There is plenty of blame to go around. The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same. Movies and shows seem to be eye-rollingly preachy and talk down to audiences. The whole industry is due for a sharp correction.
>The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same
I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.
Eventually the money men become so risk-averse that they give up on originality entirely. Hence the endless stream of remakes, adaptations and formulaic additions to existing series.
It is always the businesspeople at fault for it. Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work any more than software developers want to naturally build CRUD apps for ad-tech companies. The employees go where the businesspeople and their money lead because working class folks need to make a living and most Hollywood creatives are working class.
> Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
There are of course good businessperson led movies and bad businessperson led movies. The same is true for creative led movies. Maybe the "explore the liminal space of boredom" movie is bad, but that description certainly sounds more interesting than a bad version of Transformers 7 or whatever.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
> Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.
> Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness.
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
It’s normal to have creative flops too, but generally the landscape looks much better and healthier than now. And some of those dreamscape flops are likely low to mid budget or self funded projects.
How many of them have you talked to or worked with? The ones I know don't "snub their noses at the 'working class' and share none of their value of beliefs". But I have a feeling that you're not looking at the whole working class, only a subset.
Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident. It used to be, when an adaptation was bad, writers and execs would blame each other and audiences would sorta side with writers. Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema, so now writers and execs blame audiences when they fall short.
> Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident.
A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?
I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.
But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!
It wasn't the ending per se that everyone got mad about. It was how the ending was written. Silicon Valley has showed us that execution matters as much or more than ideas.
If you'd been paying attention to what the writers and actors on strike right now are saying—including some of the A-list ones who are genuinely quite rich and famous—you'd see that, at least as a class, they do not, in fact, snub their noses at the working class.
The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.
Reminds me of a movie from the 1960s, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I was watching recently.
I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution
Funny that you mention Monty Python, they almost had to cancel the production of The Life of Brian since their original financier was apprehensive about the the film's content making fun of religion.
George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.
The same was true for the holy grail too. Other financiers included (iirc) led zeppelin and other British rock greats.
The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.
The Beatles funded some very weird stuff. Ringo Starr in The Magic Christian is probably the best example, an extremely on-the-nose set of satirical sketches.
There was no one suggesting that the scene but cut, it was a clickbait-like appeal to the reactionary press to get some extra awareness of the project out there. And it worked.
It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.
Monty Python was only ever possible with something like the BBC. There's no way a commercial network would have taken a risk with it, and even more so in the USA. Its popularity in the States began underground, with PBS affiliates getting the ball rolling in the 1970s. There's no way that major networks would have run the show, even in a late-night slot.
Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.
Studios are essentially big piles of cash to fund movies; rights to scripts, stories and IPs to make movies; and contracts to distribute movies (and, since everything old is new again, they now also own streaming services rather than movie theaters). So it makes economic sense to lock down as much IP as possible that can then be used to generate an endless torrent of remakes, sequels, adaptations, secondary media, adaptations of secondary media, remakes of adaptations of secondary media, and so on; much more cost-effective than hunting for new screenplays in the slush pile, and much more comforting to the investors to see the next two years of movies on a PowerPoint slide at the shareholder meeting, even if you have no idea what those movies are beyond a title and some executive producer's vague plan.
Very often the money printing is more a function of how many eyeballs you can get your product in front of, and reducing friction of consumption to a minimum, rather than their real preferences in a flat hierarchy of all the options out there.
"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?
Sometimes it is as much because there isn't something better so people default. And there often isn't much better because it is more financially rewarding to get a “not bad” reaction from a large audience than it is to produce something that only appeals to a smaller one.
Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.
I don't think it is entirely. Even with safe and neutered, writing could have been much better then it is. The butchering that happened in Witcher or Game of Thrones was purely on writers. It is not just money men.
It is that contemporary screen writing is unable to engage with characters and complexity outside of, like, 5 stereotypical tropes. That they internalized set of rules about how to simplify things and just can't comprehend any slightly realistic psychology of adults or set of events.
The money men did a lot of damage and are the ones who set the rules. But the bad writing we see now is because writers insist on cproducing bad writing even having choice. Maybe all the good writers left, maybe it is something else, but they screw it up even when having freedom.
Yes, this exactly - the quality of writing on a lot of shows these days is absolutely abysmal. Not just dialogue, the plots - so much 'tropes copying', pointless or stupid 'reveals' or just plain dumb twists to make things edgy and exciting. I feel like the average IQ in Hollywood writing departments as dropped significantly in the last 20 years ... sad
Well, it could get a level of magnitude worse with AI. And Im not necessarily blaming AI but how the industry will recycle the successful tropes and cheap out on everything else.
One could argue that there's a selection effect during the up and coming phase that means a different subset of writers are the ones who make it to the top these days.
