, then buy more of it for each picture. If people liked special effects in Star Wars, we'll invest more in special effects. If they thrilled to the epic set pieces of the "Indiana Jones" movies, we'll pour money into every bigger and more spectacular set pieces. If they loved stars like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business", we'll pay more and more money for stars with sure-fire appeal.
As more and more money gets poured into an enterprise in order to make it a "sure thing", what is actually happening is that you're staking more and more dough on the picture. Which means you can't afford to fail.
So you ride the creative people hard to provide you with all the elements that go into a "hit" movie. You bring more people to look over their shoulders, and soon everyone is looking over everyone's shoulders. If the screenwriters are not producing work that has metrics that are associated with success, you replace them, and replace the replacements as often as necessary. You squash all the creative talent you can into your enterprise, and the result is a mushy gray.
You keep trying the same proven formulas, with little tweaks to raise the bar a bit, but it doesn't change the truth: you're just making the same damned picture over and over again.
More money == more conservatism == more boredeom.
Mr. Lucas is the perfect example of this. The more resources he had, the less he needed to improvise, and the less interesting he became. If he had been making Episodes 1-3 before Episode 4, they would have been one movie. He'd have thrown out everything that didn't work so he could make sure that what he absolutely needed could be said before the series was cancelled. Instead, he had enough money to put everything he could think of into the films, which had they each been edited down to three one reeler serial installments (like the old Flash Gordon serials) would have been great stuff.
Artists who don't have somethign to struggle against stop being artists.
The old studio system was able to turn film making into a repeatable process, producing modest picture after icture until they could reliably produce pretty good movies relatively cheaply, with an occasional blockbuster spectacle that might be a "Gone With the Wind" or might turn out to be a "Duel In the Sun". But movies are made diferently now, are distributed differently, and have to compete with other sources of entertainment. It may not be possible to sustain a business confidently putting out journeyman work at modest cost for modest but consistent reward.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To quote Howard Mann:t m-rules30jul23,1,3814092.story?coll=la-headlines-w est)
(stolen from http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-
Years ago, I had an actor friend, John, who happened to be a Native American. We were having lunch one day when he said: "Howie, things are OK with me now. But when I first came out here back in the '40s, I couldn't get a job. I went over to Republic studios. They were doing hundreds of westerns then. I figured I'm a cinch to get an Indian part.
"Sorry," the casting director tells me. "You don't look Indian enough."
"I don't look Indian enough? I happen to be a full-blooded Sioux!"
"So what? You still don't look Indian enough."
"So if I don't look Indian enough, who does?"
"Italians."
"What?"
"You heard me. We only use Italians for Indian parts. They look more Indian than the Indians."
"Well, if Italians are doing Indian parts, maybe I could play an Italian."
"No, we use other people for the Italian parts."
"Who?"
"Jews. They play all Italian gangsters. Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield. All Jewish."
John told the guy he didn't understand.
"Look," the Republic guy said, "Jews look more Italian than Italians. I was in Rome last summer. I didn't see one Italian who looked how an Italian is supposed to look. They had blond hair, fair skin, high cheekbones."
John said, "Howie, I asked the guy, 'If Italians play Indians and Jews play Italians, then who plays Jews?' He said, 'WASPs. Who played David? Gregory Peck. Who played Charlton Heston's mother in "Ben-Hur"? Martha Scott.'"
John pounded the guy's desk and told him: "OK, Italians play Indians, Jews play Italians, WASPs play Jews. Let me play an Oriental. After all, Indians came over from Asia."
He said the guy apologized. "White guys play Orientals. Who played Charlie Chan? Warner Oland. Who played Mr. Moto? Peter Lorre. Who played Chinese dames for years? Myrna Loy."
Johnny seemed exhausted. The waiter came with the check. I paid. It was the least I could do. I asked him how he managed to stay in the business.
"I got the idea that if Italians are grabbing all the Indian parts, I would become Italian. I changed my name from John to Giovanni. I learned to think like them, dress like them, walk like them. I was ready. I went up for a part in the movie 'Little Big Man,' starring Dustin Hoffman.
"The casting guy asked me my name. I told him I was Giovanni and could play any Indian part he had. The guy gets up from his chair. 'I'm sorry,' he says. 'Things have changed. We only use authentic Native Americans today . . . people like Iron Eyes Cody, Graham Greene, Chief Dan George. Now if you were a genuine Indian, I'd hire you on the spot.'"
John said he couldn't take it. "I screamed at the guy, 'But I'm a full-blooded Sioux. I am an authentic Indian. I am the realest Indian you'll ever find.'"
He said the casting guy laughed in his face. "You actors," he said. "You'll say anything to get a part."
Solomon Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Okay; I would have used The Godfather: Part II as an example of a good sequel myself, but each to their own.
Man, I feel old..
...but it seems you started to grow up :)
Try foriegn films, especially films from Asia - there are excellent films coming from South Korea (films of Kim Ki Duk and if you like love stories try 'My Sassy Girl'), Hong Kong (Johnny To, Wong Kar Wai), Iran (Majid Majidi), Russia (try the Nightwatch/Daywatch series), India (films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Bharadwaj, films like PIRAVI, COMPANY etc.), Argentina (La Cianega)
The above are filmmakers who are actively making films. If you go back a bit, you can start with Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini and others and end up at your own countrymen like David Lynch, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch and others.
