221–230 of 454 posts
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Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.
Please, anime today is purely for children and teenagers. The golden age of serious anime is long over.
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2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc. Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since…
There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception. 2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity. The rise…
We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.
It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.
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In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your…
Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.
A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?
I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002. [1] All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size. And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them! Even for individual movies. For all the m…
Movies had a century as one of the main stages for global culture. That era is ending, and other things are replacing them, mostly based on computers and internet. If you love movies this is sad, but movies once replaced other beloved things. The world spins on and nothing is forever. Enjoy the ride!
They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.
Hollywood has always been a little bit dumb, a little bit over-written. It's hard to have both artistic individualism and a reliable business. This is not a new trend. The examples are not very good. I would take Gladiator II, but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field, and The Apprentice... I'm not sure what it's an example of. Many more titles are dismissed with a couple words.…
>but Megalopolis was a self-funded project which is completely out of left field sure, but it was self-funded and it was completely panned by the audiences which I think was undeserved, from a lot of people because they found it "weird" or incomprehensible. Which it wasn't in the grand scheme of things. I can't remember whose blog it was on but someone recently compared audience and critic ratings in the 70s/80s and…
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/hollywoo...
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away. Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"…
>No one in this world ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people... I think you're disproving your own point. If you look the major flops in all industries (video-games, movies, ...) the general trend is contempt for the audience. This generally results in some form of uproar from the most involved fans, which is disregarded because of the assumption that the g…
That phrase is about conning people...
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Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.
> a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies? I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.
I agree that the average experience could easily cost half that, but the point of how expensive cinema can be (imagine adding a second popcorn or, God forbid, nachos!) is a good one.
I find this article rather underwhelming because it spends so much time calling out bad examples and so little time highlighting examples of subtlety (in any era). Without positive examples, I don’t think they make the case that this is a new phenomenon or even a phenomenon at all: all the author has done is identify a lens to criticize through. It may be the case that this is a recent phenomenon (though some other c…
It's a bit of a humble brag to complain that movies are too obvious, isn't it? Serpell invites us to pat ourselves on the back for our sophistication as we turn up our noses at art that the uneducated rabble can comprehend.
Yes, there is a tradition in the arts of weaving subtle elements into a work that will reward the savvy observer. Arguably, it began when scribes and storytellers became no longer satisfied to merely repeat ancient texts, and set out their own commentary and interpretation, no doubt with some frequency constructing theories that never were conscious in the mind of the long-dead author.
This literary game is wonderful for arts colleges who happily charge young adults a handsome fee to play at this game that arose in a time when eligible aristocrats scrambled after every affectation that might provide an honest signal of their ponderous amounts of free time, wealth, and sexual fitness. Like tonsils, these vestigial organs have their defenders.
No doubt Serpell holds the skills she honed first at Yale and then at Harvard in great esteem. I imagine she derives much satisfaction at her ability to write hundreds of pages expounding on the literary equivalent of atonal noise. But while I'm happy for her to share her preferences, I'm not sure why those preferences should hold any great weight when it comes to popular culture.
Unsaid--and of course it is unsaid, it would be gauche to speak directly--is the claim that great art cannot be direct, clear, or obvious. The purpose of art is not to speak to us, but to sieve society into gradations of fineness. If any coarse, unimproved grit passes through the sieve, the sieve is defective. After all, if this rough grit can pass through the sieve, who will pay Serpell to laboriously grind the sediment into a fluffy, airy, rarefied powder at Harvard.
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In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your…
Plus the 30 minutes of previews and messages from the theater.
I miss the days of the slideshows that would play while people where getting seated for the film. I loved the occasional trivia slides.
I don't know if calling it a "New Literalism" is helpful. I just don't know that a penchant for literalism ever went away. Now, what IS relatively new is the "ruined punchline" phenomena that they identify (without naming) on the movie recap podcast Kill James Bond, which is that contemporary movies always ruin jokes by telling one, say... "x" and then having another character chime in with "Did you just say 'x' !?"…
Can you describe more about the "ruined punchline" thing? Cause that sounds natural to me. Like in Jurassic Park, Alan Grant hears "We clocked the t-rex at 32 mph" and he goes "Did you just say 't-rex'?". Actually they repeat it like 3 times more to really lean into it. And I guess my point is that Jurassic Park doesn't feel modern or clumsy in this particular execution.
That's close to the way the conversation would happen in real life.