https://archive.ph/2022.03.25-133359/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/oscars-movies-end.html
But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today.
Over time, this combination of forces pushed Hollywood in two directions. On the one hand, toward a reliance on superhero movies and other “presold” properties, largely pitched to teenage tastes and sensibilities, to sustain the theatrical side of the business. (The landscape of the past year, in which the new “Spider-Man” and “Batman” movies between them have made over a billion dollars domestically while Oscar hopefuls have made a pittance, is just an exaggerated version of the pre-Covid dominance of effects-driven sequels and reboots over original storytelling.) On the other hand, toward a churn of content generation to feed home entertainment and streaming platforms, in which there’s little to distinguish the typical movie — in terms of casting, direction or promotion — from the TV serials with which it competes for space across a range of personal devices.
Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences.
The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined.
Yes! This is also what makes me so disinterested in Superhero stories, it feels like they always restart before anything interesting can be done with them. An origin story is meant to be a starting point for the story not most of the story itself.
Anecdotal, but my family tends to enjoy the origin films more because they forget who the characters are.
Same thing for the decline of the movie star, why cast someone expensive when you can cast someone cheap
Oversaturation was an issue even 20 years ago. These people are just noticing because it's gotten to the point where their dumb medieval epics and 50's reboots don't hit the same both financially and culturally.
There's plenty of good movies being made, you just have to look beyond Hollywood.
There’s plenty of good movies being made, you just have to look beyond Hollywood.
1000% this, I thought I stopped liking movies as a format but it turns out that I like movies that encourage its audience to do some critical thinking and I hate CGI slop.
I also like movies with lesbians in them — highly recommend checking out film recs from LGBT sites since they tend to have more indie and foreign films in the mix, along with older films that still hold up. Autostraddle's top films list is great for sapphic stuff
Yeah! My #1 recommendation right now is The Handmaiden (2016) directed by Park Chan-Wook which is a Korean film set in the 1930s in Japan-occupied Korea — my strongest recommendation is to not learn anything else about it and just watch it whenever you're in the mood to watch a 3 hour film with subtitles. (CW for a couple fairly graphic sex scenes and some implied CSA)
Totally fucking legendary movie. Kim Min-hee is one of the greatest actors still working today. Criminal that she hasn't been in any big movies since because she had an affair with the ever prolific Hong Sang-soo (who also happens to be my favorite director still making movies). He's still giving her work but she's been totally sidelined by the larger Korean cinema industry because it's ultra-conservative.
Oversaturation was a problem 20 years ago, but movies were still more varied. In 2000 there were three different comedies on the top 10, along with two disaster films and a horror movie. There were three franchise films in the top 10 that year - Mission Impossible 2, The Grinch, which is an edge case, and X-Men. Compare that with 2019, where all 10 were remakes, sequels, or Joker, which might as well be.
it was different before! it was more artistic 20 years ago!
:thonk: which is what they were saying 20 years ago. and 20 years before that. Snobs have been complaining about lowbrow pushing out highbrow since like, the advent of the talky. And then in a couple decades it gets reappraised as 'oh that schlock we were hating on is actually Super Art and the shit coming out now doesn't compare'.
But they can never talk about why this is, even though its obvious and has been the same fucking process the entire time. Hollywood has always always always been about getting asses in seats, never artistic achievement. You want to see what artist-lead film is go back in time to the fucking Soviet Union.
God these nostalgia hogs make me sick
Wrong, culture is dying and being killed by market forces more and more. Capeshit is objectively worse than 90s schlock action and you will never change my mind
a culture notably devoid of market forces circa 1992.
don't get me wrong most of what comes out now is still horseshit, it just used to be too. collective memory separates the chaff and gives people an incomplete picture of whatever era they're nostalgia-ing
Falling Rate of Profit squeezes out any room for creativity or culture. Yes it was always for-profit, but it is undeniable that it has gotten worse
i am begging you to test this hypothesis and going and watching every release from [any period in the past] not just the ones which are beloved enough to warrant rereleases and streaming contracts. film is a graveyard of creative bankruptcy and low effort exploitation.
even the USSR has a backcatalogue of cheap imitation and trendfollowing bullshit
Honestly this is a Reddit tier take I’ve heard a million times from Reddit neolibs and it’s a fact that we are lucky to get even a single good film per year now yet we got dozens per year in the 80s and 90s.