Seriously, you havent seen interesting cinema...you and many others were prisoners of pop-culture.
Tat Tvam Asi
Wait a second... you're asking why movies are so bad, then use Stargate: Atlantis as an example of something good? I'm not disagreeing that movies have been rather bland the last few years, but Stargate: Atlantis? Let me reiterate my shock, STARGATE: ATLANTIS?!!!! Ok, I feel better now.
AFAIK, they haven't found any ancient factories at all.
And if you go to earth, you won't find any factories for power stations. Some things are built from scratch.
For the first colony in a galaxy, it would make sense that they brought their power supplies from where they started.
I agree that they lack plot direction on Atlantis. However, I suspect it's too late for them to do anything about it. They kind of blew their wad from the start. You need to build up to it. Imagine how cool it would have been to occupy Season 1 with visiting all these new worlds, helping the local population with whatever problem of the week, and hearing tales/legends/etc about "The Sleepers" or "The Hordes" or "The Wraith" ... everyone has a different word for it, and it becomes apparent to SG:Atlantis that there really might be something behind the Atlantians fleeing their Galaxy for Earth. We make alliances with other worlds under the presumption that if there is something out there, it's better to stick together. The Genii trade ammo for technology, etc. Around mid-season break, the team makes an encounter with some Wraith, some get away, and after that there's the realization that we might have woken something up. Keep going, and by season end, the team has a major encounter in an action-filled 2-part episode, but after their victory they realize this was only a "small" group of unsuspecting Wraith. And now the Wraith know about us .. maybe they don't know about Atlantis, but they know we're somewhere, and they are coming.
That would have been a killer season 1, and would have set up following seasons with new characters as you grow the alliances. But no, the writers didn't take us anywhere near there. Instead, we met the Wraith in episode 1, season 1. And by the end of season 1, the Wraith knew aobut Atlantis and were trying to invade.
And hey, would it have killed them to (a) show us more of the cool Atlantis city, and (b) had something of a more believeable Gateroom .. in a time of 'war', why did the Ancients leave their Gate in the middle of their command center?
I guarantee that people will point to all the great software out there, as any reasonable person can point to all the great films out there. Let's face it, you take your salt with your sugar in all realms of media.
Disclaimer: I'm over 35, so almost everything produced today looks like crap to me these days.
The biggest reason for the decline in cinema is not just the fact that studios like to turn profits. In fact, this isn't much of a reason at all: Most studios want to have a rate of return on an entire portfolio of flicks in pursuit of an average rate of return. Some of that portfolio will be riskier than other parts, so occasionally an interesting movie manages to get made. This is very much like the way a venture capitalist will throw money at a handful of start-ups, hoping that at least one or two will succeed wildly while the rest tank.
Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to forecast revenue, let alone income, from a movie project. (Remember the remake of "Godzilla"? It could have, would have, should have been a hit, but it was a huge disaster.) Oh sure, you can cut expenses to the bone, and try to innovate with cheaper-yet-edgier marketing, but there's no guarantee that a studio will ever get its money back. Of course, relying on tried and true tactics, including rehashed plots and reliable demographic groups (like teenagers in the summer) mitigate the risk -- but not entirely.
And how, do you ask, are projects evaluated since there's no hope for decent financial projections? Enter "the pitch", the fifteen-second description of the movie that executive producers give to studio heads. The pitch is often the sole basis for decision-making. Sure, there may be a script ready to go, but a quick blurb describing the plot ("it's like the Princess Bride, but with a twist..") and possibly some hints about the talent involved ("we lined up The Rock for the Princess Buttercup role") will go a lot farther to bankroll the project.
Now think about the kinds of pitches that are most successful, and you'll soon understand why sub-par films get funding while innovative ideas do not. So a director wants to be an artist, or a screenwriter wants to be the voice of his or her generation? Nobody cares: there are plenty of those cockroaches scurrying around LA looking for deals, and the fatter ones know how to play the game.
My advice? Avoid the recent offerings of big studios, and opt for independent film (since producers are encouraged to take risks) and older classics that were truly innovative for their time. We all know how the entertainment industry resists change, but you may as well try to force change upon them, in your own little way, with your dollars.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Movies have gotten really expensive, they need to make that money back, so they want to appeal to the biggest market possible, and that means to play it safe.
Pirates of the Carribean is a pretty good example, the movie was just plain boring and bad, but still it reigns the box office because all is badness, there are enough people who find SOMETHING in it and moreso it doesn't offend anyone.
Stargate Atlantis (or Deadwood, Rome etc.) are niche shows that have a well defined audience who the writers can aim too (that, and Stargate as well as BSG may benefit from being a Canadian production).
In essence what it comes down to is: Good writing vs. Mass compatibility, it does not necessarily exclude each other, but a lot of times that is what happens.
