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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.
It is simple, the art and passion which existed in making movies and entertaining people has been replaced by hunger for making money by thrusting whatever junk they create, called "art and entertainment", into people's throats.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
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
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
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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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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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).
You're absolutely right, but not in quite the way that you think. Remember the Hollywood writer's strike in the late 80's? If you don't, I guarantee you the studios certainly do. That strike thrust Hollywood into major turmoil, and the studios weren't going to let that happen again anytime soon. Why did the television industry latch onto "reality" shows so enthusaiastically? No real scripts and no writers required (not to mention low wage non-SAG "talent" in front of the camera). For more about the writer's strike (and a little insight into the machinery of Hollywood), check out this article.
I suppose Hollywood makes rehashes because no one in the organizations wants to stick their neck out and take a chance. So then, they figure, why not make a remake - it's better than even a proven forumula where you would have to put some thought into reinventing it.
/.er, including myself, are at an age where we have seen it all before. Perhaps it is something every generation has gone through, but it is coming at an unprecedented young age since we are such an media addicted generation, and that video games, internet has raised our expectations (and the bar) to an unprecendented amount that even though the schlock coming out was the same basic crap it always was, we are demanding more. It would make sense, as every single generation eventually talks about a downward spiral in the quality of the entertainment for the next generation. (But I'm already bitching in my 20's here, which does not bode well:/ )
Looking at the latest releases of the intellectually barren void that is the entertainment industry, I'm beginning to wonder if the people making entertainment have just run out of ideas. They've been drinking their own koolaid for so long, they can't really think "different", let alone anything revolutionary.
The 2 movies I went to this year (one was Scary Movie 4 which I expected to enjoy at least superficially, but not even that) didn't give me a good ROI. The last decent movie I was at was probably Batman last year.
In 30-40 years, I suspect ultra sized movie theatres will be a thing of the past (note I said ultra sized). It seems the Hollywood Blockbuster is dying out slowly and this summer has been thoroughly disgraceful. I think entertainment will slowly settle more and more into happy niches more specific and targetted than they are now.
Or the current disillusionment with movies could be that many
Compare these extremes: Pixar Studios and youtube.com. In the former case you have a company that has staked its success on a small number of expensive to produce products and consequently the selection process is very stringent before anything reaches distribution. In the latter case, the cost of production and distribution is astonishingly low and so is volume of crap.
Technology lowers the bar. Just like having cars leads to fatter asses on average, the diminishing cost efficiency of TV and mainstream theatre production and distribution puts the content in the middle of the quality vs. volume graph.
So yeah, there is more crap. It's inevitable. But also, there is a higher percentage of crap because the forces that cull lower quality are also weaker.
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.
Don't forget 'Primer' http://imdb.com/title/tt0390384/ made for $7,000 and is excellent. The only movie I ever immediatly rewound and watched again. Also one of the few good time travel movies out there that doesn't gloss over the messy details of causality, but rather revels in them.
http://notanumber.net/
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.
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.
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.
Superman Returns
imdb: 7.2
rotten tomatoes: 76% (7.1/10), rotten tomatoes cream of the crop: 73% (6.9/10)
ebert: down, roeper: up
X-Men 3
imdb: 7.0
rotten tomatoes: 57% (5.9/10), rotten tomatoes cream of the crop: 51% (5.6/10)
ebert: up, roeper: up
I saw both movies at Cinerama here in Seattle, and I tend to agree with the critics that Superman Returns was a better movie than X-Men 3. However, I don't think either of them are worthy of my DVD collection. (Note: I have the original Superman, the original X-Men, and X-Men 2.) Personally I think X3's IMDB rating is artificially boosted by the fact that you get to see more of Mystique's blue boobies in this movie than in the others.
Spoiler warning: Lame plot, craptastic acting and uninspired climax battle aside, I think X3 really sucked because they killed off all the characters anyone cared about, and they failed to resolve the issues with the minor characters. Superman also failed miserably in plot, acting, and action sequences. Like X3 it didn't adequately address its relationship sub-plots. Oh yeah, and surprise surprise: both movies managed to leave themselves open to sequels.
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"I suppose Hollywood makes rehashes because no one in the organizations wants to stick their neck out and take a chance. So then, they figure, why not make a remake - it's better than even a proven forumula where you would have to put some thought into reinventing it."
In all fairness, mass-audiences are fickle. Different can often mean easy-to-lose-lots-of-people. I imagine if you put your mind to it, you could call up a good-sized list of movies you liked that lots of people didn't. Think even harder, and you may even remember some of the reasons why. "I just didn't get the whole robots thing." Hollywood's out to make money, but the big money is in making movies that tens of millions of people want to go see. I personally don't attribute the rehashes to Hollywood stupidity, but rather to having a really tough problem.
What's funny is while movie viewing is going down, TV viewing is going way up. Ever noticed that most popular shows in recent years are seeing lots of high-end visual effects? Thanks to the low cost of entry and DVRs, one can afford to take bigger risks on a show. Lost and BSG come to mind. I cannot imagine these shows being that successful in the 80's. Not because of the content, but because of the dependence on seeing the previous episodes to watch the current one. It's easier to stay home and catch these shows than it is to plunk down $10 a piece and catch a movie you don't know shit about. (I call it the open-your-mouth-and-close-your-eyes business model.)
I'm not ready to predict the death of Hollywood yet, but I do think we'll see a trend of lower budget films (~10 million) in the coming years intended to reach a narrower audience. The idea here is that you go after a smaller group of people so you can make films that appeal to them. Remove the "well we gotta make sure 80 year olds as well as 10 year olds will love the movie" requirement, and you'll have the more interesting content.