(I hear tell that as adaptions go The Expanse was relatively well done, though I haven't watched it myself as yet)
Another problem is that everyone is aiming for the broadest international market, so any dialog must be easily translate-able to Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, and so on. No more clever wordplay, double entendres, puns, regional dialects... It all has to be vanilla and the themes need to be simple and straightforward (not to mention politically uncontroversial) so it can be palatable across the entire globe.
I've seen Japanese subtitles before (I mean Japanese language subtitles) and almost all subtext is lost regardless. Far worse than the english subtitles on anime.
You might as well make the movie you want, the end result abroad will be bland regardless. The translation issues are just an excuse.
Agree Japanese subtitles are absolute garbage—I once made the stupid mistake of using Japanese subtitles watching a comedy on a date with someone that didn’t speak English.
However, the dubs are the complete opposite. They pack in a ton of the original subtext and nuance, character quirks, etc, even making new jokes when necessary to convey something similar when the original is impossible. And of course the voice actors are great.
Japanese subtitles being terrible isn’t necessarily a natural state. It seems to just be where things landed in that industry.
Yeah Japanese sub is too much omitted. It's designed to just understand meaning quickly. People understand emotions from original actors' voice (though I doubt is it precise). Movie on theater can't be paused, so very long annotation like anime fansub isn't possible. Drama translation is done by same culture.
Over the half of people (including many non movie enthusiasts) prefer dub, but sub is very popular in the internet because such people is verbose. I like sub for English (that I can understand a bit and good for learning), dub for the rest.
Can you recommend interesting "unsafe" shows that, but for the money men, you think would/could be made today? Or are being made but on smaller subsidiaries?
A lot of shows on Adult swim. I have seen many folks that have worked with the network basically say they have near 100% creative control. Mind you it is about 90% animated stuff.
You see absolutely crazy stuff like The Eric Andre show get 6 seasons. A talk show that is basically just out to torment all their guests. 'Off the air' while only a few episode every few years, is much more of an art experimenter than anything you would consider a show, it is wonderful.
Every few months there is something new and twisted that comes along, it feels like Adult swim is that TV studio that the main company complete forgot exists and that head corporate hasn't checked on since the late 90's.
But the budgets also show, there are no million dollar budgets here.
What counts as "new and twisted" these days? I guess I'm wondering what sort of thing is being held back from wide audiences because of studio money men rather than just current tastes.
The Young Pope. It is new and different. It is edgy and definitely not like other stuff these days. (The young pope, not the new pope which is the second season.) It was made in europe and couldnt be made in north america, not today.
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
The older seasons of Top Gear. It was wildly popular but got its energy from an old form of "blolky" male-dominated humor that just doesnt fly these days. The Grand Tour continues but is a pale comparision of the previous energy.
Note that all of these are dominated by male protagonists, a rare thing in recent years.
> The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It only existed because of a special relationship with the late show. Without worry about ratings, he did some great stuff that wouldnt get past the moneymen today.
Man did he flirt with the beautiful actresses he had on the show.
Two recent Criterion releases that have got criticized for colour grading were the Wong Kar-Wai boxset, and the Kieślowski “Three Colours” 4K re-release. But the Wong Kar-Wai colour grading was the director’s own choice and simply handed over to Criterion, while crew on the Kieślowski pictures claim that the 4K re-release colour grading is more faithful to the original celluloid than the earlier Blu-Ray release.
Modern film colour palettes is why when I saw That Dress breaking the internet my first thought as "you're both wrong, it's teal and orange" and -lolsob-
The problem with Criterion is that they have no idea how to catalog things or like everyone else they make a Byzantine system for good engagement/enragement.
I believe media should be arranged by at least the following categories.
Year
Studio
Director
Genre
Country of Origin
After that they can do whatever they want. I hope I"m wrong but I can't do this with iTunes, Netflix, HBO whatever, Criterion, TCM.
Criterion has newer films once they are released to the home market.
Also Criterion just edited "The French Connection" to make it more appropriate for viewers.
that has some cool animation and looks like stuff from when I was a kid or comic books, but what is "unsafe" about it? From the clips online it seems like just the sort of thing that can be made today without ruffling any feathers. Is there something controversial about it?
Indeed, it reminds me of the Witcher show, where Cavill left due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and were just using the show's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.
> due to the writers literally having disdain for the actual source material and we're just using the how's setting as a backdrop to push their own entirely disconnected stories.
Is this concretely true, or just disinformation to put blame on writers vs. producers?
I’m not saying it’s not plausible either way, but this is a common cop out.
It's all entertainment industry gossip, but one of the writers for the Witcher show said the same thing:
> "I've been on shows — namely 'Witcher' — where some of the writers were not or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material). It's a recipe for disaster and bad morale," wrote DeMayo.
Also, this characterinzaction of the Witcher series writing is 100% correct - especially in last season. Going by the comments writer made publicly, she did not even understood events or relationships between characters in books. It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
> It is as if she understood adolescents, but had real issue comprehend adults or write about them.