I agree, there really aren't many movies out there that I want to see, I was considering watching Clerks II, but I wonder if I really want to plop the money down for it as I somehow feel it is Kevin Smith's attempt to go back to something he knows, and I don't think he'll really progressed anywhere with it (if you've seen it, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong with my assessment).
If Digital Distribution really takes off, things may change, because then smaller movies, that aren't that expensive and are carried by a story can be easier made available, but for the time being you have to deal with large productions that are heavily influenced by (conflicting) market research.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
DRM. Digital Rights Management is only the beginning of the plan. The idea is to have absolute corporate control over every movie, song, image, or piece of writing...even the post I'm writing now will someday be banned by a corporate interest and you'll have to pay to read it and you'll have a chip in your head that erases the memory of it five seconds after you've read it so as not to allow you to share it with anybody else. Also, the chip implants will prevent you from having dreams when you sleep for free.
So why bother to make *good* movies anymore? Control the present, control the past, control the future, right? Just outlaw the old version and digitally remaster it and re-release it as new! Oh, how I envy future generations, who will be discovering the great yet-to-be-made classics Citizen Kane, Sound of Music, and Wizrd of Oz. Fully rewritten and edited, of course, so they do not conflict with the "Correct Way to Think", which will be a video which will be shown in every classroom, and become the new constitution (the old constitution will also have to be destroyed because it isn't DRMable).
Well, future readers who cracked the encryption just to read this, was I right? And would you believe, I was the only one back at this time who thought it was a bad idea?
10% of everything is not crap.
Probably 1% or so of everything is absolutely golden, pure genius. The trick is to know where to look to avoid the crap and watch the good stuff, because after all, no one wants to sit through 90 "Wild Wild West"s and an additional 9 "The Matrix: Reloaded"s to find the 1 "American Beauty".
Of course, tastes differ. You know what I mean, even if you loved Wild Wild West and hated American Beauty.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Special effects can add to a movie, but they can't carry a movie unless the characters are developed to a point where you care about them, and the plot shows a little imagination. There are too many movies where the special effects is the "star".
The MPAA says that we're making crap because of copyright issues. Um, and nepotism . . . and, oh yeah, incompetence, don't forget about the complete and absolute incompetence that is so pervasive within the industry.
Be sure to see that fourth remake of a movie originally based on a book, that was based on folk tales from 400 years ago - coming soon to an empty theatre near YOU.
Movie quality as a whole hasn't gotten better or worse. Hollywood has always had a SNR of AT LEAST 85% shit/15% worthwhile--or worse. The thing is, no one remembers the shit of yesterday--no one owns it on DVD, and the cable channels mostly show the worthwhile classic movies, so we wind up comparing today's shit to yesterday's masterpieces. But if I made a top ten list of my favorite movies of all time, I bet half of them would be movies made in the past 10 years--Fight Club, Memento, and Life is Beautiful would definitely be on that list... quite possibly The Matrix (first one only) as well. I would have to agree that I haven't seen any truly awesome movie in the past couple years, but you can't expect Hollywood to produce legendary movies every year--and there are plenty of not-quite-legendary but still very good movies I could name: Brokeback was pretty damn good, Star Wars EP:3 (crappy love sequences and the "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" notwithstanding) was on par with the original trilogy and was a rather scathing satire of our current society, Return of the King was a solid rendition of Tolkien's work, and Serenity was just as good as the series. I also think that Batman Begins beats the crap out of every other Batman movie ever made and most other superhero movies too.
So, in conclusion--if you expect Hollywood to produce awe-inspiring classics every year, you obviously haven't been paying attention. The vast majority of it is shit, most of the rest is only decent enough to see one or twice, and if we're very lucky indeed we might get a single awesome, legendary classic made per year. It's always been that way, and if you doubt this you need to go find and watch some obscure 70s movies that didn't make a bunch of money and weren't lavishly praised by critics.
Hollywood has two major ailments: 1. an astonishing lack of creativity and 2. worship at the alter of a shockingly small pantheon of performers. For an industry whose very existence would seemingly be based on creativity, Hollywood shows a surprising lack of imagination. I have nothing against translation of television shows to movies, or movie re-makes in principle, but the last 10 years have shown most of them to be little more than missed opportunities and betrayals of the original art. In this, the "Mission: Impossible" movies join a large number of other flawed works. The other problem is that a very, very small number of actors and actresses appears in movies with such frequency, that many of them can be identified by first-name only ("Sylvester", "Bruce", "Arnold", "Meryl")! Most people cannot remember the names of the characters, only the names of the actors, even in their favorite movies. One major symptom of this pathology can be seen in the "Mission: Impossible" movie posters: Notice the relative size and position of: 1. Tom Cruise's head, 2. Tom Cruise's name and 3. the title of the movie (which you may have forgotten already, owing to the prominence of the previous two items).
Hollywood has long since ceased to show any creativity. It's just about money; nothing else matters. Art, stories, characters? All irrelevant. So we have remakes, sequels, plot-free special effects "movies", movies based on old tv shows, and so on. I remember asking people what the various Matrix movies were actually about, and nobody seemed to have an answer. They just taked about the special effects...