The ideas aren't gone, just too hard to adapt.
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Wait, you wrote a simple python script to yank the top 250 movies off of imdb, and sort them according to year and decade?
...
You officially win slashdot, this site will now close.
In all seriousness I blame advertising. Curse this society so capable of advertisement! T.V., radio, billboards, Internet, viral advertising, previews like you wouldn't believe! (That previews guy plays up *every* movie like that, eh?) I would wager that there are roughly equal numbers of "good" movies (good a relative term to the viewer of course) per year since the thirties.
The problem is there are so many more average to bad movies being produced in recent years that it seems like movies are continually getting worse and worse. This is especially so with movies that are advertised as "the next big blockbuster", "the film of the summer/year/decade/century", etc. so we are led to believe we are going to see a good movie but really it's just average. I realized this stuff a few years ago: "Pay it forward", "The Majestic", and "Hart's War" were all advertised that way. "War of the Worlds" and "Red eye" are some recent examples I can think of. Not that they were terrible movies, but they were advertised like they were the film of the year. Since 2000, how many movies (besides LOTR) can you think of that are actually great films? I count only a few out of the top 50 off of that top 250 list at imdb, and some are foreign films I've never heard of. Then think again about how many trailers you've seen in the last few years which talk like their films are shoe-ins for Oscar glory? (And what's the deal with "Snakes on a Plane"?)
Another contributer are sequels which are not designed to be trilogies but are obviously just money grabbers. How about the sequels to "The Matrix", or "Spiderman"? Back to the Future III anyone? Have you met the Fockers? Oceans 12? My sister hated Pirates of the Carribean 2. The sequels were decent but the originals deserved to be stand-alone films. They have watered down the masterpiece that is the original. Of course the advertisers play up the trilogy theme trying to focus our attention on how cool the sequel will be. I'd say watching the original begins with a passive attitude before but finishes with a high. The sequel feeds off of this high as you begin but usually trails off to a passive attitude in the end leaving the entire story wanting.
Case in point: The last two Pictures of the Year were Million Dollar Baby and Crash. I had personally only first heard of these films at Oscar time.
Case in point: I've found that M. Night Shyamalan understands this stuff well. All his films are stand-alone (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and now Lady in the Water which I haven't seen yet). In interviews he indicated how he didn't want any of these movies to be advertised as "From the director who brought you..." because he wants the movie to do itself justice. The trailers make the audience enter the film with a sense of mystery and leave with a sense of satisfaction. The trailers do not advertise themselves as huge blockbusters, but just as good movies. Nor do they feed off of the success of others, but simply sell themselves because they are good movies.
My advise for finding good movies: pay only minimal attention to the advertising. If you read and hear a ton about it and the commercials seem like the movie will blow you away, it definately won't. Take in only enough information to get an idea for what the movie is about. If you like the idea, you'll like the movie. I usually wait for Oscar time to see which film I never heard of wins big. Those are the ones I like the most. I found "The Pianist", "Crash", and "Hotel Rwanda" that way - all of which were good films.
(I should also mention that another contributer is the advancement of our household technology. People don't need to go to the theater to get a good movie experience when they can get even better at home. Not to mention the proliferation of pirated movies available for free
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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-
I wholeheartedly agree - especially with the selective memory and the age. I think much of this is the "when I was your age, things were better" syndrome. Everything starts to seem worth less in comparison to idealized memories of things you love, and when you add inflation on top of it, people who are accustomed to movies costing a dollar think that 10 is outrageous. I'm still young by most anyone's standards, and I think 10 is outrageous. But ask a 12 or 13 year old who is just starting to go see movies, and they'll just assume that's what a movie is worth, and then they'll think that 20 dollars is astronomical in another decade. Also, I think that summer isn't the best time to be analyzing movie quality. All the big budget movies come out right before the academy awards these days (sadly) and summer movies tend to be explosions strung together for an hour and a half or so in order to draw throngs of teenagers and middle aged men - which isn't to say they aren't fun, but that I'm not gonna pay 10 bucks to see it (proving my earlier point, I guess).
maybe movies really are declining in quality, but it's so hard to tell from our biased frame of reference, that I just assume our standards are warped by the first "good" things we see.
Two words; "package deals".
TV stations routinely get offered deals that include a few blockbuster hits, or really good movies, and 10 pieces of indefensible filler. Sometimes, the contract even spells out that the crappy movies MUST be aired. This is why TV stations will sometimes have 'specials' focussing on a particular actor (or e.g. the entire Police Academy serieS); they had to buy all his movies, just to show the good ones. This is also why you can sometimes see feature films programmed in the middle of the night. No one will watch them, but they're aired, so the requirements of the package deal are fulfilled. The TV stations get 12 movies for the price of 3, the studios get royalties on their back-catalogue (and can claim million dollar losses if you download one of those long forgotten movies), and everybody's a winner - except if you happen to be awake in the middle of the night and flipping over to a channel showing Police Academy 6..
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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.
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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.
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
Perhaps a deeper look into irony than the dictionary can provide may explain some of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
Anyway - most of the people who believe irony is being misused lately believe that true irony has to do with incongruity and double audience. So when you need a knife when you have a lot of spoons, that's not ironic, because you don't expect for there to be knives instead of spoons. Perhaps not finding a knife in a knife shop, having told your friends you were going to the knife shop, and having them know it's gone out of business would be ironic. Alanis just lists a lot sometimes unfortunate coincidences. An unfortunate coincidence is not ironic unless one expected a different outcome and someone was in on the joke.
But, as with all language issues, the distinction is subtle, and word meaning changes to accomodate current usage.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient