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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It is simple, the art and passion which existed in making movies and entertaining people has been replaced by hunger for making money by thrusting whatever junk they create, called "art and entertainment", into people's throats.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
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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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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
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.
Wait, you wrote a simple python script to yank the top 250 movies off of imdb, and sort them according to year and decade?
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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
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.
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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