But not all movies are made in Hollywood. There are lots of good independents out there. Hollywood may view "small but interesting" movies as not commercially viable, but here in Canada that's all we can afford to make, so we go ahead and make them anyway. Some of them are self-indulgent crap, but we've made some amazingly good ones too. Some of them tell universal stories, like My American Cousin and Outrageous, while others push the boundaries, like the beautiful and bizarre (and very sad, in the end) Kissed. We also have a substantial movie industry in Quebec, who come up with stuff like Liste Noire and La Contesse de Baton Rouge.
All quirky films, but we do quirky well...
Other countries do their thing: they tell their stories, their way. This is not necessarily Hollywood's way, but with the garbage Hollywood churns out nowadays, who the hell cares?
Do not get me started on reality tv. U.S. reality shows are all garbage. Reality can be done well (e.g. Girl Friday and Spy), but, like all devices, reality can get stale very quickly if it's over-used. And why are both my examples BBC productions?
...laura
If you're going to use a term like this, make it relevant.
Just how many *total movies* were made in each of those decades? I'm not convinced that was constant...
Just for example, 30 of 500 movies is far more impressive than 40 of 1000 movies...
I think it has to do more with a natural effect, and people living longer, or investing more of their free time in movies.
Used to be people had rather finite lives and joined a cycle of movies "in progress".. like taking up a magazine subscription. In the beginning its simple and story building, after a while things depend on other things and you have to have a history with a project to appreciate its depth. Stories seem and do get more complicated. But sooner or later the train has left the station and they are too complicated to grasp with a brief investment in time, no matter how "good" your friends say a show is.
Movies are series but generally (or used to be) with better special effects, music, and more experienced actors (or used to be).
Now the poster about it being a symptom of a profit making business with no regard for entertainment has a point. But I think malice has no place where ignorance will suffice. For want of an understanding it just makes sense to hire young fresh faces that seem to have a bit of pretend about them and a nice look.
One of the more interesting authors (and I do mean authors) are comic book writers and people like Kevin Smith and JMS of Babylon 5, they actually do get the problem and have worked within the system as best they could to deal with it. I'm not entirely sure they are conscious of what they are doing (in my opinion) but I think Joe has the schooling to know what he's doing.
Ron Howard may also have a clue, somewhat like Steve Speilberg did back at another entertainment crisis point in history. And Ron hired JMS recently.. which shows some elgance of understanding.
Whether they sort it out and fix the 'problem' will be intellectual entertainment all its own.
It looks like people are working on the problem themselves too.
As long as I can recall people have ganged together and shared ideas and bubbles of consciousness, like a group of trekkies they see the same or similar movies and have similar likes. There are the occasional guilty pleasures and outlyers or indies.. but for the most part they stay within their comfort zone.
And for a while people collected massive VHS and DVD collections.. for a rainy day?.. as a safety net against.. 500 channels and nothings on? or can't get out to the video store or movies because kids are too young.. ect..
But now with Cable on the decline.. ceeding to NetFlix and download movies over the Internet on demand.. people are building whole new online bubbles of friends and family.. sharing ideas.. and the money scene is getting very complicated.
I think movies and videos will survive as a business.. including the older ones.. but the values and costs are going to have to someday carryng the cost, of their archiving and downloading as a floor cost of access, with some nominal surcharge of simply remaining accessible.
When you think about it the treasures of Ancient Egypt and Mummies and such also had a floor cost and were a form of entertainment.. eventually however that cost exceeded what society could afford and they disappeared into the dust. Well thats another thought train.. style.. what's in and out is more a symptom of what's in the bank than what people really want.. although calling it style is a great self deception for a while.. and soon we forget the real reasons.
well.. those are my thoughts anyway.
is simply a way for elistist movie buffs to claim their superiority. There has always been bad movies, there are currently good movies. Nothing has changed.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
LoTR sucked. Or at least, I didn't enjoy it at all. I was bored, and when I wasn't bored I was confused. No, I never read the books--well, I got halfway through the series when I was thirteen--but they sucked too. I was about to go on a long diatrabe about exactly why and how they sucked, but I'm sure it's been done a thousand times better than I could do it already, so I'm just going to express my opinion and take the -1 flamebait -1 troll -1 omgwtfhedoesntlikelotrburnhim.
I just don't understand why so many people love this movie. Even non-geeks, and people who have even less of an idea what's going on than I do. Maybe it's the best fantasy movies out there. I'll concede that at least, but rather than spawning a bunch of good fantasy movies (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is over-verbose and yet simple enough story-wise to compress to a trilogy movie, Discworld would be an awesome fantasy/comedy, WoT for an HBO series that runs for 3-6 years, etc.) it just seems to have fizzled out. I don't get it. If the people love a crappy fantasy movie, why wouldn't you follow that up with something good?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
.. for disguising the fact that movies aren't, on the whole, much worse than before. Two reasons:
Maybe you just grew up? Hollywood has churned out tons of crap since before I was born, but I gobbled it up happily when I was a kid. Take Moonraker, for example. Most people seem to agree that it was perhaps the worst of the Bond movies, but I loved it when I saw it in the theater. I think I was about 14 then.
There were some legitimate gems over the years, but they were in the minority. Movies from other countries expand your options, but they aren't necessarily any better or worse than Hollywoods offerings.
-Rich
Hollywood has become very good at marketing movies. How to get movie-goers excited about a new movie has become a science. So long as a signficant fraction of movie-goers can't see past marketing and go to see movies simply because a trailer made a movie "look really cool," the movies will aimed at them, not at those critical of their quality.
Oh please, I have a stack of ticket stubs here on my desk for movies I loved. What I can't find is anything to watch on tv.
I have yet to find a current American drama that I can actually stomach the writing, acting and directing in, short of some of HBO's offerings. Compare MI5 (Spooks) to The Unit, 24 or any of the CSI's. Check the zing of the new Dr. Who against the plodding melodrama of Battlestar Galactica and the Stargates. Heck, find me a live action comedy half as watchable as Spaced -- I sure haven't. It's tv that's completely sold the farm: Too-short production schedules, has-been and never-will-be actors, 9-to-5'ing directors who know there's no way to cross into features from tv, DPs who expect studio lighting to suit every shot, and hack writers slumming a few bucks until they can get their next novel advance. Add to that a management structure even more accountant-driven and risk-averse than features, and no possibility of an indy scene...
And actually, tv starts to sound like videogames. I guess everything that sinks converges. Meantime, BBC America: I will continue to forgive you for Footballers' Wives.
Rain on your wedding day is irony. Rain is a sign of a fertile union, and is lucky. But it sucks.
It is the only irony in the song
I'd add to the above commentary that our expectations of movies are based not just on the history of movies we have seen but also on comparable experiences, which includes TV and DVD. In the last few decades we have shifted from a few public broadcast channels to many channels of cable television, easy access to videos and DVDs from the local store (or via Netflix et. al.) and private collections of DVDs (which can be be pretty extensive- see your local fanatic). Add to that international fan dubs (I'm thinking particularly anime) and the 2 minute phenomena that is YouTube and Google Videos and there are a lot of things that might be considered competition for your moving picture experience.
And that isn't all- the Internet and video games should also be considered competition, although that is more competition for your time than directly comparable experiences.
The result of this is: if you are going to pony up cash for a movie you want it to be 'worth' those extra dollars in comparison to the 'free' (or other) experiences you might get elsewhere. But TV/Cable/DVDs/Videos are often the same material (on a smaller screen- but with added convenience). And some of the alternative channels actually have 'better' material (for your personal definition of better- which could be 24 hours of Lynch, or 72 hours of Ranma Half). So it is increasingly hard for the cinema films to differentiate from all the other media which is available.
And made for TV stuff is in absolute terms of directly comparable or better quality to older films: Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica 2005 have on screen effects that are much better than even huge feature films like Star Wars Ep 4. And TV series story telling has moved on too- series length plot arcs, even show length plot arcs, character development(!) and sometimes acting too!
All of this raises the benchmark for a movie.
On the flipside, the big budget blockbuster film budgets aren't getting any smaller, but ticket prices are (specially when you allow for inflation). Which means you have to hit a bigger audience, which means- usually- you have to water the material down. Because when you are aiming at a smallish audience it is about conveying a message to those people and you can challenge that audience. But with broad audiences it is about not offending people so where, in a small film, a scene is "challening" and "interesting" in a big film it is "morally offensive" and "unacceptable".
And smaller films are nipping at the heels of the big budget features. The $100K movie can many if not all of the special effects of the $100M film. They can hire the cameras and everyone works for the love of the film. And most of them are crap. But every now and then they aren't and that will tend to suck attention away from the big films.
As other posters have said, and I agree: there are actually still good films out there. There are some really good films being made. There are even some great big budget blockbuster films (the Pirates of the Carribean films would be examples for me). But most big budget films need to pay for itself and there water down their content to get the big audiences. But that lowers the differentiation from competing media...
The answer is probably a combination of:
* Lower distribution costs so cinemas are cheaper to run so ticket prices can go down so movies don't have to be that much better to be worth going to see
* Movies will continue to make a larger proportion of their total earnings outside of cinemas in the so called 'after marker' (c.f. long tail)
* Greater proportion of smaller 'niche' (but still quite large distribution) movies which leads directly to...
* Smaller cinema complexes with fewer seats per cinema
* Improved cinema experience: food and drink, maybe alcohol, lots of things I haven't thought off
* And finally: cinema closures as the competition vets t
Industries that are hurting (film, music, anything else effected by file sharing), used to have a budgeted amount of money to spend on stuff that was interesting but had no really strong signs of a profitable return. Like any investment portfolio, speculation is where you make the most when something pays off, but loose until that 'win' comes along. That budget is one of the first things to go as people stop supporting the entertainment industry. Record labels, and movie companies can't afford to take a risk on anything (that falls outside an easy mainstream consumption) like that anymore, they're only option to survive is putting out another 'Scary Movie' or signing another crappy emo band with a pre-establish teenage following.