This seems like a very common problem in modern American entertainment. I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience. Characters who should be mature adults seem like immature teenagers. Maybe the writers know how to write mature characters but think this is what audiences want... but I tend to think the writers are nepo hire hacks.
I think part of it is generating and stretching out drama to create more content. If situations were handled like sensible adults then much of the show wouldn't happen.
I don't think this is true. First, this is specifically not true about Witcher or Game of Thrones. Plenty of drama even if they all acted sensible.
Second, being fully grown adult does not have to imply perfection. Fully grown adults make bad insensible decisions all the time. They however do that differently then teenagers, for different more complex reasons.
And this is something that is super visible in Witcher. Original characters don't make sensible decisions all the time ... but they have adult psychology. Even when they are bad to each other, they still don't act like middle schoolers. They act like adults with issues. And show writing just completely stripped them off the adulthood.
That sound similar to the bad writing technique of "character X did action Y because the plot needed Y to happen somehow", which cheapens character X and makes them seem less like a real person and more like a puppet for the authors.
One of my big concerns is that people will see the lack of communication as normal acceptable behavior and emulate it, the show will either not address it or will explicitly excuse it. They’ll see the negative outcomes as incidental and faults from the other characters.
> I think it's because they're hiring writers who are too young with too little life experience.
That’s what you get when you hire writers willing to work in mini-rooms (and not go to production): inexperienced folks still sponging off their parents.
This is an unfair comment. First, people do have to get started somewhere and early career is rarely as glamorous as late career. It’s highly possible that the only jobs in that industry for new entrants are in mini-rooms. So the choice becomes not working in one’s chosen industry at all or starting out in mini rooms — I say starting out because you’re talking about inexperienced folks. So that part of the comment isn’t really fair.
The other part of the comment that isn’t fair is the “sponging” part. Generally this implies loafing or laziness, someone taking their parents resources and being lazy with them. But we’re talking about working people who are new to their career and putting in the sweat and willing to work in mini-rooms. I don’t think using parental resources is sponging when someone is early career and trying to work hard to get ahead.
I read labster's comment as a criticism of the industry, rather than the writers.
If the pay is so bad that the job's only available to kids with rich parents, whence comes the breadth of experience needed to portray the world as it really is?
And by offering such bad pay, hasn't the industry brought this on themselves?
Those things are exactly the problem. You don’t actually gain experience without going to production, and you don’t have steady enough income to support yourself. They can work hard but never actually get ahead.
Imagine a world where all junior developers are contractors hired for a month or two. They work with more experienced senior devs to write a program together. But junior devs contracts end before the code is ever compiled or run, so they never learn anything about bugfixing or adjusting to client changes or performance with real world data. This is what working hard to get ahead looks like in Hollywood today.
They don't pay enough so people who's moral code whould have them support themselves can't participate and instead you get people who are OK with mommy and daddy paying for everything, often well into their 30's, and it shows.
If this is someone’s “moral code” then it goes against basically all of human history’s actions with the elders helping out the children until they get on their feet, and then the children supporting their parents when the parents age. Not everyone has the privilege to align with this system, but certainly aligning instead with a contrived moral code comes across more as sour grapes than any principled stand against receiving some help from one’s elders.
Majority of human history have kids being expected to contribute meaningfully much much sooner then we do know. And them being seriously mistreated if they don't. And them being expected to actively help elders by the time they are 30.
The older I get, the more I realize those supposedly "mature adults" do the exact same shit that immature teenagers do. They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
That is because you are interpreting "mature" and "immature" as terms for approval or disapproval. I am not arguing that mature adult characters should do all the supposedly rational correct decisions. I am arguing that their behavior is NOT the same as behavior of a teenager nor the behavior of 22 years old. The difference is not just in hiding something. It a lot of stuff like that for teenagers 2 months ago is long time ago while for mature adults it is yesterday. It is that mature adults form friendships differently then kids.
And good writing sees the difference. Take Breaking Bad - neither Walt nor Jessie make good decisions. But Walt is clearly mature man and Jesse is young and immature(and matures during the show). That is good writing involving mature adult, Walt, despite him making one bad and emotional decision after another. Same thing Game of Thrones in initial series - involves well written mature adults doing horrible things.
Then take writing in the Netflix Witcher (and everything that was said about it) or last Game of Thrones series. Long term friendship between mature imperfect adults is something the writer did not even understood. Complicated respectable mature women (who still have difficult personality) is changed into clingy teenager with crush. And judging from interviews, the writer just does not understand these aspects of humanity or of writing.
> They might be better at hiding it, but they still do it.
Do you think the writers wanted to work on an adaptation of a franchise they hated? Producers care more about targeting an existing market than taking any risks, even if the result is a mediocre show.
How many non-franchise fantasy TV writing opportunities are there? As nobody will consider trying their ideas, every job picked will likely have some compromises.
