71–80 of 414 posts
I suspect younger people generally understand this and watch streaming shows instead. A creative who wants to tell a deep nuanced story would prefer 10 episodes where they get more time and probably better terms. People lamenting the death of movies don't get this. The good stuff is still out there, it's just in a different format. Movies are now more occasions to go out to the theatre. They have to be mass appeal, f…
IMO, much of what The Drinker describes is just plain old bad writing, but currently it's a lame writing in the style or George RR Martin or whatever is modern. It's not the style that sucks, it's the writing.
GRRM makes for an easy example. He wrote the novels for GoT's wonderful early seasons. Other people wrote the later seasons. We can compare. Both told morally ambiguous stories that played with fantasy motifs, but with the confusing twist. The handsome knight is a villain. The good lord gets killed. etc. This is the style of both early and late seasons, the late seasons just suck.
In GRRM's writing, you follow characters make fucked up, horrible and evil decisions... but motivations make sense. You understand why." In late seasons, that breaks down.
I believe a good writer could have hit all the "Rey Skywalker" identity waypoints and tied it into a story that doesn't* suck. The sucky writers could have written a simple, New Hope style hero's journey where Rey overcomes internal and external obstacles... and that story could have still sucked.
Fiction writing can have almost any moral take. Confusion, nihilism, certainty. The world can be just, the characters immoral. The world can be cruel, the heros can be moral.
In short, it's totally possible to take the lamest of moral positions and write a great story around it. Possible, but not guaranteed. Look at Ayn Rand.
I think I agree with the thrust of the video. My caveats would be: 1) When anybody dunks on "modern movies", they mean "modern movies with $>100m marketing budgets". Which is actually a small minority of modern movies. 2) The messaging has changed, but movies have always had terrible messaging in them. Edit: Maybe it's a bad idea to say this out loud, but when you get protagonists who are "just born preternaturally a…
Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, with quiet, mumbled lines[1]. I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on, or to miss a good chunk of the dialogue. And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase…
I'm guessing you're using a stereo setup then, dialogue is usually mixed into the centre channel, downmixing a 5.1 or 7.1 stream to stereo will produce those results. even worse is if you don't downmix to stereo, and all you are hearing is front left and right, which is often just the reverb effect channels for dialogue
Another enormous gripe I have with modern movies, other than the (lack of) interesting moral lessons from OP, is the sound design. Loud explosions and music, with quiet, mumbled lines[1]. I'm forced to watch every movie with subtitles on, or to miss a good chunk of the dialogue. And I'd go beyond that, and blame the mumbled lines for our lack of interesting quotes. It's a lot harder to have unexpected turns of phrase…
That problem is due to wrong downmix from multichannel to stereo. both VLC and Kodi have options to compress audio so that louder parts can be lowered. Here's the relevant Kodi wiki page: https://kodi.wiki/view/Settings/System/Audio
What a great video! On Star Wars in particular, in the original trilogy, it's about coming from nothing, and overcoming your challenges. Luke fails, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the series. Ray never makes any mistakes, in fact in Episode 9 she clearly kills Chewbacca, but 30 seconds later they backtrack that decision. The new Star Wars movies are absolutely god awful, except for Episode 8. I liked it for a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So true. I feared the Hollywoodization of the game industry. But it never happened in the mindless extend of movies and music. Indie games are still going strong.
I mean there’s indie games that are works of art just like there are indie movies for the lack of a better term. Similarly there are plenty of popcorn games with big budgets and shallow content.
I think the video doesn't go deep enough: the problem is not that movies teach the wrong lessons, but rather that the movies are so hyper-optimized for engagement and ROI that there's no room for nuance. He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money. That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", whic…
Postmodernism scuttles truth, prepending a grade of 'F' to the word 'art'.