Causing a traffic jam when you're already late would be ironic behaviour, as you'd expect someone who is late to attempt to try to get where they are going faster.
Simply being in a traffic jam is just a pain in the butt.. or unfortunate.. whatever.
Buying or otherwise intentionally acquiring ten thousand spoons when you need a knife would be ironic; merely having the spoons is not.
Paying for a ride that was just offered to you for free would be ironic, however if the ride is paid for first and then a freebie comes along then the Universe is just playing silly buggers with you.
In short, the only thing ironic in that song is the song itself. Through it's title it represents that it is about irony, when it is in fact not.
And please don't hang one definiton off of another and then use the second definition to prove your point.
That's all there is to it. You can't actually take any risk running a public company these days, so the studio are all producing cheap, safe, formulaic remakes.
You can easily justify something that has a 100% chance of making a 20% profit. It's much harder to justify something that has a 20% chance of making a 100% profit.
When the studios were private (and/or Wall Street was a different place), risks were taken, and you got a mix of turkeys and gems.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Why...
To combat antipiracy. Or so they say.
See, if hollywood reports that they had a few millions in losses compared to other years and present statistics about the increase in illegal movie downloading, they may have arguments to lobby politicians/courts into believing that internet piracy is the culprit.
As you can see it is a scam. Trying to create the effect in the cause/effect. Albeit the real cause is crapy movies not piracy.
It is very likely that "high street" pirates (people who actually make a profit from stealing movies), are also suffering financially as a result of hollywood's crap scam. They probably have difficulty selling crapy bootlegs of crapy movies.
So, in the end MPAA will find easy to blame and sue innocent people who are not making a profit and let the real criminals have a breathing space because basically none is taking care of them.
Oh, and don't forget about the slump in DVD sales.
Perhaps hollywood forgot, just like the recording indsutry, that they are producing entertainment and not indispensable goods and services. Not everybody NEEDS to consume movies/records. If they can't sell them is their fault, nobody else.
Here's tip for hollywood from Capitalism 101:
If the demands is low, how about reducing the price? It has worked in the past with other industries.
I eternally gave up on that turd when he sent me off to see "Purple Rain" in 1984! Refer someone else.
Films are no longer made to express an artists vision of a story. They are made to collect money.
;), then add some useless fluff to it, and spoil the whole thing. Pathetic.
If the preview audience don't tick all the right boxes the film gets cut to ribbons and new "feel good" endings get tagged on whether this ruins the story or not. Either that or something ridiculous gets put in to make things "more exciting" e.g. killer bees in the utterly pointless remake of the Wicker Man.
The film industries are run for money men, by money men. That's why the majority of films produced today are utter crap.
In fact the remake of the Wicker Man sums up the modern film industry for me. Take an excellent film (which had already been butchered by having the original directors cut chopped to bits) remake it for American audiences (i.e. spell everything out in big letters and speak slowly
If the film industry were interested in painting they'd "remake" Picassos "Guernica" by putting it in proper perspective. Thank %INSERT_FAVOURITE_DEITY% they aren't !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/holl ywood/
I'm fairly new to Stargate SG1. I started watching it in 2004, I think that was Season 8. But I've seen reruns of some of the older eps, and I agree that it's gone downhill quite a bit over the years. The sad thing is, even with the drop in quality, SG1 and Atlantis are among my favorite shows. That says something about the state of TV right there!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If we're talking about good taste here, I can think of plenty of classics that have been labeled as being in bad taste at one point or another.
As another poster said, taste is in the mind of the beholder. There is such a thing as a broader, societal taste. This, however, tends to change greatly both between societies and time periods. smitty one each does not want movies of "good" taste, he wants movies of "his" taste.
Anyway, as to sex and/or gender confusion, it's a device in more of Shakespeare's plays than I wish to verify. And as for incest, hath he heard not of the good Prince Hamlet?
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
"The real things needing challenging are the decay elements in society."
You're not after good taste, you're after propaganda. A media fed force against the decline of Western Civilization as you see it.
About this we can reach no consensus, for our worlds fly apart at different seams
You see a world where people should stay married, and I see one where divorced fathers are naturally discriminated against in matters of child custody.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
As time went on, more authors/publishers have wised up to Hollywood's tactics and have refused to relinquish the rights to their works. They can afford to dismiss Hollywood because they have found other ways to earn money from their works. Hollywood is finding fewer cooperative parties to extort source material (some even plagiarize them), thus there is little originality in movies today and they are resorting to material they already own or seeking out works whose copyrights have expired and are in the public domain (but have been picked dry). That is why Hollywood is releasing so many sequels, remakes, and big screen versions of TV shows and why there is so little originality in movies today.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
You know, in order to avoid stereotyping of exactly the same type you are suggesting.
He is of Indian descent actually.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know nothing about the film industry, but hey, this is Slashdot. When has that ever stopped anyone?
My theory is that it's the cost. Movie studios make a small number of very expensive movies each year, so their survival depends on those movies being hits. Since more money spent on the movie increases its chances of doing well (at least, that's the theory), studios aren't too worried about spending even more on an already expensive movie to improve the odds, leading to even higher production costs.