Doing bad work on less desirable projects in the hope of getting more desirable jobs is an interesting strategy. I mean this is an industry where showing everyone your work is the whole point. They can all see exactly what you wrote; it's all open-source by default.
The bottomline is that as a screenwriter you should do the absolute best work you're capable of, within the constraints of the project. If you can't do that because you aren't passionate about the franchise or whatever other bogus reason, don't take the job. You'll only hurt your own reputation.
While I agree that doing poorly is unlikely to help them long term, I also understand that the situation they're in is probably frustrating.
They've likely done several other shows where they were told that ignoring their distaste and working hard would serve them well in the future, then the only options provided were more shows where they'd have to ignore their distaste and work hard. Eventually you'll try to cram your ideas into a project you aren't terribly fond of.
To illustrate my point, while it's probably not a comprehensive list, I took a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fantasy_television_pro... and from what I can tell there is one fantasy show not based on an existing franchise airing after 2020. The Outpost on CW.
You're moving the goalposts. My original suggestion was that writers only work on franchises they're passionate about. And that doing good work would lead to more offers to work on such projects. Fantasy writers are also fantasy readers and viewers, which means they are surely passionate about some existing franchises and should be happy, even proud, to do new work in those universes.
No one said anything about original TV shows. 99% of screenwriters - a number I pulled out of my ass - never have one greenlit.
I did. That's what I meant by targeting existing markets over taking risks, or why I mentioned non-franchise fantasy writing opportunities, and what I assumed the person I was replying to was talking about when criticizing using The Witcher as a backdrop for their disconnected stories.
And even if we brought that number down to 95% of screenwriters, that would still provide a place for everyone to stick their own ideas in.
I disagree with most of those but even if they were true, all of those would still be the fault of the studio bosses.
Actors all look the same? You bet they do, we market tested the top five male face shapes and we make sure every actor’s face is modelled on the most popular.
Writing derivative? You bet! Our customer surveys said they love that curly haired kid from Stranger Things! That’s why he’ll be the lead character in three separate Stranger Things spin-offs.
That's not new at all. The amount of acting in any Rat Pack movie is about zero. A lot of classic black and white comedies and musicals are just actors doing vaudeville or Broadway schtick with a camera running.
It can still be fun and enjoyable, but it's not Acting.
I think Joel Kinnamen is fine in the roles he's cast in - maybe he doesn't have much range (I'm not saying he hasn't got range, just that I've not seen him in anything other than things like Altered Carbon or The Suicide Squad); I think Chris Pratt is exactly the same.
Joel does stoic tough guys with a dead-pan sense of humor extremely well and doesn't stand out as miscast in the things I see him in.
“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said.
“Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”
There's no reason why having the back catalogue in streaming should be different from having it in DVD .. except that streaming has opaque accounting and seemingly pays terrible residuals.
Licenses are written before the technology is invented. Originally we had radios and record players. Each new medium requires a new license due to the structure of the ownership of the content.
Publishers that own images for print can't post them on the web. The problem is the exceptional nature of the contracts. This is why things are so splintered. All the acquisitions of corporations may create even more exceptions to the licenses.
If you have an original DVD collection of The Boondocks [1] then you have the episode
Boondocks, The S03E04 The Story of Jimmy Rebel
banned after first showing on Adult Swim for excessive depictions of racism and perceived racial insensitivities over the episode's portrayal of a racist country singer named Jimmy Rebel (a parody of real-life white supremacist country singer Johnny Rebel). [2]
There are many other examples of broadcast episodes still available on DVD, BluRay, torrents, and still indexed on IMDB theTVDB etc. but not available via online streaming.
The difference is that DVD collections were mostly created by movie fans. You had a small, but loyal audience of people that would wait every Tuesday for releases similar to movie releases.
Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.
Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.
Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.
If that was true, then why are there movies/series created solely for streaming providers?
It can't be there sole reason, and I sincerely doubt it's even true. Sure, the price of a single DVD would've covered the price of 1-2 months of streaming on Netflix, but people didn't buy a DVD each month. And if they did, they lent it to friends after.
Some bought the movie, others rented the movie, and others just waited for it to show up on their cable subscription where they paid 100-150/mo for. Not it is just 20/mo and whatever the box is.
And yet, instead of making them available for streaming, in order to recoup at least some money, studios pull them from services and make them unavailable outside the US.
Thus making the only way to see something piracy, which is beyond trivial at this age and (at least to somewhat tech person) actually a better experience. All possible video, audio and subtitle formats, including fan-production are available within few clicks, no need to connect TV to internet (so it starts getting all those ads you've missed so terribly).
Makes me think - how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie? Or do they just get some bulk fees from Netflix based ie on region and duration, and nobody cares about actual view counts?
I recently tried to watch Spirited Away on Netflix. While Netflix has umpteen audio versions on mobile and desktop, it only shows 5 (Japanese, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish) on Apple TV. Why?