Things are getting worse. This is not just nostalgia. This trend can be seen across all cultural and artistic mediums - especially prominent in capital intensive ones such as video games and films
directly compare 2019 with 1994.
spoiler
2019 awful films: joker, endgame, once upon a hollywood, spirderman 2, captain marvel, star war 10, the irishmen, it 2, glass, lion king, aladdin, klaus, the king, alita, dark pheonix, dead don't die, cats, ma, escape room, men in black...4?, 6 underground,
lets peruse the complete shit 94 shat out: Forest Gump, the Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura, Ed Wood(fight me), Santa Clause, The Crow, the Flintstones, Naked Gun iii, bottle rocket, junior, street fighter, beverly hills cop iii, mighty ducks 2, the next karate kid, leprechaun 2, city slickers 2.
this is not close to extensive, these are films millions of people watched and some millions quite liked or thought was decent.
i don't think i've ever been accused of neoliberalism for watching way too many movies before but that's a good bit
The neoliberalism comes from the forced optimism and the “things aren’t getting worse” denialism. In my experience, neoliberals entire ideology rests on things staying the same or getting better. Culture and art are intrinsically linked to the economy in capitalist nations. When economic forces get worse, culture gets worse.
The economy has gotten worse, and the culture has too. Falling rate of profit is why everything is homogenized, bland, soulless and committee designed
im not going to pretend US culture was ever anything so high as to be able to experience 'decline'. film sucks, art sucks, mostly because capitalism fucks it up but some of it don't work in ideal conditions either
we've never had communism. why do we need to fetishise art from a capitalist past with the same conditions making it awful that make it awful today?
Someone who thinks American film, music and literature “sucks” and cannot decline has nothing to add to a cultural conversation with me. We have no overlap whatsoever in cultural outlook.
It’s not fetishizing art to admit it exists and is in decline
they can never talk about why this is
Two quotes from Fredrick Jameson's Postmodernism:
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.
What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian Bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally “antisocial.” It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather “realistic,” and this is the result of a Canonization and Academic Institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western Civilization.
I think the video game industry is a microcosm of this and have been like that for years now. The industry is built around the demographic of teenage shitheads with small worldview who just play the same damn games and genres over and over again. The industry is built around chasing whatever the current trend is and driving it to the ground, companies pretty much sticks hard to whatever genre they're known for and only make games in that lane. We even have reached the point with Gacha games where the exploitative skinner box mechanism isn't hidden behind the curtain, but rather up in the front as the entire core gameplay.
Of course, off the side we still have indie devs doing cool unusual shit like :lt-dbyf-dubois: or Cruelty Squad. But just like indie movies, the only people who know indie stuff are those who are already in the know in the first place, and are still ultimately a miniscule minority when compared to the mainstream industry raking billions of dollars monthly.
I don't know if this relates to your point but this is why I play almost only single player games involving stealth (whether exclusively or one of many options) or strategy. The rot is strong in multiplayer
I haven't bought a AAA game in years. They all look so bland and boring - I don't know how anyone can get interested in the new Assassin's Creed or Far Cry games or whatever else when they're so trite and basic. Half of them are just a multiplayer only thing, and seeing those just makes me want to play the games I already have because they aren't doing anything new. The other half are these horrible unending open world games where you just have the most bland, undesigned map ever and a random scattering of scavenger hunt bullshit in the place of actual gameplay. Like sure, they look pretty, but they're not actually conducive to interesting or fun gameplay. I won't even play good games with open worlds anymore because after I sat through all of Borderlands 2 I never want to have to go to a place ever again, and I'm actively having to fight myself to play Fallout: New Vegas. The only stuff I can even understand people liking from recent years is stuff like FromSoft games and Nintendo stuff, since those still have some kind of coherent vision instead of just trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
I recently voiced my fear to two friends that the GTA Online/Fortnite Battlepass model will consume all of gaming and I was rather shocked when they were all for it
I will never watch another Spiderman or Batman movie. Enough already.
The grimmest darkest Batman film (Batman: Darkest Midnight (2027)) is just three hours of poorly-lit shakycam footage of a nude Timothy Chalamet writhing around in a sewer and eating the viscera of a
community organizer"gang leader" while they're still aliveFortunately after the revolution, Batman is retired for a generation until Superman: Red Son is made as part of a therapy program for elderly capeshit fans with dementia. This kicks off a short run of other nostalgiabait films, including the anarchist Batman that another comrade here sketched out the plot for like a month ago.