This whole eggs-in-one-basket approach makes studio types very, very, very cautious about what they're going to do. So, they try to be safe. They use big name stars (because those worked before), they use big name directors (ditto), they make sequels to movies that worked or they adapt TV shows or (occasionally) books that sold really well because all of those are known quantities. They already have an existing audience.
Then, there's the whole blame-deflecting game. If a big movie flops, the people who made it get their careers damaged. After all, they've cost their studio hundreds of millions of dollars. So, producers bring in lots of people on the theory that if it fails, they can blame the underlings. And they use focus groups to further spread the blame, because if the focus groups okayed it, they were justified in making those changes, right?
The result is mediocre. It's what you get when you have too many cooks and you try very hard not to offend anyone.
That's why the movies that are good were either 1) made by a director whose name is so big that he can tell the studio to leave him alone and they will or 2) has such a low budget that they don't really care if it flops.
Clearly, the lack of original movies is at the heart of the problem. I looked at a newspaper this past spring, and of the twenty or so movies in the big theaters, only about three or four were original screenplays, or adaptations that were not from movies.
Once upon a time, sequels were ASSUMED to be bad - so few had been successful. But ever since Star Wars, and the advent of brand merchandising (think of the those stuffed Wookies and Luke Skywalker action figures), sequels and remakes started getting a second look.
The latest trend now is to make three movies in one shoot (LOTR and Pirates of the Caribbean). So don't look for any relief soon - if Hollywood can make money off bad movies (and there are a LOT of bad movies) they will keep making them.
I copy the slash/dot news article on the movies. I have 180 channels and seems it's all crap or umpteenth repeat of crap. The only thing that I can think of is that the creative people don't feel so creative at the moment because of what's happening on the socio-politico level. When there's war going on (the war president and if it's war why are we treating people as illegal combatants rather than prisoners of war) people don't feel so creative. There's a lot more to this this simple statement.
2) The writer's strike in the mid-70s caused a shift in the way movies are written:
Prior to the writer's strike, writers were brought up in the last remnants of the studio system, basically going through a movie writing apprenticeship. Thus, the writer had time to learn to write a good script. They had mentors helping them, and they didn't start out writing scripts, but rather worked on refining scripts under the watchful eye of the head screenwriter.
Following the writer's strike, the shift was made to a "spec" script market, where writers write what they write and the studios buy from that pool. So, while there is a really tiny writing department in some studios, the vast majority of screenplays are written by people who may not get paid anything. That means that a lot of screen writers aren't getting good feedback and aren't learning what makes a good script. Which means that a lot of the scripts being bought right now are being written by a group of previously successful writers who may or may not be able to do something different: Elliot and Russo, for (a good) example, or M. Night Shaymalan (a poor example). In any event, the studios are going with writers who have had hits in the past, but fewer new writers that have fresh ideas are being produced.
3) There are two types of development execs, and neither is exactly known for picking good movies:
The first is the 18-35 year old male - They don't, in general, like much that doesn't have explosions or sex in it, and they aren't really interested in stories. They generally have their positions because their father or uncle or neighbor is a producer with a lot of clout and wants them to have a job. A lot of them aren't even really interested in making movies, they just want to get laid and being a development exec helps with that. They don't pick good movies because:
The other major type of development exec is the high powered, ultra-sensitive female exec. They don't, in general, like movies with explosions or sex, and want to make lots of touchy feely chick flick films that girls drag their boyfriends to on dates. They have had lots of life experience, but it hasn't helped them pick good movies, it just made them cry a lot in therapy. They want to change Hollywood, leading it to make more female centered films that have sensitive takes on important female life issues and are very serious. They don't pick good movies because:
For the money spent on renting gear, you should be able to buy the gear outright. Having built low-volume scientific equipment that is far more precise for dollars that would probably fit in a 100M film budget, it could be done. But, of course, I suspect that much of the stuff is locked up in IP rights and you can't buy the stuff for a reasonable fee. Which is one reason why film will die at the hands of digital production. Sure, there will still be IP and rentals, but that sort of thing is far more commoditizeable (is that even a word?).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Or maybe one of the following:
1. The ZPM factory is on Earth and hasn't been discovered yet. The outpost in Antarctica was only recently discovered. Perhaps the factory is somewhere else on the planet.
2. The ZPM factory isn't on Earth and hasn't been discovered yet. The stargates contain naquadah so it stands to reason that a ZPM would as well or perhaps naquadria. In either case, neither substance is native to Earth and therefore making the ZPM factory on Earth would be illogical.
3. There isn't a factory. If there are only a handful of outposts in the Milky Way and Pegasus and considering how long the ZPMs hold a charge, it's possible that there where only a few dozen created in a lab environment. Given that many of of the systems of Atlantis can be powered by a handful of naquadah generators, it's possible they didn't foresee needing more than a small number. Why use the nuclear reactor if you can get by on some AA batteries.