Somehow they still let you cast from mobile to TV with all the audio versions, but I expect them to remove that ability soon.
> how do copyright owners know how many times ie Netflix streams given movie?
The actors and writers, who may be paid residuals on a per-stream basis, do not have access to this information, and I believe this is one of the demands of the current strike.
They got it in their minds that inaudible dialogue is more realistic and therefore has more artistic integrity than actors giving proper theatrical performances. A good stage actor can 'whisper' and be clearly heard across the room, but that's not realistic and is out of style. So now they have actors actually whisper and everybody has to watch the show with subtitles on.
Actors should never be whispering or mumbling for real. Even an actor pretending to be drunk should be able to clearly enunciate their words while still making themselves sound drunk. I'm sure modern actors can still do this, but they're being given bad direction.
It was an interesting experience watching David Tennant in his first season of Doctor Who and feeling like he was overacting in a way that I found got on my nerves ... right up until I remembered that most of his acting work previously had been on stage, recalibrated, and was able to enjoy his performance fine from then on.
And I thought its just my ageing coming quicker to ears than rest of the body... same here, as a non-native EN speaker I can understand every word said in person regardless of whether its US bible belt slang, cockney, some Australians or kiwis, heck even fairly well scottish/welsh/irish (but there it depends how hard they try).
But watching any US movie and I have to either turn on subtitles or blast it so loud that some action scene will probably crack speakers or the wall, since I hate getting lost in plot.
don't forget to insist on seeing Oppenheimer in a cinema with subtitles, if you plan on seeing it; it's a bit harder to find, but hopefully will send a message
I keep thinking I'm starting to go deaf. I ask my wife what that character just said, and she admits she couldn't make it out either. Then we rewind, turn the volume up, and we still can't hear what a character is saying.
Also, what happened to proper lighting? Even in a night scene, we would actually like to see what's going on, otherwise I might as well listen to a podcast drama.
Forget night scenes, what about day scenes? Regular scenes in productions today look darker than night scenes used to be a decade or two ago.
And no, this is not a technical limitation: case in point, the new Star Trek shows. We've had three of them produced in parallel, sharing some sets and props, and they go full-spectrum - from "every scene is night scene" Picard, through "everything is underlit" Discovery, to "everything is bright well-lit all the time" Strange New Worlds.
The only reasoning I can think of for making what's clearly an artistic choice is that maaaybe it looks better on actual TV. I wouldn't know, who owns a TV these days anyway? But I got one clue - rewatching parts of last season of Picard on a hotel TV, I was suddenly able to make out colors and shapes that I couldn't on a computer screen.
From what I understand, there's a current epidemic of dull flat dark lighting in movies that is motivated by SFX considerations; if you have beautiful golden god rays piercing the scene, that becomes a serious burden when it comes time to modify the clip in computers. Also dark scenes are better at hiding low quality effects from the audience.
> Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same.
I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice this one. There seems to be five or six "allowed looks" for each gender, and many mainstream Hollywood actors and actresses have become almost clones of those archetypes.
I thought maybe I'm just old and more familiar with actors from older generations. Show me a random famous Hollywood actor who's under 35 years old and I probably can't tell you who it is. But maybe it's because they all actually do look the same!
It's not the "allowed looks" as much as the fact that they must be all super-fit and super-beautiful, which inevitably makes it look all samey. The young Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffmann wouldn't get roles today, because they're not conventionally attractive. Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies, but he's hardly the only one doing that.
The last leading man that I can remember with non-conventional looks, is Vin Diesel - and he got there by muscling (eh) his way in, not by acting.
Every era has its tropes, and this one may be slightly stronger or you are just not liking it so much, thus seeing it everywhere. Look at some mainstream movies from ie 60s, all people wearing same clothes (all guys wearing suits and shirts for every single activity, surreal now yet even my own grandpa was working (biggish) garden in nicely ironed shirt and pants every day). Everybody is nicely shaven, same haircut, same... everything.
Hollywood was never about matching reality, rather just creation/working on dreams, so one shouldn't expect these things. If you complain, you basically complain about what majority wanted to see at given time, which is never fringe-pleasing experience.
> Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies
It has been years since I followed Scientology, but IIRC its beliefs see physical attractiveness and physical fitness as a sign of moral correctness, therefore anyone without it is suspect.
> Tom Cruise is particularly guilty of overcasting beautiful people in his recent movies
Heh, this can be interpreted in two ways and I think both are true. His movies have too many attractive people (over-cast). Also none of those attractive people are very memorable because they're in Tom Cruise's shadow (overcast).
Definitely attractive, but probably too short/not built enough these days. I doubt Michael J Fox would have been a leading actor today too. Can't decide if Bruce Willis would have made the cut, but I would lean towards not. His roles went to the steroided up Rock/Vin Diesel.