Tell me you only watch Anglophone movies without telling me you only watch Anglophone movies.
This critique is old and played out. Yes, capitalism has totally decimated Hollywood, the medium budget film is dead, etc etc. There's a world outside of Hollywood. There are thousands of movies released every year. Quite a few of them are very good.
Likewise, the concept of giant movie stars who transcend the movies they're in lives on. Look at Bollywood or the Chinese film industry—they have massive, massive stars that aren't tied to capeshit. This author needs to zoom out and realize that the Anglophone world, and the United States in particular, are a cultural dead end experiencing decline and decadence the likes of which we can only scratch the surface of. Expecting powerful and uniting cultural products from an empire undergoing its death throes is just unrealistic.
Ok rec time—I've seen all of these, but there are plenty of other great Chinese films that aren't romcoms or CGI action movies that I haven't!
- In the Mood for Love (2000) is a tragic romance film by Wong Kar Wai with superstars Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, one of the best movies of all time and has a claim to best movie of the 21st century. His earlier film Chungking Express (1994) is also wonderful.
- 24 City (2008) is a great film by Jia Zhangke about the closure of a state-run factory in Chengdu in favor of building a modern apartment complex. Really poignant movie about what is gained and lost in modern China.
- To Live (1994) by Ge You is a movie about life in China during the Cultural Revolution, Great Famine, etc all told through the eyes of a normal family. Sometimes brutal, pretty tragic, shows an honest look at the failures and triumphs of the Maoist period.
- An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) is a dreary, almost-apocolyptic film by the late Hu Bo. It's hypnotic, an absolute masterpiece that reminds me a lot of Bela Tarr's films. Really hard hitting, one of the best of the century imo
- Lust, Caution (2007) by Ang Lee has Tony Leung and others attempting to assassinate a Japanese official in occupied Shanghai, and it's insanely sexy.
- Long Day's Journey into Night (2018) by Bi Gan is this dreamy, surreal film with stark visuals and the last hour is a single take that in theaters was played in 3D and it's honestly breathtaking. I still think about it, very powerful movie.
Not sure if you count Taiwanese cinema as "Chinese" but for this rec list I'm sticking with mainland and Hong Kong films, since Taiwanese cinema is also massive and has plenty of greats. If you're interested, literally any movie by Edward Yang is a masterpiece (Yi Yi is one of the best movies ever made), everything he touched is some of the greatest film ever made. Hou Hsiao-hsien is also a legend, particularly love City of Sadness and Flowers of Shanghai by him.
George Lucas has legitimately been about 10-20 years ahead of everyone else in the industry his entire career and I am not exaggerating in the slightest. In fact that's been more then a bit of a double edged sword for him given he's always tried to roll things out before it's actually ready to fly. It's not just in vfx or film tech but also in shit like the rise of streaming.
Hell the prequels were basically every current marvel or star wars or disney movie, but literally 20 years ago.
Charlie Rose looks so annoyed listening to George even speak the name "Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics" lmao
he has unlimited funds to bank roll whatever artistic projects he wants, but all he could manage was red tails lol
On a related note, Netflix, please stop trying to adapt animated shows in live action, I beg you.
The end of Evangelion but it's Spiderman watching Mary Jane turn the world into orange tang
:shinji-impact: :RIchard-D-Wolff: and :pathetic: are the only ones i know of besides the ones posted already
No one seems to have mentioned that this is written by Ross Douthat, a friend of the pod.
Pretty hysterical article, everyone in the movie biz knows that Avatar 2 and Passion of the Christ 2: Resurrection are going to save movies when they drop later this year.
Jim Caviezel says it’s going to be, ‘ Biggest Film in World History’ and that man has never been wrong about anything so I’m hyped!
Honestly, sounds much more interesting than the first one, which, from what I understand, is just Jesus Christ: Superstar without the songs.
honestly, not the worst way to gage if the rest of the film is worth seeing
I feel like there could be interesting stories to tell with both capeshit and zombies. But they wouldn't be as profitable
Didn't they already do this in the comics?
Actually I'm surprised they haven't made the pride and prejudice and zombies movie yet.
Depends if you see a difference between a gun-toting noir detective who is supernaturally able to dodge bullets & kill the baddies with amazing accuracy or a superhero who gains the ability to do the same via radiation/spider bites/inventions/parents didn't love him enough.