4. The ZPM factory is infact on Atlantis. They've only explored 50% of the city. While they have schematics that say what things are, it may not say ZPM lab. Additionally, since they'd only decoded a fraction of the ancient database, perhaps the instructions for building a ZPM are in the database.
It's not lazy writing, it's a careful balance of leaving enough plots holes to keep your future story options open without creating so many holes the story falls apart. If they'd found a room in Atlantis stocked full of charges ZPMs there really wouldn't be anywhere for the Atlantis storyline to go.
I do a lot of films here in Austin, TX. Why would they want to make inovative movies? Why would they want to take a chance? They are only interested in making money, your entertainment is at the bottom of their to-do list.
Why are there so many reality TV shows (In fact an entire cable channel now devoted to this ever increasing menence)? Because it's cheap, and guarantees a profit. However, good TV is taking a change, a chance they are not willing to take.
Why are there SO MANY horror films the past 2 years? They guarantee a profit, not because people like them, because they don't cost all that much and people love seeing them.
There was a film done down here 2 years ago about a man that ended up 2,000 years in the future. When he got out of the building to witness the future world, he saw a movie theatre showing a film called "Butts". It consisted of b-roll shots of peoples butts . . . that's it.
It's sad, but I think if someone did that they would be rich here. What I would like to see happen is realease old, GOOD films today. This would be benifical on two grounds: A:> We would have something of value to watch. and B:> Current films would be in competition with all films ever created, not just current ones. Can you imagine going to see the original Omen, Butch Cassidy, Clockwork Orange, or even Midnight Cowboy. If I had my choice I probably wouldn't watch anything after 1995.
And I'll tell you something else, I bet movie studios would pay a lot more attention to it's customers once complete competition came into play.
"When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." --leonstryker
Brokeback was a one message movies. Even cowboys could be gay? Obvious I say. Obvious to the people who liked it, and even those that did not. It was a movie just meant to stir things up to create a name for itself - like all other "message" movies it will vanish into history, just as the other poster said. There just was not enough special about it as a movie beyond the message it was trying to send, not even with the tragedy of love denied laid on top of the message.
Brokeback was a movie for people who liked to think they saw a movie that made them think, because the subject was taboo enough to feel deep even if it was not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been thinking about that, and I have decided that reality is more screwed up today that the most creative minds in fiction. At the risk of offending many I will say that this is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy, and things will continue to degenerate.
A story based on sexual confusion can be very interesting indeed. Brokeback is not it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally, I just watched about 6 episodes in a row of this show. I hadn't seen it before, I like it. Your comment is nitpicking the absurd. Let us suppose a disaster destroyed our civilization as it stands today, and there was just pieces left, and you came along 10,000 years later. Let's suppose you find our ICBMs very handy (never mind that an ICBM wouldn't work in 10k years). Would your complaint be realistic to find that the equipment to build new ones wasn't just around? That the books detailing exactly how to make the warheads, guidance systems, and missile schemtics are not in the public library, even the university one? (and they are not. Yes, you can find books giving enough of the theory that if you were part of a whole team of scientists and engineers, you could build your own weapons with less resources than it took the first time) The ZPM, supposedly containing a whole bubble universe that we are using as a sort of unlimited heat sink, could be the ancients equivalent of a nuke. Knowledge on how to make one would be carefully controlled.
Although cryptic, I am assuming you meant "Philidelphia Story" was a good movie with lasting impact. I agree.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We watched the new "Poseidon Adventure" remake a few weeks ago. I absolutely hated it. The ocean didn't look real, the ship didn't look real, but worst of all, I couldn't empathize with any of the characters.
Watched the original Poseidon Adventure just a couple nites ago and really liked it. I thought the scenes of the sea were better, but most of all, they took the time to develop the characters a before they had the big disaster.
I think hollywood would rather hire famous stars they think people worship than take the time and effort to intelligently develop characters.
Use IMDB and rent foreign flicks... good luck!
I think that we are simply in an entertainment glut, where our number of media technologies has outpaced the amount of good and original creativity. There's this demand among "civilized" populations for wall-to-wall entertainment that is much more of a security blanket for existence than it is something we watch to be "entertained." I think it's much more accurate to say that our (as in society's) definition of entertainment has devolved to "stuff that fills our eyes and ears."
If you want to find quality entertainment, it takes work. You need the right social circle, the right instincts for where to go to find out about quality stuff, and/or the patience to dig deeply into something you like to find its lineage of inspiration. However, it is important to remember that "independent" will never be equivolent to "better."
Anyway, most people are too lazy for that. So the choice is to sit back and let your ears and eyes get filled with money-driven crap, or to say "to hell with it" and actively participate in life itself--read, be creative, write. Meanwhile, the big entertainment companies will be:
1. doing marketing research
2. writing or rewriting crap for the widest mass appeal
3. marketing the shit out of the resulting crap
4. profiting
I blame the people that keep going out and seeing these movies. I've seen maybe three movies I've really enjoyed in the last two years, and have made the conscious choice to just STOP GIVING THESE JERKS MY MONEY. I've switched almost entirely to TV series (mostly HBO stuff)
That'll teach Time Warner!