It is not just US cinema though. I see the same in other countries' movie markets such as India's. Possibly just that population increase of potential actors made it more competitive, so minimum standards increased.
This is why I find it funny when certain shows manage to get through the banal filter. Bojack Horseman and The Good Place are great examples. Both basically went in with a goofy premise but then pivoted as soon as they could into some really decent stuff.
Depends what metric you use. When was the last time you saw an overweight character in a leading role? Or someone with a distinct accent (e.g. Boston accent, NY accent, southern accent)?
You can see this very clearly in US remakes of some UK stuff where they'll add a black guy or whatever and increase diversity by that metric, but typically diversity goes down by almost every other metric.
And I'm not against adding black folks, I'm just saying that the US idea of "diversity" is exceptionally narrow, one-dimensional, and overall quite un-diverse.
That's what you get when its not organic diversity reflecting reality but a forced one, by corporate order #123 to 'be diverse or forget grammy' or whatever triggered this self-censoring direction of past decade.
Sad part happens due to rise of situations where certain art (and I still call much of Hollywood product an art, just like white triangle on white canvas can be called one) can't be produced anymore. Think about ie Tropical Thunder, even Downey jr admitted it would be impossible to do such project only a decade later due to exactly this. I guess the conservatives again won, even if within diversity movement.
I recall vividly, when doing Aconcagua trip few years ago, one team member was a 2nd or 3rd generation taiwanese immigrant lady from New York. She was so pissed off how diversity movements in US are actually racist towards any other than black race, specifically her own. Try to say anything, ask anything, and you are immediately labeled as another racist, no discussion, no understanding.
I guess we all get why its wrong and then somehow on our own come up with ways to adhere to it, and sometimes some folks overdo it just to not be seen as not caring enough. Western Europe is same scheize, especially it seems English folks tend to go that extra mile in this without any actual need for it. Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here).
> Eastern Europe just stares cluelessly, we really don't get this since we have no shameful racist history to work through (plenty of other shameful history to work with though, but we prefer being ignorant and tell ourselves sweet little or big lies to feel good, critical thinking ain't popular here)
Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of unexamined prejudice in the Balkans.
Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned with the woke ideology, you don't make movies interesting, you make them shallow and sometimes even loathsome.
But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.
I hear a lot of complaining about "woke content" and I think the real problem is shitty writing. There was plenty of "woke" messaging in movies and TV shows in the 90s (just look at Star Trek TNG), but the writers has the good sense to provide a layer of abstraction through allegory or metaphor.
Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview.
It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.
> Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering.
Yes. It's just not very well thought out. And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Doing "wokeness" by box-ticking also has counterproductive effects when writers try to get too many things into one film, resulting in lots of one-dimensional characters. It works a lot better when the diversity originates from somewhere slightly outside the system but intrinsic to the film, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
> And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer.
Or worse, confuse the character as-written with the actor performing that role. I'm sure this happened before the internet, but people couldn't reach out and send vitriol towards the actor quite as easily. I still remember when Anna Gunn got a bunch of hate mail for "being mean to Walt". It's a miracle that good movies/TV shows still manage to get made in this environment.
Colossal losses of Disney due to "rethinking" of classical plots in a "new ideology" way. People just don't want to watch it. But for some reason it's not possible for Disney to avoid it and continue making movies in a way that was mainstream maybe 20-30 years ago.
Disney profits have been strong and generally upward or steady from 2010 through to present with the sole exception of a massive hit to their Park revenue segment ( early 2020 - third quarter 2021 )
Disney's accountants have very powerful magic, but the fact remains that Disney is trashing all the Lucasfilms IP at an alarming rate. Lots of cancelled sequels, projects on hold, and the movies that do get released get lukewarm receptions from lifelong fanboys who should have been ecstatic for it.
You're not going to see me defending Lucas's slop, but I think the fanboys have a lot more goodwill for even the worst aspects of the prequel trilogy than they have for Disney right now.
I won't defend either nor step on the judgement of the true fans, etc.
However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment:
Colossal losses of Disney ...
You mentioned Rian Johnson and his work on Part two of trilogy ?? (I honestly don't bother with anything past the original version of the first film) Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia).
Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
I think this kind of analysis basically exemplifies the MBA disease Hollywood has. They think that as long as they can show a profit, things are going fine. But in the meantime fans are catching on and goodwill is being burnt. The fanboys become less fanatical and the performance of future movies begins to suffer.
The thing Disney added to the mix is massive overexposure. Getting 3 movies every 20 years, even if they're bad, doesn't instill a sense of fatigue like an annual release schedule and several continuously running TV shows do. I have a hard time understanding people who are still excited for this stuff. Even if something looks promising it's just item n+1 in an endless conveyor belt of content.
Disney losses are because of other factors, like a whole world of new content being available... including engaging video games in all platforms and all phone apps and content and remember that any and all entertainment content competes with them.
The entire history of art relies on rethinking of classical plots in new ideology.
I don't think Disney can seriously blame competition from video games when they hire a notorious "mystery box" writer to write/direct the first movie of a new trilogy for their most valuable IP, and predictably he sets up ticking time-bombs of unsolvable mysteries that future writers/directors don't know what the hell to do with.
People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
Recent flops: nearly all new star wars content, Indiana Jones, buzz lifhtyear, Thor love and thunder, Ant-Man quantumania. All should have been hits. People did not want to watch new content. Why? You mostly anwered in comments. Most of you complain that writing is bad, and I believe this majority. That would also mean that critical drinker and nerdeotic are correct in their analysis. I think it all comes to inflation of woke. Woke is the goal, nothing else really matters. The movies become predictable. Fame character cannot loose a fight. It is a checklist driven scenarios, where you have tick all the same boxes. You cannot depict unlikeable bad gay person. There were in history movies about racism, gender, but they were not preachy. They were discussing the issue. That's the difference.
Why? Is it not possible the proportion of the population that wants to watch movies (especially non novel ones) in movie theaters is trending lower and lower?
Based on the fact that the examples you listed are all sequels, the quality of the content is also suffering, but it is very possible that even if it was not suffering, the demand would be lower.
There's a fair chunk of content out there these days that's thunkingly woke in a way that annoys the crap out of me - stuff that might as well end with an "and the moral of the story is" segment ala moralising kids TV.
Stuff with a wider range of actual three dimensional characters that aren't all the usual Straight White Person fare is fantastic, but not everything with non-white or non-straight people is actually any good.
The example I always come back to of doing it right is Russell T. Davies' Queer As Folk, where the characters all felt -real-, I could imagine running into them on a night out down Canal Street and sharing a natter outside a club over a cigarette - and found myself rooting for them to be happy -because- they came across as real flawed people rather than Avatars of Representation.
One drama series that does this very well is the Lincoln Lawyer. Everyone there is a character with personality, motivation. All of those are, at least to me, rooted in who / what they are: lawyer, criminal, LGBTQ, people of color... And nobody is without flaws.
Grey's Anatomy on the other hand... well it was great early on, had some up and downs, hit a rock during amd just before Covid, then recovered is now a little bit too on the nose regarding certain issues. Yes, send a pro-Choice message. Yes, highlight the hard reality of strict anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws. Or racism, or the obesity pandemic. But please, don't turn it into a lecture, entertainment is not the right format for the that. A lecture is.
I'm not sure what you're referring to for Disney. Bud Light in particular hardly did anything in the first place, a microscopic marketing deal with one trans influencer, and they tossed Mulvaney overboard almost immediately, to no avail. Target was doing more or less the same Pride stuff they've been doing for a long time, though some widely-spread misinformation has muddied the waters there. I'm pretty sure I have a solid handle on who's responding to "manufactured outrage" in these situations.
A cursory google of “target guillotine” reveals a shirt that was never even sold at Target, but was a past creation of a designer that later designed some Target products. Devious “promotion of violence” on Target’s part.
This strikes me as a meagre attempt to post-hoc justify the outrage after the viral story that triggered the initial moral panic (targeting “tuck-friendly” swimsuits at children) turned out to be completely fabricated.
It’s outrage laundering - you have a story that could outrage a neutral observer but it’s predicated on bullshit. So in order to make keep the outrage alive its proponents need to fill the air with more bullshit that takes more time to debunk than it does to spew.
> In actuality, the reverse is true — Disney, Target, and Bud Light being examples of where catering to that mythical minority power cratered a company.
Oh yeah because Disney lost all its money and went out of business because they decided to have some black and gay characters.
Actually no, the right-wing snowflakes lost their tiny fragile little minds because there was a gay black person in a film instead of someone straight out of 1950s propaganda.
Slavery abolition is a progressive position, and in the Civil War era the Republican party was the more progressive party. In the 20th century there was an ideological shift in the Democratic and Republican parties.
It's pretty clear that the modern Democratic party was the one pushing for civil rights.
"The transition into today's Democratic Party was cemented in 1948, when Harry Truman introduced a pro-civil rights platform and, in response, many Democrats walked out and formed the Dixiecrats. Most rejoined the Democrats over the next decade, but in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The civil rights movement had also deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, and Republican politicians developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. These approaches are known as the Southern strategy. Anti-civil rights members left the Democratic Party in droves, and Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats' presidential candidate from 1948, joined the Republican Party." [1]
Also, look at a map of the Confederate states. Look at a map today. Why are they mostly red states today? The people/families that lived there then mostly stayed, except for the millions of African Americans that migrated to the north.
The modern Democratic Party is outraged that the US Supreme Court told them this month that “there’s too many Asians!” isn’t a legal basis to engage in systemic racism at universities like Harvard and UNC.
Multiple Democrat politicians publicly have condemned that victory for civil rights — because their platform is rebuilding institutional racism.
I don’t know how twisted up you have to be to think the same party that founded the KKK, implemented Jim Crow, implemented racial quotas, and implemented systemic racism against Asians is somehow the one fighting for civil rights — but it’s factually untrue.
Democrats right now, today, are fighting to rebuild organized racism.
Weird then that the major wins of the Civil Rights Era like the Voting Rights Act are being attacked by GOP state legislatures and dismantled by Supreme Court Justices that were appointed by GOP presidents.
Yes, the people who had the affiliation "Democrat" in the 50s and 60s were the most visible drivers of segregationist policies. So what?
Even if you were to conclude that right wing activism was motivated by protecting asian enrollees and was a continuation of the project from the Civil Rights Movement (which I don't, considering the arguments made in Fisher and the fact that conservatives opposed the provably race-neutral merit lottery proposal for TJHSST), you still need to contend with the very real fact that the specific legislation passed in that time period is being attacked and dismantled by one party.
And add to this the fact that the GOP voted for a man whose primary campaign message included policies explicitly denying basic human rights (travel) to an entire religion.
Shelby County v Holder is a good example of dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.
I also referenced the specific merit lottery policy for TJHSST.
The actual ban that eventually stuck was not his first attempt and it was not nearly as strong as the campaign promise, which is what drove people to the polls. Trump was very clear.
According to [1], they made $82.7B in 2022, up from $67.4B in 2021, for a profit of $3.1B. Also looks like they have ~$100B in assets. Pretty sure they're doing ok.
No you are not. Disney isn't broke and invoking southern democrats of the 50s and the kkk to score a point against the democrats of today betrays ignorance of history from your side.
Not to defend the troll you're arguing with, but conservatives moved to the GOP early to mid 1900s. Look up Strom Thurman for example. Reagan was another of many.
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Occasionally there is a good show. More often than not on AppleTV or Amazon (entities with more money than God) these days and more often than not completely overlooked.
> To YOU because you are probably a middle-aged man who is not supposed to have time to watch everything so that all the tropes are familiar to you. Watch less media, focus on other things.
Then why is it that when I watch older movies I haven't seen before, they seem fresh to me? Maybe the problem is the writers today think as you do, and have contempt for media-literate people who aren't totally naive to tropes.
It might be just be a zeitgeist thing. To me, all movies from the 70ies feel the same. They are distinct from movies from the 2010s (which are all similar to each other), bit are all similar to each other.
Alien vs The Andromeda Strain vs Taking of Pelham One Two Three vs The Godfather vs American Graffiti vs Animal House vs Apocalypse Now vs Tora! Tora! Tora!
Honestly I don't see much connecting "70s-ness" thread between these. You can kind of take a guess at the era by the color tones, or for those movies with a contemporary setting, the style of clothing and cars. But otherwise there is huge range in old movies.
I've got this theory that although technology advances and social mores change with different social standards being imposed on art (e.g. Hayes Code), artistic merit is more or less evenly distributed through time. That is to say, old things are about as likely to be meritorious as new things, there's no general trend of newer = better. However the general public realizing this would be bad for business, new productions don't want to compete with the best of old generations, and so there are efforts to persuade people that old content is unwatchable and a waste of time to even consider. People are strongly encouraged to favor new content over old, for instance by having an averse "eww icky" reaction to black and white movies or even technicolor. Technical developments in film stock, SFX, etc are touted as being extremely meritorious and are heavily emphasized in the promotion of new movies because this is the competitive edge for modern productions.
Previous shows were discussing complex issues. Current shows make a speech for a toddler. They say you are oppressing people. They say you are at fault. They tell but not show, which is against the writing motto. It is like propaganda nowdays. Now it is all about divisions, race, gender.
I think that it is just what you consume. There's so much content produced and you apparently only consume things that back up your preconceived notions.
Ad preaching - there is engaging with the thing and there is preaching the thing. Like, yeah, majority of the complains about "diversity" is rooted in sexism, racism or homophobia and it is not even hidden.
But then I have characters having mini speech about female equality or power, in a weird situation, while the very same character is not even written to be competent adult woman. That is preaching. They could write competent medieval woman or gay, acting capable and mature within the context they are in. But instead, they make them stereotype and then slap a speech on it.
Like, yeah, quite a lot of what people call "neutral past" was conservative preaching and not even hidden. But like, the preaching currently absolutely does happen.
> They could write competent medieval woman or gay, acting capable and mature within the context they are in.
Umberto Eco somehow made William of Baskerville, a 14th century christian monk, present enlightenment ideas and values in a way that seems consistent and convincing. But of course most Hollywood writers can't hold a candle to Umberto Eco. From hack writers, such things come out hamfisted.
They can have as many gay characters as they want in any movie and it wouldn’t matter. Hell it probably wouldn’t even come up. But once it becomes the characters ENTIRE identity and only character trait, it does seem a bit preachy.
